Burning the Ships

Cortez, during the Spanish Conquest of the Americas, was said to have burned his ships, so that there was no returning to the Old World – and ensured that his men were 100% invested in the success of their endeavor.

Daily, we read about the latest out-of-this-world valuation on some startup, from someone who isn’t a programmer, or has no formal business training, or has only a partial working brain in their head. Rarely do you hear of the level of commitment that those people have invested in to obtain their “overnight” successes.

Being an entrepreneur isn’t about going to cool parties, or hanging out to make a connection that will make or break you, or getting that killer round of Series A funding.

It’s about creating value where none existed before – and giving 100% of yourself toward reaching that goal.

When I started my company in 1996, my wife and I both quit our “day jobs” in the same week. I triple-booked business to ramp up. And worked my ass off 6 or 7 days a week until the checks started coming in. It wasn’t glamorous – but it was sustainable, and most importantly, profitable.

I wouldn’t have had the level of commitment to my enterprise if I hadn’t metaphorically “burned my ships” (i.e., quit my fallback, my day job).

If you think you’re ready to strike out and create the next Facebook, the next Instagram, the next Twitter, you have to be ready to scuttle the ties that are keeping you close the the shore, and head into the jungle.

Cause that’s where the gold is. Not on the beach.

Tags: Cortez, David J. Hinson, Entrepreneur

Take Only Memories. Leave Only Footprints.

As our lives are being lived ever increasingly digitally, I often think about the electronic footprint I’m leaving behind for posterity.

In times past, loved ones passed on years of correspondence – old love letters, journal entries, notes in the margins of calendars – from which those left behind could construct the simulacrum of a life lived.

What are we leaving behind today? Arguably, a richer set of media in the form photos posted to Facebook or Instagram, high definition videos of every waking moment, blog posts strewn across the interwebs.

It is a paradoxically ephemeral – and yet, everlasting – legacy we are leaving behind.

Ephemeral in the sense that – should there be a catastrophe where everything electronically was wiped away in an eye blink – there would be nothing for future historians to decipher who we were as a people and as a race; and everlasting, in that as we share our digital periscopes, they are innumerably replicated across the world in countless nooks and crannies of the web, to the extent that anything we throw into the ether cannot be retrieved and re-bottled, even if we desired with all our hearts to do so.

We are living lives with fragmented attention spans, conflicting and constant demands on our time – but little time for reflection and “soak.”

All the while, we’re leaving millions of digital footprints, all with the potential to last forever, but the very real possibility of being swept away like sandcastles in the surf.

Here, at the beginning, we are only starting to come to grips with the ghosts we are leaving behind.

What will stand as our Ozymandias?

Tags: Ozymandias

Creating Calendar Events – Using WebView – in Android

Hey – it’s been a while.

No time like the present to write a post about Android coding.

Specifically: “how do I create a calendar event from within a WebView in Android?”

First, let’s talk game plan. I am going to construct an url “scheme” that will indicate to a handler that I want to create a calendar event, and not navigate to a web page; then, I need to call an Intent that will allow the event to be created.

Easy Peasy.

So, for my dates that I wish to portray on a web view, I do something like the following:

<a href='date:beginmonth, beginday, beginyear, 
endmonth, endday, endyear, My Event Description'>
My event link</a>

Then, I construct a shouldOverrideUrlLoading handler that will detect that a date: is being clicked, and handle it specially (see the code below):

final WebView crimeView = (WebView) findViewById(R.id.webview_crime);

crimeView.setWebViewClient(new WebViewClient() {

@Override

public boolean shouldOverrideUrlLoading (WebView view, String url)

{

if (url.startsWith("date:")) {

Log.d(this.getClass().getCanonicalName(),url);

Calendar beginCal = Calendar.getInstance();

Calendar endCal = Calendar.getInstance();

Date beginDate = new Date(0, 0, 0);

Date endDate = new Date(0, 0, 0);

String parsed = url.substring(5);

String[] components = parsed.split(",");

beginDate.setMonth(Integer.parseInt(components[0]));

beginDate.setDate(Integer.parseInt(components[1]));

beginDate.setYear(Integer.parseInt(components[2]));

beginCal.setTime(beginDate);

endDate.setMonth(Integer.parseInt(components[3]));

endDate.setDate(Integer.parseInt(components[4]));

endDate.setYear(Integer.parseInt(components[5]));

endCal.setTime(endDate);

calendarevent(beginCal, endCal, components[6]);

return true;

}

return false;

}

});

Finally, we need code to invoke the Calendar intent. It looks like the following:

 // Create a calendar event
    public void calendarevent(Calendar begintime, Calendar endtime, 
                              String eventName) 
    {
        Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_EDIT);
        intent.setType("vnd.android.cursor.item/event");
        intent.putExtra("beginTime", begintime.getTimeInMillis());
        intent.putExtra("allDay", false);
        intent.putExtra("rrule", "FREQ=YEARLY");
        intent.putExtra("endTime", endtime.getTimeInMillis()+60*60*1000);
        intent.putExtra("title", eventName);
        startActivity(intent);
    }

And that, as they say, is that.

Tags: Android, Calendar, David J. Hinson, WebView

You Have to Show Up

I had a friend some twenty years ago – I’ll call him Bill – who opened a small music store in Nashville, on Second Avenue (that was just becoming a revitalized tourist area at the time).

