Jelly!

The good folks at Yahoo! have posted the video of the July 24th Jelly Talk featuring talking heads YT and Bijan Sabet, hosted by Jon Pierce.

If you weren’t able to make it to the event last week here at TechStars Cambridge, here’s your chance to revisit! And as I like to say, I hope I was at least entertaining if not informative

Fake Steve ON FIRE

Best Fake Steve post in a while.

P.T. Barnum? David Blaine? The big J.C. himself? I have pieces of guys like that in my stool.

Be readin’ it!

TEE: Get the Timing Right

This post is part of a series of posts called The Educated Employee (TEE), the goal of which is to get employees up to speed on the terms and conditions they usually (but maybe should not) agree to as part of taking a new job. As always, I will caveat the following with the statement that I am not a lawyer; my ruminations should not be taken as legal advice; and you should seek out proper legal counsel before you sign potentially-life-altering contracts.

Get the Timing Right

So you’ve hit the pavement looking for you next gig. Congrats and happy hunting!

Once you, our intrepid job candidate, are done dancing with a bunch of companies, if history is a guide, you and one or more companies will decide you might want to get married. I’ve given out hundreds of job offers, and in my experience, this is usually how this process has (WRONGLY) panned out:

1. Employer makes candidate an offer. Salary, options, basic benefits, start dates, et. al. are discussed.
2. Candidate contemplates offer and asks various questions of employer.
3. Candidate accepts Employer’s offer.
4. Candidate gives notice to his or her current employer.
5. Candidate – now Employee – starts with new Employer.
6. Employer hands huge stack of contractual employment docs to employee to sign.

In case it isn’t painfully obvious, Step 6 in this process is broken – for the employee. Total, unequivocal, complete FA1L on his or her part.

For the avoidance of doubt, Step 6 should be part of Step 2. Ask for copies of the company’s template employment documents / contracts that they are going to require of you. Make it clear you will be evaluating them as part of the offer. Read them and understand them. Get them reviewed by a lawyer.

If a company refuses to share such documents with you, try to reason with them that it’s a reasonable request, and if they put up any sort of a fight about it that’s a bad signal.

You want to see all those documents as you evaluate your offer(s). The terms and conditions of your prospective employment are absolutely reasonable things to request. Those terms and conditions are a material part of their offer. If two companies you dig offer you an $80K salary – but one has a broad non-compete agreement, or a crazy-long non-solicit, or non-standard option vesting (you get the idea) in their employment documents, then the offers that look “the same” at first glance are clearly not.

Net-net: do your research. Remember, this prospective employer is going to be sniffing your butt to the Nth degree and you should be doing likewise. It is your responsibility to figure this stuff out and know what you are signing!

And if you don’t like one or more of the terms, then try to negotiate them away — the topic of our next TEE missive.

Please submit any questions or comments or arguments in the Comments to this post. My goal is for this series of posts to become a useful community resource, so please participate!

Seeking Mac Software – Address Book Tool

I tweeted on this and came up 110% empty. Let’s see if a blog post gets us any further .

In Windows land, there is a very useful app called Anagram. I’ve been a happy user of Anagram for probably five years or more. What Anagram basically does is allow you to select some text and then hit a key (I used to use F12) and it would automagically take that text, parse it, process it, and put it into your address book (Outlook, in my case, though I think it worked with others too). It let you do a nice pass over the data to make sure it was kosher before you hit the final commit. It’s a nice app – I highly recommend it!

On OSX I can find nothing equivalent, and not for lack of looking. Can anybody point me in some useful directions?

Most importantly, I need it to work inside Thunderbird (Thunderbird extension, anybody?!?!?) and feed AddressBook.app. However, it should also work across any application – processing any selected text, or data on the clipboard from within Pages, Word, Firefox, Safari, Evernote, TextEdit, Preview, and so on and so forth.

If nothing exists, could one of you creative folks out there please whip one up? The Anagram guys have been making money on this for a long time. LinkedIn even licensed their technology for their “grab” toolbar. There’s gotta be a Mac market for something like this, no? And of course you can charge an extra $5 to $10 over what Anagram does, just ‘cuz you’re selling to Mac users .

