Site’s layout has now been updated (finally!!). Although some minor tweaking is still needed. Had some problems with WordPress.com CSS, but those should be fixed now. Give a shout if you think something needs more attention. Thanks! :)
There was lot of talk (and here) after comments made by Mr. Arrington in Le Web during the Gillmor Gang. I was there and to me the comments made Arrington (comments such as The Europeans are lazy) look a bit arrogant (and even more so after the comments made when he returned to US). It was nevertheless entertaining and all in all I really enjoyed the Le Web.
On that stage that day was also Loren Feldman. I didn’t know who he was before, but I liked his charisma. After that day I did some research about him, watched his video clips, started to follow him in Twitter. He seemed like a cool guy.
Today the fun started when I woke up. Little did I know what would happen.
Loic Le Meur had posted a link to this video:
I knew he had some NY-attitude, but come on!
I replied to Loic and look what happened:
Nice :)
Boy was I bummed. Then I found more Loren’s comments about Europe:
Back home. G-d Bless America. Amazing how much better we are then the rest of the world
Up and working. Last day of European tour. I came, I saw, I’m leaving unimpressed.
And I’m not the only one being blocked by Loren:
@ToddGilmore Questions like that are probably the reason I blocked you. You seem like an idiot to me
@danielracovitan – Blocked frenchie!
France is rapidly becoming a distant nightmare. So happy I banned them.
And so on.. What a classy guy! I hope this tactic works for him and he gets ton of views for his show. I’m not impressed and I’ll continue following more classier New Yorkers like Gary Vaynerchuk.
Loren Feldman, I now ban thee on all mediums that we share together and from Europe.
I’ve been preaching about importance of business models to everyone near me. I’ve always thought that most of the new startups had bad business models (or none). I still think that, but after Le Web’08 it came clear to me..
In this financial situation you need working business model from the start. You need positive cash flow. During these times you sell businesses, not ideas. Nobody will buy your fancy ideas. Everyone has ideas. It’s the execution that matters.
During the week in Le Web I’ve seen bunch of nice business models. Problem is that most of them need large user base which the startups didn’t have. Nor did they have good enough plan how to get them (being mentioned on Techcrunch is just not enough).
So from now on I’ll preach about importance of working business model. Cash is your fuel. Get it. You need to grab it! No one will bring it to you. Times are changing and it’ll be a hell of a ride!
For the most part of my career as consultant I’ve been doing traditional contracting work. There are times when it has worked perfectly and times when it hasn’t. I’ve always been interested how to do project work “right”. Scrum and other agile methods (if done right) tackle most of the problems. But for the contract/outsourcing part there is much to be done, especially on business and contract level.
I think the main reasons behind why it is so difficult to do properly are:
Although the above reasons sound similar, they are very far away from each other. There are bunch of other reasons too. Such as features are defined already in the contract and so on. All these reasons cause decreases in agility and do not offer the best value for the customer.
How to do it better?
Partnership through equity compensation or profit sharing. This way both parties (customer and contractor) have common goal – making profit. We at Kisko Labs have been trying this out with two projects. This has been very exciting and we consider our experiment as succesful. Most important findings for us and our customers were:
It’s not for everyone, but at least for the projects we chose for testing this it worked very well! Cultural change is big and it really seems more natural way of working.
