2011 Annual Report

I said that 2010 was about “laying foundations (literally and figuratively)”.

In 2011 we got busy with walls etc!

The literal foundations were a new place to live now under construction near Nelson. This has already been a long project – nearly four years, and counting. It’s a bit unusual for me to stay focussed on something for this long. It’s been very satisfying seeing the development progress from the original idea, through lines on a page, to something now physically taking shape.

We’re looking forward to re-locating in March/April. It’s going to be a big change.

The figurative foundations were Southgate Labs. I’ve throughly enjoyed working with Amnon and Koz. Towards the end of the year we were excited to add Nick and Amanda to the team.

Our first investment, Vend, has had an amazing year. Once a start-up has momentum like this is when it really gets to be fun. The business has scaled quickly and added hundreds of customers around the world. Vaughan has grown into his role as CEO – he’s hired a great team in Auckland and San Francisco and it’s exciting to be a part of that. It’s my first experience as Chairman and as such has my full attention. Stand by…

On top of this we made two new investments during the year: Go Vocab and The Rugby Site (one more thing that Richie McCaw and Ruby On Rails have in common!) We have high hopes for both as they continue to refine their product and business model over the coming year.

In August we completed a new iPhone App for StarNow, and just this week released v2.0 of the RadioNZ iPhone app, with live streaming and a bunch of other improvements.

And, after some false starts, we also have a couple of product ideas of our own which are under development. Hopefully at least one of these will surface in 2012.

It would be misrepresenting things to say we know exactly what it is going to be yet, but some of the blanks have been filled in, and in any case we haven’t let that stop us getting on with trying a few things.

All of that makes it sound like a lot of fun. In reality, I spent a large portion of the year just drowning in email. I received 14,363 messages (not counting spam and junk mail), or 40/day on average. This is a 50% increase since 2010 and nearly three times as many as in 2009. I sent 6,765 messages, or 25% more than in 2010, despite consciously trying to reduce this. It doesn’t seem particularly sustainable to continue to work this way.

I took a lot of coffee meetings too (but I still don’t drink coffee). In the process I met some excellent people who are working on some exciting new ventures and a bunch of others who are probably going to struggle. I tried to give honest and practical advice to both.

I didn’t blog as much as in previous years, with just 51 new posts, although 2,449 tweets made up for some of the difference. I’m especially proud of two series of posts – The Mythical Startup (which was also published in Idealog), and Founder Centric Startups.

I was featured in a business profile in the Dominion Post. Thankfully it was a very friendly article – so the only uncomfortable bit was posing for the photos (lesson: don’t do this in front of a whole open plan office full of amused onlookers!)

It does feel a bit odd to still be talking about Trade Me in these sort of situations, given it’s now years since I worked there. It was very cool to watch from a distance as they completed their IPO, and achieved a market capitalisation of over $1billion, although amusing to see media pundits say that we original shareholders obviously sold too cheaply, when at the time the same people thought David Kirk had gone slightly mad.

In between all of that there wasn’t much time or space for anything else, to be honest.

However, I did try to keep moving…

In March I completed the Contact Triathlon race in Wellington in 2:41:35, (doing the final 10km run leg in 47:25). In case that sounds impressive it was more than 20 minutes outside of qualifying time for the World Champs.

In August I completed the National Duathlon Champs in Taupo, in the wind and sleet (the weekend it snowed everywhere!) I ran a fast opening 10km in 44:36 (as fast as I’ve ever run over that distance) but died on the bike leg and struggled home in 2:36:10, 13th in my age group and again well outside of the qualifying times.

As part of my training I did the Wellington Half-Marathon in June, also in pretty cold and windy conditions. This was the first time I had raced over that distance without a long swim and bike immediately beforehand, so I was more-or-less assured of a personal best time. Nonetheless I was stoked to get home in 1:44:11, a good 45 seconds ahead of a fast closing Koz!