The Educated Employee (TEE)

Welcome to TEE: The Educated Employee. This blog post (TEE#0) marks the start of a series focused on educating the people who work for companies (a.k.a. “employees” – probably “you”) on the various terms of employment they may bump into during their careers.

I was inspired by two events to create this series of posts. First, the current, bubbling debate over non-compete agreements in Massachusetts has kicked my ass into gear on such topics. Education is the best fix for this challenge. Second, as I performed due-diligence on the nine companies we invested in for TechStars Boston 2009, I found a few (a few too many) unpleasant examples of unreasonable employment paperwork clauses that should never have seen the light of day – never mind the ink of an employee’s pen.

There needs to be more knowledge out there among employees.

The goal of TEE is to discuss employment-related contractual topics in a manner that provides employees useful context on what can be negotiated, what is and isn’t reasonable, and, for some of this stuff, what the heck it even means.

Employers get away with some wacky stuff because many (perhaps even most) employees appear to be clueless on these issues. An educated employee pool will mean (a) employees will get fair deals, (b) companies won’t be able to over-step, and (c) the ecosystem will operate more efficiently.

Most of these posts will apply to any type of employee. My personal experience is with software companies of varying sorts – as employee, employer, founder, executive, advisor, director, and investor – over the last 20 years. It shouldn’t matter a ton whether you’re prospective employee #38,192 at HugeCo, Inc. or whether you and your drinking buddies have just incorporated, planning to build the next great video game company (which you’re now all employees of).

I don’t claim to be a world expert on these topics. However, I’ve seen a ton of these agreements and situations over the years, from both sides of the table. I’ve certainly seen a fair bucketful of bullshit. As this is a public forum, my strong hope is that the community will chime in with comments, links, and the like to help flesh out any oversights, errors, and additional details.

The straw-man list of posts is as listed below, and will probably be presented in roughly this order. I’ve tried to put the slightly more obscure and/or less critical stuff later in the cycle.

• Everything Is Negotiable
• Get the Timing Right
• IP Assignment (before / during / after)
• Non-Disclosure
• Non-Compete
• Employment-At-Will
• Non-Solicitation of Employees
• Non-Solicitation of Customers
• Limitations On Other Activities
• Founder-Employee / Employee-Employee
• Termination Not For Cause
• Death & Disability
• Right to Insure
• Assignment & Succession

Disclaimer: I am not an attorney. I’m sharing my own personal experiences and opinions here; I am NOT sharing legal advice. It is your responsibility to have each and every legal contract regarding your employment reviewed by competent, educated, clueful counsel.

Changing MA’s Non-Compete Laws

Amrith Kumar put up a blog post last week that presented some thoughtful arguments in favor of non-competes and also spurred a great thread of comments that are well worth reading. I for one am very much looking forward to the Non-Compete Forum being held on July 22nd. Over the past few weeks there has been a gaggle of great conversation online and offline about the state of the state as it concerns these non-competes. The Boston Globe today published an op-ed on the issue. Dialogue is good!

For the world in which I live (early-stage internet / software / mobile startups) I believe that non-competes are relatively pointless, and a net-drain on the overall MA ecosystem. However the arguments for and against broadly changing or striking the laws are not cut-and-dry.

The idealists-against-non-competes believe we have enough data to declare MA non-competes valueless and growth-limiting. That’s a non-trivial leap to take based on examining insanely complicated ecosystems in jurisdictions other than MA. It might be true, but if the analyses are wrong, it could be a gargantuan mea culpa.

The idealists-in-favor-of-non-competes believe that things are fine, and the employers and court systems will behave rationally. This is a stretch, since extracting the ultimate ‘rational’ answer to a non-compete contract / argument will involve litigation, thereby maiming the entire process at the outset.

The pragmatists seem to be arguing that non-competes, as currently crafted and legislated in MA, are just too broad, and we just need to put in place better clarification re: who they apply to, for what reasons, for what timeframes, and in which industries. Amrith’s post and the ensuing comment discussion riff on this nicely. However, even a cursory pass through the proposed House No. 1799 should make your eyes roll. Nobody said pragmatism was easy .

