Some Principles

Give your best effortHelp your fellow employee to your best abilityOur employees choose us not the other way aroundI give you a place to grow I want to be someplace you were proud to have worked for if you leaveDon’t write checks you can’t cashEmail is not a commitment systemDon’t use the internet excessively other than for work and never access something your mother or my mother would be offended at.Treat money like its yoursDon’t punk anybody that is not playing that game as well

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Principle > Procedure

Ten times more. Let’s take a real life examples. Don’t write checks you can’t cash Meaning don’t make a commitment or work for another person to do without getting their consent (not in email) you aren’t “cashing” Now if you just adhere to a “rule” I have had people tell a customer: “demand this, by this date” because it is a pet feature they have been pushing for. I found out………we all do. Well the rule was………No the principle is……..and now you have to go. The customer didn’t ask for it, you convinced them and tried to write a check you couldn’t cash. But that wasn’t the “rule”!!! I don’t give a #%$, you are gone. You violated a core principle. I am serious. You know how small pedantic people actually have tons of written rules not principles So they can show you them. But they are the ones that violate the spirit the most. I have standards. We indent code a certain way. Fired somebody over that. We will not ever take customer data out of the datacenter. Fired somebody over that. A rule is: the person is not grade G8A therefore their salary cannot be above X, and

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More Salespeople != More Sales

For those of you that don’t code that means does not equal. I am going to challenge that assumption. I call it swagger, if you know you are making your number you have swagger, confidence. If you aren’t you are desperate. People sense this. Think of going into a car dealer. I’ll tell a brief story as I’m apt to do. I was sitting next to a VMware (Visualization Software) sales guy. We got to talking during lunch. He said you know I used to have a big enough territory that when a customer said why don’t you come back and give me another demo while I think about it, he would say ok, but it will be two months. Got the sale right then everytime. They added so many people now he says next Tuesday or Thursday? Sales way, way down.

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Timing is Everything

Everything that sits between the end customer the person parting with the money and business they do that with becomes commoditized.’ Yes for periods of time the business “that they do that with” will pay dearly to be able to get the tools to “do that” And there is nothing wrong making money during that time. Let’s take, Intel, Dell, Cisco, and Netscape as examples. All made tons of money as the internet needed to get built out. But do you are I know what browser I am using? How about what computers Disqus is running on? How about their datacenters networking equipment? So once it becomes a commodity then it becomes the growth of the last person getting paid. But look at Apple! Apple is the last person getting paid. Do you know any of the suppliers of the parts in your iPhone? Now how about Android? Well the reality is that Google is trying to commoditize the OS layer, but Apple has said I will control the consumer and I will also control the hardware.

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Technology and End User Contract Arrangements

Every technologist who sells technology knows that an non technology end user must use. Now there are two sides to the coin, I have seen many cases where the technologist blatantly tells the end user bullshit. No different than a car mechanic who rips off somebody by telling them a lie. Worst is a technology sales person who says it will do anything. (What is the difference between a software salesperson and a used car salesperson? The used car salesperson knows when they are lying) This hurts the rest of us, it is pissing in the well as I say. But the other case is the end user does something so stupid, doesn’t do something, or expects some sort of unimaginable product and then doesn’t pay. The traditional model was charge upfront. This causes a big issue. Say anything to get the sale, pay for something and be unsatisfied. Fret over terms to prevent the client from not paying and the vendor from not delivering OR I have actually come to the point of view, I don’t care about long term contracts. I am fine with 90 day terms lined up the the end of each quarter. Have for fifteen

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Another reason change is so hard at big companies

The problem at many big companies is that being on a failed project is the kiss of death. And things are very political. Here is why. I once said to an SVP at MBNA you know it is ridiculous how much an SVP makes and then how much the CEO makes. I mean the company was already there when you became one. Same for many professions. He said Phil you don’t understand. How do you think we get all of those lower employees to work so hard? That includes me, I want to get promoted to President. So you are right if you are a credit card company and you take out the ability for you to process credit cards that truly is a billion dollar screw up. You cannot make mistakes like you can when you have much less to lose, instead the cost of mistakes is immeasurable. But why wouldn’t you come up with a device like Stripe to allow people to process cards? Because you won’t get promoted if it fails. Combine that with who goes to work for big companies? I mean many of these people have been on the conforming system for all their life.

