Entries Tagged 'Entrepreneurship' ↓

My desire to share information and promote tight nits companies is completely selfish. I want other companies to adopt this philosophy, therefor making marketplace more competitive, therefor delivering higher quality products and companies to work with, therefor making my job easier.

We have had our share of bad relationships that I can look back on and all center around the lack of how “tight nit” that organization is.

The goal of this post isn’t to point out bad instances though, but rather highlight amazing relationships.

Stealing a bit of Gary Vaynerchuks thunder, would say these companies are “crushing it”, with regards to how tight nit they are

Tubemogul

These guys have built an amazing analytics company and someone we work with extensively to power our analytics toolsets. They started out of Cal Berkley and have many incredibly smart people working for them. At around 20+ employees they have been able to rapidly build out the best analytics platform in the online video business.

When working with them, if we have a problem an API here or there, they will work overnight to get us the answer or fix by morning. One evening in particular, we had a problem with our flash player and analytic tracker, with everyone out for the day, and not his responsibility, Jason Lopatecki, Chief Strategy Officer, pulled out flash editor, and put together a fix for us. Who has C level officers that know how to code flash?

Incredibly smart and passionate people that are not afraid to wear multiple hats.

Edgecast

The Content Delivery Network (CDN) business is very competitive right now, and get dozens of vendor emails weekly about new CDN price breaks. Having worked with these guys for over a year now, they listen and deliver. This is extremely important as many larger CDN businesses think they have it figured out, and aren’t invested in innovating and listening to there customer.

We have many business service customers we work with. Each of these customers needs to be tracked individually for bandwidth usage. Edgecast listened to this need and not only delivered reporting functions for us with a UI layer but delivered an API with 20+ functions a few weeks after.

And when someone on the Viddler team may call in because we are having a problem with some reporting tool, or inquiring about new services, the level1 support engineer could be the core architect for all we know because of how well versed he is with the status of features and problems within the company. Transparent organization or talented hire? I would assume all organizations have high level of transparency, just that they find passionate and intelligent people.

To get started over there the man to talk to over there is Duane Sulo.

Google

Due to size of Google don’t want to post anything too confidential here. What I will say is that there account reps and support staff are all on point. When working with individual units of Google, they feel like small startups themselves, proving that you can still be tight nit in one of the largest companies in the world.

Woopra

Just started using this product on this blog. But the fact the CEO, John Pozadzides,  is talking transparently about business model with his users, just rocks and leads by example on how passionate his company is about his users.

In summary it appears that there are a few key factors in running a tight nit organization:

1. Smart/Passionate People
2. Ability to Listen and Deliver
3. Employees not afraid to wear multiple hats.

Please think of these when building a company or working with other companies as it’ll help foster more tight nit companies.

Also, just a small disclaimer, there are a more companies I want to list, but in order for Viddler to attempt to be a tight company, am going to have to cut this off here.

If you know of a tight nit company, let me know what tight nit company you work with, would love to hear your story via comments, blog post, tweet, viddler, or email rob at viddler.

Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3 has launched his blog, louderback.com. Jim is an old-school internet dude, if Jim started this blog only halfway through his internet career he could have registered jim.com.

Seriously though, Jim is great to Viddler and community. If you haven’t done so already make sure and checkout Revision3Beta. If you are looking for another Gary-Vaynerchuk-like “personality” in the video space, make sure to subscribe to his feed!

Now all I gotta do is convince him to get a Viddler.com account and branded player

DEMO 2008 Reunion – Robert Sandie of VIddler

Originally uploaded by b_d_solis

It just is too difficult. My cheeks cannot go any higher. Someday, I will learn.

Two years ago I was doing the elevator pitches for Viddler in front of large audiences like this. I wonder if they sounded as crazy as PooYou.com… Don’t answer that

Watch Matthew Bare’s elevator pitch:

They send poo through the mail for people.

What do you think, would you use this service?

This was recently uploaded on Viddler by entr200.

Last year, I posted on Jeff Hawkins as a role-model to all entrepreneurs, when I was learning about Entrepreneurship.

He brings up some great points in this video. It’s all about Passion.

After moving into my appartment building that was probably built in the 1800’s when (used to house Bethlehem Steel engineers) I found myself reflecting on the benefits of living in the Lehigh Valley while driving an online startup:

1. Think outside the box – No buying the hoopla around Silicon
   Valley chatter and slip into groupthink. You truly think like an outsider and question UI/functionality/application development. It’s great benchmarking trends and common themes but there is something to be said about being different.
2. Focus On Yourself - Worry about your own goals/objectives instead of staying tuned into rumors and “what if’s” about other companies. This may be my football background stepping in as nothinig proved more valuable then worrying about your own game before others.
3. Big Fish in Little Pond – Viddler.com (our startup) has received funding and support from the Ben Franklin Technology Partners and the State of Pennsylvania.
4. Your forced to live online – everything you do is focused at the core of where you work. Your habits form in online behaviors and save time networking and get straight to the core of problems. Also, you focus on talent and developers and designers that deliver on time.
5. Inexpensive! – They have $5 pies (an entire large pizza) and $1 beer specials at my favorite joint Casa Mia. Boooya!
6. More Talent Available - WHAT!? Why else would Google be building a campus out of Detroit? Silicon Valley resources are tapped. There are many talented engineers out here coming from enterprise corporations. Darron Schall, rockstar actionscripter and author of O’Reilly’s Essential ActionScript 3, is an hour outside of Bethlehem. Robert Hall, award winning flash designer, is frequently available to come on board for projects and once again only an hour away as well!
7. Stay Hungry – I always worked out best in old rusty gyms with just the essentials. In my opinion, the same should goes for a startup. No climate controlled facilities, raised desks and bouncy balls here.

Here’s my toast to Bootstrappin’ Bethlehem…

technorati tags:Entrepeneurship, Bethlehem, Viddler, Lehigh

In football, as in life, cheating should not be condoned. Erik, my brother who plays Nose Tackle for CSU, did win on Saturday against Wyoming 39-31. Erik told me after the game the refs did not make a holding call all game and he was really upset. So what am I getting at?

Football teach’s life lessons. Life is not always fair is one of them. It’s all about overcoming and being the toughest guy on the playing field.

Here is the summary of my presentation for Entrepreneurship class in bulleted format (hopefully my plan to record this will work and can put up)

Continue reading →