. and that is sometimes enough.

This is my first time working in a startup and I can tell you: is fun stuff. I don’t mean that I’m playing around all day or there is no stress. The contrary, in a startup environment, sometimes the pressure is higher than in a establish company. However is fun to be able to contribute to “a cause” or common goal. Even if what you produce is small, as a grain of sand, still is not trivial and will always be welcome, specially when resources are scarce. 

Is fun because nobody sticks to their job title, everybody has other tasks (even if it means washing the dishes or buying food for everybody). Is fun because of the uncertainty: not know what the next day will bring us. Is fun because people have a chance to connect, share ideas and go into endless discussions that don’t go know where.

I guess a startup is fun when is built to be fun, where the right person and attitude is more important than the right CV, which leads to a environment where can connect with the others in the company. like pieces of a puzzle coming together by chance.

Sure it might sound romantic or or just me experiencing the honeymoon syndrome (when early on, everything is great), then again this fun: the whole experience.

Some hours ago Gmail was down and everybody started to complain. Now is up and running and people are still complaining. This made me think that how can business and organizations rely on Gmail for business, if it goes down for around 6 hours as it did today.

Google today provides 99.99% of uptime for Gmail for Business, which translate into approximately of 53 minutes of down time. However this outage wasn’t of an hour, it was more than 6 times the guarantee they offer. This pain the current customer suffer and others don’t wish to suffer, has a partial solution: configure your account of offline use using gears, but still we have the problem of sending. Here is the thing: it is impossible for a service like Gmail to be up 100%, the whole internet and systems are to complicated, there is always a point of failure somewhere. However we could mitigate this points of failure by “not having all our eggs in one basket”, which translates to:

A third party providing a solution (generally in a server hosted by the consumer) that serves as backup for the services. For example company XYZ will host in their server room, a backup of Gmail. So ,if we have the outage we had today, the business can still read and send emails, because it doesn’t fully depend on Gmail. The same principle applies to all services that reside “in the cloud” i.e CRM, Office Suite.

[source]

Now, this is not an easy task: to develop such backup servers, especially when the providers (such as Salesforce, Google, Microsoft) don’t have  support for such services through a API. Also, In the case of email, a third party will have to implement a spam filter and SMTP server for the Backup for Business Gmail to work. Then we have the issue of support to the backup and how to seamlessly change the customers from the web based.  And then there is, of how much to see such solution and if a there is actually a demand for such products.

Still, like Travis (a Ausie I met at the Laundry room) said: lack of resources can lead to an opportunity. Right now, we lack the resources to have 100% uptime in our services on the cloud, and the need (or pain) is there, since we now started to depend on them and get outraged when is not fixed at the moment we snap our fingers. The question is: How? Certainly I will love to find out.

A friend, that we will call Steve-o, suggested this title for a blog post. The argument behind it is: should you start a company to sell it and be able to live in a paradise, where you will have a carrot like eternal sun tan or, to make meaning with your company. The last one is a Guy Kawasaki philosophy or belief, which basically can be sum up in the following:

if you make meaning, you will probably make money. But if you set out to make money, you will probably not make meaning and you won’t make money

You can here more about making meaning here.

Making meaning in your company or job, is all good in a world of pink and flying elephants, however when you need to “survive”, many people will see any money as “making meaning money”. When we had secure our survival is when the world becomes pink, full of hearts and flying elephants.

Interesting enough, there are people that don’t want to make a meaning or secure any “survival money”, but hit the jackpot to get that “Eternal Suntan”. The making meaning thing might be seen as full of crap, but eternal suntan is worst. Imagine you start a company, because you live in a system where you are chosen, just because it was your turn. You got your money by selling it for millions, move to the Caribbean or exotic pacific islands and spend all day in a “Speedo” seeing topless women (or men). You life just got shortened with all that sun (hello skin cancer) or you might catch up something in you bohemian lifestyle. And then what, your still lonely, bitter, full of crazy stories that will entrain tourists for a five minutes (your not considered a tourist anymore). Then in a moment of enlightenment, at age 53 (looking like 73) realized that there is no reason to live.

The above sounds dramatic, however that happens when people have secured their “survival” early. You see people in developing countries don’t have time to think about suntans and making meaning, they have to focus on one thing: SURVIVE, REALLY SURVIVE. And this is what keeps them sane, busy thinking and innovating, not thinking on the “immortality of the frog” [translation from the saying "inmortalidad del sapo"], getting depressed and whatever they do. Giving their love ones and second chance is their “making meaning” path, their families come first before changing the world, at the end what more can you ask if every human tries to make the world a better place for the love ones. What better way to leave this world knowing that, your children are what they are because of you.

So for those wanting to get lucky and hit the jackpot, well as Einstein, “God does not play dice with the universe”. If you don’t believe in God or a god then think of karma, “pay it forward” and.

luck is when preparation meets opportunity

This is a nice presentation (and point of view) on how to make (and run) profitable business. The nice thing is that it goes “retro” where gives arguments on that the revenue model of putting a price on a product/service, still works and that its really better that trying to be the next youtube, facebook, etc.

The reason I find it so interesting is because in Honduras, that is the way you start business and run them. You don’t look for VC money, go on the web and offer things free or go IPO. What is really done is start it with your own capital or take a loan and work [hard]. And those who do this are doing OK, the challenge that the middle class (which have the minimum resources to start a business) is very thin.

