Found+READ: Stories by Carleen Hawn

The Dangerous Myth of the Dream Job

Carleen Hawn — Wed, 09 May 2007 22:57:59 GMT

I’ve adapted this post is from “Timothy Ferriss’”:http://4hourworkweek.com provacative essay “The Dangerous Myth of The Dream Job”::http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/05/09/the-dangerous-myth-of-the-dream-job/, originally published on our sister site “WebWorkerDaily”:http://webworkerdaily.com

Basically, Ferris pours cold water on two sacred cows of leadership/management wisdom:
1) Turning your passion into a company is a good idea.
He says it’s not!
2) Worklife balance is a good thing.
Ferriss prefers work-life segregation.

Like I said, it’s a provative post, but we think Ferris makes points worth considering. Give his essay a read and let us know what you think.

The web offers alluring new ways of making a living, ways that may allow you to profit from your deepest passions—as a company founder, or as a webworker. Still, converting passions into “work” is the fastest way to kill those passions. What you once did for your own pleasure on weekends may be not nearly as fun once you’re doing it 40 hours per week. (More if you are a founder!) In this way, mixing business and pleasure can be a psychologically toxic cocktail.

So you’re a founder who has turned a passion into a company? What do you do now to give yourself a break?

Don’t expect too much of your work

I’m not saying we shouldn’t be interested in our work, I am saying we shouldn’t expect too much of it. The more unrelated demands we place on a single vehicle, the less likely that vehicle is to get us where we want to go. For example, fun sports are seldom the most efficient path to fitness. Why? they are about recreation, not the most time-efficient means of exercising. So mixing recreation with exercise can get you both mediocre enjoyment and mediocre results.
(Don’t expect golf to make you fit (Tiger lifts!) and don’t expect founding a company to fulfill your social life.)

Aim to separate instead of integrate

The concept of work-life “balance” is dangerous because “balance” is often mistaken to mean blending, where work and personal tasks are alternated in the same environments, or where one activity is expected to provide satisfaction in work and personal life. The Blackberry is checked while you wait for dinner in a restaurant, the laptop is cracked while your spouse waits for you in bed. The hobby you enjoyed for 10 years is now expected to pay the mortgage. This keeps your mind in the office 24/7 and co-opt the activities you once cherished for the pure joy of experiencing them. This produces—at best—a state of constant low-grade overwhelm, even if actual workload is low.
(Compartmentalizing your personal and professional activities will help keep your mind sharp, improving your focus, whether you’re wearing your founder’s hat, or your fun hat.)

There are examples of people who chase passions and make it work, but I’ve interviewed many millionaire passion-as-work entrepreneurs who smile for the cameras, and then tell me privately of the existential crisis they face every Monday when a reality hits: they have no escape from the office!

Focus on artful separation instead of integration, and you might—as I did—feel that an enormous burden has been lifted. And its’ OK to expect a lot out of life, just don’t expect to get all of it from your job, or your company.

Timothy Ferriss is a serial entrepreneur and the author of The 4-Hour Workweek, a Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestseller.

How do you reinvigorate morale after a lay-off?

Carleen Hawn — Fri, 11 May 2007 19:12:29 GMT

_I'm posting this question on behalf of a few interested parties_: Layoffs are a reality of the startup trade. Executing a layoff is tough, but maintaining the morale of your team in the aftermath is even harder, and arguably more important. Could the Found|READ community chip in with some tips for how to manage the painful process constructively? How do you prepare for a layoff? How do you manage your remaining team in the days and weeks afterward to reinvigorate their commitment to your company's mission? Tips from people with hands on experience in the before and after would be ideal.

The Opportunity to Fail

Carleen Hawn — Mon, 14 May 2007 16:57:51 GMT

Most of us learn more from our mistakes than from our successes. In fact, it is the process of making mistakes, and discovering the many things we do not already know, that leads us to our ultimate success. This is why experiencing and embracing failure is such an important part of being a founder. “As Robert Young wrote on GigaOM in January”:http://gigaom.com/?s=Opportunity+to+Fail,
it is critical for founders to understand that failure, in this case, bankruptcy, is a great opportunity to learn.