I enjoyed some cycling in Wellington with PayPal founder Max Levchin, when Wellington had her best Autumn coat on, and a brisk/refreshing ride up Signal Hill in Dunedin with Julian Cox. Perhaps 2012 is finally the year for me to get into mountain biking?

I started the year at 73.7kg and finished at 75.3kg. The difference is explained by just 53 calories per day – or the equivalent of two small chocolates. You can tell from the graph when I got really busy with work.

I really did keep moving…

According to TripIt I was away from home 113 days during the year.

I especially enjoyed two trips to San Francisco and Silicon Valley with Vaughan from Vend – including meetings on Sand Hill Road, and a guided tour of the Twitter HQ (thanks to Doug!) We even managed to squeeze in a ball game at AT&T Park.

But, of course, the big sporting event of the year was the Rugby World Cup. Highlights for me included watching Wales vs South Africa with my dad (the best crowd noise I’ve experienced at the Cake Tin since the Lions test in ’05), All Blacks vs Canada with my oldest son (his first live test match, also the first time the ABs have played during the day since he was born), Tonga vs France with my new brother-in-law (a former Tongan player, both of us proudly wearing some official team kit he had been given) and the two quarter finals in Auckland. I watched the semi-finals and final from the comfort of my couch (from the very edge of said couch in the later case!)

In May I grew a beard, under doctors orders! After getting that prescription I had some nervousness about the strict definition of “in sickness and in health” but luckily Emily was understanding – even if it did overlap with our 10th wedding anniversary.

We made up for it with two great trips: to Mount Cook, and to Auckland to see the Foo Fighters, in the rain, at Western Springs. Maybe in 2012 we’ll finally get around to a honeymoon?

There was a stark mix of happy and sad family times during the year.

We started the year in Perth, Western Australia, where extended family had gathered for a scorching Christmas and my sister’s wedding, which was excellent. And, we ended it in Nelson, to celebrate some milestone birthdays with Emily’s family.

In between times we welcomed a new nephew (my brother’s first) and niece, but sadly farewelled my grandmother, the matriarch of our family and my last surviving grandparent, who died suddenly in April.

And so to 2012…

At this stage my rough plan is to keep running hard until Easter and then collapse into a comfortable chair and hibernate. We’ll see how that goes!

How about you?

Previous Annual Reports:

• 2008: Quantifying Nothing
• 2009: So this is Christmas, and what have you done?
• 2010: Head First, Then Foot, Then Heart

I thought I’d had a pretty good week … mostly keeping on top of my inbox, meeting interesting people, getting lots done.

Until I look back at my Top Three history:

Two out of three ain’t bad, apparently, but in terms of the three things I considered most important at the start of each day I only managed half that!

Today I have just one thing on the list. Sadly, it’s not writing a blog post.

I was asked to speak to the Trade Me Commercial team off-site this morning. There are now 35 people in this team – more than in the entire company in 2004, when the commercial team was MOD.

So, please excuse the reminiscent mood…

Ten years ago this week I left New Zealand to live in London.

I had recently sold my start-up to Trade Me in return for stock. Trade Me was valued at about $1m in that deal. Shortly after that shareholders were asked to provide loans to keep the company afloat while we waited for the recently introduced success fees to start to cover costs.

I had mixed feelings about leaving. I’d spent a pretty full-on couple of years at Trade Me and was pretty proud of what I’d helped to create. But I was a little jaded too and ready for something new.

I was also just married.

I had organised a sponsored work permit to get into the UK, and can only imagine how that must have looked to the person processing our visa applications.

We had no idea…

We were up for an adventure, but within a couple of months we’d be struggling to find new work post 9/11 and wondering what the hell we’d gotten ourselves into. Partly in an effort to deal with the stress of that situation, I started running.

As it turned out Trade Me and impending parenthood would eventually entice us back, but we returned having fallen in love with London and with a new perspective courtesy of travel to some amazing parts of the world.

It seems like yesterday, until I think about everything that has happened between then and now at which point it seems like half a lifetime ago.

