Casetext

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Yesterday, Clippership announced the close of another venture investment.  The company is Casetext, founded by Jake Heller.   This investment is particularly close to my heart, as it is attempting to disrupt the legal technology market.  I’ve had the pleasure of working with attorney’s through my previous company Simplegrid, and one of the biggest pain points for these attorneys (especially the smaller law firms) was the exorbitant costs of legal research websites.  Pricing can range up to thousands of dollars per attorney per year.   This data often times became stale, and essentially led a law firm to pay for research that they may not even use in their cases.

Casetext aims to change this by providing case annotations for free to everyone, that will stay up to date and analysis to help one understand judicial opinions.   Think Wikipedia/Quora for legal research.  They are working While you will be take in L-arginine from certain of the foods that you deeprootsmag.org cialis canada eat on a day-to-day basis, often you won’t get concentrated adequate levels to see real benefits happening. Natural supplements for thyroid Here are some natural supplements that when incorporated in meals will help get rid of erectile dysfunction and generally keep your body healthy and fit, people pay a lot order viagra overnight of money. A gap of 24 hours is compulsory between 2 generic viagra generic doses and consumption of below that period can give an unhealthy reason of inviting health ill effects. Driver prescription order viagra without education classes also teach learners about traffic rules as per the requirements of their state. with top professors and law firms to annotate cases and otherwise showcase their work.   They are already seeing tremendous traction on their site and they only launched six weeks ago.      

Casetext is truly coming at the right time.  We’ve seen the success that Wikipedia and Quora have experienced, thus lending credence to the open source format of sharing knowledge.   We believe that as the knowledge economy grows, we’ll see more of these industry specific knowledge sharing sites grow.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see something similar to happen within health care that would make understanding diseases, prescription medication and their interactions much easier to understand than it is today.

It’ll be very exciting to see how Casetext matures; if early results are any indication, attorneys will be changing the way they perform and share legal research in the near future.

Simplegrid Technology, Inc.

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Today, I am excited to announce the sale of some of the assets of Simplegrid Technology, Inc.    Simplegrid started off as a dream for me; when I first started the company, I knew I was a good consultant, and I thought that is all it would take to run an IT consultancy.  Boy was I wrong!  It took a lot of hard work, perseverance and failures to help mold me into a business man that can actually build and sell a company.     It’s a bit bittersweet, as we are selling off a portion of something that we created from scratch, with our own blood, sweat and tears, but at the same time I am very proud of the efforts and accomplishments that my team and I have put together to get us to this day.

IT Firms in NYCYou may be asking what an asset sale is.   When I had first started contemplating the sale of Simplegrid, I just assumed that I would sell off the entire business – all of our client contracts, the Simplegrid brand, and our employees and management team would then work for the acquiring company.  As we were negotiating with potential suitors, I quickly realized that a complete company sale wasn’t in the best interests of myself our employees.   Instead, we chose to sell off some of our assets – in this scenario, our Managed Services division.  I’ll get into details about the valuation of the company and other factors to consider when selling a company in later blog posts, but in short, we found the highest value in selling off our Managed Services contracts, as both Simplegrid and our acquirer were able to quantifiably value the worth of those contracts. 

As for the future, I’m very excited.  In the short term, I will be a consultant for the new company as I assist them with the transition, and some of our team will be joining them as well.  In the long term, the sale of these assets will allow me to free up more time to work on Clippership International, LLC, our seed investment fund.  It will also allow me to dedicate more time to the non-profit organizations I work with.  Lastly, graduating from the Kellogg School of Management in May also makes a great transition point into new opportunities.  The future looks bright, and I am thankful for the opportunities in front of me.

Before signing off, I realize that there is no way I could’ve done this alone.   The sum is always greater than it’s individual parts, and that cannot be truer for the Simplegrid team.  I couldn’t have done this without them and the appreciation I feel for all of their efforts knows no bounds.  We started off as professional contacts, but we quickly grew into close friends, and then into family.  Thank you. 