If you care about this issue (and you know you should), please consider attending the forum being held on July 22nd so we can all get better educated and get this problem fixed!

What is the Role of a Mentor?

I’ve been working my way through Sir Ken Robinson’s the Element and this evening stumbled into a brief, interesting discussion of mentorship. It seemed worth sharing. Sir Ken believes that “mentors tend to serve some or all of four roles for us [mentees]“:

1. RECOGNITION of the subtleties and nuances that set us apart
2. ENCOURAGEMENT – “mentors lead us to believe that we can achieve something that seemed improbable or impossible”
3. FACILITATING – mentors can help lead us forward,”offering advice and techniques, paving the way … and even allowing us to falter … while standing by to help”
4. STRETCHING – “effective mentors push us past what we see as our limits”

It’s an interesting framework to keep in mind as all those crazy mentors out there work on improving our skills as mentors.

It’s a Great Time to be an Early-Stage Entrepreneur!

In a blog post yesterday, the good folks at True Ventures wrapped up their thoughts with a stupendous assessment of the early-stage technology venture market:

We are fortunate to live in an incredibly disruptive time.

The best entrepreneurs want less from VCs today: less capital and fewer constraints in order to take more risk earlier. But the the best are demanding more in terms of new products, services, alignment, attitudes, and business practices from their investors. This means new expectations around board roles and responsibilities, more flexible deal structures, aligned efforts to add value, broader syndicates that amass the resources and participation of multiple groups and multiple angels. This means innovation in venture capital.

If you are an entrepreneur today, this is an historic time to chase your dreams. With over $1 billion in fresh seed capital in the very early stage market, what are you waiting for?

Amen.

Ovation TV FTW

If you asked me a month ago what my favorite cable channel was, I’d have told you it was Ovation TV. If you ask me today, I’d shout that answer at you.

On July 1st, Ovation kicked off a series called American Revolutionaries Rock and Soul that runs through the 18th. Normally I don’t get to watch much TV, but since I was already keeping tabs on Ovation I saw this coming in their promos and gave the DVR some appropriate pokes and prods well in advance. Today I was able to watch two exceptional shows:

Electric Purgatory is a thought-provoking look at how black musicians have had a more-than-challenging time making it as pure rock musicians. Footage and interviews with folks from Living Colour and Fishbone and Bad Brains brought back a lot of memories of the 1980s for me.

Welcome to Death Row is a  thorough history of Death Row Records – the notorious gangsta rap label created by Dr. Dre and Suge Knight (and maybe Harry O).

Neither of these are brand new documentaries. EP dates from 2006 and WtDR from 2001 (though with some updates at the end). Regardless, Ovation has done a stellar job  of pulling all sorts of amazing such shows together for this series. Thanks Ovation – keep ‘em comin’.

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK

I think it’s time we moved the word FUCK into the common lexicon. It’s a stellar word. It’s no less stellar than MURMUR, LILT or SCINTILLA. It’s no less useful than LAUGH, SUNLIGHT, GO or COME.

A word has only those powers that a society agrees to confer upon it.

We are in complete control of those rules.

Words, strung together, are what should move us. Words, strung together, are to be loved or feared. Words, strung together, allow us to be rational, thoughtful, entertaining, disgusting, and beyond.

There is no net-positive reason for a sole word to be conferred such capabilities.

No rational society would allow the color #4E36C8 to be assigned, explicitly or implicitly, a politeness, usability, helpfulness, or appropriateness ’score’ – thus broadly limiting or mandating its use in societal functions. Folks would need to repaint their houses, change their corporate logos, throw away lots of clothes, and revamp their schools’ art classes. Picasso’s Guernica probably couldn’t exist without #4E36C8. It’s clearly irrational.

Imagine the global good that could come from the removal of irrational societal constraints on individual words. If epithets are made powerless, it means you have to string together words to hurl a (usually pointless) insult at someone – and in so doing you are suddenly halfway towards having a conversation with them…

So can we start with FUCK? Let’s decide to make it, singly, as powerless as the four letter words DOOR, BLUE, MAKE, and SIGN.