What I have been up to

Long time, no blogging. And this is not really an attempt at getting back to it at all, but just intended as a quick update of what I am doing now and have been doing lately:

• Artifik is where I am spending most of my time, as CTO - after being CEO getting us beyond MVP and to the first ten early access customers. We are building a procurement platform where it is easy to do things correctly and follow legal requirements that apply in particular to public procurements. At the time of writing, we are passing 20 paying customer and are around the same number of people involved in total (around half of that, counted as FTEs). A very exciting place to work as we are entering the scale-up phase, utilizing AI and cloud native serverless architecture.
• Ledidi has been growing up. I am out of the day-to-day with them having an employed CTO and their own development organization, but I am still part of the board and a significant shareholder despite selling some shares. They won a very important contract before Christmas with the largest hospital organisation in the country and things look great.
• Prokarimi - our startup in partnership with Genetic Analysis that is doing analysis of gut microbiota, often associated with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), with home tests - have built a platform and have sent out their first test kits to paying customers. My good friend and partner Fredrik is heading this now and I am somewhere between a hands-off CTO and an advisor and board member here.
• Apprendly intend to revolutionize how game-based training can be created and consumed, using AI and the same engines that power state-of-the art computer games. 
• Comono has moved even clearer in the direction of being a consultancy not looking for clients, but rather mostly working on our own stuff - meaning startups or projects where we can have a stake beyond selling hours. 

Following up on the last point, do get in touch if you have superb domain knowledge and a solution to a problem that you believe could be a startup. We often provide specialists in full- and part time roles, early funding and/or work for sweat equity.

As for the development in Comono: When we got together in Timisoara in the late summer last year, we counted around 35 people from partners - including Enovatika that were excellent hosts and we own half of,  startups we have founded and Comono itself. This was amazing to see and experience, going wine tasting in Recas with colleagues and friends. Comono now includes Comono India, which itself runs the startup Prevale that provides compliance as a service. In Oslo we are around ten people, with offices in Gamlebyen Loft, next door to Fuglen coffee. 

And if you wonder "weren't you in edtech?", that is absolutely the case, but not so much these days beyond the board seat in Apprendly - with our reading platform Lesemester being acquired by Lexplore, where I was part of the board for a while and has helped a bit here and there as an advisor. Inspera is still going strong, but beyond coaching a small team we have helping there, I am not involved much anymore. I do help Creaza a bit still. Finally, I am sometimes being asked to assist on things like DD processes and reviews of software development organizations as a subcontractor to one of the big strategy consultancies.

On the private side, I enjoy being a dad, still like poker as a hobby (100% cash rate in the Main Event!), have picked up eFoiling as a great alternative to surfing given our relatively wave-free location of living in Oslo and feel like I have nailed the work/life balance a bit more than when I routinely worked 70+ hours a week. 

The cereal entrepreneur

I follow the blog of Seth Godin and admire this thoughts on marketing etc. almost daily. I particularly liked the piece today called The cereal entrepreneur.

This section is worth remembering, I think: 

Every dollar not spent is a dollar you don’t need to raise. Eat cereal, not sushi.

Kind of relevant to us, as we just raised money for our product company (article in Norwegian). We'll continue to eat cereals and work hard. 

Startup valuation hype cycle

There is a lot of discussion in the startup community these days about if we are on the top of a hype or close to seeing a bubble burst. From my point of view, running a bootstrapped startup, it is not feeling like VCs are throwing seed money at you. At least not in Norway. But valuations for the "Unicorns", which are truly not common to see just like their fairytale counterparts - even if we forget it when we use them as samples and idols, are surely high.

Anyway, I wanted to share a super fun tongue-in-cheek "press release" from Basecamp. The entire thing reads well and if you are like me, it will give you many giggles, but this is my favorite part:

In order to increase the value of the company, Basecamp has decided to stop generating revenue. “When it comes to valuation, making money is a real obstacle. Our profitability has been a real drag on our valuation,” said Mr. Fried. “Once you have profits, it’s impossible to just make stuff up. That’s why we’re switching to a ‘freeconomics’ model. We’ll give away everything for free and let the market speculate about how much money we could make if we wanted to make money. That way, the sky’s the limit!”

