Getting Started - Creating Value in a Tech Startup

Turning ideas into companies, tips on making it happen…

The startup scene in Dublin is vibrant yet many have poured their hearts and minds into their startups, with little to no success to date. Over 90% of startups fail, which by the numbers alone are turning out newly seasoned and committed entrepreneurs who are more learned, more agile and capable of achieving success with a start up then was probable before. With the climate in Dublin and elsewhere nurturing start ups with grants, tax breaks and mentorship, there is never been a better time to start up a new business. As the world slowly recovers from a horrendous recession, we see the buds of new business in cases such as India’s announcement of a $1.5 billion fund for startups just a few weeks ago.

From my own start up experience and observations, here are some points you may consider as central to increasing a startup's chances of success:

• Start like you mean to finish. Plot out what you want to become in success with a start up. Is it the next multi billion dollar company or a business to support you and your family with no wish to expand the business beyond a “mom and pop store”?
• If successful, will you sell your business? If so, when will this be? Plot a company size in revenue, employees and asset size (value of assets to turnover of business) when you will start considering offers to be bought out.
• Embrace modern Risk Management. Risk mapping, risk registers, risk assessments, 3rd party country risk, financial risk reports are all useful and are a good way to see your mapped future unfold as you build your business. If done from the start, you build into your structure a culture of risk management and thus information awareness.
• Scaling Systems. If you want to be the next billion dollar enterprise, you need to think about how IT infrastructure, systems design and development will fit into this vision. Will it be costly or seamless to scale your IT resources to fit business needs? Bootstrapped startups have great opportunities to develop low cost scalable systems using cloud and hosting providers. How it’s designed and built however will determine its true worth in availability, stability and scalability.
• Your digital brand. Market yourself for credibility, expertise and leadership as a Founder. Build your social media profile and creds with consistent high quality posts, blog articles and actions online that reinforce your digital brand message. If you approach a VC for funding, they will investigate you thoroughly including social media because in a startup, it’s the people, not the products that make the bew business successful.
• Network Network Network. You need to find co-founders, business partners and indeed potential customers in the marketplace. Meetup.com is a great start in your networking efforts that you should approach strategically.
• Community. Make sure you build bridges with your marketplace but also with the startup community. The access to people and shared experience is incredibly useful especially to a newly minted entrepreneur.
• Marketing. Build your marketing efforts based on tested Marketing models such as the 4P (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) and seek inputs on how you can develop a marketing strategy and a marketing mix that fits your startup
• Finance. If you are not funded, be sure to bootstrap everything you do, make sure your efforts are within a projected finance curve (ie. within budget) to where your business will start earning money for itself or you can reasonably expect to get VC capital on board so you can develop your business into a self sustaining entity.
• Create Value, then create Customers. Make sure your market research and everything you see from that point on is consistent with your products and services creating value for the customer. Qualitative approaches to service quality influence pricing and also create repeat customers. If you cannot create value in your customer's eyes, you will not have any customers.
• Stay Flexible. Start ups often start with a great plan and product. When the marketplace interacts with the start up, it often turns into something very different. Be sure your startup is structured flexibly so you “touch base” with your customers in a manner that creates value for them in what you do.
• Disrupting a market? If your product revolutionises a market place by its disrupter effect, then be ready to capitalise upon it. Have base plans for this type of dynamism in place so you don’t waste time wondering about what approach to take to capitalise upon it. Large companies act fast in protecting their market share from disrupters, so be sure to have a plan.

The need for flexibility, dynamism and intelligence is never more relevant than it is today even with a support structure in place. As the information era moves onwards, more and more opportunities will appear for aspiring Entrepreneurs. Taking that opportunity and turning it into something meaningful is often a hard learnt lesson through business failure. Once the budding Entrepreneur does not give up, their time will come and the days, months and years of trying will be rewarded by success.

Sources/Credits

Pics;

www.entrepreneur.com

www.stacksocial.com

www.picjumbo.com

Credits;

Gifted with hope… The reward of the Continuous Learner

Learning becomes a vocation in life for those who truly embrace it finding… the value of passion, understanding and purpose

When at school, my main aim was always the gate, to get home in the evening, the summer holidays and of course for my ‘education’ to be ‘over’! When I finally completed my secondary education, I was relieved it was all over and was ready to be an adult...woohoo.. I’m all “grown up!” <<sigh>> Anyway, I eventually become a real adult and with it came maturity and perspective. The giddy hum of the teenage idling mind became a curious, passionate and purposeful drive to find out more about my place in the world and what my passion is... my “raison d’etre” if you will.  After the Military and Financial Management, I found a deep passion for Technology and with it a natural curiously for how things worked. If I had only connected with this sooner???