A former mentor, and a very smart man, once told me that the greatest invention in this democracy and capitalist system we live in and know as the United States is, of all things, bankruptcy. Yep, bankruptcy… the opportunity to fail.

I mention this because I believe Jeremy Liew, venture capitalist at Lightspveed and subsequently, James Hong of Hotornot.com, posted some “must-read” thoughts and observations on this topic. In fact, I would encourage every entrepreneur to read what “Jeremy”:http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/01/24/failure-is-an-option/ and “James”:http://james.hotornot.com/2007/01/do-you-have-balls-to-try-part-i.html just blogged.

Simply put, we live in a country that encourages dreamers to take risks, and the laws protect those “entrepreneurs” from the potentially excessive consequences of failure. Bankruptcy laws enable risk-takers to protect themselves and start over. There is no other nation on this planet that by its very by-laws fosters such an economic environment. This spirit, the acceptance of failure, while counter-intuitive, is crucial to this country’s enormous success within the world economy.

Consequently, it’s not a coincidence that in the world of technology, having some failures under your belt is actually a badge of honor. It means you’ve been around the block — you’ve made mistakes, ones to learn from — experiences that will make you stronger the next time around. In fact, the incredible and rapid rate of technology innovation almost requires that any entrepreneur worth his or her salt fully embrace failures as a very normal and acceptable part of the journey.

And as Jeremy and James implicitly advise all those dis/interested observers, who are unwisely kicking those who recently failed when they’re down: be warned, if your goal is to succeed, chances are 99 percent that you’ll experience failure along the way. And when the inevitable happens, let’s hope your peers are not as naïve and self-unaware as you’ve been.

It seems weird, I know. The ability for a U.S. entrepreneur to go bankrupt is actually the most important element of this country’s economic success and wealth. It’s a great example of why I love counterintuitive thinking.
——-
For more on how failure benefited some (now) big names in tech, see this April 2007 feature from our colleagues at “Business2.0”:http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/03/01/8401031/index.htm

How do I deal with a troublesome board member?

Carleen Hawn — Fri, 18 May 2007 14:22:24 GMT

Naturally, this is a question most founders would just as soon not have attributed to them. I agreed to post it on one person’s behalf.

How do I deal with board member whose priorities seem to be diverging from mine and my co-founder’s at a critical time in the startup’s life?

My co-founder and I have our hands full dealing with things like a) a product upgrade and b) a big sales push to get us over the hump. It’s a critical time for the business, and we’re pusing our team really hard. We’re confident that this will work, but we have a particularly difficult board member who doesn’t seem to share our attitude.

We’re not sure why, but nothing seems sufficient to meet his expectations for revenue (some of which I feel may be unreasonable for a young startup). We hear the word “results” a lot. I am beginning to fear that his attitude might have more to do with his own investment portfolio (need for an exit?), and less to do with our company. More pressing: we worry that his attitude, or lack of patience, will taint others on our board—insecurity breeds insecurity, and after a certain point, I’ve observed that many investors will opt for unloading a startup that represents a troublesome situation. (Ditto for a founder who represents same.)

The director is a well-connected investor, so we can’t afford to alientate him, or anyone else. And I figure if we go head-to-head with him we’ll lose. (Money talks.) So short of fostering more confrontation/conflict before the board, what can we do? The more time we spend assuaging his concerns, the less time we have for the real work.

Powazek's Progress

Carleen Hawn — Wed, 23 May 2007 16:10:26 GMT

“Derek Powazek”:http://powazek.com/about/ recently left the digital publishing company he cofounded with “Paul Cloutier”:http://www.jpgmag.com/people/theorem in 2006 called “8020 Publishing”:http://www.jpgmag.com/about. Last week Derek wrote a moving and (in his own words) “radically transparent” piece about the pain of leaving the startup, and the frustration of being forced to abandon the “organic community” he helped to build around “JPG Magazine”:http://www.jpgmag.com/ after 10 issues and three years of hard work. (Powazek co-founded the magazine in September 2004 with his wife, “Heather Powazek Champ”:http://www.hchamp.com/about.html. She has also left 8020.)