Here are a couple of things that might make you think:

Firstly, Kathryn Ryan’s interview with High Court Judge Justice Joe Williams:

Justice Joe Williams on leading the Wai 262 inquiry

He talks a little about the concept of kaitiakitanga, or guardianship of physical and cultural environments and knowledge, and specifically where this overlaps with the modern idea of intellectual property rights especially where these are used in commercial settings.

As he succinctly describes it (my emphasis added):

“… thinking about how we value this environment, that we share.”

I recommend you listen to the whole interview and would be surprised if you don’t learn something in the process.

(if you have an iPhone or iPad, may you allow me to recommend the official Radio New Zealand app for your listening pleasure!)

Secondly, Lawrence Lessigs keynote presentation from the recent NetHui event organised by InternetNZ:

Among his important suggestions for policy makers is this: assume there is an internet.

Or put another way slightly later in the presentation:

“to protect the future, you need to protect the equality, that produces the sense of entitlement and insight and freedom that the internet has given us, and to resolve the inevitable policy problems we have to churn those problems through democracies that are not corrupt”

Both have clearly thought deeply about these issues, and it’s interesting to hear both of them talking about the importance of finding the middle ground.

Lessig asks New Zealanders to continue to resist US extremism on intellectual property matters, in order to avoid importing US corruption.

I wonder if the is an aspiration even greater than that: perhaps exporting the idea of kaitiakitanga to other places in the world that are willing.

We normally only ever get to hear from the winners (see: survivorship bias). Imagine if that wasn’t the case…

Joe Bloggs was left pondering what might have been this morning, after missing out on last night’s Lotto Powerball jackpot.

Earlier in the week Joe made a special trip to the Pak N Save in the next town, where he decided to spend twice as much as he normally does.

“I normally get a $100 ticket, but with the jackpot this week I decided it was worth an extra investment”, he said.

“The Pak N Save is such a lucky store too”, added Joe, “They’ve sold three division two winners in the last three months, so I just can’t believe that it wasn’t to be for me this time.”

Store manager, Betty Bell, offered her commiserations, but was also left struggling for an explanation.

“We have a big sign by the checkout with photos of our previous big winners, and I know that people come from right around the region to buy their tickets here because of that.  It’s sort of like a tourist attraction.  So of course it’s just so disappointing for Joe and for us that we can’t add another happy face.  It would have been huge news for the district.”, she commented sadly.

“We were literally run off our feet selling last-minute tickets yesterday”, she noted, “It’s just heart breaking to think that all of them are losers this morning.”

Joe’s misfortune is also bad news for some local charities.

“I had more or less decided what I would do with the money”, Joe said.

“Of course I would have paid off my mortgage first and got myself an expensive new car. But, what I was most looking forward to was helping my family and some local charities that I have always wanted to support.  I just never have enough money left over at the end of each month to give them as much as I’d like”.

A spokesman from NZ Lotteries was also sorry to hear about Joe when contacted, but pointed out that 20c from every dollar Joe spent on Lotto is recycled back to the community eventually via grants.

Despite his misfortune, Joe is apparently not completely discouraged.

“I’m sure there will be another jackpot eventually, and I’ll probably play again then. I know the odds of winning are low, but when you read about those lucky people who win it’s impossible to not believe that it could be you next time.”

AllAboutTheStory.com (one of the ventures we are working with at Southgate Labs) has announced a Media Scholarship for NZ journalists, to help build links between the media and web development communities in New Zealand and contribute towards greater depth in reporting on our industry.

The selected journalist will attend one of New Zealand’s best known web conferences – Webstock – where they will have the opportunity to interview big name speakers from overseas and fill their contact books with the good and great of New Zealand’s own web glitterati.

Founder and managing editor Julie Starr …

“This is a terrific opportunity for a journalist not only to learn more about the web and see examples of innovative journalism overseas, but also to interview some of the world’s most interesting online business people and researchers.”

