David Teten » General

Ultimate Office for Fitness, Post #2—Photos and Coverage

David — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:02:57 +0000

We've received a very positive response to our post about creating a fitness-friendly office. Daily Burn posted some photos, and we thought some additional ones would be interesting. Our intern Matt Fairbank took the photos below.

When visitors enter the office, the first thing they see is our portfolio:

Though most of the office is set up in an open layout, the four closed conference rooms are separated by glass, allowing them to feel much more open than most. The conference rooms include opaque, writeable white glass walls for projecting slides and whiteboarding.

The Edison conference room (below left) is set up in the photo for standing meetings, and the Galileo room (below right) features many spheres (appropriately). It has been a favorite among visitors. Our model is Franklin Bi, another intern.

Electronically adjustable desks, below, allow for quick transitions between sitting and standing.

We've found that the standing-only work set up encourages much more active participation and sharing of ideas on the white boards (just as we had hoped!).

The Parse.ly team (who sublet from us) have embraced the standing desk culture.

Einstein, the main conference room, includes a wine rack. We hold regular idea dinners, intern lunches, board meetings, and other events in this room. We have several volunteers who've offered to write wine reviews on this blog.

The Speed of Trust Review

David — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:41:17 +0000

A while ago I read Stephen M.R. Covey's book, The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything . As you would guess, Stephen M.R. is the son of Dr. Stephen R. Covey, who wrote the extremely influential book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

The heritage shows. Speed of Trust is written in a very similar style to 7 Habits, and I mean that as praise. It contains reasonable advice, based on the author's work with clients, and is seasoned with anecdotes from Stephen M.R.'s clients and family/personal life. It discusses five 'waves'; thirteen 'behaviors'; and the four 'cores of credibility' that inspire trust. I know management consultants are often mocked for their love of the numbered list, but there's a reason why they use it: it enhances recall for the reader.

Echoing Ronald Coase's argument for why firms exist in the first place, Stephen M.R. argues that a high-trust workplaces receive two main benefits: they get things done faster, and at a lower cost. This certainly echos my own experience, both inside and between firms.

What's particularly interesting to me, given my experience building Circle of Experts, is how economic capital can be used to substitute for social capital in building trust. The whole power of an expert network is that it allows a customer to very rapidly open up a high-trust conversation with a source, without all of the lengthy relationship-building that historically was necessary. This can reduce the amount of effort required to build trust.

I think that the book has a lot of wisdom and encourage you to take a look.

#1 fastest growing private company in San Francisco Bay Area

David — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Congratulations to the team at Accolo, which was just named the #1 fastest growing private company in the San Francisco Bay Area. Accolo is the company that acquired Teten Recruiting. For more on their approach to recruiting, see "Use Online Networks to Find Your Star Employee".

10 Job-hunt tactics you might not know

David — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

From the "brazen careerist", 10 Job-hunt tactics you might not know:

2. Use proactive recommendations.
Instead of waiting for a hiring manager to ask for references, have your reference call immediately. This works well if you have a heavy-weight reference, like a well-known CEO or someone who knows the hiring manager. But it also works well if you have little professional experience.

Blog Carnivals - Keeping Up with the Best of the Blogosphere

David — Fri, 19 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

My coauthor Scott Allen wrote on The Virtual Handshake blog:

I love to read blogs, but increasingly, I find it harder and harder to keep up with all the blogs I'd like to read because there is just so much good stuff out of there. And, of course, it's all mixed up with a lot more stuff ranging from merely mediocre to just plain pointless.

Recently, I've particularly become a fan of the "blog carnival" format, a weekly traveling roadshow of the best of the blogosphere on a particular topic. I got overwhelmed trying to keep up with the dozens and dozens of good blogs out there, and just setting up search feeds on keywords wasn't giving me a good variety.

Blog carnivals, though, give you a very concise view of some of the best of the blogosphere on various topics. Here are some that you may find particularly relevant:

Carnival of the Capitalists - 50+ weekly posts about economics, entrepreneurship, personal finance - basically anything having to do with money. I hosted this week's edition. (UPDATE: TheVirtualHandshake.com hosted another edition on May 15).
Carnival of Marketing - Seven editor-selected posts on all things marketing.
Carnival of Entrepreneurship - Inspired by both of the above, I started this back in February and it's going great guns. If you have a blog, I'm always looking for submissions and hosts.
Carnival of Business - Newly launched this week.

To learn more about blog carnivals, including what they are, submitting articles, and a list of all known blog carnivals (here's another), visit BlogCarnival.com. This site is a one-stop resource where you can subscribe to RSS feeds for individual carnivals, submit posts to multiple carnivals, and have some great tools for managing a carnival if you already run one or want to start one.

111 Ridiculously Obvious Thoughts on Selling

David — Tue, 02 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

From Tom Peters: This list of not-always-obvious tips is worth reviewing.

http://www.changethis.com/21.01.111ThoughtsOnSelling

360 Review process for CEOs

David — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path (which just launched a new blog) wrote a useful summary of the 360-degrees executive review process he uses for himself.