The irony of wasting time on things we think others want us to do and then struck for time chasing our true passions and place in life is nothing new. It’s something we all feel and the opportunity cost can weigh on us in an unfair manner when we eventually come to terms with it. At that point, we always look back on that part of our lives with the clarity of hindsight connecting the dots accurately.  Needless to say, it’s not so easy to be that wise in the moment ergo the challenge life has laid out for us on our path is duly set. So, how do we overcome this conundrum and find our passion in what we do before it’s too late?

After considering this at length, I have come to some realisations as follows:

• It’s never too late to find your passion and start again. If you find your passion, remember it’s a key ingredient to your happiness.
• Society may expect a certain standard, if its your path to rewrite the book of standards, make sure it’s a good read and you fit into your own narrative.
• For every problem, there is a solution. As Lao Tzu said “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. Analyse and develop a step by step plan to change career and/or occupation and/or lifestyle based on passion, ability and real interests.
• Learn to love the world you’re living in. Be bold and curious about the world and harness your remaining time in it to become richer in character for being here. It’s not enough to skirt past life hoping no-one will see you and/or will not like you... embrace your passion and the world around you with both arms. Without the negative, you can not really live in the positive. 

 If we can do that, then the tenants of continuous learning become very relevant and useful indeed. What might once have seemed like a hostile concept becomes a cherished companion on life’s journey lighting up our minds and hearts with understanding along the way. If I was to say anything on continuous learning, it is that the more I learn, the less I know. Its that fascination with the world around me that drives my passion, purpose and contentment becoming a little wiser and happier at the end of every day when I think of lessons learnt, both good and bad that have been visited upon me during the day. When all's said and one, I can say... “hmmm that was a good day”. Not a bad ending for the bad days and only getting better from there… What do you think? Can understanding lighten your load along life’s path? Let me know what you think by leaving a comment…

Sources/Credits:

Pics;

www.communication4m.blogspot.com

www.digitalpromise.org

https://stocksnap.io/photo/1YE1LLNXGB

Credits;

Strategic Decision Making - Cognitive Bias V Data Driven Decision Making

What gives cognitive bias a competitive edge today.. and why data driven decision making prevents it from being a liability in tomorrow’s world

As we head into 2016, it’s natural to think of the future, what it holds and how we will fair out when it arrives! Shall our children enjoy an uninterrupted run of good luck and will our lives only get better with the success we have worked so hard for?? All very natural questions to think about in the new year yet we rarely think of the strategic decisions made by others that can impact events creating missed opportunities and/or unseen dark clouds on the horizon of our life’s path.

Thinking about this strategic review of our lives, how many of us have thought strategically about the future assuming patterns of future success based on a summation of our past experiences? How many have done so without any real interrogation of the past to see if it is feasible to repeat into the future? This oversight of thought is known as cognitive bias (aka intuitive bias), which by Webster’s definition is “Common tendency to acquire and process information by filtering it through one's own likes, dislikes, and experiences.”

Cognitive bias has its origins in evolution. We created a mental filtering system to manage the large volumes of data we receive every day and through a learning process of experience, education and observation, we developed a short cut list of actions to speed up our reaction times, which to date increase our chances of survival. Whether it’s steering clear of an angry Lion on the Savanna or under pressure in the office where we “skim” through a 200 page report by reading the 2 page bullet point summary; our ability to maintain performance under pressure relies on our ability to make lightning fast decisions that rely on prediction based on past experiences. In essence, the decision we made “successfully” in a 100 near-similar cases to date will gain favour with us over a perfect match solution someone else told us about just the other day.

So, sounds like all is well? I would agree if the decision was based on 2 minutes before work to get a Mocha Latte or an Americano coffee. However, what is the case when you have a major decision to make on strategy that affects many people along with large amounts of resources in an organisation?? After all, if you have the right man in the driving seat, then trust his gut, it’s worked this far… right?? 

