Weekend reading list...

I have been meaning to assemble a list of resources that several company founders and entrepreneurs sent back about surviving (and even thriving) in a downturn. This is in response to an email I had sent out to a number of friends, asking the question:

What would each of us do to make this a little less gloomy period and make things a little more positive in our business and friend circles?

That post, which has evolved from this specific question to a more general set of thoughts / resources, is coming soon. I am psyched about the responses, because most are coming from folks' experiences from actually building and managing through past downturns. Leave a comment if you would like to get in the loop on that discussion.

In the meantime here are some interesting links to (re) read this weekend:

- Tim Draper on the next big successful company being a mobile applications company.

- Marc Andreessen's truly insightful article on hiring and managing key executives and employees (part of a series of posts guiding young startups).

- Amr's article on his lessons learned from 8+ years of building products and managing teams at Yahoo!

- Mike Bonifer's piece (taking off from his comment on this blog...) on farming the downturn.

- IDA's list of Top 25 documentaries. Interestingly, Hoop Dreams, which is at the top of this list was never nominated for an Oscar because of the rule that feature documentaries should consist of mostly original footage.

- Steve Blank's "Customer Development Model" presentation TiE (which was hosted by Murrali Rangarajan).

- A quick and dirty method to calculate the intrinsic value of any business (for those of you trying to figure out where the bargain stock buys are).

- The concept of Obliquity (first heard of this thru' Rajesh Jain and since then has come up in several conversations in various contexts).

- FORTUNE's feature: Best advice I ever got! (My favorite = Drucker's Cow is in the Ditch tips).

- Paul Graham's popular article: The 18 mistakes that kill startups.

I am at the Web 2.0 Conference next week so let me know if you will be there as well.

Happy Halloween, everyone! Hope your costumes turned out as you had hoped :)

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After stocking up on food... (tips to build a business during a down economy)

What started off as a series of Tweets, has morphed into an actual blog post. It is also a sorta response to the gloom and doom posts around building a small, growing company in a down economy. Having founded and helped build one through a couple of down years (aka IT nuclear winter), survived and learned a lot from it, here's a list of things from that experience to consider:

#10. Look out for new competitors who are smarter and nimbler, because cost of building a business is lower in these times. Read Tip #9.

#9. Spend on customer support. good service during a down economy is always rewarded with customer loyalty and repeat purchases when things come around.

#8. Keep revenue focused ppl. focused on revenue. They do not need to hear the gloom and doom. If possible, keep their salary the same to keep their morale from sagging.

#7. Question the revenue model. down economy closes some budgets, opens others. think like your customer would. better yet, ask them.

#6. Unless you have an update for customers/partners, press/PR is a low priority. watch out for ceos wasting time with press in this time.

#5. Try not to listen to every macro trend (esp. the negative ones). as long as internal operations are going acc to plan, it matters very little.

#4. Let go of employees who are taking from the company's energy instead of giving to it. Promote key people during bad periods.

#3. Go out of your way to overcommunicate to current and potential customers. You WILL survive, if you make them miss you.

#2. Put a brake on status quo, and figure out a meaningful path / timeline to revenue (unless financed for 2+ years in which case re-validate the company's timeline and value prop a la the Hedgehog Principle).

#1. Founders take a meaningful salary cut, ask others to do the same. Compensate with stock that vests in a shorter period than 4 yrs.

Are these useful? Do you agree with them? Let me know!

What can you learn about personal discovery from 3 children's books?

For my birthday this year, I received several gifts that one can expect - cards (one of which is worth seeing), pranks (wait until I get you guys!) and wishes from several friends. Among the gifts I received were 3 children's books...

Children's books? At a time when people were asking if I am having any symptoms of a mid-life crisis (seem to be doing ok so far!) and advising me to grow up, I'm getting children's books?

But since I read them, each one of these has become a favorite for one reason or the other. The little prince of course is one of three and very well-known. For some reason I had it pegged in a very different genre. Originally thought it was in a Machiavelli / Sun Tzu type book, but it's nothing of that kind. The other two were pretty good too. Highly recommend all three as a fun read with serious takeaways. Since my friends took so much time to select them, I wanted to take the time to capture my thoughts on each of the three (average read time: 30 minutes).

The Little Prince Dedicated to a grown up, this book is about why grown-ups sometimes do not get it. Starting with a seemingly weird "Please...draw me a sheep", the story goes on to make (rather subtly, which I loved) the point that the best things in life cannot be seen with one's eyes. How events are sometimes difficult to understand and the best option is to succumb to the 'mysteries.' Antoine de Saint Exupery's personal story around wanting to always be a pilot and continuing to take off (despite several previous crashes) adds an additional layer of depth... besides hitting close to home, I might add.

There is no such thing as a Dragon The idea is that when any issue confronts someone - as long as it is acknowledged and directly confronted... it stops being an issue. It was funny that the book said in less than 20 (big sized font) pages what J Krishnamurti said through several books. Can't believe that a narrative for a six-year old made so much sense. On a separate note, kept going back to the theme of this book as I listened to Steve Blank's customer development presentation. any customer facing person at a startup needs to read this! :)

Not a Box Quite literally talks about thinking 'out of the box' in a witty way. Helps for everyone to think of what their "not-a-box" is.

Not sure if I would have ever picked up these books by myself. So thanks for the gifts and they've been more helpful than I could have imagined. It's uncanny how children's books sometimes drive a complex idea home in a simple way (one word: PICTURES!)