Monthly Archives: July 2008

New Gadget: iRobot Verro 500 PowerScrub

Posted on July 31, 2008 | Leave a comment
iRobot Verro 500 PowerScrub

Disclaimer: My company was involved in the software design / interface for the iRobot ConnectR product. 

I love having a pool but one of the things that I have never been particularly interested in, or honestly, very good at, is cleaning it.  When we first bought the house 10 years ago, we looked into a pool robot but most of the reviews were very, very bad.  However, this past summer, I decided to take a look at the market again and found some very good reviews on the iRobot pool cleaners. Based upon my research, the best choice for our pool was the iRobot Verro 500 PowerScrub.

Overall first impressions are that this is an amazing product.  It came pretty much all set to go and that is exactly what it did.  I let it run without doing much and then I brushed the floor and let it run again.  The pool has never been so clean and using it was a snap. 

From a consumer point of view, the only gotcha was that the power connection from the robot to their power supply was hard to connect properly.  But other than that, I would say that this device, though expensive, is a homerun.  I’ll follow-up after I’ve used it for a month but it was simple to use, extremely effective, and will save on electricity, pool pump, filter, chemicals, and water refilling.  I may try do a ROI on it, but, it is hard to calculate the pleasure of seeing and using a sparkling clean pool.

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Posted in Gadgets

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Treating failure as the best opportunity to learn

Posted on July 24, 2008 | Leave a comment

Earlier this week, I came across this great article by Roger Ehrenberg:

It is definitely one of the most objective and well-written startup post mortems I have read by a member of the actual team.  His list of Seven Deadly Sins, which in my opinion is not complete but a great list nonetheless, consists of:

  1. The lack of a single, “the buck stops here” leader until too late in the game
  2. No separation between the technology organization and the product organization
  3. Too much PR, too early
  4. Too much money
  5. Not close enough to the customer
  6. Slow to adapt to market reality
  7. Disagreement on strategy both within the Company and with the Board

Now, depending upon the situation, some of those may or may not hold true for all startups, but I would like to highlight the first one “the buck stops here” along with “not close enough to the customer”.  You need a strong leader who can come to final decisions and be responsible for them (but be ready to change as the market or situation requires) and you also need to truly get in bed with your customers.  Now, by that, I don’t mean you need to cowtail to each and every whim (especially on the features side) but you do need to truly  understand their pain and come up with a solution that directly addresses it.

I want to send out my thanks to Roger for sharing his insight into the problems and struggles at Monitor110.  It is great to see others willing share their real-life experiences building startups and doing it without placing blame all around.  That’s a hard thing for most people to do and I applaud those that are able to successfully accomplish it.

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Posted in Entrepreneur

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Hiring (and firing) at a startup

Posted on July 14, 2008 | Leave a comment

The recent post by Dharmesh Shah (Startup Hiring: An Entrepreneur Disagrees With Entrepreneur Magazine) reminded me of a few simple rules I follow regarding hiring and firing people:

  • Find great people who excel at learning new things as they will almost always be of the greatest value to your organization.  This is expecially true for startups as you need people able to quickly adapt as your company grows and changes. 
  • Put an emphasis on finding people who are able to execute.  In a startup, whether it is a sales guy, a programmer, or a customer support specialist, your employees need to accomplish the task and move on.  Some people get caught up with the process or by trying to do it perfectly. However,  when you are trying to launch and grow a new company on a shoe-string, you need people who can really get it done with as little fanfare and struggle as possible.
  • The moment you realize that someone is not working out, fire them.  Dragging it out (and that is what you are doing) makes it worse for everyone.  When it comes to employee management, this was one of the hardest lessons I have ever learned but one of the most critical in keeping the company productive and the morale high.  As soon as it starts going sour for you (or them), cut the ties, find a replacement, and move on. 

So, when hiring at a startup, find those people who love to learn and execute.  And, don’t let the difficulties of firing someone prevent you from doing the right thing for your company.

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Posted in Employees

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Comcast Support: How Twitter Saved the Day!

Posted on July 2, 2008 | 1 Comment

This is the story of my experience with Comcast, their support teams, and how Twitter saved the day. Now, unlike many of the people I see complaining online, I have, for the most part, found Comcast to provide very good service.  I did, however, try their new Comcast TiVo DVR box and that was a complete failure…but except for that, for the most part, they have met my expectations in regards to service and support.

So, yesterday, July 1, was the day we launched VendorCity to the public.  So, it was going to be a crazy and stressful day no matter what.  However, it got off to a VERY BAD START when I awoke early to get a jump on my email. I went to send email through my ”old” company’s email server which uses port 25 and does security via IP address.  (I know…I know…it should be over secure connections..let’s just ignore that issue for now and chastise me later).

I started up Outlook and my email arrived without a hitch but I was unable to send out (but had no trouble with my VendorCity account which is hosted by Google Apps).  After a quick investigation, I was able to definitively determine that port 25 was blocked.  Well, you can imagine my surprise and frustration of having to deal with this on the day we are launching VendorCity. 

I called Comcast support and get connected with a standard first-level support person.  I made it very clear that I needed to speak with a networking expert because it appeared that Comcast was blocking port 25 (the smtp port). She asked me what email program I was using (MS Outlook) and she said that Comcast does not support Outlook (only Outlook Express) but that she would work hard to help me anyways. 

Well, that was nice of her but then she proceeded to try and walk me through lots of Outlook and Control Panel settings.  After my, oh, 10th time trying to explain to her that it had NOTHING TO DO WITH APPLICATIONS but it was a problem with my network and specifically sending SMTP email over port 25, she told me that the only way to get someone else to help me would be to hang-up and call in again. Well, you can imagine my surprise and anger when I was told that. 

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