My considered answer is this. The “gut call” is fine to a point but our world is changing even faster than ever. We cannot rely on even successful past experiences to solely guide our future strategic decision making. We need to embrace data driven decision making by creating a process pipeline for it; where we can evaluate a data rich and clearly presented issue(s) before reaching any swift conclusions based on our experiences, likes and dislikes (aka cognitive bias, the “gut call”). Companies who embrace data driven decision making will increasingly build a competitive edge over those who don’t for the following reasons:

• Dynamic Markets - they change and trend even faster with the onset of the information era and if you don’t understand your customers wants and needs nearly at an individual, real-time level based on their behaviour, then you will lose out to the competitor who can
• Impact Awareness - the age of industrialist capitalism is coming to a clear impasse where the impact of strategic decisions on staff, internal productivity, performance, regulatory compliance and social responsibility all matter as much as the impact on revenue, which in times past (and present for some companies) was the sole consideration. The need for transparency and accurate insights by mapping the impact of strategic decisions is increasingly more important than ever
• The Disrupter Effect - the information age has levelled the playing field to a great extent for new tech start ups who have proven to be vibrant, savvy and able to disrupt pre-existing non tech industries. Apple’s disruption of the music industry is a classic example of this. Microfinance based start ups like Grid Finance shows great disruption potential to the retail arms of banks and lower level investment companies providing a direct investor - beneficiary platform at a fraction of the cost a bank or investment company would take in fees and/or equity
• Faster to Market - the onset of the information era and web 2.0 technologies (cloud) has made it possible to develop and bring to market new products in a fraction of the time to times past. The effect of this in the marketplace is felt by shortening the cycle of new product generation, which in turn is making product life-cycles shorter and more prone to disruption

Staying ahead of the information game is becoming increasingly more dynamic, harder to predict especially if the decision maker has no access to data when making the decision.That said, as the onset of technology has driven the information era and the rise of disruption. It also drives the data driven decision making approach, which companies can now use to their competitive advantage. Companies wanting to embrace it are well advised to consider the following:

• Risk Management - develop risk management structures for enterprise that cover your risks in the main areas of business, finance (including FX) and operations. Use tools like risk registers, risk mapping, scenario planning and risk assessments in all major strategy decisions.
• Data Management - a data management platform should be built and structured so as you know how to get to your data in a highly available state, retrieving what you want, when you want.
• Process Management - process management structures should be easily maintained, executed, highly effective and auditable via control points in the process flow that feeds into metrics for the business. This should be automated to the extent that it is feasible based on company size and data quality. If the control points don’t enforce data quality, then they need to be revised until they do.
• Predictive Analytics - transactional data feeding analytical data sets is one of the biggest tools one can get in the modern era. That said, if a robust process management structure does not guarantee good quality data sets, then predictive analytics will produce no qualitative analysis. The need to get the quality and structure of your data sets right from input to analysis cannot be overstressed. It’s the basis of a value creating “data pipeline.” 

Technology is marching ahead at strength in all areas above, which is why a business considering how they make their senior level decisions should be considering the above points plus more to create an infrastructure of awareness that will make the enterprise more able to meet dynamic markets and act and/or react in time to build upon prior success into an ever uncertain future. The future is here, do you use a data driven approach to decision making? Do leave a comment with your thoughts...

Sources/Credits:

Pics;

www.forbes.com

www.etlsolutions.com

www.reviewpro.com

https://stocksnap.io/photo/EC50CC8658

Credits;

Cognitive Bias: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/cognitive-bias.html

https://www.grid.finance/

Welcome to 2016 - The 1st Centenary of the Irish Rebellion, but are we keeping up with the Times?

Bringing the best and leaving the rest at the door of 2016, the lessons from the Irish experience, which can be of benefit to all… 

When I thought of 2016 as a year to come, the lotto gave way to wider thoughts about Irish society; past, present and future. Given 2016 is the 1st centenary year of the 1916 Irish rebellion that started a chain of events leading to partial Independence from the United Kingdom in 1921 and full independence as an Irish Republic in 1937, the lessons learnt from Irish tragedies and triumphs over the last 100 years came into focus.

