June 20th, 2008
Earlier this week my son learned to ride a bike without training wheels. Father’s day even, which was so cool. There’s nothing like that feeling of watching his world suddenly expand and realizing that his next big milestone in which that’ll happen is when he learns to drive a car. It’s fantastic!
In the last few weeks I’ve had a similar feeling several times when watching b5media evolve. In case you didn’t catch it on our team blog, we’ve hired a bunch of new people recently. Marketing manager, director of tech, project manager, admin assistant, sales guy in NYC, VP finance, director of branded (ie: non blog) content and a training manager. A lot of hires in the last 2-3 months.
Watching these folk find their footing and take on projects (new media kits, new systems for tracking bloggers, new ways of running and selling ads, new partnerships, improving projects, reviving dead projects, etc, et, etc) and watching our “older” team get excited too has been fantastic to watch. There are dozens of examples where I’ve been floored by the entire company’s energy, creativity and Get It Donery. I’m so proud of the entire team.
But it’s not just the team I’m proud of. Our bloggers and channel editors have been in a similar spirit recently, covering great events like Cannes, the MMVAs, Fashion Week, and, today, doing a 24-hour blog marathon where they post every hour. Let me repeat, every hour. Crazy, and all for charity!
Both our Business Channels and Entertainment Channels are participiating, and the idea was generated entirely by our bloggers and CEs (though, obviously, the internal team did everything we could to support it!).
Awesome!!!
Here is a list of the entertainment blogs / contests associated with this!
And here are the Business Blogs:
Business and Blogging (www.businessandblogging.com)
Accounting Solver (www.accountingsolver.com)
taxgirl (www.taxgirl.com)
Doing Biz Abroad (www.doingbizabroad.com)
Home Biz Notes (www.homebiznotes.com)
Everyday Networker (www.everydaynetworker.com)
One Vote Matters (www.onevotematters.com)
Interview Chatter (www.interviewchatter.com)
Biz Chicks Rule (www.bizchicksrule.com)
Buzz Networker (www.buzznetworker.com)
Digital Money World (www.digitalmoneyworld.com)
Franchise Pick (www.franchisepick.com)
Yielding Wealth (www.yieldingwealth.com)
Small Business Boomers (www.smallbusinessboomers.com)
My Organized Biz (www.myorganizedbiz.com)
Viva El Negocio (www.vivaelnegocio.com)
And the official announcement here :)
So, again, I’m so proud of our bloggers, CEs, team and everything. It’s fantastic! Thank you all, and well done!
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By Jeremy Wright -- 3 comments
June 17th, 2008
Tris asked what I listen to while I work. I don’t use Last.FM or any of the other music sharing sites, mostly cause I don’t see the personal benefit. But, either way, thought it might be fun to show what I listen to most (out of my collection of 3000 or so tracks).
So, here it is. Mock me if you must.
- 3 days grace - fallin
- 3 doors down - behind those eyes
- Akon - Smack That
- All American Rejects - Move Along
- Chingy - Right Thurr
- The Corrs - Runaway
- Crazy Town - Starry Eyed Surprise
- Crazy Town - Butterfly
- Creed - Arms wide open
- Eminem - Mosh, Eminem - Superman
- Evanescence - Bring Me to Life
- Evanescence - Lies
- Moulin Rouge - A Story About Love
- Fallout Boy - Sugar we’re going down
- Feist - Intuition
- Finger Eleven - Paralyzer
- Five for Fighting - The Riddle
- Flyleaf - Cassie
- Flyleaf - Fully Alive
- Fort Minor - Petrified
- Fort Minor - Where’d You Go
- Gym Class Heroes - Oh my god
- Habib Koite - I Ka Barra
- HIM - Wings of a Butterfly
- Jay-Z/Linkin Park - Encore
- Johnny Cash - Bridge over troubled water
- Jordin Sparks - No Air
- Kid Rock - Cowboy
- Kid Rock - Behind Blue Eyes
- Lifehouse - Take me away
- Linkin Park - Papercut
- Linkin Park - breaking the habit
- linkin park - numb
- Ludacris - get back
- beethoven - sympthony no 3 in e flat
- mighty mighty bosstones - where’d you go
- mika - spell it out
- mims - this is why i’m hot
- ministry - hero
- nofx - that’s why i love her
- oasis - supersonic
- one republic - say
- POD- alive
- POD - boom
- posies - love comes
- rihanna - the hotness
- rihanna - please doon’t stop the music
- savage garden - i wanna stand with you
- seal - crazy
- seether - broken
- skillet - angels fall down
- soulja boy - soulja girl
- sublime - tequila
- 3 days grace - pain
- 3 days grace - riot
- tokyo police club - nature of the experiment
Anytime an artist appears more than once, I probably really like them. And yeah, ignore typos and such, was typing it into skype and I’m too lazy to fix it ;-)
Feel free to include yours, especially any you’re embarrassed about!