The whole thing is posted to Derek’s blog under ” The Real Story of JPG Magazine”:http://powazek.com/posts/534. We encourage you to read it. Pay special attention to the six lessons Derek calls out at the end—they will be extremely useful to all entrepreneurs.

Also read “8020 Publishing’s response”:http://www.8020publishing.com/blog/2007/05/dereks_departur.html, published a day later, for the other side of the story in this unfortunate startup divorce.

Finally, read Derek’s “follow-up piece”:http://powazek.com/posts/542, where he endeavors to explain why he went public with his humiliating, but learning experience. Derek freely admits it is “the kind of story people don’t usually tell.” We’re glad he chose to share it, and would love to hear what you think about it.

Method Act

Carleen Hawn, Michael Cerda — Thu, 24 May 2007 18:20:09 GMT

Jangl founder “Michael Cerda”:http://cerdafied.typepad.com/about.html recently posted “this terrific piece”:http://cerdafied.typepad.com/cerdafied_voip_mobile_web/2007/05/gamechanging_pr_1.html on his site “Cerdafied”:http://cerdafied.typepad.com/ about the process he and co-founder Ben Dean employed to develop a “game changing” new feature for their popular phone service “Jangl”:http://jangl.com/JanglWeb/Default.aspx. (It includes tequilla shots in the board room.) Cerda’s essay has the beginnings of a great case study on the methods of innovation, and ought to be useful to the Found|READ community.

We republish the May 21st piece below. Pay special attention to the list of product prerequisites Cerda and Dean devised to help guide them in their hunt for the next, best “game changer.” Very instructive. Cerda followed-up yesterday with “this post”:http://cerdafied.typepad.com/cerdafied_voip_mobile_web/2007/05/blowing_a_horn_.html on Jangl’s new beta service. Read it next to see what all that tequilla has wrought! (Then check out what “Om has to say about it”:http://gigaom.com/2007/05/24/jangls-new-social-voice-service-first-step-to-white-pages-of-voice-20/.)

MAY 21
Game-changing premises, millions of people and Patron shots.
It’s been crunch time for the past few weeks at my startup – Jangl. We’ve been working on something that I truly believe is game-changing. Here’s the deal… when Ben and I started Jangl, we had some big ideas in mind. There would be an organic progression for how and when those ideas mature as services people adopt. We started with a focus on privacy, because we believed privacy was the first inflection of bridging people’s web relationships to their phones. So we did private, disposable phone numbers, provisioned by Jangl IDs and widgets. Next stop was to move from IDs to other ‘already-in-use’ people identifiers. Here’s a diagram we put together in December 2005, just after we had closed our first funding:

We were still using our stealth name at the time “Buzzage”. Notice the license plate as a potential means for provisioning a Jangl number. We were only half kidding.

The working premise is that you cannot truly make phone numbers behave like email and IM addresses, until the privacy thing is solved. So now that we’ve got this web-to-phone privacy thing figured out, it’s time to migrate to the next inflection of our vision. There were lots of ways to skin the cat. We could have gone a route that says ‘give people private numbers to use whenever/however, and then build personalization based services to apply to those contextual phone number personas. We could have found ourselves looking more like GrandCentral and RingCentral had we gone that route. It’s all good, but not what we’re here for.

Ben and I needed to put our heads back together and hone in on a theme for our next several releases. The prerequisites:

1. The theme must be an enabler for something yet even bigger.
2. It must take what we’ve built, incorporate it into something new that is more universal.
3. It must be simple and free (with great, logical placements of revenue generating extensions).
4. It must have legs to huge adoption.
5. It must give people what they want today, but also give them new wow functions.
6. It must spread virally (duh).
7. It must be game-changing. (something nobody has seen, that everybody could use)

You might be thinking about now… “ok, right, yeah, uh huh.” Stay with me a sec.

So Ben and I went to lunch, and we also grabbed Aaron our VP of marketing (who by the way joined us from Podshow a few months back). We talked about product as-is, things we need to improve, etc. I was itching to spark a bigger discussion though. In my car driving back from lunch, I said “Ok guys, take all your predispositions, thoughts, inclinations and throw them out the window right now. Think game-changing. Don’t stop at any hurdles. Then we got back to my office, hat shots of patron and got going.