Speaking at Webstock in 2011 is Ruby on Rails luminary, and Southgate Labs partner, Michael Koziarski, as well as some others. :-)

Applications for the scholarship close on January 30.  To apply email julie@allaboutthestory.com or visit her blog for more information.

More Details

The Award

Media registration for both days of the Webstock conference (February 14-18, 2011) which includes conference pass, free coffee, and much-admired conference bag and other schwag.

A face to face interview set up for you with at least one Webstock speaker and the opportunity to mix and mingle with others.

A ticket to the Onya Awards 2011.

How to Apply

Email Julie Starr by January 30, 2011 explaining:

• why you would like to attend Webstock 2011
• which speaker you most want to interview and why
• which publication you write for or intend to pitch your Webstock-related stories to
• how the scholarship would help you in your career
• why you’re the right person for the scholarship

Visit the allaboutthestory.com blog for eligibility details.

This is still one of my all time favourite YouTube videos:

And containing a really great put-down: “you non-contributing zero”.

Originally via @traskjd, most recently via @cdixon.

Enjoy!

2010 Annual Report

Image: Sociology by Jessica Hagy

It’s become a tradition to publish an annual report here on January 1st.

This started off a couple of years ago as an attempt to answer for myself the difficult question: “what do you do?” Thankfully I don’t stress as much about this anymore, even though I still don’t have a succinct answer.

I finished in 2009 by saying:

“I think the best I can hope for is that there will be another good collection of stories to share this time next year.”

Actually the volume of stories isn’t really what is has been in previous years. A lot of my time in 2010 has been invested in laying foundations (literally and figuratively) for projects that will hopefully form the basis for annual reports for a few years to come. As fun as that’s been, foundations are not very interesting in and of themselves.

Travel

After all of the travelling I’d done in previous years, I started out expecting to do much less in 2010. In fact, I foolishly predicted that I wouldn’t travel overseas at all.

That quickly went out the window in March when the opportunity came up to travel to Africa with Sam and Nina, and Kevin, Laura and Mahri from Mulago. We spent time in Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya and Zambia visiting some impressive non-profit organisations and getting up close to some amazing wildlife.

Sitting quietly in the bamboo forest at Parc National des Volcans, Ruhengeri and watching a family of mountain gorillas was definitely the highlight of the year. It was chilling to visit the crypt at Nyamata, where 10,000 people were killed during the genocide. It was fortunate timing to visit the Kings’ Tombs in Kampala, Uganda, just a few weeks before they were burned down by protesters. It was stunning to share the dusk in Luangwa Valley with a large group of zebra and elephants and to sit while a small pride of lions walked in and out of our spotlight.

It was also excellent to spend some time with people like Martin from KickStart, Jake from Nuru International and Tevis from Komaza. It is a privilege to be in a position to be able to support their amazing work.

Then, in June I was honoured to be invited to attend the O’Reilly Foo Camp in Sebastopol, California. This is the original unconference. It was great to spend a few days there soaking up the accumulated knowledge from the daunting attendee list which included many of my tech heros. Combined with a pilgrimage to the Googleplex in Mountain View, an expert guided visit to the SFMOMA in San Francisco and the excellent company of the other kiwis who were attending it was a memorable trip (we won’t mention my driving or the sat nav dramas).

And, as if to make a complete mockery of my initial travel prediction, we’re ending the year in the smothering heat of Western Australia where the extended whanau have gathered for my sister’s wedding last weekend.

In addition to those international trips I also completed 28 domestic trips. According to TripIt I spent 109 days away from home, which is a lot more than I would have guessed.

Included in that count are frequent trips to Auckland to visit Fishpond and Vend, two start-up companies that I’m excited to be working with as an investor and advisor.

But, it wasn’t all work. I also managed to squeeze in a few smaller travel adventures – not the least a great day jet boating up the Whanganui River to The Bridge To Nowhere with Jon, Lance and Mod.

I also continued the tradition of playing the world’s great golf courses with my father and brother – adding Cape Kidnappers and Kauri Cliffs this year. When you play as inconsistently as I do they say it’s important to enjoy the walk, which is always more difficult at these flash places where they typically prefer you to take a cart.

