Matt Warren

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Category: Entrepreneurship

Founder journey, startup lessons, and business strategy

  • Making Longterm Plays

    In an age where we expect everything quickly it seems that it can be harder to have the patience to endure long term investments.

    People are career hopping between companies and entire job types more today than at any time in history.  Employees who want to progress up the ranks find that a quicker route is to job hop.  Ambitious employees are not content to put in 10 years at a company before getting a promotion.

    Investors also look for quick gains.  Few are willing to park their money for multiple years in order to get rewarded with modest gains. We look for the quick buck.  Day trading to make 1000’s of dollars in hours instead of months.

    This psychology has repercussions in our endeavours.  It becomes hard to focus for years on a blog to build an audience or create a piece of software in our spare time, or start a business.  These long term goals take time and time is the one thing that we too impatient to wait for.

    However, being conscious of this is the first step to being empowered enough to account for our natural tendencies and make long term decisions that are in our best interest.

     

  • Investing More

    Amazingly we’ve been living in Calgary for 5 years now.  The time came to renew our mortgage and while I was doing that I started the process of opening a HELOC so that we can use some of the equity in our house to invest.

    With today’s low interest rates it has become pretty attractive to borrow money. I expect it will be relatively easy to get a positive spread between the interest rate and the return on any investments.

    Leverage like this is the only way to become wealthy.  This is dramatically apparent for our house value: since buying a house the slope on our monthly net worth tracking doubled.  Unfortunately in the case of house value that equity is not very liquid and difficult to access.

    The plan for the HELOC funds is to invest most of it in a well diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds.  I’ll withdraw funds each month to pay for the interest on the loan.  By the time the HELOC is paid off we should have made a nice profit.

  • Reading about Solar

    I’ve been reading and doing some math on the feasibility of Solar electricity.

    Turns out that costs have dropped significantly over the last few years due to the scale of production in China that actually is currently over-supplying the demand, and new manufacturing technology that is making it much cheaper.  You can find panels for sale in China for as little as $0.30/watt right now.

    The ROI for solar is getting down to a reasonable timescale and is at a tipping point where it’s a worthwhile investment for many people.

    It’s something that I want to do a lot more research on.  But over the next few years I expect we’ll all be seeing a significant increase in the number of houses with solar panels on them.

  • Re-invigorating Old Products

    Sometimes you need to go back and look at the things you’ve done in the past to see if anything is due for an update or refresh.  Leaving old products to go stale is a sure way to let your customers know that you don’t care and don’t provide good customer service.

    With that in mind we’re going back through our catalogue of products – stuff that we have spent thousands of hours developing – and seeing if we can apply what we know now to those products to breath new life into them.

    Beyond the easy stuff like bug fixing, graphics tweaks and updating and modernizing the projects it’s a chance to apply entirely new concepts.

    One that I’m particularly keen to experiment further with is Behavioural Dynamic Response.  The idea is to trigger context correct information to users to help push them through the key response indicators.  It may be a notification to get the user to finish the particular level they were on, or to come back to beat their friends score.  When you have sequences defined that you know you want your users to go through you can do whatever is within your power to get them to keep taking that next step.

    Behavioural Dynamic Response is a super powerful technique that is not yet being widely used and shows a lot of potential for improving the user engagement with your products.

    Even without the major overhaul and completely new features.  Just the occasional touchup to your products shows that they are still active and more worth checking out.

  • Finishing

    There are plenty of hurdles that you have to make in order to be successful.  Perhaps the most critical is taking something all the way to completion.  When you are not working with a team this is a deceptively difficult thing to do.

    It takes determination, momentum and accountability to start a project and see it through to the end and beyond.  Many times you will hit on things that seem insurmountable or mind numbingly tedious.

    When I launched the iPhone apps that I’ve worked on the struggles all add up. All the aspects to each project needs to be completed and to an acceptable standard.

    • Software development
    • Graphics
    • Sound FX and Music
    • business registration
    • iTunes accounts
    • bank accounts
    • certificates, signing, provisioning processes
    • marketing graphics, app descriptions
    • webpages, support forms
    • backend
    • testing and Quality Assurance
    • App Submission
    • ongoing marketing
    • iteration and improvements

    If just one of these presents a hurdle you cannot overcome by either doing the work yourself or delegating to someone who can then your project is likely doomed to fail. Like the links in a chain only one link needs to break for the chain to fail.

    That is why finishing is so hard.

    Projects start with the best of intentions, fantastic ideas and a solid plan and can still be derailed by a hiccup.

    The Agile approach of daily stand up meetings is supposed to prevent stoppages from lasting too long.  Eventually someone says: “I can’t continue until X is complete.” This is an indicator that someone in charge needs to take action quickly to keep the work progressing.