What is it? I can’t say because I’m under our own press embargo;). The first step in our next theme will show its face tomorrow. I hope you and millions of others like it.

My favorite gadget?: Yoga mat!

Carleen Hawn — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 21:51:10 GMT

One year ago, “Found|READ contributor Luke Sontag”:http://www.foundread.com/view/passion-spotting co-founded “Vidoop”:http://www.vidoop.com/technology.php, a Tulsa, Oklahoma-based start-up which plans to change the way companies secure their websites, as well as the consumer experience of logging into them. As Sontag puts it, if he and his team have their way, “the days of your ‘pet’s maiden name’ as username and password are over.” Vidoop debuted it’s login authentication technology at “Web2.0 Expo”:http://www.vidoop.com/about_us.php in April this year, to “some nice reviews”:http://www.oreillynet.com/conferences/blog/2007/04/wired_web_20_expo_vidoop_and_t.html.

This interview with Luke is the inaugural piece in our new series: “10 Questions with a Founder,” in which we’ll introduce Found|READers to a unique entrepreneur and, hopefully, reveal to you a bit more about what the mind, and life, of a founder is really like.

Since my chat with Luke took place while I was trying to break away for the airport, he got jipped and only had 8 questions to answer. Luke being Luke, we think his responses are still fun and instructive. But tell us what you think.

1) What is the first thing you do when you get up in the morning?

Yoga. I go to sleep with my yoga mat right next to me. I wake up, roll out of bed, and do about 30 minutes of Iyengar yoga every day, even when I travel. We have a lot of activity going on right now, and so the yoga helps me by consciously taking my activity down a notch.

2) Tell us something revealing of your personality that you also believe has contributed to your success.

I have eight friends whom I’ve known since kindergarten.

3) You’re not a coder, and you have people now who handle sales. Other than managing staff or fund raising, what do you spend most of your time doing as a founder?

If I’m at the office late, it’s because I’m reading. I read all the time—basically, whenever I’m not doing something else. I read blogs, newsfeeds, magazines—everything I can get my hands on to keep up on what’s happening in our industry, which is site security, or trends in the “OpenID”:http://openid.net/ movement, which I think will be the future of our industry. We’re not based in Silicon Valley. We’re in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But our “patent lawyers are”:http://www.wsgr.com/WSGR/Index.aspx, and our “PR maven”:http://lastfridayladieslunch.net/whoissylvia/index.htm, Sylvia Paull, is also. I found them both from reading up on our industry to figure out who the important people are.

4) So you’re a big weblog reader. But what is your favorite book?

Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I like for the same reasons everyone else does: it’s a book about rebellion. Besides the important tech blogs, like TechCrunch or GigaOM, I really like “Mark Cuban’s blog”:http://www.blogmaverick.com/, and Sun CEO “Jonathan Schwartz’s blog”:http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/, it’s great. Of course, now I read Found|READ regularly, too.” See Luke’s earlier contribution on the topic of talent spotting”:http://www.foundread.com/view/passion-spotting.

5) Is there a business leader whom you consider a role model, who is not in tech?

Sure. Patagonia founder “Yvon Chouinard”:http://www.patagonia.com/usa/patagonia.go?assetid=2047. He is a guy who stuck to his guns and built a business in a truly different way—not just to make money (although he has done that)—he just wanted to make quality gear for his buddies. I admire that. He wrote a great book about his management philosophy: “Let My People Go Surfing”:http://www.patagonia.com/web/us/search/esearch.jsp?OPTION=ESEARCH&N=0&Ntt=Yvonne&search.x=0&search.y=0.

6) What is the least “founder-like” thing you do on a daily basis, besides yoga?
I never take my PC home with me at night.

7) What is your most precious possession?

My class ring from “Subiaco Academy”:http://www.subi.org/, the boarding school in Subiaco, Arakansas where I attended high school. Subiaco is an all boys Catholic school, run by monks, and I think—besides being a founder—going there has been by far the most defining experience of my life. Like a lot of adults, they taught us kids that we could do anything, but they also told us that we should do it with a BIG-a@! piece of Humble Pie. I think about that all the time.

8) We get a lot of questions from our readers about how to find a co-founder. So what was it about your co-founder Joel Norvell that told you he was the right person to found your company with you?

