For about as long as I can remember, I have bought a new laptop every 18 months – 2 years. Thanks to Moore’s law that has been about the time where a new computer would have a meaningful impact on my work.
Some people have been skeptical about that 18 month number so let’s go back over the past few.
I have a new favorite restaurant in town. Silly Goose recently opened up in East Nashville next to Ugly Mugs (where Fresh Blends used to be). I expect it will be one of my most frequented haunts this summer.
Here is how their describes what they do:
“We make delicious, nourishing, wholesome food with love and care from the highest quality ingredients available to us. We search for and buy local, organic, sustainably produced, minimally manipulated food.”
A few months ago Brad Feld posted about his Quest For A Personal Dashboard. It was a post that stuck with me for several reasons. With a background in Business Intelligence and analytics I love this kind of stuff. The main reason the post stuck with me is because I really want the same thing.
On some levels, my needs are not very different from Brad’s. I have been working on refining my daily routine that involves checking a variety of numbers (watched numbers grow), checking to make sure some processes are running properly, checking my todo list and appointments, etc. I also have social needs that are part of my daily process which mostly consists of checking the social media of people I am in close relationships with.
A few weeks ago this post about the Panic Status Board made the rounds (followed by this similar and less expensive example). It is a beautiful example of a dashboard, for a company. I want a dashboard for me (which includes companies, but isn’t all company focused). I want a truly personal dashboard.
There was a “pro-business” Supreme Court ruling yesterday that scares me as a small business owner. At issue were campaign contributions from corporations to political campaigns (and I assume PACs and the like).
The losing side is lamenting that under the new ruling, the wealthy will have a greater influence over politics by using corporations as a proxy (though wealthy people already have more influence). The winning side is trumpeting it as a win for free speech (not free-speech for individuals, but the person-hood of corporations).
I am not overly concerned about corporations influencing wedge issues such as abortion, social security or even health care reform. Rather, I am worried about efforts by corporations to create seemingly innocuous laws that change the competitive landscape. Laws that will likely fly under the radar of the general (voting) public but create legislation that favors the big guys and hurts smaller businesses. To me, this ruling is not a threat to democracy; it is a threat to capitalism.
It has been a little over a year since I created a new venture with Nicholas Holland. We created Side Hobby LLC after Nashville’s first Startup Weekend to pursue our project gpsAssassin.
When we first started out we were (foolishly, but commonly) optimistic that it would just be a little 3 month side hobby (thus the name) that would either make a bunch of money or fizzle and die quickly. We thought the game would release before Christmas and we would be all done with it (or rolling in money) shortly thereafter.
It has been an amazing experience so far, and I think we are going to keep growing the business for a long time to come. TechCrunch has said gpsAssassin could be the next highly addictive hit game. We have been featured on games.com, had an article make it to Reuters, and even got an editorial shout out in the Nashville Scene’s Best of Nashville for Best iPhone Game Developed by Some Local Dudes. Needless to say, it has been an entrepreneurial success so far. (We aren’t making a bunch of money yet, but we are cash flow positive).
We have made some serious blunders along the way (I wish Nick’s BarCamp presentation was online, it was awesome). However, as a business we have addressed the problems, but as an entrepreneur I have learned a ton from them.
At times it has been stressful trying to juggle this “side hobby” with being a single dad while keeping up with the other projects I am working on. The freedom that comes from being able to pursue entrepreneurial ventures makes it totally worth it. I was able to spend every Thursday and Friday with my kids over the Summer, and for that I am really grateful.
So what’s next? We are keeping that close to the chest right now, but we are going to continue to grow gpsAssassin. Our numbers look good (and I think we are watching the right numbers). We are continuing to add new players. Most importantly, we have demonstrated that people will pay for what we are doing (thank you!).
This post is old. The Entrepreneur Center now exists as an actual place and I think it may be the most significant thing to happen to the Nashville business community in the past decade. I am launching my current startup out of the EC. Check out the Nashville EC. It could not have happened without a lot of individuals putting in a lot of hard work.
I just read an article in the Nashville Business Journal about some ambiguous program filed under the keyword “entrepreneur”1. Read Chamber wants to lure tech start-ups to see what I mean.
First off, I can’t even tell what the article is about. Is it about some Chamber initiative? Is it about the Accelerator2 program at Owen? Is it about the Virtual Entrepreneurship Center they are teaming up to create? There is a sentence about all three, but no substance. Let alone any inclination of how any of this is designed to lure tech startups3 to Nashville. However, it did pique my interest enough to go search4 the internets for more information.