Sounds like a brilliant plan! 

Get-set-go!

On Friday a blog post I wrote was posted on Innovation Norway's Gründerpulsen blog. It is in Norwegian and covers how to get a professional (cloud-based) infrastructure for your startup up and running in a week.

It touches on everything from email providers to PaaS, so it was a challenge to try to keep it relatively short. At least it is very to the point, mostly containing specific recommendation of tools (with links) in the different areas. Hope someone finds it useful!

A cure for the Summertime Blues?

I think all entrepreneurs work pretty hard, also at times normal people might be on vacation (i.e. pretty much right now in Norway). Sometimes it can feel like being the last kid in the classroom, solving math problems while hearing the sounds of playing outside. In fact, I don't think I was ever that kid (I counted on the last minute stress to get me results), but I think I can claim to be the metaphorical one at times, working long nights and cutting a few days of holiday trying to build a product and a company.

When the results of the extra efforts are not evident and short term in nature, it is easy to get a bit of a Summertime Blues feeling. But then, even if things take longer than you hope, I still believe in one of my favorite sayings - often attributed to Bloomberg: The harder you work, the luckier you get. And this Saturday our TapBookAuthor.com company was featured, through an interview with me, in Finansavisen - one of our two major business newspapers in Norway. Below you can find a snap of the article.

So even if customers coming shuffling in (we got at least two new paying customers this summer!) is a stronger cure for the summertime blues, a bit of publicity does not hurt either. So Eddie Cochran was not right, there IS a cure for the summertime blues (playing the song also helps, in fact!).

And to prove I can be, or try to be at least, the cool kid not being stuck in the classroom; in a week I will go to Bali surfing. Almost offline.

Imperfections of personalized advertising

I am pretty excited about the possibilities of blending online and physical traces to deliver more relevant content and ads. So Kjartan and the guys at Unacast are chasing a huge opportunity for sure.

That being said, there are certainly smaller fish to fry - so to speak - first, because even the current cutting edge personalization engines (of the likes of Google) are so far from perfect.  I would even say they are totally broken. A few samples from the last two weeks:

• I was on a day trip to a city in the south of our country last week. On the airport I briefly checked if it made sense to rent a car instead of jump into a taxi or bus (I was picked up in the customer's Tesla in the end...). Since then, there have been ads for car rental in that particular city all over the Internet. 
• The last thing I bought on DX.com is shown me all the time, and the same applies to my last MPX.no purchase. Since I just bought these things, the ads are less relevant than ever.
• My Google Apps CRM shows up in ads for me all over the place, even if I am already using it daily.

As an engineer, I have no problem understanding that it is difficult to know what is (still) relevant for me. Some of the cases would require deep integration into ecommerce systems connected to ad platforms, and possibly raise additional privacy issues. But as it is, I would say that personalization in these cases make the ads less valuable than if they were not personalized. 

So before having my browsing of cars in the physical world affect the ads I see online, I would like to see the more basic problem fixed. Maybe the solution will come from the same provider (and I am sure it will be bought by Google) that cracks the "beacon code"?

Running like a gazelle

I am proud that my company qualified for the so called gazelle list of Norway's main business newspaper, DN, based on 2013 numbers. Today I got the physical proof in house:

Out to buy a frame! :) And then on to make our product company behind TapBookAuthor.com a gazelle in 2017!

Singapore Sling(shot)

We are continuing our internationalization efforts with TapBookAuthor.com. Most recently with participation in Innovation Norway’s Tech Incubator program at JFDI in Singapore. So for the next three weeks, I am discussing with potential partners and collaborators in the South East Asian market.

I am old (or young?) enough to be truly amazed by how global the world has become (I wrote a separate post on the practicalities of this globalization for a small firm some time ago). Tomorrow I am meeting a potential partner that contacted me about two years ago and we have done several Skype demos and project discussions in the meantime. Still - even with all our electronic tools, there is nothing like meeting face to face, so exciting day tomorrow.

If you happen to read this and are in the area and want to meet for a coffee to discuss something interesting, give me a ping (+47 91741574, sbjorneb on Skype or on local cellphone +65 9166 5766).