I met “Joel”:http://www.vidoop.com/management.php seven years ago at the gym. He’s a former dancer, and is very disciplined about his physical fitness. I used to see him there regularly, every single time I went. He wasn’t one of these people who comes and goes or exercises in faddish fits. That tells you something about a person, when they care about their physical health. And it also told me that he is consistent and dedicated, which are important values in a future partner. I guess that was one simple thing that told me right away that we share some of the same values.

Q of the Day: Is a start-up the 'Hotel California'?

Carleen Hawn — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 14:37:12 GMT

The “departure yesterday of Terry Semel as CEO”:http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyId=16&articleId=9025200&intsrc=hm_topic was newsworthy for sure, but more interesting to us was that Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang took up the helm, again.
It is noteworthy that Yahoo!’s board didn’t give Jerry the common title of “interim CEO” (which would have indicated that the company was hunting for another professional outsider to run the company), or name Susan Decker CEO, as some on Wall Street have been expecting. (She gets the new title of President.) Read the “full press release here”:http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?&ReleaseID=249882.

Anyway, Yang’s heroic return to save his struggling Yahoo! made us wonder: can a founder ever really leave the company he created?

Greg Reyes' Day in Court

Carleen Hawn — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 19:39:41 GMT

I’m in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco this week observing the “criminal fraud trial of ex-Brocade CEO Greg Reyes”:http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2006/2006-121.htm. Reyes helped found the “storage area network company”:http://www.brocade.com/company_info/index.jsp in 1995, and coached it into one of the dotcom-era’s highest fliers by 2000. Now Reyes is being prosecuted for an alleged conspiracy to avoid properly accounting for backdated options on shares of Brocade stock, which he dolled out to his employees during the boom. His is the first criminal trial to come out of regulators’ two-year review of some 264 companies that backdated options between 1999 and 2004. “Reyes’ case opened yesterday”:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aTpguvQJwJ2Y&refer=home, and as I sat in court listening to the lawyers woo jurors and spar with the Judge, it occured to me that there are lessons in this legal drama for us all—and for founders, especially.

10 Lessons From Greg Reyes’ Day in Court:

10) The law is enforced by example. It’s just like kindergarten, where lots of kids might act out at once, but if you’re the tallest or loudest among them, you’re probably the one who’ll be singled out for punishment. You want to stand out? Great. Just make sure yours is an example that you can be proud of under a spotlight (and we don’t mean the klieg kind).

9) Your low-profile human resources staff is just as important as your high-profile finance staff. Your finance department staffers might have more MBAs, fatter salaries and the seats on the IPO roadshow bus, but your HR folks are the people who tend to the most vital concerns of the rest of your employees. Dotting the ‘t’s’ on everyday benefits like vacation days or even seemingly small equity compensation incentives matters, a lot. Care for the people who care for your people.

8) The only constants in life are death, taxes…and that SEC & FASB rules will change, again! Ben Franklin had it mostly right. A common argument made by executives involved in the options backdating scandals is that it was just too hard for them to keep up with the SEC and FASB rules because the laws, namely the “Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002”:http://fl1.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/gwbush/sarbanesoxley072302.pdf, kept changing. But hey, part of your job as a founder (whether your company is public or not) is to be prepared for change, all kinds of change, so that when it comes, you can adjust accordingly for the benefit fo your business. But you can help yourself if you…

7) Hire a compensation consultant. Equity pay packages are great for cash-poor start-ups. But because SEC and FASB rules are messy and evolving, prepare your company, and help yourself, by outsourcing the job of staying on top of the rules to a certified expert. Your corporate lawyers can help you with this, but it is a good idea to get an objective view from someone other than your outside counsel, especially if your lawyer is also on your board (as was the case at Brocade). One good thing about SOX is that it has spawned an entire industry of lawyers and accountants who only consult on compensation.

7) Get a second opinion. Even after you’ve done this, get a second opinion from another compensation consultant or from another law firm. Trust us, this is as important as getting a second opinion from a doctor. A third view (yours + 2 consultant opinions) will reduce the risk of any debate devolving into a “he said – (s)he said” contest should your compensation policy ever come under scrutiny.

