There’s a large number of things that, if you took them away, I’d still find a way to make things happen. On the other hand, there’s a small number of things that I really don’t have the time to re-learn, desire to re-experience, or money to re-buy. So here’s a brief list of them, broken down by category.

Tools:

• My iMac and a 20 up/20 down connection.
• vi – Indispensable.
• Korn Shell – Similarly indispensable.
• Google

Skills:

• Typing.
• Linux 0.96 Kernel It shipped with Slackware in ’93. If you could get this to install, compile, boot, and dial out on a 2400 baud modem on a 386DX you were stoked. You also had to learn just about everything about computers, from bios settings to manually setting jumpers. No Google for another 4 years.
• 10 Days to Faster Reading My reading speed went from 350 wpm to 850 wpm in one month. Great for plowing through tons of stuff.
• Getting Things Done Create one way in to your own process for getting things done. For me, everything physical comes through a box that’s by my left foot. From there I either knock it out or put it in Things to follow up on later. Same with emails except they don’t go in a box.
• Practical C If you can write even semi-basic programs in C then you can hack your way through just about any other language. Or at least read it and figure out what it’s doing. Plus, you also get to allocate memory all by yourself.
• Running Meetings There’s two types of meetings – informational and problem solving, there is no “both” or “we’ll play it by ear” options. Here’s how to set an agenda, stay on track, end the meeting, and follow up. This is apparently so difficult a subject that Harvard Business Press had to publish this.
• Presentation Zen Seriously, please stop throwing everything on a single slide to show how much you could find on Google. If you want to show how much you know try and use as few words as possible to convey your idea. The less you slap on a slide to get people to understand what you’re talking about the smarter you are.
• Knowing that the sale price minus COGS had better not be negative. Not even close. Ever.
• A statistics course in college. The professor made us calculate the odds of a real horse race for our final. I can’t remember how I did but it made calc and trig look pretty damn simple. I also learned that the only time there’s ever a precise answer is in calc and trig. Everything else is SWAG.
• Advanced Selling Strategies A book by Brian Tracy in which, if I distill it down says, shut your mouth and listen to what your prospective client’s problem is first. Then figure out how to solve it. Never get those two backwards. Find the pain points first, then the solution.
• Peak Performance Learning the mental skills of the world’s top athlete’s was invaluable. I used this to help me get into the Teenage Mr. Arkansas in 1984 at 16 years old. And the concepts apply to business too.
• USMC. ’85-’89. The last two years was working in two-man teams, on our own, away from the battalion. I really learned that I could fend for myself and pretty much deal with anything that came up.

So there it is, the list of the top 16 things that make everything else possible. None of these (especially boot camp and getting the .96 kernel to boot) do I want to repeat. Everything else gives you the basics to figure out how everything else works. If there’s tools or specific tools sets that you’ve picked up that you couldn’t or wouldn’t want to be without then feel free to leave a comment here. Maybe you’ll be able to help someone else out.

The bylaws are drafted – in my opinion they’re a bit of overkill, I’ll start pruning back some of the verbiage over the next day. But at a high level you need to answer how the Board of Directors conducts itself – how many seats, how are they elected, terms, scope of the director’s powers over the organization, how the board selects corporate officers, how they’re documented and who can appoint a director in the event of a vacancy. It also needs to state how the bylaws are amended and what constitutes a quorum. The first meeting to get all of this put together is the “organizational meeting of the Board of Directors” and that meeting is where all of this is agreed to and recorded in the meeting minutes. That meeting is this Friday evening. As I’m preparing the agenda and materials for that meeting I’m also working on stock issuance, vesting schedule and dealing with the rest of the paperwork. Also, as a reminder, if you’ve formed a company in Florida, Annual Reports are due May 1 of it’s a $400 penalty. Fortunately, you can file electronically.

Now, to blow off some steam I went with some great friends to Iron Maiden last night. Great show, one of the best I’ve seen in the Forum. Bruce Dickenson is about 52 or 53. He did not stop running for the entire +2 hour show. Non-stop, the guy was always moving. Really impressive and I didn’t see anybody in their seats for the whole show.

On the left is the “read” pile while on the right is the “do” pile. What I’ve learned over the last three weeks is that there are a lot of things going on that will try and take your time away from you. One of the skills I didn’t have when I started was the ability to say “no” I won’t get involved with that. At times it hurts as there are a lot of great things going on. Startup Weekend is getting ramped up and there’s always meetups and events to go to. At some point I realized that my time is better spent getting my shit straight. I’m having to make some tough choices as you can see. Things I want to do (read) vs things I need to “do”. I can do all of them and suck at each of them or I can focus on one or two and rock ‘em. So here’s a hint, keep the “need to do” pile at a minimum and the “want to do” pile growing.

