Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

A friend of mine, William Sulinski, has recently started a cool new project called From Holden. The concept is pretty basic – Will like to wear quality clothes (he’s way more fashionable than me!) but he, like me, is on a startup person’s budget. So he’s decided to start a verticalized men’s clothing company focusing on high quality shirts. It’s a cool concept, and I like the style of the shirts that he’s working on.

From Holden V Neck T Shirt

From Holden V-Neck T-Shirt

Will is on the cusp of a new trend in internet retailing, which combines manufacturing/sourcing with internet distribution in the goal of driving down the cost to the end consumer. I like the concept and will be asking for a few shirts for my birthday…

He talks more about what he’s trying to accomplish in a video on his Kickstarter campaign.

Please check out the From Holden Kickstarter campaign and, if you like the shirts, help Will out!

Can you teach ethics?

There is always a lot of chatter about teaching ethics to MBAs. Wharton recently revamped, again, the core courses to re-emphasize ethics, and Harvard’s MBA ethics oath come to mind.

But the recent, horrible events in Libya have me thinking a little bit about this whole teaching ethics thing…

Colonel Gaddafi’s son – Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, or rather Dr Saif al-Islam since he is the proud holder of a doctorate from the LSE. The younger Gaddafi’s thesis was on the undemocratic nature of global governance (I have heard his father wax lyrical on the same theme from the podium of the UN). David Held, professor of politics at the LSE, recalls Gaddafi junior as manifesting a “deep commitment to liberal democratic reform of his country.” It has to be said that deep commitment didn’t seem to be much in evidence on Sunday when Saif Gaddafi made a rambling speech on television, threatening to fight “to the last bullet” to retain control of Libya.

Source: Financial Times

And according to the Guardian, Saif’s thesis was on “how to create more just and democratic global governing institutions”, focusing on the importance of the role of “civil society”.”

Ok, so LSE didn’t exactly turn a despot’s son into a democratic human rights reformer. Pretty extreme example, I know.

But it does highlight the strange role that people somehow expect business schools to take mature individuals and somehow ensure that they are all ethical business people once they graduate. Is this really possible?

It seems strange to me that journalists like to harp on how certain schools’ graduates do unethical things, as if somehow the school could keep/teach these people to act ethically for the rest of their lives.

What can business schools do?

I feel like the best schools can do is to 1) admit ethical people (to the best of their abilities given the admissions process) 2) kick out unethical people if they are unethical while at school,  3) establish a framework for dealing with ethical dilemmas in the business world and 4) let them know and that it is OK/normal to have ethical issues sometimes and that they should feel good/normal challenging unethical behavior in the workplace once they graduate.

A crazy idea – let in a few unethical MBAs

Schools let in people from all sorts of walks of life and with different backgrounds under the guise of exposing students to new things and having a well rounded class.  Note that I liked having a well rounded class, since I had only worked in finance before school so getting exposure to people from different backgrounds was very positive for me. It would have been very boring to go to school with a lot of people who were just like me.

Now here is the crazy idea. Since school is a great place to experience new challenges in a low consequences environment… maybe it would make sense to admit a few unethical people? That way students would be exposed to working with people with a different value system and would learn how to deal with them?

Wouldn’t unethical people be just as an important group of people to be exposed to? There are clearly people in the business world who do nasty stuff. Why shouldn’t schools help students learn how to interact by fostering actual interactions?

I mean, it is easier to stand up to someone who wants to cheat on a group paper than it is to stand up to a boss who wants to do something nasty, isn’t it? Why not practice in school so you are ready for the real world?

Ok, so that was a crazy idea.

Follow me on Twitter: Healy Jones

Jason Baptiste has a very good post on going to college or dropping out to pursue a startup. He dropped out of school to try to grow his company, then ended up returning to finish his degree. Great perspective. We can stop blogging about this now!

We’ve had some cool developments at my startup, OfficeDrop – mail-in scanning service + document management – and I figured, why not brag about it on my blog.

