My Plans for 2011

It's not how you start, it's how you finish,

And it's not where you're from, it's where you're at.

- The Hours

About a month ago, I wrote about putting a 2011 Action Plan together with the caveat that I'd share what I'd be up to this year. Below is my list for this year. I plan to accomplish everything, though if this year is anything like last year, it's likely to dish up a lot more than I could have planned. I share it because I am learning that it takes a village to make a warrior and in the spirit of what I learned at The Foundry and my last blog post, I am opening up the details of my strategy so that you can assist in creating the life that is possible for me. If you have experience or connections in any of the areas that I lay out below, feel free to email me (travis.corrigan@gmail.com).

Objectives:

1. High leverage employment - Generate the best possible experience-based learning from my work. Be intentional about the choices I make at Discover, The Foundry and the companies that I am starting. Be a contribution in my various positions and add value to the institutions that I am in service of. Build a community that imprints me with precision-execution management practices while coaching in me in the learning process of growing, developing and interacting with colleagues, subordinates and superiors so that I can begin to distinguish the contexts that enable me to act and lead powerfully and transformatively.

2. Own the stewardship of my financial house - Learn and implement new technology to manage my finances such that I have knowledge and control over my spending and saving. Create and establish a context that accelerates getting out of credit card and student loan debt, allows me to fully contribute to my retirement accounts without impacting monthly cash flow and teaches me financial discipline.

3. Become a finely tune piece of fitness machinery - Generate and follow a training regimen that tracks my gains in strength, endurance and flexibility to achieve new levels of performance in events and competitions.

4. Expand the breadth and depth of my relationships - Make time to have meaningful relationships with the people in my life in order to learn more about them, learn from them and reap the benefits of having relationships founded on resonant bonds.

Key Results:

1. Financial Fitness

• Utilize Quicken to create and live from a realistic budget.
• Reduce revolving debt by at least 25%.
• Complete "Your Money or Your Life", including all the exercises.
• Currate wish list for big ticket items and set savings plans for them.
• Be in a position to max out 401(k) in 2012.

2. Fitness Machine

• Establish Vo2 Max and Lactate Threshold metrics as a baseline for 2011.
• Complete the "300" workout in less than 41 minutes
• Win 2 Cyclocross races
• Move up a criterium class.
• Complete the Wasatch Death Ride.
• Complete LOTOJA.
• 40 mile average ride by July

3. Expand relationships

• Reach out and create the possibility of regularly occurring "dates".
• Schedule and complete dates that have workable contexts for both parties.
• Track insights and learning in journal.

Reading List:

• How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work
• High Output Management
• Why You Do The Things You Do
• How To Write A Lot
• Your Money or Your Life
• When the Game is Over It All Goes Back in the Box
• Decoded
• The Great Reset
• This Time It's Different
• Where Good Ideas Come From
• Mind Wide Open
• The Mind's Past
• The Wave
• The Devil's Teeth
• The Great Divergence
• Dumbing Down America
• Future Shock
• Science of The Brain (research paper)
• The Lesson of Entrepreneurial Experience (research paper)
• The Entrepreneur Next Door (research paper)
• The Nature of Man (research paper)
• The Role of Team Composition (research paper)
• Web 2.0 - Design Patterns for Business Models (research paper)
• Creating Leaders - An Ontological Model (research paper)
• A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation (research paper)
• Integrity, Without it Nothing Works (research paper)
• Introductory Reading for Being an Effective Leader (research paper)
• Procrastination and Impatience (research paper)

Movie Queue:

• How I Met Your Mother -Season 5
• The Big Lebowski
• Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
• The Fighter
• The Hurt Locker
• Memento
• The Social Network

Course Queue:

• MIT OpenCourseware 21F.301 - French I
• MIT OpenCourseware 21F.301 - French II
• MIT OpenCourseware 15.615 - Law for the Entrepreneur and Manager
• MIT OpenCourseware 15.301 - Managerial Psychology
• MIT OpenCourseware 15.316 - Building and Leading Effective Teams
• MIT OpenCourseware 6.090 - Building Programming Experience
• MIT OpenCourseware 6.00 - Introduction to Computer Science and Programming
• MIT OpenCourseware 6.001 - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• MIT OpenCourseware 15.975 - Special Seminar in Management - Business Plans
• MIT OpenCourseware 15.060 - Data, Models and Decisions

So there you are. That's my entire year. Again if you have any insight as to how I could be doing something easier, quicker or cheaper, I'd love to hear from you. If you want to get together for the sake of getting together, let me know and we can schedule something. Looking forward to hearing from you.