Five Fine Years

Today it is five years since I quit my job to run my own company as a full time gig. It is quite different from doing some product development things on the side with the employer's blessing or in addition to studying as I did back in the days... You can't be half pregnant and it is hard to be a part-time entrepreneur as well.

Even if things may not have "taken off" by some measures (and some of the first products truly never got out of the phase with a few pilot customers), I am extremely proud of what we have been able to do with TapBookAuthor.com with no external funding since 2011. All the major publishers in Norway are customers and we also have customers in exotic, and less exotic such as San Francisco and London, places all over the world.

Today I met with an author that was so inspired by our tool that she was shivering from the opportunities it opened (we are working on our business model and technology to help indie and stand-alone publisher-authors, and are running a beta program to learn more). Such experiences makes it easy to find motivation for an extra long night of working (I've had my share of such late working nights, or to paraphrase Joey from good-ol' Friends: Actually, I've had a lot of people's share!).

If you read this and are considering to do the same and start your own company, should you do it? I will not claim it is easy and I am still not quite used to the insecurity of not knowing the economical situation just a few months into the future. That being said, I can honestly say I have never regretted jumping. So I would say jump, get the experience and find out for real if it is your thing. And unlike being pregnant, there is even a way back if it should not work out for you. Good luck!

Nir the Truth

Following Facebook’s announced acquisition of WhatsApp a week ago tomorrow, many interesting discussions about valuation have popped up (my stand on this is that the defensive argument makes a lot of sense and that improving ads on Facebook is probably the primary monetization strategy, but enough on that).  Yesterday I saw a blog post from Nir Eyal, one of the guest lecturers in our TINC program, that explains what I discussed with a fellow entrepreneur the other day: While it is super cool with such an event, there is a sting of jealousy to be felt quite clearly for most of us. “I could have written the prototype for this in a weekend and done many things better”[1].

It does not feel fair. What Nir basically points out, is that you will be happy with your car (or salary) until you learn the neighbor’s is better, or if you are a monkey in an experiment a piece of cucumber is a nice treat until your mate gets something nicer, like a grape. Then no way you are going to keep working for just a cucumber slice!

I have a personal experience to share, that is somewhat related to these types of feelings as well. I experienced my first “liquidity event” quite early, about 23 years old and still in university I got about 1% of a company as compensation for going the extra mile and working several nights to land a fixed price project, even delivering some interesting features like social scoring of the stock forum that was part of the service.

This company was sold (at 1/10 of the estimated price when discussions begun, one dotcom-crash in between…). Looking back, it feels somewhat like pocket money[2] - but at the time it was both significant in economic terms for me as a student, but not least it gave me a taste of what might even be an important reason for me being an entrepreneur today.

But my point is this: I remember how happy I was about the reward at the time. That is, until I learned that someone else in my university had earned more by just selling a domain (they had it by chance, same abbreviation as a bigger brand). On all my available scales, at the time at least, my effort was bigger, so it did just not feel fair! Like Nir points out, such feelings might have helped during earlier phases of evolution, but it does not help us being sympathetic (or happy!) right now.

Anyway, my personal cure to this is to always ask myself the question “if there is never an exit, will it still have been worthwhile?”. As long as work is fun[3] and meaningful from day-to-day and the economics work out somehow, I can easily live with not being acquired for heaps of money - even as we try to become “venture worthy” I will not let go of this. Then it is also easier to honestly admire other people’s success and just hope that some day a smaller scale version awaits you, knowing you are still good even if that is not the case.

[1] - Most people realize there are subtle details in focusing on such a narrow area, not least to viral growth and adoption, but there is of course some truth to it. You need luck and timing, in addition to gut feeling, dedication and hard work. Having worked a lot with scaling web apps, I think the engineering effort to scale to this level with such a limited team size sounds impressive - even if also this aspect in theory sounds like “easy” to scale since traffic (minus large group broadcasts) is very easy to partition.

[2] - Inflation adjusted, we are talking about maybe two months of my current salary. Now this may also show that we have decent salaries in Norway (but high taxes), but try measuring it in beers out on town. My best estimate for that is that it would have covered maybe 900 pints of beer in a bar. :-) If it had happened the months before at 10X the price, I could at least have been pretty beer-soaked in the rest of my student days...