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By Jeremy Wright -- 3 comments
May 20th, 2008
Whoa, a new, actual, blog post? Crazy, eh?
Over the weekend I read Steve Fisher’s new post up at TechnoSailor. Steve’s a fantastic guy, wicked smart, and his series’ of series at TechnoSailor/VentureFiles has been fantastic to say the least. His new one on “Rules for Entrepreneurs” is more salient to me than his last one on raising funding.
The Perils of Founderitis
Per Wikipedia, per Steve, Founderitis is:
“The term “founderitis” or “founder’s syndrome” refers to the unhealthy condition that afflicts many companies whose founders maintain a stranglehold on organizational leadership. While many companies owe their success — and in fact their very existence — to their founders, those same individuals can create chaos that ultimately leads to the organization’s collapse. The challenge to founding CEOs and boards of directors is to take steps to change conflict and chaos into opportunities for growth.”
In short, it’s the inability for founder CEOs to let go. At the extreme it’s a case of “I need to know everything and make every decision”, though most VCs will spot that a mile away and nip it in the bud before it’s a real issue. More commonly, it’s an inability to transition from founder to leader to a leader of leaders.
Here are Steve’s symptoms for Founderitis:
- Inability to delegate
- Anger when not included in every decision
- Paranoia derived from a sense that the venture is “slipping out of their control”
- Ignoring input from subject-matter experts
- Expressing prescient knowledge, even when lacking subject-matter expertise
- Lack of respect for formalized planning
- Subterfuge of efforts to institute procedures, processes and controls
My Experiences with Founderitis
Personally I’ve had my fair share of challenges. Pre funding, all the founders at b5 made decisions as a group. Most decisions. Sometimes they were awake and I wasn’t (they were all in Australia!) and a decision needed done right away, and vice versa, but we tried to make decisions as a team. That’s fine when the entire company is the founders, but once you start to hire people, a chain of command (at least operationally) becomes necessary. Especially with folk in Australia, because a 24 hour lag on every email becomes painful (for both sides of the ocean!)!
Once we took funding, someone had to be CEO, and the VCs wanted me given that I’d done the “on the ground” work raising the round. Not that the other founders hadn’t done a boat load to help, just that the VCs wanted someone local to yell at ;-)
We very quickly started hiring people, and thanks to great advice from Rick and thanks to personal experience we adopted a policy right away of “hire the smartest people, hire smarter than yourself”. For awhile we tried to operate with me at the center of all decisions (not purposefully, but just because things evolved that way naturally). We soon realized that each team lead had to have all the responsibility, all the authority and all the resources in order to perform to their peak ability. And if they didn’t, it wasn’t because of lack of authority/responsibility/resources (ie: they were responsible).
The Next Phase
As a CEO/founder, I realized pretty early that my first goal in hiring was to hire where I was weak. For the last 18 months, that’s been most of our hiring: hire smart people where I/b5 are weak. But increasingly I’ve realized (once again thanks in part to great Rick advice) that the next phase is even more important: hiring people where I’m strong.
Hiring folk where you or the company are weak allows you to delegate stuff you don’t know. But that still means you want to / have to be involved in certain types of decisions. Hiring people where you’re strong lets you truly empower your entire team to do everything, but it also lets you truly scale the organization.
Imagine if you were a software shop and you were the only real good project manager and you were the CEO. Not hiring other project managers would create a serious bottleneck.
These days, I’m doing everything I can to solve that bottleneck here at b5.