-Travis

Work Hard and Be Nice To People

Well there's always time

On the telephone line

To talk about things to come

Sweet dreams and fine machines

In pieces on the ground.

- James Taylor

I've been talking a lot about living intentionally. Like anything in life, it's pretty easy to talk about. It's a lot harder to actually do. The thing about life is that no plan survives reality. In the first few weeks of the year, my time has been taken up by a lot of unforeseen, but important and joyous, work. Some progress has been made on the goals, but there are some things that I find are dropping off.

I have found that having a theme for the year helps me fixate on the ultimately important thing that you want to be accomplishing this year in the face of everything that comes up in your life. My theme for 2011 is the title of this post: Work Hard and Be Nice to People.

I plan on acquiring and framing this poster and placing it above the head board of my bed. In the meantime I have it on my DAYTUM tracker, along with everything else that I'm tracking for my life this year.

This is not an original theme and it is borrowed from one of my mentors but I find it highly impactful for me this year. Why? Because it's hard to do. Working hard requires focus and lots of calories to keep up with the mental and physical pace. Being nice requires that you be emotionally and mentally flexible in the face of approaching deadlines that competing demands that run counter to your plans.

I'm fairly decent at working hard. I'm fairly decent at being a decent human (I haven't always been) with the caveat that I'm well rested and not focused on fulfilling the sometimes complex web of my commitments. It's no secret that I have a lot of opportunity to improve my ability to have both of those present in the same space.

As this will be another year of transition, renewal, hard work and growth I must remember that anyone can work hard and that it doesn't take much work to be a rigid personality. The goal is to have fun, build beautiful things and contribute positively to the people and institutions around me. People aren't seemingly bureaucratic, opaque or difficult for the sake of being those things but rather simply they are being humans in the face of what's going on in their lives.

No one is perfect at this and I am not implying that this new commitment is some unrealistic notion of a perfect behavior around this commitment. Sometimes I'm not going to as work hard as I could or should. I'm also not going to be as nice I'd hope to be. But it would be a direct contradiction if I stated a commitment to contributing to others and go off working hard without being nice to people. It's my opinion that working hard and neglecting being generative in my engagement with others would be akin to riding a cycling criterium race and never moving out of my granny gear: I'm definitely working hard but I'm also not getting to the finish line any time soon.

The point is this: no amount of working hard can overcome being a constantly unpleasant person.

I know people who are missing out on some very beneficial personal and professional relationships because they are unaware that they occur as cruel individuals. The sad thing is that people get confused about why their efforts don't yield the results they expect. It'd be like me riding in my granny gear and making up some story about how the rest of the cyclists are dropping me from the peloton because they are bureaucratic, opaque, difficult or stupid. Even sadder is that sometimes some people are more committed to being right about the story they make up rather than come to grips that they are a jackass. It sucks, but it happens.

So in closing: I'm committed to working hard in service of building beautiful, durable institutions that, by definition, leave people inspired and enlivened and keep in mind that everyone is fighting their own uphill battle, not trying to prevent me from accomplishing the possibilities that I see in the world. Easier said than done. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth committing to. Also, feel free to tell me when I'm dropping down to my granny gear - I don't want to get dropped.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it:

The Man in the Arena

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

- Theodore Roosevelt

What I've Learned about Entrepreneurship in the Last 12 months.

Below is a "mash-up" of collective learnings from Dr. Robert Wuebker, Eric Ries, Dr. Taylor Randall and others during my experience at The David Eccles School of Business about the space of validating a new business idea and leading in an ambiguous environment. This is a rough paraphrase with a lot of my own interpretation of what's been passed on to me, not just in lecture halls but in live-round field drills at The Foundry, Dash & Cooper and recently Template Cafe.

The thing about entrepreneurship is that most people think that it is a smaller version of running a large, corporate company. The space of starting a company is nothing like that - it's completely different. It's not about writing a plan and executing the plan. It's about getting your ass to the tarmac, selling your face off, taking customer feedback, pivoting the direction of the company and repeating.

This is what it means by no plan survives reality. You must keep setting up experiments that test your stated assumptions about the space you are operating in and simultaneously reveal the assumptions that you didn't know you had. Eventually, the experiments get so large that you can no longer fund them yourself -it is THEN and ONLY THEN that you start having conversations with investors. Even then, you aren't convincing them that you have a business that's going to work, you present a series of case studies (your experiments) and the logic of taking the next step.

How you actually make this happen through the conduit of a team is management science that is not researched very much and, despite numerous attempts is not taught very well.