Luckily, the NBJ was scooped by Milt Capps5 8 months ago on Venture Nashville (link to Milt’s article). Milt actually has some details about what the Virtual Entrepreneurship Center is or will be. By “details” I mean that he has some quotes from people responsible. However, the lack of substance in their quotes leads me to the conclusion that a Virtual Entrepreneurship Center sponsored by a local Chamber of Commerce is not only a complete waste of resources, but also a solid step towards the continued mediocrity of Nashville as a location for tech startups.
Why is a Virtual Entrepreneurship Center a complete waste of time and money? The last thing people creating startups need is more web resources. Every kind of resource you can put on a website for entrepreneurs is already on the web. There are already some exceptional resources online for entrepreneurs. To add insult to injury, an entrepreneur who live in Nashville runs exactly that kind of resource. It is SmallBusiness.com and is run by Rex Hammock (and that URL is hard to beat).
Maybe I am wrong. Maybe they are creating something unique that is specific to Nashville and will eliminate a barrier that local startups have been experiencing. So, let’s look at the quotes and see what they have to say:
First up, Janet Miller the Chief Economic Development and Market Officer for the Nashville Chamber of Commerce:
“Our knowledge and attention to the needs of existing and future businesses, combined with the creativity of these students will surely lead to an exciting opportunity for Nashville, especially when it comes to supporting technology start-ups”
Oh, ok, so they know some stuff we don’t and by combining that with creativity (which I guess is where the entrepreneurs come in) then an exciting opportunity will magically appear. Surely.
Maybe she didn’t convince me, but I am sure Bobby Frist (who I think is really smart guy and is definitely a successful entrepreneur) will be able to explain the value to the entrepreneurs:
“I believe the health of this region’s economy begins with a strong entrepreneurial culture, and the creation of the Virtual Entrepreneur Resource Center will further develop that culture in new and important ways.”
Hrm. Maybe he was having an off day. In case you aren’t seeing a pattern here, Frist’s co-chair gave an equally fluffy quote:
“Nashville is full of smart, creative, independent people, and this Web-based Resource Center will help them achieve their goals as entrepreneurs.”
Here, let me try: By exploring synergies between the creative spirit of Music City entrepreneurs and the more than 8,000 years of expertise of our committee we will gain a better understanding for exactly how to provide resources to people in less creative and experienced areas like Alabama.
Now, I know I am being harsh. I have been a very vocal supporter and participant in the growing community of tech startups in Nashville. I would love for the Chamber of Commerce to participate in a meaningful way, but this isn’t it. I am sure some of the 82 committee members (who I think have great intentions), must have been frustrated with such a neutered and meaningless outcome. It must have taken a lot of time for a committee of 82 to come up with an idea this lame. I think the quotes above show that they aren’t very excited about it.
I hate to be critical of what I think are good intentions. It is going to take the collaboration of the interested groups in order to take Nashville to the next level (and this is currently happening with the Nashville Technology Council and the BarCamp / geek / etc camp). The reason I am writing this is that I think we need to praise innovation and risk-taking and condemn mediocrity in order to raise the bar for Nashville. The Virtual Entrepreneurship Resource Center reeks of mediocrity to me.
1 – The word “entrepreneur” is becoming meaningless.
2 – The Accelerator program at Owen Business School looks cool. I briefly toys with attending this summer.
3 – I wouldn’t be surprised if the Nashville Business Journal is technically correct to hyphenate start-ups, but those of us who work in them don’t.
4 – I searched with Google and Bing. The best resource (Milt’s article) was #1 on Bing and #4 on Google.
5 – Hey, Milt, how about that article on gpsAssassins? 
One of the goals that I have is to help nurture the entrepreneurial spirit in my community. Specifically we have a growing technology community that has some thriving startups (as well as some not-yet-thriving startups). I want to help them work together and promote the city / state as a whole.
That is why I have decided to participate in the SpringStage Startup Blog Network. I have signed on as the catalyst for Tennessee Startups.
Check it out, subscribe to the RSS feed, etc. I will be posting about Tennessee-based startups as well as events and topics that are of interest to the startup community.
I went to the Nashville Technology Council’s roundtable on Venture Capital tonight. (see Venture Capitalists Reveal: How to secure Funding).
Courtney Ross did a great job moderating a conversation with Rachael Qualls (Angel Capital Group), Vic Gatto (Solidus Company), and Sid Chambless (Nashville Capital Network). It was a good overview of how venture and angel funding works, the questions startups need to be ready to answer, and what to expect during the process of getting funding.