And lastly, thank you to my family.  My wife and children have been very patient with me over these past four years, as I worked late hours, traveled almost every week for both work and school.  I missed many dinners, and  cancelled last minute on many of our family events.  To my lovely wife Naveen – not once did you complain (ok, well maybe once or twice).  But believe me that your patience and understanding didn’t go unnoticed.  My success is your success.   I couldn’t have done it without you.

 

Key Takeaways:

  • Sometimes selling your entire business isn’t the best option.
  • Your team plays a critical role in the success of your business.
  • Having a strong, supportive family is tantamount to your career goals.

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The Lean Startup Methodology will change how Enterprises build products

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In this hyper-competitive age, enterprises are not only dealing with stiff competition from their peer enterprises, but also dealing with competition from startups that are trying to disrupt the market that those enterprises dominate.   It is for this reason that Enterprises need to get better at building products. And they need to be able to build them faster, and at the same time, fail faster in the event that a product doesn’t work out.  This is especially critical as most startups are very nimble and can pivot quickly to build a better product.  Enterprises have difficulty doing anything quickly.  In fact, it is so difficult that this according to this Harvard Business Review article, 75% of consumer packaged goods and retail products fail to earn $7.5 million in their first year!

We have many examples of failed products right in front of us (see: Microsoft Vista or Blackberry Playbook).  So, how can enterprises become better at this?

Enter the Lean Startup Methodology.   Although this methodology was primarily created for helping startups build a product quickly, it is beginning to be adapted to work in different industries. .  As such, enterprise are beginning to adopt the Lean Method to help them build successful products faster.

James Donnelan has an excellent blog post which explains what the Lean Startup Model is all about.  He writes:

…the lean startup model, when you boil it down, simply says that when you launch any new business or product you do so based on validated learning, experimentation and frequent releases which allow you to measure and gain valuable customer feedback. In other words – build fast, release often, measure, learn and repeat.

The ability to “build fast, release often, measure, learn and repeat” is the core principle to the Lean methodology, and is a critical element that many large corporations are missing today.   James goes on to list the principles of the Lean Startup Methodology:

    • “Use a continuous delivery model to release new features quickly with the least amount of friction.
    • A/B test different versions of the same feature on different user segments to identify which is more valuable.
    • Act on metrics – if you can’t measure it you can’t act on it to ensure that you are always improving the product.”

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We’ve already seen some companies adopt this methodology.  Facebook and their release of code 2x a day being a very popular example of how this methodology is working in the enterprise.   But companies like Facebook and Google are quite innovative and therefore not the best example of your common enterprise.  The typical company will need assistance in learning how to implement LSM and will need access to tools that will keep them committed to this methodology.

I strongly believe that most companies will have to adopt this methodology, in order to succeed in today’s competitive market, and that is why I’m thrilled to announce Clippership’s investment in a company that is at the forefront of this movement.   Along with Upfront Ventures and others, we are proud to be investing in  Lean Startup Machine.   Trevor Owens, the founder and CEO of Lean Startup Machine has been a thought leader in this area, and the company is already offering hundreds of Lean Startup workshops over the world.  Trevor and his co-founder/CTO Obie Fernandez have also written a book about how the LSM can be implemented in the enterprise.  It is a must read for all those that are looking to get a head start on learning this methodology.

Key Takeaways:

  • Enterprises are facing stiff competition not only from their peers, but also from startups that are trying to disrupt markets.
  • Enterprises will need to get better at creating/updating products quickly.
  • The Lean Startup Methodology will be the new de factor methodology that enterprises will use to create and deliver successful products.

Firing employees is never easy, but at times necessary

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Ultimately, as a CEO, your job is to find the best solution to problems that are not easily solvable.  If the problem was easy, it would’ve never made it to your desk.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as CEO is the responsibility of managing employees cannot be taken lightly, and that responsibility has to be taken in context with the responsibility I have to all of our clients, employees and to the wellbeing of the organization.  Recently, we had to terminate a sales employee, who wasn’t performing up to our expectations.   We had recognized early on that he wasn’t going to work out.    He was, however, well liked within the company and gave the impression that he was putting in a lot of effort.   Unfortunately, the results weren’t reflective of his performance.   We were also aware of some difficulty he was having in his personal life.