We saw U2 live in Auckland and enjoyed flying laps with Jonny Reid and Earl Bamber at Hampton Downs courtesy of Audi. Both had our ears ringing for a few days afterwards!

Health & Fitness

It’s been a much quieter year for me in terms of physical challenges, after I completed the Taupo Half Ironman in December ’09. Even so, I’ve still done quite a bit of “for fun” cycling and running, and the odd sea swim when time and weather have allowed. I’ve completed a couple of the standard distance Scorching Triathlon races in Wellington, and enjoyed racing in these without putting so much pressure on myself in terms of time or performance.

If any of you are tempted to include something like this amongst your New Year’s resolutions, I definitely recommend the novice option that is available at these events (comprising a shallow, parallel-to-shore, 100m swim, 6km cycle and 1.2km run – very achievable). But, be warned, if you have the necessary competitive genes then it could lead to something much longer.

In the first few months of the year I dropped another 3.5kg. I now top the scales at around 73kg which is a number that would have seemed beyond the realms of possibility a few years ago. While it’s easy to point to all of the physical activity, actually some permanent changes to my eating habits have made the biggest contribution. It’s hard to imagine anything else I could have done for myself during this time which would have had the lasting impact that this hopefully will, so I’m obviously very pleased to have taken the opportunity.

I’m feeling fit and starting to get itchy feet for another event to aim for to get me motivated about training again, so who knows what 2011 holds in this respect.

Thinking Out Loud

I popped my head above the parapet a couple of times during the year. Firstly, speaking at Ignite Wellington and then as a playing favourites guest on the Saturday morning Kim Hill show on Radio NZ. In December I enjoyed speaking at the Summer of Tech Seminar Series about start-up myths. I’m hoping to expand on some of that thinking here on this blog shortly.

Work

It’s really been a year of two halves in terms of work. In the second half I finally got busy.

This is most obvious when you look at the volume of emails that have flowed in and out of my inbox:

What happened?

Over the last couple of years I’ve invested in a number of early-stage companies. I’ve generally ended up with a small shareholding and no role in these businesses. When these sort of ventures go well, there is little reason to be involved and so little opportunity to learn from them. When they don’t go well they are a lot of work for little/no return.

From this experience I learned that investing from arm’s length doesn’t really do it for me. I realised that I was not well set up to actually deliver on any interesting work as a one-man-band and, more importantly, had stopped doing what I am actually good at. I decided that continuing to do this sort of thing and expecting different results was silly.

At the same time the opportunity came along to do something together with Amnon, who was one of the impressive heads-up developers I hired at Trade Me and for the last couple of years the Creative Lead there, and Koz, who is part of the core Ruby on Rails team and probably the smartest developer I’ve crossed paths with.

We call our combination Southgate Labs and describe it as a software studio.

We hope it will be an interesting mixture of :

• Ventures, that we can work on up to our armpits, taking a founder-centric approach and helping out however is required – e.g. Vend which we’re working on with Vaughan … plus a couple of other exciting projects we have in the pipeline;
• Client Work, to help us keep the lights on and to provide some cash to invest – e.g. we recently designed and developed the Radio NZ iPhone application;
• Products, because we think you learn the most when you work on your own stuff directly – e.g. two interns we have working with us over summer recently took out the ‘Best Newbie’ category of the Mix & Mash competition with their Tax Receipt web app – and because we were curious and anxious to make our way up the learning curve for iPhone application development, we built and launched Top Three.

I’m happy and excited to be part of a team again. It’s hard to imagine better people to work with on this sort of thing, so I’m definitely feeling optimistic about what we can do together. If the price to pay for that is more time spent on email, so be it.

We are already seeing lots of interesting opportunities, and hope to uncover even more. If you have something we should look at we’d love to hear from you.

I have no idea if this is going to work out the way we expect, but we’re going to give it a good shot and hopefully have some fun in the process.