[3] - A slightly tongue-in-cheek test that is in fact useful in practice for evaluating many options such as projects, features and partners is: It is either "no" or "hell yeah".

If you cannot keep up with one blog? Start another!

If you cannot keep up with one blog, it might not seem like a super tactic to start another... Anyway, if not exactly started, we have lately published more frequently to our company blog at blog.tapbookauthor.com.

Wanted to mention it here, in case you wanted to have a look. Not that I have a lot of traffic, but to paraphrase my philosophy regarding exercise: Any additional traffic is better than none at all.

And about that "not keeping up"-part, I actually have managed not to be all that far from my original goal of posting maybe once per month (OK, sometimes not really close either). I do admire people like Fred Wilson posting something quite insightful each and every day, but that was never my goal when starting blogging. And that the focus of the posts here have shifted a bit from lean project management and into entrepreneurship is just fine and reflects my current focus at work, which was exactly what I promised to do. OK, probably thinking and writing too much right now - will stop. :-) Would be cool if you checked out the TapBookAuthor Blog.

Correct, Clay? At least in theory.

In a well-written post titled "What Clayton Christensen got wrong", Ben Thompson uses the iPhone as a proof that the theory supporting the disruption-from-below pattern might be wrong. He puts forward that the faulty claims of Christensen are:

(1) Buyers are rational & every attribute that matters can be documented and measured
(2) Modular providers can become “good enough” on all the attributes that matter to the buyers

The grouping of his first two items into (1) is intentional and lets me come to my quick response right away:

(1) Non-functional attributes are of course important to buyers, even professional ones[1]. This is kicking in open doors. Just because Clayton Christensen is not good, or at least has missed here, at predicting just how important they can be, it does not really make the theory wrong. Brand counts. Feeling counts. (And why touching the iPad 1 screen still feels superior to the very newest Android tablet is a mystery to me, but that is a side track!) I'm no expert of rational choice theory, but accounting for these non-functional attributes does not make it less rational in my use of the word - and if the theory is to have any use modelling consumer behaviour, for sure such non-functional elements must be factored in as attributes in some way. If not, it would be useless for this purpose.

(2) The good-enough-curve[2] for mobile phones, a product with usage patterns very personal and frequent, might be pretty high. So iPhones may still not over-serve their customers as much as Clayton Christensen thought they would in the interviews mentioned, thus the theory as such can be correct. Maybe the high positioning of the curve is particularly true in countries with strong buying power, but another piece of anecdotal evidence pointing to the same being the case for developing countries is how smartphone penetration is increasing there (not yet so much for iPhones, but relatively speaking $100 Android devices are also put pretty high on the list to make the cut for many of their recent purchasers!).

I've heard Clay Christensen speak on the topic a couple of times (a long time ago, but I still recall it with joy), and he does not really claim this is the only pattern of paradigm shifts - which means it cannot really be proved wrong by providing counter-examples as such, if it still accurately describes (and maybe even predicts) others.

It is very useful to point out, as I tried to do to the students in my Entrepreneurship class today - leading to one of the students reading Ben Thompson's piece with plenty of great references, that it cannot be used as a simple acid test for new ventures. It does not have to be a disruptive innovation to succeed - and planning to disrupt an industry segment is easier than doing it anyway. Thinking about it is still useful for positioning the product and learning which segments will appreciate your value proposition.

In my opinion it is bold to claim at this point that Apple will never fall into the trap of marginalizing their real market over time, by only focusing on the top end. In some of the old examples in The Innovator's Dilemma, there were "genius CEOs" (and they were, at the time!) focusing on the high end of the market for improved profits. Of course right now, with 5Ss and 5Cs flying out of stores of the rate of 9 million over one weekend (AAPL stock price was up the day of this blog post because of this), it seems Apple is far from in that situation just yet.

[1] - The claim that professional buyers are extremely rational might be about as misleading as saying consumers are not. It all depends what you measure into that value. What is the value of the McKinsey brand for a strategy project and is not some of that irrational and/or unconscious? Why does Coke taste better than the white label variant sold as as a store chain's private label, even though they cannot be separated in blind tests?