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Goliath’s Revenge

I am going to a conference https://philadelphiapact.com/phorum-philly/where a fraternity brother and friend Scott Snyder is speaking about Goliath’s Revenge: How big companies can actually be the disruptor: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/03/07/how-established-companies-can-be-bigger-market-disruptors-than-start-ups.html https://www.amazon.com/Goliaths-Revenge-Established-Companies-Disruptors/dp/1119541875 I agree with his premise which is that big companies have the resources, customer base, history, and process that any startup would dream about. The challenges for big companies doing this internally are most importantly usually the leadership culture is one of not embracing failure. This is why it can be powerful to bring in somebody from outside the culture. If one has done many startups failure is not the career limiting move it can be for someone who has spent decades moving up the corporate ladder. I have found that as a change agent from outside the larger obstacle than failure is actually success. As soon as success begins to look imminent, people pile in: Legal, compliance, finance, marketing, sales, every department can smell the success, but all of these large bureaucratic organizations stifle the effort, and cause the disruptor to become mired in “corporate politics” Important to think about. I will report on the conference tomorrow and look forward to a great day of exchanging differing ideas, which is

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Admitting you were wrong

Somewhere along the way changing your mind or admitting you would do something different or were wrong has become not acceptable and seen as a sign of weakness and as a way to jump on you. I never saw this Steve Ballmer video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9d3wp2sGPIh. I never had as much respect for the man until after seeing that. He says we were wrong not going into hardware on the phone. We didn’t, I was wrong. Charlie Rose thinking there was blood in the water screams “Why didn’t you!!!” as if he just scored a point. You didn’t score a point. You lost a point. I can tear you down, actually means you only tear yourself down. I think it is being taught in schools and “lawyering up”. Why can’t you say you were wrong? No today it is important to “win at all costs” never show a weakness that is a shame. “I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but holding it a sound maxim, that it is better to be only sometimes right, than at all times wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.” ―

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“Safe” Rounds

There is a new bridge round called a “safe” round. Entrepreneurs, know this: When a financial person comes at you with an “interesting” new way to finance you…….you better look closely. I am not ascribing malice, but this is a rename for a bridge round convertible note. I would love to see the terms of that “convertible note” if it does not convert at a price above the current valuation. Everything you do other than straight equity has the possibility to come back and bite you in the ass. HARD. I’ve learned this the hard way. You can learn the easy way. Entrepreneurs understand this……there is a good chance that not only don’t you know the rules of the game, you don’t even understand what game is being played. The biggest mistake I see entrepreneurs make is looking at a valuation number and confusing that number for cash in the bank. Cash in the bank is a cold new $100 bill in your pocket. That Franklin has no terms and conditions. When you have literally pages of terms and conditions attached, it is not cash.

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What you need for success in Retail: Stand for Something

You just have to have your niche. Have you heard of Bealls Department Store (pronounced Bells) 500 stores in FL and killing it: https://www.beallsflorida.c… The opposite is Macy’s A ton of this is just blocking and tackling LE says about Wawa which also started down here: https://www.wawa.com Notice a ton of these are private which means they can have a long term view. This is near to my heart We had 20mm transactions in our North American DataCenters on Black Friday this year which provide rewards to retailers that have at least 500k customers. Think about that means 500/second average. The question is why do people go to you? Bealls for instance is loaded for bear when the snowbirds from the Midwest come to escape the cold. Wawa serves people going to work, and the trades, and lunch. Dollar General builds stores in places like where I live so people can only travel a mile and get basically stuff that they need now instead of driving to the grocery store or Walmart. People now have infinite choices which means that just having lots of stuff doesn’t work, and sadly when I informally survey most big department stores outside of the city

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