I deliberated about this for quite some time.  It wasn’t a question of money for me, but more about the impact (both positive and negative) he was having in the organization.  I knew that he represented Simplegrid every time he visited a client, or spoke on the phone with someone, and he was not representing the company positively.   I knew this was having an affect on our reputation, and reputation in an IT consultancy is paramount to it’s success.  At the same time, I was worried about his personal life and how losing a job would further add to his woes.  Lastly, I was worried about how the rest of the team would react to his termination, as he had formed some strong relationships, and people in the company were aware of his predicament. 

Ultimately we decided to terminate the employee.   We considered investing more into him, training him more, or at least waiting until his personal issues subsided.  But none of those solutions were ideal.  We had already invested heavily in his training and were constantly doing whatever we can to help him succeed.  And we don’t know when (or if) his personal issues would subside.  With that said, we didn’t want to just let him go and fend for himself on top of everything that was going on in his life.  We  offered him a generous severance package, and assistance with finding another job. 

We also met with some of this employee’s closest colleagues in the organization to answer any questions they may have.  Surprisingly, most of them agreed with the termination as they also were aware of his poor performance.  Some consultants even were getting upset that this person was working for the firm, as they felt that they were working more effectively than this person and having him continue working for the firm would’ve affected their morale.   Lastly, many of the consultants were appreciative of the assistance we offered this employee after termination and increase their confidence in the management team that we would do the right thing.

 

Key Takeaways

  • Firing people is never fun, but at times necessary.
  • Firing employees is more than just about dollars and cents and being aware of that is notices by those around you.
  • As a CEO, you have responsibility to both your employees on an individual basis, but also to the employees as an organization, and must factor in both when making personnel decisions.
  • Your staff is very aware of the performance (or lack thereof) of their peers, and how those employees are treated affect the morale of your other employees.

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Lessons from my first failed startup

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Before I started Simplegrid, I had actually started another IT consulting firm, which completely failed. This firm was started with 7 friends who were all interested in working together. We realized very quickly that this model wasn’t going to work. All of us had overlapping skills sets, and didn’t have the complimentary skillsets that are needed for a business to succeed. For example, we were all technologists, but no one had sales or administrative experience.

Beyond that, we were suffering from too many cooks in the kitchen syndrome, so all seven of us had to agree in order to make a decision to be finalized. It would take us weeks to come to a decision on something as simple as to where to open our bank account. Lastly, since we were all friends, no one wanted to step on each other’s toes, and no one wanted to do the more mundane work that is needed in the beginning stages of a business.

I was very serious about starting a IT consulting firm, and saw it as a big part of my career, so I had to make a tough decision and let my friends know that I wouldn’t be working with them, but rather starting my own firm.  It was a tough time as many feelings were hurt.  I learned a lot of lessons from this one failure, that I think can be applied to all businesses:

  • Never start a company with more than 2 or 3 (max) co-founders.   If you do have co-founders, make sure that each of you have complementary skill sets.  For example, if one of you is the technical one, the other should have a strong skill set in sales.
  • Try not to go into business with your friends.   Unless you can separate out the business aspect of your lives, from the pleasure aspect of your lives (and believe me, not many people can), you’re looking for trouble as issues in your business will spill over into your personal lives.  Do you really want to involve your other friends, or even your families in your business issues?  Do you want to go to a party and be upset because your partner isn’t pulling his weight, but you can’t tell him that cause he’s your friend?  It’s a really bad idea.
  • Fail fast.  You’ll know when the writing’s on the wall.  In my situation, it was obvious that this firm wasn’t going anywhere.  It’s always better to cut your losses and try again.

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