10+ practical ways to use your phonecam

David — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

10+ practical ways to use your phonecam, from 43 Folders

11 steps to a better brain

David — Fri, 27 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Invaluable advice: 11 steps to a better brain. I'm just waiting to hear that Modafinil is becoming standard issue at all the major investment banks.

3 WISE PEOPLE -- Investors & Visionaries Wrap Up the Year For Us

David — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

My notes from this mornings iBreakfast: 3 WISE PEOPLE -- Investors & Visionaries Wrap Up the Year For Us

Tue. Dec. 21, 100 Park Ave., with:
Esther Dyson, Editor, Release 1.0, CNET Networks
Howard Morgan, V. Chairman, Idealab
Stephen Brotman, Silicon Alley Venture Partners

Every year, we look for direction and understanding from the industry sages. This year, we ask the people who have launched dozens of new companies about the past year -- and their investment outlook at a time when the industry seems to be growing again.

======================================================

Esther Dyson, Release 1.0 at CNET, has devoted her life to discovering the inevitable and promoting the possible. As an active investor and commentator, she focuses on emerging technologies and business models (peer-to-peer, artificial intelligence, the Internet, wireless applications), emerging markets and emerging companies.

COMMENTS

+ A lot of tech spending will be useless; its hygiene (E.G., SarBox) not new services.

+ Social networking is going to morph again
Shes now working on attention.xml, a would-be standard for expressing how many people read your blog, how many people looked at your photo.
Social networking is a functionality that will go into other services

+ Physical world has been very separate from the IT world, but that will change. RFID and other technologies will change that. Our big challenge will be filtering, not collecting (just as we have this problem with email).

+ Huge changes in how healthcare works. Were thinking about healthcare in an innumerate way. Currently, incentives misaligned, and risks not adjusted properly.

======================================================
Dr. Howard Morgan, Idealab, began working with Idealab in 1997 and began serving as Vice Chairman in early 2000. Howard is also President and Founder of the Arca Group, Inc., a consulting and venture capital investment firm specializing in the areas of computer and communications technologies. He has more than 25 years of experience with more than thirty high-tech entrepreneurial ventures.

COMMENTS

Josh Koppelman (half.com) and Morgan created his new VC
MyPublisher (one of their portfolio companies) lets you convert online content to offline. TurnTide was a recent success for them.

Trends:

Big getting bigger (Oracle/Peoplesoft, etc.)

VOIP is real.
Hes used VOIP for 3 years and only got one complaint about voice quality.
Soon youll be able to call someone on a website just by clicking on it.
Next phase : Video over IP
US is last country in the world to get into thumb messaging. This will become bigger, particularly for gaming/dating.

======================================================
Stephen Brotman founded Silicon Alley Venture Partners in 1998. The fund's institutional investors control over $2 billion in venture capital and include TL Ventures, a Safeguard affiliate, TD Capital and the principles of Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Boston Millennium.

COMMENTS

Good news: wisdom is part pattern recognition and part experience. You have to find opportunities that are patently obvious but yet have a contrarian perspective.
When consolidation happens, its not a great place to innovate.
The new paradigm is about corporate dropouts, its not about university research. Why? Because the tech world has become corporate.
Capital intensity is much lower now.
To start a tech-enabled business, very easy.
Value of R&D is lower (its all in Russia, India); the value is in servicing, design.
The older technologies we described start from zero every quarter. IT services have much more recurring revenues.

For all these reasons, Brotman thinks that the tristate area will generate tremendous opportunities.

20% of Fortune 500 is in tristate area.
590,000 tech workers in tristate area: applied technology people. They write scripts, customize, etc. Many use other peoples products, as opposed to using new products.
170,000 tech workers in silicon valleymore coders, etc.
The people in the tristate area are the new paradigm.
SAVPs portfolio are customer-intimate; they know their industry.
Big customers in CA (Intel, etc.) are very different than big customers in NY (JP Morgan)

In general, 62% of venture capital goes to services businesses
In SF bay area/MA, its only 16-17%

======================================================
Q&A
======================================================
Rick Bruner, DoubleClick
Where will the growth be? What should a 19-year-old study?

Dyson:
The only place with less growth than the US will be Western Europe
To get rich, go to another country.

Howard Morgan:
History doesnt repeat itself, but it rhymes"
The rhyme for next 20 years will be biotech/bioinformatics.
PartSearch now outsources for Best Buy, Radio Shack, 13 major chains. $50M revenues next year.
Rap is universal because you have to have music that annoys your parents."

Teten: How will social neworking becoming a functionality?
Dyson: People doing other things will incorporate this functionality. For example, she likes Flickr (in which shes an investor) which allows you to see who else likes the same topics to photograph that you do. She likes Visible Path (in which shes an investor), which uses social networks for a clear purpose, as opposed to simply doing it for its own sake.

Brotman: open source is end-of-lifecycle for core technologies.
Dyson: Its also leading edge of pricing shift.
As an investor, focus on the person not the model.

Brotman: they just invested in Critical Mention, which analyzes TV content

Another trend: make customer serve himself
IBM was losing $200M/year on its PC business; it was a good deal for them to sell.

Dyson: online music is like electricity-based lightingits not a separate category.

Morgan: There are 70M cities in China with >1 million people. Those are natural places for social network software.