First of all, we have really had some aggressive integrations with Google Aps. These basically allow people to get paper into Google Docs, either by our self-scan scanning software download or by linking an OfficeDrop account directly with Google Docs, which pushes the mail-in scans directly into Google Docs accounts as text-searchable PDFs. For us, this is a pretty big deal. A blogger lead a piece on this integration with the title:

OfficeDrop Puts Pressure On Microsoft

Very awesome! (Scroll to the middle of the article) I’m not sure Microsoft feels pressure from us, but we think our integration is a big deal…

You may have noticed that Prasad Thammineni, my occasional co-blogger here at Startable, is becoming very occasional. Well, this is partly because he’s been writing some good stuff on other sites like Small Business Trends. His two most recent articles were published this month and are getting some good traction:

20 Tips Small Businesses Can Use to Build Web Credibility

and

Finding the Application Marketplace That’s Right for Your Small Business

Check them out!

I’ve started spending time on Quora, a question and answer site that is pretty cool. Quora let’s me follow particular topics and lines of questions, some of which are near and dear to my heart like online marketing and venture capital. One of the best parts of the service is that I can connect and follow my friends/connections and see what topics they are answering/following. Well, imagine my surprise when I saw my friend’s profile (I’ve redacted his identifying information in case he finds this public exposure embarassing):

Basically, any of your connections can “suggest” you follow a topic. And it currently appears that you are forced to follow that topic. And the result could be pretty funny. Please note that I’m not at all suggesting that sexual orientation is at all a funny topic – I’m just suggesting it is funny that you can pretty much force your contacts to broadcast that they are following anything that you want.

Despite the awesome little bug I recommend you check out Quora. I think it is a useful service.

This is my profile on Quora (you’ll need to log in to see it). Check it out and connect with me – but first you have to promise not to sign me up for any topics without my permission! http://www.quora.com/Healy-Jones

Prasad Thammineni, my occasional co-blogger, was recently quoted in Forbes (and some other locations, via the AP) on his quest to track down the UPS guy to get his iPad delivered to the OfficeDrop office this past Saturday!

People could also “pre-order” iPads online to arrive Saturday. Prasad Thammineni did just that, but had to chase the UPS ( UPS – news – people ) guy down the block from his office in Cambridge, Mass., to get his iPad.

After playing with it for a few hours, his impressions were mostly positive. Typing on the on-screen keyboard wasn’t as comfortable as using a laptop with a regular keyboard, and Thammineni said he found himself using several fingers but not touch-typing normally. Still, he said, it was much easier to use than a Kindle keyboard.

But the weight of the device might keep him from typing on the go. Thammineni said that after about two minutes of holding up the device with one hand and typing with the other, it got too heavy, even at a mere 1.5 pounds.

Funny. Last night I was watching the president speak at the state of the union address and fired off a tweet about something that caught my attention – elimination of the capital gains tax for small business investment. From @HealyHoops: Don’t understand how it will work, but sounds interestingRT @jsteig: eliminate cap gains on all small businesses . . . that’s good! #SOTU

Then I stop paying attention to Twitter… but lo and behold, CNN is using some pretty interesting social media measuring tools and somehow decides to mention my tweet on the air. You can see it here – my tweet is about one minute and forty seconds into the clip.

First of all, the social media monitoring and display technology they are using is pretty cool. It’s a pretty interesting segment.

Secondly, I do think that the elimination of small business taxes could be really powerful for sparking investment in local and startup businesses. I really don’t understand how it will work, as in what will stop it from becoming a vehicle for tax avoidance and how will it impact venture investing? Will GPs count as small business investors? How about LPs? Will funds be counted the same as grandma helping her daughter getting her hair salon off the ground? Pretty interesting questions…

Third, thanks to Joseph Steig for the tweet I retweeted/commented on.

Finally - Can I now say that I’ve been featured on CNN? Or As Seen On TV?

Update – HealyHoops on the Daily Show too!

This is getting a little out of hand, but my little (re)tweet was also on the Daily Show. The twitter/CNN bit starts around 9:55 into the show (I found the video navigation a bit difficult with Chrome.) I don’t think the particular sketch is all that funny, but it is amusing to have my tweet mentioned by Jon Stewart. And I don’t agree with Jon that Twitter is totally useless!

Today I use a ton of applications on my iPhone to get the full experience of online services/sites like Facebook, Amazon, LinkedIn, Wikipedia and others. But the beauty of the web (at least on the PC) is that you don’t need to download software in most cases to get a full, awesome experience. I can just log into eBay and start trading stuff; I don’t have to wait for a download to get going.

But on the mobile phone it’s different. To get the best experience I need to hit the app store and download something. It’s a like a weird step backwards from the point where anyone could easily use any site with a browser (from your PC) without downloading software to a place where each site has its own special software that requires a download and install.

