The NVA Blog

I wholeheartedly agree with Josh @ First Round on his posting about how to handle bad news. Too often fear of failure and personal pride gets in the way of effective communication in companies.

One of the things to watch is the “spin-o-meter”, that is the amount of positive spin being put on bad (or even just potentially bad) news that is relayed to the BoD or even the rest of the management team. You know what it sounds like…”Development is 3 weeks behind schedule, but we will make it up during the QA and Beta cycles” or “We missed our Q3 revenue target because or biggest deal slipped into Q4, but it will close in 2 weeks”. Hope is not a strategy… I found that a bit of pragmatism and honesty go a long way in driving effective communication.

Before reading this post, if you are not already familiar with Sonos, go check out their products.

True, the market is littered with personal media servers and home network music broadcasting solutions. I’m sure some of them actually work too. I’m quite into music and I’m into how it souds, so I waited and waited until the right product emerged. I tend to be into techie-gear and be an early adopter, but in this case nothing I saw on market had impressed me. Until I met Sonos…

Sonos is an example of a company that “got it right” in my opinion. They brought to market a product designed to do one thing exceptionally well, and thoughtfully included the must-have features but left out the fringe stuff that appeals to only power users and geeks (of which I am one, ironically). They got it right because they built a hybrid that appeals to both the computer-user market and the audiophile market. The controller has an iPod like interface and feels solid in your hands. It’s a many-to-many setup (you can control multiple players from multiple controllers and manage multiple audio zones) that enables total control over the music in the house w/o running speaker cable everywhere. Another reason they got it right…their support team recognized that some of us are a bit more capable when it comes to the technical stuff, and they enable you to bypass the initial line of support designed for non-techies. Smart.
I’ve got over 100GB of MP3s, and I can play them at any time throughout the house with the very intuitive controller .

The system works very well, has good audio quality, and is pretty damn fast given it’s dealing with a network of 4 players and a library of over 38,000 tracks.

What’s cool is that when friends come over and pick up the player, they can easily browse my entire library on the controller and make playlists. Everyone’s a DJ. I also use myTunes from SonicSwap to fill in the album art for all of my music, which Sonos displays as well.

The hardware is well made, solid, and intuitive. The company is easy to work with and has done a great job making a cutting edge digital music system that just works, doesn’t crash, and doesn’t require an engineering degree to configure.

Highly recommended…

while every tech start-up is unique in some ways, I’ve noticed the business strategy tends to follow one of these themes.

1. build a cardboard foundation, grow fast, and buy the concrete later

or

2. lay the concrete foundation (with re-bar) first, and build a room at a time.

Both strategies have been proven to work (and fail!) but the path looks very different. I think about this a lot given the work I do, and I’ve seen both from the inside in the past. This topic will be explored through a series of posts focusing on some of the key areas of tech start-up business strategy. The right answer is out there…

choosing a trajectory - there are times when ramping up fast (and spending $$ fast) are necessary, and there are times when it is just plain foolish. How do you know the difference? How can you be sure? The truth is that the answer depends; the decision is almost always situational. (<

Conundrum #1: spend venture money as if it was your own, but don’t miss the growth numbers in the plan or we won’t give you more

Conundrum #2: customer acquisition is key; it validates the product and the market, but don’t chase customers or do one-offs as it will hurt you in the long run

Conundrum #3: F500 enterprises don’t’ like to buy from start-ups (for a million reasons, but they still do), so if that’s who you are selling to you must appear as competent and well resourced as the 800lb gorilla you are selling against, but see Conundrum #1. now what?

they say that hundreds of new blogs come online every minute, so this blog will help keep the counters ticking over. As of 8:54 AM MDT, the newmanva.com blog is alive. I’m going to break the Guy Kawasaki rule of being only one kind of blogger, and post musings, rants, and dribble I think is interesting and relevant to the world of venture capital and tehnology. If you love it subscribe, and if you hate it, don’t read it!