How do you become a good leader? You lead. You get on the court and practice enrolling others to put their heart and soul into a possibility for little or no immediate compensation. Every time you lead, it costs you the person that you thought you were. You will make mistakes and bad decisions and you will have to live with the fact that those things affected people's jobs and the livelihood of their families. It is the messiest, slimiest profession in the world - which is why there are so few of them and even fewer who get to be called "great" leaders.

Do not read business books about leadership. Read biographies about great leaders. Gaining insight about how George Washington finally figured out how to start winning battles will be more valuable than a whole library of New York Times Bestsellers.

Cash Money.

In a follow up to my blog post yesterday, Gary the Snowman gives us the low down on the cush life of a Venture Capitalist.

Enjoy.

Innovations in the Venture Capital Industry

Somebody bring me back some money please, hey

I got a million ways to get it, choose one

Hey, bring it back, bring it back

Now double your money and make a stack

I'm on to the next one.

- Jay-Z

I don't know a lot of about the nitty gritty of the Venture Capital industry but I presume that a majority of the decisions are made around optimizing returns for limited partners like large banks and pensions. This is appropriate - it's called a fiduciary duty - because these institutions have to manage the deposits of the customers and have fixed timelines of when they need to have the cash returned, depending on their balance sheets.

Unfortunately, this mechanizes behavior incentives to make investments in companies that would make a lot of money but don't really doing anything because they can easily attract and retain users (Twitter, for example). Because most venture capital funds have a hard deadline of returning the funds within 10 years, a firm must be VERY focussed in its ability to make good investments. Most firms specialize (appropriately) in a particular stage of company growth (seed stage vs late stage) and do not deviate. This forces them to pass up opportunities that are objectively good ones but don't fit into their investment strategy because they have to answer to their LPs and worry about having a good track record so that they can easily raise money for a new fund.

But there are some people innovating in this area:

Union Square Ventures just announced that they raised a new Opportunity Fund to keep capital in reserve for investments that are good opportunities but don't fit within their investment strategy.

Additionally, Andreesen-Horowitz announced a few weeks ago that they raised an astronomical $650M for an all-stage fund. Ben Horowitz, GP for the fund stated on his blog the reason for this:

"As a matter of core philosophy, we invest in companies, not stages. We want to be in business with the best entrepreneurs going after the biggest markets and we do not care whether they need seed money, venture money or growth money. We believe in great entrepreneurs and the products and companies they build. We do not focus on special return profiles for various stages of investment. As a result, our fund is stage agnostic... we are excited about investing $50,000 in new seed deals and we are excited about investing $50,000,000 in companies like Skype."

Specifically with the new Union Square Ventures Opportunity Fund, it is an interesting fund model: non-commitment of the entire fund, pay-for-play fees only on the money that's invested and a loosely defined investment strategy (opportunistic).

It might be interesting to align LPs, VCs, and the ever growing demand/need from entrepeneurs and early-stage companies to have on-demand investment as they pivot their direction towards reaching market validation AND be poised to make an investment to ride the upside once (if) the companies get on rails.

Of course, it's easy to talk about. Much harder to raise. Even harder to manage. USV and Andreesen-Horowitz are rock stars with great track records in building companies and good investment decisions - they have the clout to convince people that they can pull this stuff off. It will be interesting to see if the rest of the industry follows suit and tries to convince the LP community to engage in this type of risk profile in an attempt to align investment incentives with the reality of the entrepreneur.

Simply put: it seems like institutional investment is like traditional education in that they both understand that learning and growth is non-linear but seem to invest and teach in batches (investment round, classes of students) as if it was linear. *Why* we invest in rounds is something that I know nothing about (hopefully someone can tell me). Maybe because on opportunistic investment strategy provides less certainty for GPs as well as LPs and humans naturally opt for structure and the "known" even it is not optimal (ex: investing in bonds vs stocks).

One thing that might be interesting to examine is the relationship between firm performance (revenue/profit growth, probability of an exit, value at exit) and how close to on-demand investment the company receives (smaller round size, frequency of rounds and frequency and size of bridge loans in between rounds).

We have schools of thought around running lean: just-in-time inventory management, on-demand production and lean startup strategy. Why don't we have lean investment?

Maybe it's possible only in certain industries (both the firms mentioned here invest in hi-tech companies). Maybe it's possible only in certain investment stages. Maybe it's not possible at all or it's so hard that it might as well be considered impossible. But it seems like the logical move for the at least part of the industry and I imagine that we'll be seeing some retooling with the business model in the medium term.