    When you’re working on your own it becomes incredibly difficult to self diagnose these situations and push through.

    That’s why I have tremendous respect for anyone who finishes a project on their own.

  • Taking Action

    Being action oriented is one of the biggest differentiators I have noticed in the most productive people.  It’s amazing what you can get done in a day when you just take action to make it happen.  Even a small step can get the ball moving on a large project.

    One of my partners is the most action oriented person I have ever met.  No time is ever wasted with idleness.  A car ride is a chance for brainstorming.  Every phone call is a chance to network, spread ideas and get commitment from others to meet deadlines.  It is no surprise that he has started many successful businesses and has an impressive network of connections.

    It can be quite amazing what can be accomplished when you really take action and get some momentum on a project. or tasks.

    Most of the time I find myself in these situations when I decide that no matter what “this is getting done today!”  Then it doesn’t matter what it is that needs to be done: clean the house, write code, write blog posts, run errands, fill out paperwork.

    Taking action can also take another form.  It is a great immediate response to anything that you want to accomplish or take advantage of, but don’t yet know how.

    For example. the Japanese economy is under massive strain. Debt to GDP is at unheard of levels which seem unsustainable and are at risk of a major correction ( think Iceland or Greece x 100 ).  Knowing this you might want to ask yourself what actionable steps you could take to profit off of a default on Japanese debts.

    This frame of thought, to always think about what you can do is a key differentiator with the most accomplished people I know.

  • Finding Your Motivation

    The theory for motivation has been best described by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Peak motivation can be achieved when you become self-actualized – internally self motivated, however to get there you need to fulfil your lower level needs first.

    Maslows Hierarchy Of Needs

    At each level of this pyramid you will find factors that might be motivating you.  Working up from the base starts with the physical needs – food, housing etc that we need.  If you don’t have these needs met then you would be strongly motivated to satiate them.  Note however, that they are not good motivators to achieve great things in life.  You will never compose an orchestral masterpiece if you can’t afford food and are living on the street.

    The next level is Safety, which includes job safety and personal safety.  When you live in fear of not knowing how long you’ll be employed or if the city you live in is safe enough then you will be motivated to mitigate that risk.

    Love and Belonging.  Humans have emotional needs to have friends, and family connections that are strong.  Building and maintaining these personal connections can be a strong motivator.

    The need for self-esteem and self-respect is important.  People with low self-esteem may be motivated to impress others in order to gain respect.  However, your perception of how others perceive you is not always accurate, and the drive to impress is not an effective way to fulfill this need.  Self-respect comes from within.

    At the top of the pyramid is self-actualization.  This is the need to reach your personal full potential. The more time and focus you have to devote to this need the more you are likely to achieve in life.  Someone who is fully self-actualized has all their lower needs met, and can devote all their efforts at pushing their own potential.

    Knowing where your needs are is the key to identifying you motivations.

  • Measure Opposing Indicators

    All software developers know that measuring a developer’s productivity by counting lines of code written is not an effective way to measure their output.  The correlation between the technical difficulty of a problem and the number of lines of code is not always 1:1.  Which means that one developer can write 10 lines in a day and be very accomplished, while another could copy/paste a solution of 1000+ lines in a day which was trivial.

    On the factory floor managers always should be measuring opposing indicators.  If you’re measuring the volume of output – you also need to measure the quality of output in order to prevent creating an unbounded method for taking advantage.

    For example.  If a manager of Intel processor factory production line focused solely on the number of chips produced each day, and cancelled all quality control checks then production output would likely skyrocket.  In short order, however, the defects would be found by customers, the business would suffer.  On the other extreme, if the manager focused solely on quality and checked every aspect of each chip produced then costs would skyrocket and output would crash.

    The problem with measuring a software developer by the number of lines of code they produce is that there isn’t an opposing measurement of the quality/difficulty of those lines.  Gauging the quality or difficulty of the produced code would likely require peer review, and for that peer to grade the code.  Nobody wants to be the ass that gives their co-workers D- grades on their code so it becomes difficult to get honest scores.

    In my opinion, counting anything is better than counting nothing.  If Bill suddenly goes from committing 100+ lines of code per day down to 10 lines per day it may indicate something that a manager should investigate.  If you weren’t measuring output then it would be impossible to know about or fix anything that Bill was having trouble.

    Authors measure themselves by pages written per day.  Writing 10 pages of crap is better than ending the day without having written anything. At least once things are on paper they can be communicated and others can help edit things to find the gems inside.

  • Asset Allocations

    Late last week my RRSP transfer from mutual funds into Questrade completed.  It feels as if I lucked out in that the 5 worst days of the year on the market happened while the cheque was in the mail to move money.

