Travel less, skip the hassles, and help the environment
The 20 percent solution: Summer travel frustration seems to be affecting not just vacationers, but technology execs, too. Mark Lewis, president of a division of Hopkinton-based EMC Corp., says he's trying to eliminate 20 percent of his air travel and replace it with other ways of communicating with customers, like online meetings and videoconferencing.
With the cost of fuel skyrocketing and environmental concerns escalating, it seems that we should all take matters into our own hands.
While I totally believe in face-to-face interaction and traveling to meet with customers, I have taken many trips that, in hindsight, could have been handled just as well using collaboration/communication technology. Therefore, I have set a personal goal to reduce my travel by 20 percent. That amounts to simply not taking one trip in five. While I will still travel more than most, I intend to travel significantly less.
The technology surrounds us to collaborate more effectively and (quite the opposite of air travel) it is improving every day. Technology allows us to have highly interactive conversations and share more and more rich information. So assuming that we can leverage technology, what is the downside? Let's see, I save tons of time not being in security lines, not walking aimlessly through airports, not eating standing up and not having my knees jammed into the seat in front of me. And I reduce my personal-carbon footprint at the same time. All good!
marksblog.emc.com
Do the opposite: Taking a vintage "Seinfeld" episode as inspiration, Cambridge entrepreneur Dharmesh Shah suggests that start-ups often need to do the opposite of what competitors do. "Why not try to be different?" he asks. One piece of contrarian advice pertains to recruiting a company's first few employees by being totally honest.
Shah suggests telling them:
"If you're just looking to make a lot of money, this is probably not the place. Sure, we're going to give you some options, but nobody knows what those are going to be worth (including the founders and the investors). We all work [hard] and make less money than we could likely do otherwise. We all must have some sort of genetic flaw that makes us do this. If you have that genetic flaw too, you'd probably enjoy it here."
The idea is to be honest, direct and surprise people by taking an approach that they're not used to seeing. A lot of times this may fall flat - but lots of things fall flat anyways. Why not try it?
onstartups.com
IPO introspection: You have got to go all the way back to 1978 to find a quarter when there were no initial public offerings of venture capital backed companies. And a survey by the National Venture Capital Association found that 81 percent of venture capitalists don't see the IPO window opening at all this year. Those dour data points have sparked a lot of analysis in the blogosphere. Local Microsoft executive Don Dodge says that while an IPO may be off the table for most fledgling companies, the good news is investment in start-ups is still strong, thanks to venture capitalists hunting for tomorrow's big hits.
Fear is temporary, greed is permanent. We are in a "fear" cycle now. There is fear in the public IPO markets due to slow growth, high oil prices, and recession fears.
VCs continue to raise funds and invest aggressively. Last year VCs invested nearly $30 billion, the most since 2001. VCs have a long-term view. They don't expect their investments to pay off for at least five years, sometimes much longer.
dondodge.typepad.com
See an interesting blog item? E-mail kirsner@pobox.com. 