Michael Collins was a true Irish Patriot and a warrior for doing what is right both in war and in peace. He had a vision for Ireland that certainly has not being realised to date given the recently uncovered corruption and collusion between partners best kept apart. This at times has risen to outrageous exploitation of the ordinary citizen trying to put food on the table, maybe find a little happiness and live their lives with a fair ounce of common decency. 10 days before he died in 1923, Michael Collins said of the economy: “Our object in building up the country economically must not be lost sight of. That object is not to be able to boast of enormous wealth or of a great volume of trade for their own sake. It is not to see our country covered with smoking chimneys and factories. It is not to show a great national balance sheet, nor to point to a people producing wealth with the self-obliteration of a hive of bees. The real riches of the Irish nation will be the men and women of the Irish nation the extent to which they are rich in body and mind and character."

This oratory hit home at what it means to be Irish. He embraced our relationship based society for its strengths and harnessed the protection of the longer term future even at the expense of short term gain so that our children’s children may enjoy a sustainable elevation in lifestyle, income, and quality of life in context to the Irish nation. His views had a strong socialist orientation but were sharply prudent in fiscal matters along with a mastery of economics that was not lost on his fellow Founders nor his other contemporaries of the day. Fairness, equality, literacy, art, exploration of knowledge through the sciences and international trade strongly featured in the vision Michael Collins had for the the new Irish state and its future.

So, if that was the past, it’s now fair to say we live in a present where many rightly highlight the growing gap between rich and poor along with the slowing migration to the middle class that would otherwise make our nation complete. They highlight the catastrophic failures over the last two decades in particular that make 2016 a year of remembrance of what our forefathers went through to make us custodians of our own house. It also sets a challenge for us in the present to restore the founder’s spirit and fair intent so that we all may see that fair future coming down the tracks for our children to enjoy.

My own thoughts draw many conclusions that are useful for the future ranging from learnt lessons at a national and local level to a personal level. Here are my top 5 that all could use wherever they are in the world:

• Integrity - Governments should recognise people as people, companies as companies and never ever mix the two when it comes to politics. As custodians of the public trust, lobbying companies need to take second place to the welfare of the people in all cases. ‘In the public interest’ needs to be reconstituted in this light so it rightously regains public trust
• Separation of Concerns - Private industry needs to remain private noting it must protect itself through 1st party means from market downturns and not rely on public money to “bail them out” ever again
• Productivity - Public industry needs to become owners of their own future and self motivated drivers of improvements from within so that in-house expertise is developed. This expertise then creates value so that every action at the very least negates waste
• Fairness - Those who give the most should not get the most, but get what is due. There is no point in being the richest man in the cemetery, especially when it is at the unnecessary expense of our fellow citizen. We need to accept the honour of creating value for our people that when we put food on our table, the fruits of our labour are efficiently redistributed to our kin who have not being as lucky as we have. If tweaked until done right, our public services can become a hand up and not a hand out for those down on their luck and in need of mother Ireland’s help.
• Culture - Our departure from socially conscious culture towards an ego centric culture is something we must reverse. The credit crises of 2007/08+ was not the shock, but an escalation of the shock that our fellow countrymen felt in the early 1990s when real money often in the form of credit was visited upon the real Irish citizen. Those in power need to protect those not able to do anything for them and ensure that they are not preyed upon by unscrupulous captains of villainy that hail from the four corners of Ireland and the globe. The ability of our culture to march forward with honour depends on a reassertion of our socially orientated culture. We need to do what is right bearing in mind the consequences for all in every decision.

I have passed many homeless guys over the year just gone and apologised for not being able to afford a few pennies to give to them knowing that the act of directly donating such monies would not make a difference. However, the respect of apologising to them may just may make a difference in their lives. Who is to say that the guy begging may not connect with this real self and re-find his humanity through my own by simply paying him the respect of talking to him? If our society moves in that direction, we all can reconnect with our clan roots and just maybe that guy begging could become something new and influence a positive change in our future that no-one ever saw coming. If I have learnt anything in this life, it’s that our future is not pre-ordained, its chiselled out by the characters of those in the present. This fact can make the next 100 years a golden age for Ireland, a nation that in 2016 is celebrating 100 years, yet going on 7000 years old. I think it’s time we acted our age! What do you think.. do you agree??...

Sources/Credits:

Pics;

www.politics.ie

www.limerick.com

www.derryjournal.com

https://stocksnap.io/photo/AD3F4A9C35

Credits;

Michael Collins Quote at Rare Irish Stuff: http://www.rareirishstuff.com/collins-collection-limited-edition/michael-collins-portrait.5433.html

Quality of Life Definition at: http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/quality-of-life