[2] - I'll borrow Clayton Christensen's own illustration of this from a guest lecture at MIT Sloan back in 2007:

What I called the "good-enough-curve" is that dotted red line of average consumer performance utilization of a product.

Teaching what cannot be taught?

Today I started a teaching gig in Entrepreneurship at NITH again. Hopefully it is going to be good fun (at least for me) and I try to make it as practical as possible. The students will work out their own Business Model Canvas and hopefully get experimenting (they are going to hear me quote Steve Blank's "get the heck out of the office" more, in fact I said it twice already...) for real as soon as possible.

Some groups have already founded companies, while for others it will remain mostly a normal school subject. It will be a challenge to make it interesting for such a diverse group of people, but like I said in my intro, I truly think (even if it may sound a bit cheesy) that if they'll give it all, it will for sure make it the best school subject they ever had, and it might even be life-changing if they come out in the other with a successful company founded.

The group is a bit large, so the final pitch/presentation is going to be done via handing in a video. Goods and bads about that, but will be fun to see what the students come up with. I told them "screen capture of your presentation with voiceover is fine", but I certainly hope some of them will take the opportunity to get a bit more creative.

Trying to explain stuff is at least a good way to force yourself to think stuff through, which is also my main motivation for doing these gigs (besides fun and what one might call the CSR side of it - the pay is truly awful). And this semester I will be doing much of the same exercise my students are doing, but for real with my own company (as mentioned in the previous post, I will be going to a tech incubator in Palo Alto with TapBookAuthor this autumn). After the best summer in 30 years in Norway weather-wise, let's hope I'll experience the entrepreneurial equivalent this autumn both with my company and my students.

PS. My answer to my own rhetorical question, if you can really teach entrepreneurship, was that I can at least try to teach them a bunch of techniques that will be very useful for them as entrepreneurs...

Preparing for a whiplash - or on being "venture worthy"

An excellent post from Fred Wilson today on taking investor feedback (which can, indeed, give "feedback whiplash" - as Fred nickname it! - and make you change too often without proper consideration and evidence). My favorite passage is this one:

Investors have their own agenda. They want to invest in "bigger ideas" and "larger outcomes". When they tell you that your idea is too small, they may be talking to themselves, not you. Do not make their problems your problems. This is your business, not theirs.

And to this I would like to add that you usually have only one company, while they have a portfolio. You have to decide for yourself if you want to aim out of the ballpark or if other strategies can give you a more comfortable risk/reward profile. Being the CEO of a nano-sized (now micro, maybe - we are a total of 7 FTEs now across Norway and Romania) for four years, I know my answer so far has been to play it just a tad more safe and being profitable every year since the start.

That being said, we are likely going to work on making TapBookAuthor.com more "venture worthy" ourself this autumn, with a month in a tech incubator in Palo Alto as part of the cure. 

Preparing for a whiplash.

Bologna next week

Just a super quick note: I will be in Bologna for the children's book fair next Monday and Tuesday. I you would like to have a look at our TapBookAuthor authoring tool for iPad, Android and Windows 8, let me know and I will be more than happy to show you!

We have recently signed with the last of the four largest publishers in Norway and are more than ready to get a few international customers aboard!

Bet(t - ) it will be good

Bad wordplays aside, just a quick note to tell that I am going to Bett in London this week. Pocket full of nice new brochures, hoping to meet interesting people and more than ready to do a quick demo of TapBookAuthor.com if you are going there too...

So it better be good (OK, I will stop now). See you!

Happy Last Year

OK, two things first before writing the post: First and foremost, happy new year and best of luck for your projects, people, products and passions (the less known 4Ps?) in 2013! Then, if you have even a hint of allergy towards self-promotion, stop reading. Really.

Still there? I am going to share two great things happening to our product and team at the tail end of 2012. First, we got external recognition when we won an entrepreneurship price from a leading Norwegian legal firm. Apart from nice flowers and even nicer honors, this gives us some free legal advice which will be very useful when getting our first international customers.