Bring on 2011…

Previous Annual Reports:

• 2008: Quantifying Nothing
• 2009: So this is Christmas, and what have you done?

This blog is four years old today.

Here are some of the popular posts from the past 12 months:

• Heads Up vs Heads Down, 26th January
• Ponoko Moko, 26th February
• Muzungu, 23rd March
• I <3 EFT-POS, 10th June
• LOAD * ,8,1, 18th June
• The Observer Effect, 20th June
• Beyond Tenure, 23rd September

This list is a lot shorter than in previous years. I’ve been doing just as much thinking and even writing, just not so much publishing, especially in the second half of the year.

Recently I’ve been working on a new series which will be posted here shortly, for your entertainment and amusement. So, stand by for those…

While I haven’t been as prolific in terms of blog posts this year, I have substituted a little with tweets.

It’s exactly two years since my first tentative tweet. This year I tweeted over 1100 times (mostly re-tweets, to be fair).

Here is a selection of some of my favourites:

I wonder if a farmer would find coding in objective-c as satisfying as I find digging a trench? Doubt it.
– January 12th

Now infected with Diphtheria, Tetanus, Polio, Hepatitis A, and Typhoid. Hopefully just the right amounts?
– February 16th

I really hate forms which ask me to specify an occupation. I need an “it’s complicated” option.
– February 17th

Amused by a business experience described as being “like a roller coaster” – what, up slowly, down quickly and ending back where it started?
– March 29th

Noise, Repetition, and Sleep Deprivation are all brutal torture techniques. Our 5 year old and 2 year old have perfected the combo.
– April 6th

“The cloud” is the latest technical term which technical people think everybody understands, but actually nobody does.
– May 7th

Lap pools or, worse, flow jet pools, are like Ab Flex machines for rich guys. It’s not the equipment that makes you fit.
– May 27th

In the US the nacho chips and coca-cola are bottomless, and as a result the people are not.
– June 24th

Finally POS means Point-of-Sale: http://www.vendhq.com/ (disclosure: I’m a director and investor)
– July 20th

Just rain all day, no sign of spring, autumn or summer anywhere #rockretractions
– September 16th

Lots of companies want to be design-led like Apple. But few have a benign dictator with the necessary taste and good judgement to be CEO.
– November 4th

The Case Against Buying Christmas Presents http://j.mp/hLE0Jh
– December 8th

I hope you enjoy a happy start to the New Year!

Applies to a number of things, I suppose, including trolls…

A couple of weeks ago we made geysers in the backyard using Mentos and Diet Coke:

As a result we now have a dead patch in the grass.

Something to think about next time you order a skinny drink.

This is a great talk, about how evolutionary theory can be applied to our appreciation of art, by adopted kiwi Dennis Dutton, who amongst other things is the co-founder and co-editor of Arts & Letters Daily.

It’s the first TED Talk to be animated by Cognitive Media.

Enjoy.

The #1 reason why you shouldn’t include animated Flash ads on your website is because users hate them.  This is because they very rarely provide more value than they capture.  However, in this respect, the are a useful pointer to who is the customer and who is the product:

“If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold”

– blue_beetle on MetaFilter

It turns out, they can even be a security threat:

Trade Me virus affects thousands

(by the way, the Flash ad embedded in the middle of that article on the NZ Herald site today is ironic – hopefully APN have been more careful in vetting advertisers than Trade Me !)

What can you do?

I’ve recently (and finally!) installed a Flash blocker in my browser.  This means that Flash components in web pages only load when I explicitly click on them.  It’s not only removes an annoying distraction from many of the sites I visit regularly, and has made my web browser much more stable, it has noticeably increased page load speeds (not especially surprising given that ads are often the biggest components on a web page).  So far I’ve found very few websites which require Flash to be enabled in order to be useful.

Installing something like this is not as difficult as it might sound.  Here are some links for the most popular browsers:

• Internet Explorer
• Firefox
• Safari
• Chrome

Happy browsing!