Back in the Old Days

This post relates to junior employees taking direction from senior employees. Back in the old-old days, work life was pretty straightforward in terms of decision making. Senior employees (managers) made decisions, and junior employees carried them out. This was a very efficient system, although junior employees didn’t always buy into decisions. If a junior employee didn’t listen, it was considered insubordination.

In the old days (my generation), senior employees weighted advice from both senior and junior employees. Senior employees ultimately made the decisions, and they were carried out by junior employees. But junior employees had the right to disagree, but in the end everyone still realized who was boss. If a junior employee didn’t obey the decision, it wasn’t considered insubordination, but it wasn’t a good thing over the long term.

Today, things have changed again. It seems that senior and junior employees negotiate equally and openly. Junior employees are generally not afraid to speak their mind. In particular, at TalkShoe, since we’re focusing on social networking, junior/younger employees still  have a say. Now we must reach consensus. If a junior employee doesn’t carry out the decisions made by the senior employee, it’s more the senior employee’s job to once again try and reach consensus. This can be very inefficient if decisions have to continually be revisited; however, ultimately it’s great when concensus is reached, and all employees feel ownership of the decision.

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Carnegie Mellon student project

TalkShoe has just begun doing a project with students from Carnegie Mellon University MISM program which is a joint technology-business masters degree. The students will be looking at methods and best practices for marketing into social networks, especially MySpace, Facebook and Ning. This is part of TalkShoe’s new thrust into getting social networkers to use Talkcasts for discussions, conversations, and of course live podcasts.

Check out the students’ blog where they’ll be making their findings public and soliciting feedback. http://twelve300.com/

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Taking out the Trash

Planning and executing trade shows are a pain in the butt. Lots of details, forms, etc. This week I’m in major trade show mode. I haven’t done a trade show by myself in years.

This brings up an interesting point. We entrepreneurs refer to this as “taking out the trash”. Startup employees, no matter what their title or level, have to do all kinds of menial tasks since there are no support staff. Here at TalkShoe, we have zero administrative personnel. What’s interesting is that one minute I’ll be planning the long term corporate strategy or talking about venture capitalists, and the next I’ll be faxing in a form listing the people who will staff our booth at the tradeshow, or listing some podcast on iTunes.

To be a successful entrepreneur, you’ve got to WANT and be able to do both big and small things. This is one of the reasons that people from large companies don’t always make good entrepreneurs. They’ve always had large support staffs, and can even feel some work is beneath them. Anyway, gotta go and fax in some more forms.

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Entrepreneurship Course at Carnegie Mellon Univ.

I teach several courses at Carnegie Mellon University as an adjunct professor. These days, colleges like to offer courses taught by both university PhD professors, as well as by people in the “real world” like me.

Last semester I taught my Entrepreneurship & Business Planning course. Given my experience at TalkShoe, which lets people create live and interactive podcasts, I decided to create my course as a podcast. Instead of just recording lectures, I created the podcast separately and optimized it for iTunes, iPods, etc. The course is split up into 30+ classes each about 30 min. in length. I also assume there are no PowerPoint slides to view (although I provide those online also), and have no need for the informal chit-chat that we do in the classroom.

The podcast is free and online (Go to the Podcast) To date, my podcast episodes have been listened to over 50,000 times by over 3,000 students, a far cry from the 300 or so students I’ve taught in the classroom. This semester, the course is being used as a distance-learning class. In addition to the podcast, we have live classes on TalkShoe, and the students submit assignments via email. I’m really excited to use this new medium.

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Deciding to Blog as a REAL person

I’ve been maintaining TalkShoe’s company blog for over a year now. The decision to create on was simple — everyone’s doing it, and it’s a great way to build a community. Currently, we get about 2,000 hits on our blog per week which isn’t bad. Basically, I write all the posts, but they show up as being from TalkShoe, not me. Over the past few months, I’ve become convinced that I should also maintain a personal blog, that is associated and linked to, yet separate from the TalkShoe blog.

I decided to make the blog about life in a startup. This is my 5th entrepreneurial venture, so I have a lot of experience. I will be talking about a wide range of activities including fund raising, product development, marketing, general management, etc. This will allow TalkShoe users, and general Internet users alike to come along as I cronicle the company.

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Welcome to Startup Life

This blog cronicles my current ventures and adventures with various startup companies including Brava Fashions, Vinomis Laboratories and TalkShoe, an Internet Web 2.0, social networking company. I’ll blog about all aspects of being an entrepreneur, CEO, founder, and marketing executive.

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