    Trying to devise a strategy for investing that is both safe, has the potential to beat the market, and protects me from myself lead me to read a couple of books on portfolio management theory and devise an overall approach to managing my investments.
    The take away from the world’s best investors is that the best approach for investing is:
    1. Diversification is the only guaranteed way to reduce risk and maintain good returns
    2. Rebalance your portfolio no more than twice per year to reset your risk exposures to account for drift
    3. Don’t trade on emotion – you are your own worst enemy
    4. Always consider the tax implications and costs to trade
    One of the biggest lessons I got from working at an investment management company is to hedge all your bets.  You never put all your chips on red because your analysts think it’s the best bet.  You buy the whole board and make small bets.  This way you maintain diversification – which lowers the variance of your whole portfolio.  And provided you can do better than 50% on picking winners and losers the portfolio will do better than it’s benchmark.
    Extending that to the asset allocation for a complete portfolio is relatively straight forward.  It starts with the question: What should my portfolio look like at a high level?  To answer that I’ll go through the break down of how I built my portfolio.
    The asset types I went for were:
    1. 40% Bonds
    2. 50% Stocks
    3. 5% Precious metals
    4. 5% Commodities
    Noticeably missing from this list is REITs.  I own a home which is more than enough exposure to real estate for my liking.
    I’m targetting 90% of my investable assets into broad low cost ETFs. 10% is individual stocks which I believe have good moderate term prospects to beat the market.
    Within each broad asset category things are further diversified:
    Bonds:
    • 1/4 High Yield corporate bond ETF (HYG)
    • 1/8 DEX index Canada government & municipal bonds (XBB)
    • 1/4 Canadian Real Return Bond ETF (XRB)
    • 1/4 Canadian Hybrid Bond ETF (XHB)
    • 1/8 Emerging Market EFT (LEMB)

    For bonds I wanted a good mix of corporate, government, and international bonds that were hedged against interest rate changes a bit with the Real Return bond (XRB).  Once I get a chance to compute the co-variances on this selection I may re-allocate.  In particular it seems a bit under-exposed to US and EAFE bonds.

    Stocks:

    • 4/10 TSX 60 ETF (XIU)
    • 4/10 EAFE ETF (XIN)
    • 1/5 Personal stock picks – currently (AAPL, BA)

    Admittedly this isn’t as diversified as I’d like, future purchases may go towards something very broad like the MSCI World ETF (XWD) or Vanguard World ex US ETF (VEU). I’m betting on Apple because they have a strong product lineup, entering new markets next year and have been doing a lot of stock buy backs.  Boeing is my bet that if oil stays low, airlines around the world will see billion dollar profits and funnel that back into growing their fleets with new planes.  Boeing is also a hunch that it’s possible to get ahead of the next trend by thinking critically about where profit from the current trend could end up.

    Other:

    • Precious metals are in gold bullion (CGL)
    • Commodities are in a broad ETF (CBR)
    There are so many options for things to invest in that it’s hard to choose.  My hope is that this portfolio will be low risk and have great returns.
    New money added to the RRSP will be used strategically to keep the portfolio in balance which will hopefully reduce the need to make big re-adjustments.  The way to think about this is that I will be buying the assets which have become the least expensive – thereby dollar cost averaging down.  It’s a way to frame things to avoid panic selling at the worst possible time.
    It was kind of a fun week to research, read and figure out how to invest things.  Learning is, of course, an endless journey and I’m excited to iterate and get better at investing.  It’ll be exciting to see how this portfolio does over the next year.

  • How to Create a Billion $ Company in 8 Months

    If you want to get a sense of just how crazy the world of technology is for businesses that want to make money you need look no further than Slack.

    For those of you unfamiliar with Slack.  They launched a product in February 2014 which is a private communication tool for business inspired by IRC. It has quickly grown to 30,000 teams using the service sending 200 million messages per month. Now, just 8 short months after launch they have raised money at a $1B valuation.

    It is astounding growth and an amazing success.  How can you copy Slack’s success?

    1. Identify and launch into an under-serviced market.  Internal business communication tools really wasn’t a product category a couple years ago and companies made due with less than ideal alternatives like email and Skype.
    2. Look for big scale market opportunities.  Chat is something that could be used by millions of businesses world-wide. A billion users is entirely possible.
    3. Minimum Viable Product – most important word is “Viable”.  It’s easy to err on the side of too minimal and end up damaging your branding.  If eager early adopters look at your product and dismiss it, it will take a long time for them to come back and re-evaluate.  Slack was in development for over a year before it launched
    4. Create a low barrier to entry.  Slack’s integration features, and free trial made it easy to convince the boss and get buy in from the team.

    Of course if it was easy we’d all be billionaires!  Good Luck!