Also, the company is formed and I’ll be ready to announce it next week. I’d do it now but then everyone would go to the website – which isn’t ready yet. One thing I screwed up: I formed it as a straight C-Corp instead of an S-Corp. Since a C-Corp is susceptible to double taxation (but at this point 2 x $0.00 = $0.00 anyway) I wanted to form it as an S-Corp so that the tax liabilities pass through to the stockholders. I’ll fix that next week, when I go for and seed round of funding I’ll look again at moving it to a straight C-Corp. Not really a bit issue at this stage.

So far, the week is not going as expected. It’s taking a little longer to get access to cash to make this work and GE didn’t do me any favors yesterday by restricting one of my credit accounts to one series of outlet stores. What I’ve learned so far is that people have a lot of good ideas. A lot of good intentions meant to help you – but if they’re not lined up with your vision then you’ve got to tell them either ‘wait’ or ‘no’. Frenetic activity does not equate to progress, it just causes you to lose perception of what you ‘should’ do and what you ‘need’ to do. You ‘should’ create reports, measure, check, verify and strategize. What you ‘need’ to do is launch a product. All the ‘should’ work will delay or even prevent you from doing that.

And by the way, I did miss a couple of days posting. I took the weekend off to hit the 98RockFest in Tampa and Festivals of Speed in St Pete. So the pic is of Stone Sour closing out the show.

Start saying “NO.”

There’s a lot of things I want to be doing and that I want to get involved with.  There are three or four events all coming up that need help and I want to jump in and make sure each of them succeeds. After all, I’ve got all this free time, right? Well, there’s a part of me that says “Shut the hell up and get to work!” I caught my self today getting ready to contributed more time and effort, but when I stepped back and asked “Do I really need to get involved with this?” and “Is this more important to me than what I’m working on?” both answers came back a solid “No.” It’s great to get involved with community projects but you have to take care of your own stuff first. So focus, launch, grow and then get involved with a lot of other projects.

Not a whole lot of progress over the past two days, basically refining strategic partner and investor pitches as well as getting access to credit and operating cash. There has been a huge breakthrough but I’m not yet prepared to share it.

But I can share this… Someone said to me over the weekend “Why don’t you start generating more ideas?” Well, for one, I don’t have a problem coming up with a lot of ideas. I need to focus on the one’s I’m passionate about and get those done first. But this discussion did remind me that a lot of people do have issues generating ideas. By accident I also saw The99Percent.com’s posting of Idea Generation and Execution.

I’ve had a number of discussions with my business partners that revolved around the difference in thought patterns between corporate people and entrepreneurs. It’s very hard for many to understand why someone would not or could not be a little more open minded, a little more creative. I’d written a post a few months ago about Innovators and Operators and how they approach the management of a business very differently. One through aggressive creation and the other through aggressive optimization. Both sides have their strengths and both have their weaknesses. But trying to get each group to change their perspective. This interview is from 1999 and shows how IDEO goes about looking at things differently. If you’ve used IDEO’s Method Cards then you’ll immediately see some similarities in their process and how the cards being to walk you through analyzing how things are used on a daily basis. Here’s a hint – take any established player in a market that has a low cost of entry (in other words it’s not pharma). Take one or two of their products and use the Camera Journal card to start your research. You will find a weakness in the product if you look hard enough. Do this several times with different companies and different products. At some point you’re going come to the realization that you could do better. It’s likely that you’ve found a new product.

Good luck.

By the way, here’s a link to the transcript of the interview.

I learned three key elements this week:

• Fear precedes making a decision, focus comes after you make a decision.
• Keep an eye on mistakes you’ve made in the past (HBR’s latest issue is the Failure Issue) and learn from them. Take inventory of them. What decisions did you make, why did you make them and what were the results? Would you make the same decisions over again?
• If you’re committed and passionate about what you’re doing then that will get other people pulling for you. In other words, if you give a damn it will attract others. Find a way to get those people engaged if you can.

If you’re putting your own startup together then take a look at the resources that SCORE has to offer. They also have webinars and online workshops.

For keeping track of all the things I’m now responsible for I’ve been using Things on the Mac. It’s at bit limited for anything beyond simple tasks so I’ve been playing around with Basecamp and now Zoho. I’m still undecided, Zoho gives a lot for a little money but Basecamp is really straightforward and doesn’t try to solve everything.