6) ‘Your Board,’ is really the Company’s Board. This is as it should be. As events at Brocade demonstrate, when a management policy is called into question and the resulting controversy has the potential to damage the company as a whole, if you are an executive with management responsibity (even a “founding-CEO”) you cannot expect ‘your board’ to place your welfare ahead of the welfare of the business. (Brocade’s board knew of the backdating, but forced out Reyes when the flack hit the fan.) This is why it is important to have experts who are independent of the board retained to assist you early on.

5) Ignorance is not an acceptable defense. It might work in court, but if you ever want to be considered a competent business person again, it won’t serve you in the long run. When you bear a title like founder, or CEO, or Chairman of the Board, it means you’re in charge—you’re supposed to know what’s going on!

4) An opinion letter from a lawyer is not a get-out-of-jail free card. You paid for it. As we said above, you can add to your ad hoc “insurance policy” by getting more than one opinion, but no stack of lawyer’s letters can indemnify you from a prosecutor’s curiosity. And while it might seem unfair, prosecutors rarely go after thought leaders (or other lawyers). They go after those who execute policy, and that means executives.

3) You are a steward of your investors’ money. Respect their intelligence in this choice. One of Reyes’ defense arguments is that investors wouldn’t care that he was dolling-out non-cash compensation, because it wouldn’t have an impact on the company’s earnings, and therefore, the stock price. Thus, he didn’t need to tell them about the backdated options. The Judge disagreed, saying that at a minimum, Reyes should’ve given investors the opportunity to decide for themselves since it was their money.

2) The cover up is always worse than the crime—and often much easier to explain to a jury. If Reyes was confident that investors wouldn’t care about non-cash expenses for ‘in-the-money’ options, why did he need to manufacture dates to make it look like the options were ‘at the money’ on the day of the grants? Just don’t do it. When you make a mistake, acknowledge it and make amends.

And the #1 Lesson from Greg Reyes’ criminal fraud trial comes straight from the mouth of New York’s former ‘top cop’ and current Governor Eliot Spitzer:

1) “Never talk when you can nod, never write when you can talk, and never, ever, put anything in an email.”

Shoes Optional. Sunglasses Required

Carleen Hawn — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 20:38:31 GMT

Just over a year ago, Found|READ contributors “Matt Brezina”:http://www.xobni.com/executive_bios.php#matt_brezina and “Adam Smith”:http://www.xobni.com/executive_bios.php#adam_smith took $12,000 dollars from “Y Combinator”:http://www.ycombinator.com/ and hunkered down in an MIT dorm room to figure out how to improve email. The result is San Francisco-based “Xobni”:http://www.xobni.com. They are now backed by “Vinod Khosla’s VC firm”:http://www.khoslaventures.com/ and “First Round Capital”:http://www.firstround.com/.
“We’re living the dream,” the pair “says”:http://www.xobni.com/adayatxobni.php. Matt wrote more about their experience “here”:http://www.foundread.com/view/and-then-there-were. As we get so many questions from Found|READers about ‘how to find a cofounder,’ we decided we’d ask this high-powered (and fun!) pair to tell us more about themselves as individuals, and as partners.

1) Where are you from and what year were you born?

Matt: I grew up 2 miles from The Pennsylvania State University in State College, Pennsylvania. I was born in 1981.
Adam: I was born in 1985 and grew up in Dallas, Texas.

2) What is the first thing you do when you get up in the morning?

Matt:Grab my Palm Treo from off the bed next to me. Sad I know.
Adam: I unplug my cell phone from its charger and start reading my email. I start thinking about what I want to achieve today.

3) Tell us something revealing of your personality that you also believe has contributed to your success.

Matt: I pride myself on the diversity of my friends and my deep relationships with them. For years I kept a fortune cookie paper in my wallet that said: “Your greatest fortune is the large number of friends you have.”
Adam: I try really, really hard. I’m not ‘successful’ yet, [but] persistence pays. For example, we got our VP of Engineering after a seven or eight month dialog. Just before he said ‘yes’ I was on red alert. If he had said ‘no’ I was going to be on the next flight to Zurich.

4) What is your academic background? How does it relate to your business training?