Below are myself and partner at Wikborg Rein, Torleif P. Dahl - as well as those mentioned flowers.

Second, we landed two leading Norwegian publishing houses as new customers for our tool, making the total number of customers reach the great number of four (!). I am not joking, but I am also not joking about it being great. With these lighthouse customers secured, we are looking very much forward to demoing for smaller publisher as well as international ones. If you happen to be a potential user of the tool reading this, drop me a line to book a meeting.

Looking forward to a great year in 2013 as well - on our part we have lot of exciting things up our sleeve for the TapBookAuthor / ePekebok tool (push messages and Windows 8 apps prototype support are two items in the Q1 list of new functionality, with unlimited undo across sessions and interactive graphs and questions/tests on the list of autumn 2012 highlights). Happy last year. Happy new year!

Getting the heck out of the office

When teaching Entrepreneurship at NITH this semester, I am leaning quite heavily on Steve Blank's book The Startup Owner's manual (as a supplement to Business Model Generation by Alex Osterwalder, that is our main course book in addition to articles etc.).

One of the key phrases I particularly like in Steve's book, in addition to the definition of a startup as a temporary organization searching for a scalable business model, is the advice to get the heck out of the office (there are no facts or customers in there!).

Even if "the office" might be a metaphor for many startups, there are no subsititutes for actually testing hypotheses on customers.

So do I practice what I preach? Well, I try to - with tapbookauthor.com (and Norwegian variant epekebok.no) now up in low-fi version 0.5 to start describing our awesome app publishing/authoring tool, we are ready to get the first set of post-pilot customers! Next week we are demoing for potential customers and starting discussions with seed investors - getting (the h***!) out of the office...

WeVideo named one of the most exciting startups in Norway

I just picked up that WeVideo was named #1 (or at least first mentioned among top 10!) of the most exciting startups in Oslo. So it seems you can be a prophet in your own land after all?

As a matter of fact: In two weeks I will travel to work a few days on site in Palo Alto (I help WeVideo a bit as a consultant). After about 15 years working with the software and business in various forms, I am finally heading towards software Mecca to actually work (study trips and vacations does not count!). Looking forward to it.

The current process in WeVideo is to become more independent of mother company Inspera. With the HQ now in Palo Alto, even if I am sure they are even more exciting at this time next year, that might be the reason if they are not in the list then. Anyway, it is buzzing with activity both in Oslo, Timisoara (Romania) and Palo Alto these days, so keep watching the company for news to come the next few months as well.

WeVideo got the time to succeed - and boy they seem to use it

WeVideo just raised $19M from a venture capital firm. Knowing these VC guys are not playing the 50% increase game, this certainly raised the bar for WeVideo - I guess to be a real success now by their definitions, we are talking $250M+ valuation or so... Crazy. And crazy exciting. I do of course know that the reason for such multiples is that the likelihood of going to a $0 valuation is also very real. Any way you put it, this is a huge compliment to the team lead by Bjørn and Jostein and a great opportunity to take a real shot at being and staying number one video editor in the cloud.

Just after the news about the funding, WeVideo announced their extended partnership with Google (they are already on YouTube.com/create) and that WeVideo was compatible with Google Drive from launch day. And this week, Disney launched their Avengers Remix campaign powered by WeVideo. And not long before that, WeVideo launched their first mobile app that seemlessly let you add clips from a mobile device into a collaborative video project. Busy bees indeed.

And a last quick note: This week a book co-authored by Andreas Goeldi, who I went to MIT Sloan with, came out; Video Marketing for Dummies. Reportedly he says about WeVideo that it is "Likely the closest thing to a full-blown video editing application in the cloud". Couldn't agree more!

Full disclosure: I am not exactly neutral to WeVideo. I am a member of the board of Inspera, the company that developed the technology in WeVideo and spun it off as a separate company. That being said, my very tiny stock ownership in Inspera (that is now a minority shareholder in WeVideo) is not likely to make me truly rich, even if the ball flies totally out of the park. But rich on experiences for sure! Through my company Innovation Consulting I am playing a modest role in making WeVideo tick and appreciate both the forward looking days and the more firefighting-style we might have from time to time in the run-up to a big launch.