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The Business of Technology

5 Tips For Vetting a Business Partner — OnlineNovember 23

Finding the right business partner is probably the most important business decision you can make. Do it wrong and life is miserable. Do it right and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In my first technology startup, I found a great partner while getting my MBA. He handled the technology, and I handled the business (fundraising, hiring, board and investor management, etc.). It worked out well — so well that we ended up getting married and now have two kids (human ventures)! We’re 7 years into marriage, so we’ll see how that turns out.

I’ve been going at it mostly alone in my current business, Babble Soft, with sideline help from my husband. And, although I’d made progress, it was tough and tiring. I didn’t have someone I could bounce around ideas with. I needed a partner. I found my first business partner in business school, so how would I find a partner working from my home office? How could I find someone who shared the same vision I did: to help new parents navigate the world of parenting in a digital age? I ended up finding her — where else

When You’re Going Through Hell, Keep On GoingNovember 22

With all the doom and gloom of the past few months and all signs pointing to hard times ahead, I’ve been thinking back to earlier in the decade, during the dotcom bust. I was at Live365, the Internet radio network, and we had burned through millions of dollars with no appreciable revenues nor a business model. Our CEO/founder had left, and I found myself promoted to the management team well short of my 30th birthday and with no management experience to speak of. Our investors, having lost faith in the prior management team, had the Company on a very tight leash. So tight that we depended on a wire transfer every two weeks to meet payroll and other obligations.

At one point, our ISP shut us off, and we had no Internet access at the office. I had to get an employee to drive a check over so that they would turn us back on. Even worse, our site went down when the people we bought bandwidth from got shut off themselves. It wasn’t our fault, but we were still down, and the worst part was that we didn’t have enough cash to migrate to another bandwidth provider. I’ll never forget one of our employees offering to make the Company a personal loan. I couldn’t accept it because I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to pay him back.

Amazingly, our users didn’t give up on us. They set up alternate forums to discuss what was going on, sen

Modern Networking Tools: Swapping Bits, Not Biz CardsNovember 21

With the recession in full swing, industries across the charts have been laying off hundreds of employees — making the job market increasingly competitive. So what’s a freshly unemployed tech professional to do? Hit the streets and start networking. As the hordes of job-seekers descend upon trade shows, conferences and meetups around the country, a few mobile startups could be poised to profit from their misery: digital business card services. The last few months have seen the launch of a number of services, delivered via mobile technologies from iPhone apps to text messages, that aim to do away with the business card. Previously, companies may have pitched their product as a “green” alternative to dead-tree info swapping, but in today’s market, the dynamic nature of the digital business card could prove to be a more powerful selling point — at least for a startup that can dispatch updated, social media-connected personal data securely across the range of mobile devices.

The iPhone has been a key driver of the market for digital business cards, at least in terms of visibility. Gabe Zichermann, CEO of rmbrME, says his company, which had previously offered an SMS so

5 Things to Do for Your Career in an Economic DownturnNovember 20

Economic downturns are hard for everyone, at both work and at home. Week after week there are requests for managers to further reduce budgets, lay off more people and cut projects that were previously classified as “necessary to sustain normal business operations.” These pressures forge managers made of diamond, and those who perform well in both boom and bust are destined for greatness. The very best managers get out ahead of downturns and take action early to minimize shareholder losses and, ideally, create shareholder value.

Here are six simple questions to determine if you are one of these managers.

Do you treat economic hardships in your business as a time to relax, or do you look to improve your skills?
Do you constantly push back when new budget cuts come along, or are you offering up cost savings ahead of requests from higher level executives?
Do you complain that you are too short handed to accomplish your mission, or do you spend time developing tools, systems and metrics that help you determine how to get more done with less people?
Are your top performers worried about losing their jobs, or do you spend time nurturing them and growing them to be even more successful in their positions?
Do you complain that you need all of your folks, or are you constantly weeding your team of underperformers without replacing them when times are rough?
Do you treat hiring freezes as interview freezes, o

4 Steps to Making Strategic Decisions in Today’s MarketNovember 16

David Selinger

Anticipating that a financial crisis like the one we’re currently experiencing wasn’t far away, I’ve run my company, richrelevance, on a zero-fat budget, raising small rounds of capital to ensure our team built the discipline to operate with small budgets. Yet, anticipation of the downturn does not make me immune to the shift. External risks in every business have changed. None of us will go through the next 18 months without significant impact.

But many entrepreneurs who saw the now-famous “Sequoia deck” unfortunately took its conclusions to be a tenet of truth and acted on it — perhaps too hastily. The folks at Sequoia are smart, but they aren’t necessarily smarter than you or me at running our businesses. This is the crux of the issue: While this market shift is, in fact, a 5- or 6-sigma event, what we do with that information is still within our domain.

Reacting blindly to a situation is wrong — being reactive is bad for your business. There’s a process to respondin