Solving Founderitis
I agree with Steve Fisher’s analysis of solving Founderitis:
- Respect the need for planning activities, staff meetings, and administrative policies;
- Realize that as the company grows circumstances may dictate new approaches;
- Institute new systems with approval of your board;
- Seek and accept input from others in making decisions;
- Delegate, Delegate, Delegate
But at the same time you can’t really solve it. Bill Gates still gets involved in key decisions at Microsoft. Mark Zuckerberg still sits in regularly on team meetings at Facebook. But the ability to ask your team what they think, what their decision would be and how they’d handle it is key at all times.
I’m definitely still learning, but Steve’s post on Founderitis was a great reminder not just of how far I’ve come (mostly by accident), but of how much more growing I still have to do.
Thankfully, our new senior hires at b5 will allow us to do #1-4 in Steve’s list of how to solve Founderitis naturally. Keeping our culture through this change will be our biggest challenge and opportunity!
Have I “solved” Founderitis? Naw. You never do. The company is always your baby and you’ll always wander into meetings. But hopefully by hiring smart people, hiring smarter than myself and hiring both where I’m weak and where I’m strong - and respecting the team that we’ve built here, I’m well on my way to being an empowering macromanager (ie: leader of leaders) that helps create an entrepreneurial culture vs a limiting micromanager that demands everyone does things my way.
Hopefully!
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By Jeremy Wright -- 11 comments
April 14th, 2008
I’m in San Francisco from Tuesday-Sunday this week, and I have a handful of free timeslots. Anyone wanna grab a coffee/brainstorm/do BD/hang-out?
Email: jeremy@b5media.com
Cell: 416 726 3602
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By Jeremy Wright -- 1 comment
April 9th, 2008
I’ve been meaning to do this for awhile, but it’s finally done.
For the last several months (okay, almost a year), I’ve been reposting my Twitter updates to my blog. I did this both because my “blogging” has largely moved to Twitter *and* because while my Web 2.0-y friends get Twitter, my friends and family may or may not - and this blog is a personal blog, after all.
But, the problem was that Twitter posts going up meant that I didn’t feel a motivation to try and blog much.
So what I’ve done is move my Twitter stuff to the sidebar, provided a link to my Twitter page, and a link to the feed for my Twitter updates. If you want to read them, feel free. If you don’t, you no longer have to.
This work as a compromise for everyone?
Now if only I could figure out a way to post my Tweets like once a week to the blog, as a real compromise… Any ideas?
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By Jeremy Wright -- 7 comments
April 6th, 2008
- Omw home #
- Smithville #
- Binbrook #
- Stoney creek #
- Home #
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April 5th, 2008
- Vespa’ing to niagara falls. Spending the weekend deep in thought. @ burlington now. #
- Beamtown #
- Jordan, stopping for gas. #
- Niagara falls. Checked into hotel. Now for a loooong walk. #
- @saleemkhan - can’t take 400 series highways with an m1… #
- @saleemkhan - yep. When I’m m2′d and have upgraded bike I could take big highways. But that won’t happen til summertime, at least! #
- @mikeweber - well mine has *some* guts (150cc)… Just not enough for freeways, heh! #
- Sometime’s it’s good to erase all assumptions and just "whiteboard" (sitting in restaurant with paper all around me watching the Falls). #
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April 4th, 2008
- @davewiner’s right (http://snurl.com/23f1w). Putting DEMO and TC50 same weekend = less coverage for all startups. FAIL @ TC50’s scheduling. #
- @kristaneher - sorry, you don’t ring a bell. But, I’m nice, so I’ll follow you anyways. </sarcasm> :-D … Hey, how goes?!!! #
- Challenged @leenewton to a Rock Band duel at lunch. He’s the best player in the office. I think I can take him. At stake? 2-for-1 DQ coupons #
- @mdufort - we’ll be playing Guitar on Hard. Probably do 3 random songs, so it’s fair. #
- @gapingvoid - need your address to send you $ ;-) #
- @shelisrael - lol, we could do a "walking @gapingvoid his b5cheque" video ;-) #
- Erm… Bridgestone tire ads on TechCrunch? I thought VC ads = jumping the shark, but this is a whole new high/low… #
- @rachels - what time you comin’ over? Getting hungry :-D #
- Great lunch with @rachels. #
- @davidcubed visited the b5offices yesterday and wrote a review! http://tinyurl.com/6pwb5h #
- @shelisrael - self-walking bucks? Wow, you are from the valley. Our bucks up here are entirely stationary! #
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April 3rd, 2008
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