Matt: I did my undergraduate and graduate work in Electrical Engineering, specifically focusing on control systems in communication constrained environments. An engineering education teaches the discipline and problem solving processes needed for startups. The business stuff I learned by talking my way out of playground fights, organizing groups of people for sports teams, clubs and bands, and being forced into early entrepreneurship by being irritated by the minimum wage job offerings available to 14 year olds.
Adam: I started programming when I was thirteen years old. That same year I started an online shareware company, Vira Tech Development. Then I studied computer science at MIT. Making delicious software is our core expertise.

5) Other than managing staff or fund raising, what do you spend most of your time doing as a founder?

Matt: I spend a lot of time asking for help and advice. I’m busy calling college professors for referrals to good recruits, emailing other entrepreneurs for recommendations and background checks on lawyers, investors, etc, getting biz dev and marketing advice from advisors, and getting introductions from investors. On the flip side, I’ve started to spend more time giving advice to entrepreneurs earlier on in the game than myself.
Adam: Reaching out and being a missionary, both for Xobni and for the startup world in general. Part of it is spreading the word about Xobni and what we’re doing here. The other part is encouraging other entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs. The world could use more startups.

6) Is there a leader whom you consider a role model, who is either not in tech, or not in business at all?

Matt: I’ve always been impressed by “Oprah”:http://www2.oprah.com/index.jhtml. I swear the woman doesn’t see the obstacles other people do. She never let poverty, crime, abuse, race, gender, or lack of resources get in her way.
Adam: “Paul Graham”:http://www.paulgraham.com/bio.htmlis one of my role models. He’s incredibly smart, understands software, understands startups, and is far wiser than I. Most people haven’t heard of my other role models, though. It’s hard to have Bill Gates or Steve Jobs as role models, because you can only learn about them and how they act through the media’s filter. So instead I look up to the people around me who have been successful and whose style I dig.

7) What is the least “founder-like” thing you do on a daily basis?

Matt: I ride my bike to the office, weaving through traffic, feeling slightly jealous of bike messengers for both their relaxed lifestyle and the percentage of the day they get to spend outdoors.
Adam: I recklessly bike to work, speeding past red lights and woo’d ladies.
(What a pair, these two!)

8) What is your most precious possession?

Matt: My passport and my backpack. My default state is to be traveling.
Adam: The people around me – employees, my friends, parents, and mentors. They keep me motivated, challenge me, and help me grow every day. Oh, and my toothbrush, it keeps me clean.

9) We get a lot of questions from readers about how to find a co-founder. What was it about your co-founder that told you he was the right person to found your company with you?
Matt: Adam and I met on “Craigslist”:http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/ as two summer interns looking for housing in DC. What impressed me about Adam was his dedication to and love of software and technology. The day he moved into our apartment we made a trip to Home Depot to purchase a 10 foot long piece plywood. We unloaded 4 monitors, 3 servers, a laptop and a desktop from his car and made a desk out of the plywood. That night he was hacking away on his personal software project: beating online poker.
Adam: Matt’s a tremendous evangelist for the company. He excites everyone around him. That was evident from the first night we met.

10) Other than founding your company what is the most seminal experience you’ve had in life so far?
Matt: Studying abroad. It taught me that I can adapt to any situation, deal with any type of person, and thrive in any environment.
Adam: My education at MIT was pretty demanding. It taught me to work hard, work smart, and reap the rewards of doing so. MIT also taught me to reach out to all of the resources around me. This used to [mean] fellow students and professors. Today it’s fellow hackers and serial entrepreneurs.

(OK, I lied. We gave them 12 questions…What can I say, they got on a roll!)

11) What is your favorite book or film?
Matt: My favorite film is Back to the Future. I’ve always wanted to do an electronic hardware startup. There is an untapped market in flux capacitors.
Adam: My favorite book is High Stakes No Prisoners, by Charles Ferguson. I first read it as an undergrad. It convinced me that I wanted to start a startup.

12) How do you bond with your co-founder and staff outside the office?
Matt: We all live in the same apartment building, so we get to spend even more time together than most teams. We enjoy watching movies, especially Pirates of Silicon Valley.
Adam: We watched a movie last weekend. After a long long week at the office it’s nice to just relax together.