Now I'm just a kid and I don't talk to investors and I don't have the professional experience or track record as these guys. So I wouldn't say that I'm the first to ask this question but I think it's an interesting possibility to drill down on and then build up from.

The question for me personally is whether or not anyone could do this. Could anyone follow the template model that Union Square is leading with to build regional micro-VCs? Could I help contribute to this? Anyone else interested in this?

The Foundry - A Graduate's View

It’s a good idea to be yourself, not only because everybody else is taken, but because trying to be anything else doesn’t usually get you very far. - Chris Guillebeau

What is The Foundry?

It's a question that is easy to ask but hard to answer. What's amazing is how glib and cheesy it sounds when you try to describe its state of being its state of being. Foundry is not so much an organization as it is an experience; it focuses more on "doing" rather than "being."

So what is The Foundry? How about I start with what we do:

Participants are trained in the form and function of high-end, lightweight management technology. A high-leverage, precision-execution oriented set of documents that are easy to manage from, communicate the weekly snapshot of the company and allow managers to document their process as they push the frontier of their company forward. We use two documents, each are no longer than two pages. The quarterly planning document is called a MOKR (Mission, Objectives, Key Results) and a weekly planning Management Report that progresses the company to accomplish the quarterly objectives it sets for itself.

CEOs (and Foundry admins) are required to prepare a Management Report each week and upload it to their file within the Foundry Dropbox Folder by 6pm SHARP each Saturday. These documents reviewed by each CEO within a cohort. Each participant views the document with "revision marks" turned on and holds each other accountable for spelling, grammar and format defects. They also review each company's progress, plans and problems, keeping in mind that they are looking to contribute to assisting in any way possible.

On Monday morning they meet at 7:30am SHARP ready to add value to each other by providing insight, solutions or introductions within the their respective networks over the course of an hour so that the group progresses and learns faster together than any one individual would otherwise.

Foundry's role in that meeting is cultivate and batch together commons problems or challenges the cohort is facing ans solve them collectively - often leveraging a group discount or small sponsorship if the solution must be purchased.

The last requirement is to conduct a project review every 4 weeks which serves to model a board meeting. CEOs are encouraged to invite mentors, advisors, potential investors and other participants to engage in a dialoge about the monthly progress (things that are DONE and NOT DONE), personal and organizational learning, forward thinking plans and problems. It's typically a proverbial ass-kicking about your efforts to manage and guide your growing baby.. er, startup. It's an exhausting hour and a half but it provides clarity.

That's it. That's what we do. No fancy pants stratitegery. No superlative "crush it" dialogue. It's that simple. And it's effective.

Here's proof: 7 out 10 startups fail within the first year. 7 out of 10 Foundry companies survive.

So how do we generate the results that we do? The participants do everything. By participating in the Foundry, the act of contributing to each other creates their ownership in its existence. When participants no longer decide that the mechanics laid out above work for them, then we cease to exist. So far it's working.

That's why you can't talk about what it is unless you've been in it. To read and conceptualize what it's like is an order of magnitude different than to actually DO it - just like building a rocket ship out of legos doesn't qualify you to work for NASA.

Yes, we are a cult. Yes, we have rolling enrollment. So with these results and open-source management technology, why doesn't everyone join? The Foundry experience augments the startup experience which, like Fight Club, is confronting. Our management techniques aren't glitzy fancy pants Web 2.0 apps. They are 8x11 pieces of paper and they force you to publicly call yourself out to execute and announce to everyone when you don't. This alone confronts a lot of people who think that "getting the right answer" or "checking off a list" or " appearing to do complicated things with ease" makes them a good person.

For example I have seen experienced entrepreneurs get their asses handed to them in a Project Review or Monday Meeting by a 20-something student founder. And vice versa. This is a culture in which you learn, from everyone - ESPECIALLY when the message is packaged poorly. No one does that naturally, some stick around long enough to be transformed into someone that eventually welcomes this. Which is why most Foundry graduates are seemingly carved out of wood.

All of your inner demons, the thing that you have resistance around, will show up and be present in front of you and everyone else. Those uncomfortable and slimy "realities" that you do a good job of pretending aren't there, start announcing themselves loudly. What you decide to do at that point is what it means to be at risk to learn: you learn something, not about management or your company, but about yourself.

You will do this constantly, day in and day out.

We make a claim about forging entrepreneurs for life. On the surface it looks like company building but it's really the things that one learns when he or she is engages in the trench warfare of starting a company.

This is why Foundry accepts PEOPLE starting companies, NOT companies.