Small business are the fuel of a country economy and when this is not big enough the countries economy suffers and becomes very fragile and sensitive to world events and shifts. At the end of the day that is why David Heinemeier Hansson stats, is the best thing to do, especially for third world countries. The big challenge (again) is having enough people with enough resources to do so.

Note: I’m not stating that Honduras problems and third world status are a result of the middle class disappearing or being to small, although this a more complicated matter, still I think that middle class is the reflection of that overall status of a country.

Recently I did the post “Why aren’t you a millionaire entrepreneur?” which show a video, used to point out, it might just take to change the lens of how we view life. With the purpose to identify a profitable business opportunity (if you’re in the mood of a wacky explanation then check the post). I got a comment on this post stating (in the commentator’s opinion) that being a millionaire doesn’t guarantee that will be happy since she knows many that are not, and prefers a “simple life”. The comment turn into food for thought and this post was a result.

First concrete thing that came into my mind was that is not that hard to be considered a millionaire. To qualify as a millionaire as define by the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, the estimated wealth should be a million or more (as of dollars or pounds). If you think about it, that isn’t much when you consider a person with a house, a couple of cars and a paying job that provides you with 200,000 USD a year (after taxes) of course assuming that the person owns the cars, house, etc and is not on a lease. Add to that the retiring fund, to reach a million after some time working, is not a impossible task. If that person has a successful and growing  business (a mom a pop shop could could count if its big), instead of a job, that million doesn’t look such a big deal, right? Well that depends on the opportunities and background of every individual, but there are more millionaires out there than what we think.

Source

Most people that own a business and fit this mold I just described might be hard working families, couples or individuals, sure they don’t have the life a Jack Ma, Bill Gates or Pierre Omidyar, but surely that live a good life. And it might be better because they are not always expected to pay the bill. The three mentioned are high profile people, but when the network of people that you know, know you have money, things might get tough.

If you or anybody that you know is a millionaire and unhappy, it might be time to rethink your way a of life and this leads to the second thing I remember when reading the comment: as somebody once told me, “happiness is a journey.. not a destination”. As pointed out in the article/Q&A called the “The Entrepreneurship Myth”:

You do point to this data that people are so much happier working for themselves that they’d need to earn 2.5 times as much working for someone else to be as happy. If that’s the case, then despite the personal financial risks they take on, is there anything wrong with that?

It makes a lot of sense if people say, “You know what? I’m going to earn less money running my own business, but I really don’t like to work for other people, and that’s why I’m doing it. It’s making me happier and I really don’t care.” I think that’s great. The part of it that becomes a problem is when people just won’t admit the reality that it may make them happy and they’re doing it because they want to be independent, [but] then they delude themselves into believing that also it’s financially better.

Having a million or none will not make you happy, but I bet that there are people that went from nothing to a million and are “smart” enough to not get caught up, look back, will be happy (at least for a moment) and continue living. Working hard, but having the presence of mind to take your time to enjoy other things, will give you those glimpses of happiness that will continue to fuel your tank in these ride called life. It all depends on who you are and if you are up to having a boss or being the boss. Maybe getting to the first million or having your business survive for more than 5 years is what made you happy, but somewhere in the road, we lose perception of what really counts and the value of the intangibles (health, friends, family, peace of mind, etc.) And there is where the questions and dilemmas start: can money buys happiness?, how happy I am?, what makes me happy?, how come I’m not happy, I have everything but I feel so empty, etc.

Source

What if you already have enough millions or your business is so good that it will make a lot in the upcoming years? Well, you could use that money and invested in a VC fund. This VC fund will not be like those that funded those high or green tech startups, but how about investing  people that don’t have much in life. Its high risk, may take while, but the return of investment might be greater any hot startup. Some people called micro finance, other social entrepreneurship, but at the end of the day these tags are just part of the trend. If you think about it is a investment, since you are providing financial resources, which you expect back and may not get back (part of the risk). In addition the return of investment is not money, but social impact, satisfaction given from helping people and providing the resources (and that is life) you had and they didn’t. It’s not a game of feeling guilty or just giving out money, for it to really work it should be treated like any investment. Why? Well, so the money doesn’t go to waste and when people are given things, they don’t work as much as when they have to earn it and pay it back.

Investing on people business and providing them with this “loans”, is not the only way to go. How about setting up computer labs at public schools for kids in developing countries. This again is not charity, because you are investing on this kids, to learn to use a great tool (computer & Internet) and then they can because part of the work force or an entrepreneur that you might later invest on. In the other hand you hare also investing in the future of your kids, since the more educated people we have in the present, the better the future will look.

You don’t need to develop big initiatives like One Laptop per Child, that at the end are just big marketing campaigns to make companies look good. Its not needed, especially today with all this low cost portable laptops like the Asus Eee PC. They are good enough for Internet and office apps, and they are cheap and can resist a lot of punishment (look at the video bellow).

Even if the places where the kids live don’t have electricity to charge the laptop, that is not a problem but a opportunity to provide the community with something else: source of electricity. The community can use it for their needs and to enhanced the business.

At the end of the day is all about the perspective and how we look at life and that will determine if we get caught up in things that are just not worth it. Of course like most things that are not done: is easier said than done. Which reminds me that is time to figure out how to walk the walk.