What should have been a glowing success (a music store, in the heart of Music City, USA) was instead a complete failure.

Within a year, he was out of business.

How did this happen?

Well, his business plan had two fatal flaws.

1. He sold only music he liked, and
2. He didn’t keep regular, predictable business hours.

It sounds simple enough, but simply, consistently, being available, every day, can make a tremendous difference between achieving great success in your business… or abysmally failing.

And not listening – or even pretending to listen when you do appear – just adds insult to injury.

If you’re not consistently present and engaged in your daily affairs, there is absolutely no way you can be affective with the constituencies that you’re trying to service.

Worse still, you signal that you don’t value the time, talents, and patronage of the people you need to succeed.

Show the people you want to influence that you do value them by showing up – on time, every time.

Tags: Business, Presence

Geek Breakfast Article in the River Valley Edition of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Very nice article by Dan Marsh of the Dem-Gaz. Crossing my fingers for a good turnout… and that Bob’s Grill will withstand the onslaught of Conway Geekdom.

The Breakfast will be held from 7 until 8 February 23rd at Bob’s Grill in Conway, AR. More event detail may be found here.

Lifestyle Businesses

I’ve written about this in the far past, but I simply don’t get the bias against so-called Lifestyle Businesses.

A Lifestyle Business is one where usually one or two founders create a business based upon their talents and abilities, and never intend for it to be a mega-corporation; in fact, most are created by people who want to set their own terms and live their lives they want to live.

They’re not out to change the world – they’re out to make a little profit, hire some cool people, and take the afternoon off to see little Suzy’s dance recital.

You know what’s cool about a Lifestyle Business?

• All the equity belongs to you. Want more money? Work harder. Or simply work until you can pay all of your bills.
• Where you want to live is where you work. Don’t like your current city or state? Pack up the company and move wherever you like… hopefully a business tax friendly state.
• You don’t have to answer to a board of directors or stock holders. If you want to try something, you try it. You are accountable only to your customers and yourself.
• By definition, Lifestyle Businesses are or they aren’t, generally speaking. That is to say, they are usually bootstrap operations funded solely by the founders with no outside investment. If they’re not profitable, they cease to exist. There is no “next round of funding.”

What stinks about Lifestyle Businesses?

• The responsibility is yours and yours alone. You don’t make payroll, it’s on you. You don’t get paid, you don’t eat.
• Most Lifestyle Businesses depend heavily on the talents of one or two key people. They quit, you’re done. That makes buying Lifestyle Businesses a very risky proposition, because you’re not really buying a company but you’re buying one or two people, more or less.
• Lifestyle Businesses don’t have the capacity or capital to scale. Unless you invent the next hula hoop or slinky.

There are some Lifestyle Businesses that do sometimes scale, a bit, and do get purchased by bigger companies. Techcrunch, the tech blog created by Mike Arrington, is probably the most prominent example of a business started in someone’s house and was later bought by a big company (AOL). However, as it turns out, the sale was a risky one for AOL, since the value of the company was largely vested in Mike, and with his departure the brand quickly fell apart.

But I am writing this little piece not to bury Lifestyle Businesses, but to praise them.

I owned and ran a Lifestyle Business for fifteen years, from 1996 until this past year. I spent every February (at least until my kids started school) living in the Florida Keys. I took my vacations whenever I wanted to. If I wanted to work harder I did, and when I didn’t, I didn’t. And I pretty much ran things the way I wanted to, how I wanted to, and when I wanted to.

Ultimately, it became time to do something else. The kids got older… and college for the boys started looming large in the windshield. After weathering a few recessions, successfully, there were other challenges I found I wanted to tackle. Truth be told, I simply got older, and for a large part of what I did for the last decade and a half, it really was a young(er) man’s game.

For those out there chasing your dreams, not wanting to be the next Facebook but to simply create something of beauty and utility and personal satisfaction, I say “awesome.” You can be successful, send your kids to great schools, live where you want to live, pay the mortgage, and have an extremely satisfying life. You don’t have to create the next PayPal or Twitter or Facebook to do that.

And you don’t need venture capital to do that – you simply need an idea, drive, talent, and passion.

Don’t let someone who poo-poos your Lifestyle Business as something less than worthy bother you in the least. Chances are in five years you’ll still be in business doing what you love, and they will be onto their next Pivot.

Where is My Flying Car?

OK.

So, here it is, 2012.

Where is my Flying Car, already?

In truth, I’m still saving up for a hooptie that can simply get me from place to place here in town semi-reliably. For now, we are a one car family.

But a boy can dream, right?

In the absence of a flying car, here’s what I really want:

• A car that can wirelessly play content from my mobile devices, so that I simply get in the car, press play on my phone, and drive off.
• A car that can wirelessly play video content over a passenger entertainment system, so I can stream Netflix to my boys in the back on long trips.
• A car that can be its own mobile WiFi hotspot (I know some cars can already do this).

In short, I want to be able to drive my iPad around town.

Is that too much to ask?

Maybe it’s the Vicodin from my dental surgery yesterday talking.

Or maybe those lazy R&D n00bs in Detroit just need to get to cracking on that drivable iPad.

Am I right? Am I right?

Dang straight.