[edit] Add Apollo to the list – I haven’t created an account yet but the interface looks clean and straight forward. This is one I hadn’t heard of yet.

I’m taking Sunday off and going to the Grand Prix of St Pete. I went to the inaugural one a few years ago and it was a great race. Tonight I’m teaching my girlfriend who Mario Andretti is. This should be fun…

This is going to be quick because I’m starving. Sales Strategy and Marketing Strategy are both 90% complete. For Marketing – leverage a strategic partner’s existing market presence to enable us to get ramped up quickly. Stress the benefits to their existing customer base and how this will allow those customers to stay using their product longer. That’s overly simplistic but we’ll figure the rest out as we go. For Sales Strategy – yes, we will have sales. That’s about as much as I can share.

What did I learn today? That the exercise I did yesterday (list all my mistakes) paid off today. Somebody wasn’t responding and we went with someone else. Probably waited a bit too long. So add that to the list: if you’re going to cut a service provider do it quickly and move on. It cost us time but no money, at this stage they’re equally valuable.

Planning day. And looking for real estate. A good friend of mine, Brantley Smith, is the Director of Marketing and Interactive Media at The Continental Group.  It may be some time before I actually need the space but I’ve got a really good idea of what’s out there and for how much. He really hooked me up with some great comps and I really appreciate Brantley’s help in putting this together.

At this point the company name has been picked and a quick logo has been put together. By the end of Friday I’m looking to have the articles of incorporation filed and EIN paperwork submitted. Roles and responsibilities have been chosen by the three partners as well as initial number of shares and their valuation.

The product name has also been chosen and I’m putting the roadmap together, should be ready by Thursday to discuss with the rest of my partners. I’ve also come up with an initial list of potential strategic partners to begin contacting.

I also feel like I’m not getting enough done. Not working hard enough, not working fast enough. Not sure if that’s realistic or I’m just ready to haul ass and get this launched. Since I’m sitting around a lot more (as I’m now working from the house) I want to get more consistent in my training. The bike has been sitting around for a few weeks – unfortunately the bottom bracket seized and it’s in the shop. Should be ready by Thursday. To prep I put together a quick schedule to start getting back in the groove. I usually train from 4:30 or 5 AM until 7:00 AM for 3-5 times a week. That’s a bit much all at once so for 2 weeks it will be 5-6:30 AM for 3 times a week. That’s about 85 miles a week. From then on I’ll add about 20 minutes a week and an extra session every other week. So in about six weeks I’ll be back up to almost 3 hour sessions five times a week. Personally, I like getting into the office already having my workout done. By then I should be able to post shots like this one of Tampa Bay.

After digging through Guy Kawasaki’s book The Art of the Start again I realized I had something ass backwards. I was getting lost in writing the business plan and losing focus. In Chapter 4 Guy writes that you should write the business plan after you write the pitch. This is great advice – because now I’m not cramming a bunch of crap that a) nobody is going to read and b) …  No need for b), if nobody is going to read it then you shouldn’t write it. Writing the pitch first let’s you clearly see what points your trying to get across and in what order. So today I spend about 3 hours writing the pitch. It’s about 15 slides and still needs some editing. I doubt I can get it to 10 slides but It’ll be close.

All this got me thinking – if I forgot to write the pitch first, what else am I forgetting? I took another 90 minutes or so and wrote down all the mistakes I’ve made with other ventures. So here it is. You might be able to make out some of them. They range from “bad partners” to “Focused too much on what we could do rather than what we should do.” In terms of “bad partners” that stems from a small investment fund I put together when I was 23 to invest in internet stocks. This was 1992 and when someone said they were a “high-roller” I believed them. That was dumb. I found out later that he was with Amway. Bullshit detectors had clearly not started to form at that stage for me. For “Focused too much on what we could do…” I didn’t put a stop to endless feature creep when I should have. This was a few years later and the product got unwieldy and was just too much to deal with. Other examples of where I bombed were “Not calling someone on their bullshit” when I should have. It may have saved a few people and a lot of embarrassment for others. If people make absurd statements then it’s your responsibility to make them prove it. There’s about 20 examples in the picture but the final one I’ll cover is “Tried being everything to everybody.” My mistake on previous products was to put in tons of “stuff” and have something for everyone. I don’t think most of it ever got used. All the time that was spent creating it could have been used make the one or two really important features bulletproof. I really lost track of what problem I was trying to solve. So every week or so I’ll review the list, just to make sure I’m not repeating old errors.