Some of my takeaways from the event are:
Frankly, raising money in Nashville for a non health care related technology startup sucks. There are not many institutions to seek out. However, the odds here don’t seem to be much different than what I have heard from Bay Area venture firms (say, 1 in 100 deals get funded). The good news is that there is a thriving tech startup community growing here. I know of at least 4 solid early stage startups that were in the room tonight. It was very different from the last NTC venture panel that I attended a couple of years ago.
I suspect Milt will have a more thorough write-up on Venture Nashville soon.
I have been neglecting my blog. With more and more web conversation taking place outside of the “blogosphere”, it is a refrain I am hearing from more and more people. The thing is, people seem to be bummed that their blogs are going neglected. I am thinking this is going to result in a resurgence of blogging, but this time it will be deeper. Quick snark and quips will continue to live mostly on Twitter and such, but that is leaving me (and others) feeling like there are some things that we are not sharing, expressing.
I am working on a continuation on my web-based Excel thread, but it is turning into a bigger task to explain than I expected. Hopefully it will get posted tomorrow or Thursday.
I also have a ton of other things going on. Our little Location Based iPhone game gpsAssassins is moving forward quickly. It is now a playable game and we are starting to think about expanding to other platforms soon.
I also have lots going on with statzen and I am looking forward to having most of the rest of this week to really focus on expanding our user base and the quality of our user experience in preparation for turning on the paid level(s) of service. Much of this is coming out of the strategy sessions that we are doing with centre{source}. If you get the chance to do strategy with them I highly recommend it.
As if that isn’t enough I am also working on a really cool project with RemarkableWit that is also starting to take off. I am getting to practice all of the things I have learned about creating the business side of a startup. It is a lot of fun and RemarkableWit is a great team to work with.
What else… Oh yeah, our retail stores are continuing to go strong in spite of the daily flood of bad economic news. We have always said that it is a “recession proof” business, but as we get the opportunity to test that claim it is a little scary.
There are several other big things going on in my life and as I look at the list I am feeling like my lack of blogging is a real missed opportunity. Or it could be a missed opportunity if I don’t start sharing more.
So, yeah. I am going to try and blog more regularly. I need it.
I love Microsoft Excel. Unfortunately Excel on the Mac is not as easy to work with as Excel on the PC. One major difference is the lack of ODBC connections without third party software. This has caused me to look to web-based spreadsheets like Google Docs, but unfortunately those leave me wanting as well.
Here is the business problem:
I need to create a spreadsheet that allows multiple people in various locations to see and play with the same data set (in this case the sales information for our retail stores).
Using Excel the data become stale. We have to either manually update the information on a regular basis or we have to regularly run exports and import CSV files. Both scenarios create a situation where the spreadsheet is out of date when we need to answer a question or curiosity and it takes too much work to update it.
We started using Google Docs as an alternative. I wrote some custom scripts that updated the Google Doc each night. It is a delicate process though and it is easy for the data to get out of whack. Also, there are some serious limitations to the number of calculations you can have in a Google Spreadsheet. This meant that we had to limit the amount of information (i.e. detail and accuracy) that we stored in the spreadsheets. Also, Google Spreadsheets are slow (especially if you are pushing the limits). After a while the spreadsheets became unreliable.
Enter Google App engine.
Since I have become a big fan of Google App engine I decided that it would be better to use a BigTable data store in AppEngine. This eliminated the restrictions on the level of detail and accuracy that we could store within our data set. It also reduced the propensity for errors in the updating process. The new problem was then how to put that data into a spreadsheet that could be shared and manipulated by the stake holders.
Google Spreadsheets has a function that allows you to pull in a web-based CSV into the spreadsheet: ImportCSV(url). I was able to create a set of CSVs on the AppEngine account that pulled out the desired information and placed it in the spreadsheet. Unfortunately, the Google Doc was still slow and did a poor job of providing feedback that the information was being updated. If only there was a way to pull web-based data into an Excel Spreadsheet. (This would have been easy to do with ODBC, but we are all on Macs.)
Turns out, there is a way. It is not exactly documented and publicized. There isn’t really a provided user interface, but it can be done.
The end result is an Excel spreadsheet that updates the data every time it is opened. I am still storing the data in Google AppEngine (as a free web-based data store), but the actual source of information could come from any system. Also, once everything is setup the spreadsheet can be emailed to new people and the data will still update without them having to do any setup on their side. I am even able to create calculated columns from the remote data and have them update automatically. So far, this seems like the best solution for our problem.
In my next post I will detail how you can create a web-enabled spreadsheet too.