According to MediaPost:

Gartner estimates the combined installed base of smartphones and browser-equipped enhanced phones will surpass 1.82 billion units by 2013, eclipsing the total of 1.78 billion PCs by then.

But the firm warns that many sites still are not optimized for the mobile Web, even though cell users expect to make fewer clicks on their phones than on a PC. To successfully expand into mobile, publishers will have to reformat sites from the small form-factor of handheld devices.

I totally buy this argument. While one can quibble around the exact number of mobile devices vs. PCs, there is a clear and obvious trend that mobile devices are becoming an important secondary, and to a lot of people, the primary web access device.

So I wonder – will web sites just automatically be optimized for mobile viewing, or will the “app” become even more important? Is this whole app thing for using online services a real of “de-evolution” of the web – or a mere blip before mobile browsers and bandwidth become powerful enough to support the real web experience? What do people think, are mobile web apps here to say or just a strange passing fancy?

Photographic evidence that Windows 7 kills kittens!

Just kidding; the little guys are taking a nap. For some reason they love sleeping on my computer.

Windows 7 Kills Kittens!

And I have to say, I like Windows 7. I’ve been using the beta version since the middle of the summer and it hasn’t crashed at all. I also dig the little universal search box; I still use Google Desktop, but MSFT’s search box has become part of my workflow. I have gotten used to the windows-button-tab-button way of circulating through open windows, and graphically it is very appealing. The help documentation is pretty good too, so I’ve been able to modify the preferences I want to pretty easily.

I’ve completed the second step of my recovery from being a venture capitalist* and am now the head of marketing at Pixily, an online document management service focused on the small business customers. (Yes, it’s Prasad‘s company!) I’ve had the opportunity to get close to a number of startups since I left Atlas earlier this year, and have loved a bunch of them – particularly some of the ones over at TechStars. But I found myself slowly spending more and more time at Pixily, from a few days a week to 30 hours a week to 60 hours a week plus lots of brainstorming time in bed at night when I was supposed to be sleeping. Eventually Prasad and I decided that I might as well take the plunge and go full time.

I’m really excited about working with Prasad and the team at Pixily for a bunch of reasons:

• We are growing, and growing fast. Guess what – growth is fun! Even more fun on the inside of the company vs. being an investor looking in from the board level.
• It’s new to me. I’d been an investor/finance type for my whole career. But marketing is totally new. I think I’ve got a feel for what I want things to look like from a high level from my days as an investor, but actually getting there is the challenge.
• I still get to play with numbers, since marketing is now a metrics driven function. I always liked running different scenarios for potential portfolio companies – now I just get to do it in real time…
• Working at Pixily has really stepped up my passion level. Passion matters more than when I was an investor. One of the greatest investors I worked with was a partner at Summit Partners. He had the uncanny ability to dispassionately evaluate every little detail of a deal, and had no “sunk cost” fallacies. If an important part of a deal didn’t check out he would walk away, regardless of the amount of time we’d spent working on it – even if we’d spent a year and a half and had spent hundreds of thousands on due diligence. I think that is part of the reason he was such an amazing investor. But when you are company trying to grow, you can’t be dispassionate. You have to believe that what you are doing is going to work, even when little things go off the rails. So, while the ups are great, it is the excitement I feel for the company’s potential that keeps me chugging on through the occasional setback.
• It’s really cool to do something that actually, directly helps customers. I’m getting a lot of the passion I just mentioned from customers. It was after taking a few customer support calls that I really “got” the problem that Pixily was solving. Small businesses really like this service and they are changing the way the work and integrating Pixily into their everyday processes. There is a real, unmet need in the market – small companies are still paper-based and a new generation of business owners want to manage their businesses’ information online, not in filing cabinets, and from their phones, not from their desktop. Helping people make this change is really exciting!

There are a ton of other things I’m finding really fun – but the one thing I do miss (besides the deep, peaceful slumber of the money man) is having time to blog more. I hope to pick back up the blogging pace, since I’m experiencing all kinds of new things and want to share and get people’s opinions.

Finally, sign up for a free trial for your startup! Send us your paper documents, upload your digital files, and start using Pixily as a search engine for all of your companies’ paper! And you can use the “HJ2009″ coupon code for $5.00 off when you sign up for a paying plan.

*The first step was acknowledging that I had a problem