Erich Stauffer

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  • Famous Entrepreneurs

    Walt Disney – An influential innovator and entrepreneur in the mid 20th century, Disney is the man behind the Magic Kingdom, not to mention the hundreds of animated cartoons, countless feature films and endless toys that bear his name.

    Oprah Winfrey -an American television host, actress, producer, and philanthropist, best known for her self-titled, multi-award winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history. She has been ranked the richest African American of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and was once the world’s only black billionaire. She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world.

    Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield – lifelong friends Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield completed a correspondence course on ice cream making from Pennsylvania State University’s Creamery in 1977 and a year later formed Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in Burlington, Vermont.  In 1988, the pair won the title of U.S. Small Business Persons Of The Year, awarded by U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

    Richard Branson – a British industrialist, best known for his Virgin Group of over 400 companies. What started as a mail-order record business turned into Virgin Records, which was sold to EMI in 1992, giving Branson the capital to build Virgin Airways.

    Simon Cowell – Best known as the obnoxious judge on the hit TV show American Idol whose cynical comments sent contestants running out the door in tears, but what most don’t know is that his work didn’t start there and most definitely won’t end there. His list of achievements is long and includes being a successful record producer and executive for the BMG UK record company to gathering wannabe entrepreneurs on his show, American Inventor.

    Michael Dell – both Chairman and CEO of Dell computers, Dell started the road to success out of his University of Texas dorm room in with just $1000 and an idea in 1984. Dell now sells directly to the customer so to avoid middleman mark-ups.

    Henry Ford – Founder of Ford Motor Company and manufacturing assembly line innovator, Ford was not the inventor of the automobile, but his innovations in assembly-line techniques and the introduction of standardized interchangeable parts contributed to making the United States a nation of motorists and produced the first mass-production vehicle manufacturing plant.

    Bill Gates – Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates is perhaps the most famous entrepreneur of this era. He had the vision to predict the evolving importance of the personal computer. This allowed him to top Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s wealthiest individuals, with a 2006 estimated net worth of $50 billion.

    Howard Hughes – once the most talked-about entrepreneur in the world – legendary for both his bold business tactics and his outlandish personal life. The recent popular movie “The Aviator” has prompted a new interest in this fascinating entrepreneur.

    Wayne Huizenga – the only person in history to have founded three Fortune 500 companies, and six NYSE-traded companies. Huizenga is founder of the third largest U.S. waste disposal company, Republic Industries; the global leader in video entertainment, Blockbuster Entertainment; and the country’s first and world’s largest publicly-traded automotive dealership, AutoNation. He’s also currently the owner of the Miami Dolphins football team.

    Ingvar Kamprad – IKEA Founder and one of the wealthiest man in the world, Kamprad still flys coach, takes the subway to work, and drives a ten-year-old Volvo. What started as a person-to-person business selling everything from pens to picture frames has grown to over 200 stores in 31 countries, employing over 75,000 people and generating over 12 billion in annual sales.

    Donald Trump – Billionaire real estate tycoon and host of the apprentice, Trump has a long list of accomplishments and assets in real estate development, hospitality and entertainment. He was the outspoken star and producer of “The Apprentice” making him one of the world’s most famous entrepreneurs. With his rollercoaster track record, he demonstrates one of the most important entrepreneurial traits: the ability to stand back up when you fall down.

  • My CEO Heroes

    I am going to write about a couple of my CEO heroes, Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla Motors.  Previously I wrote about my media heroes, which included two CEOs, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg, but when I classify ‘CEO’ heroes I value the entrepreneurial spirit and management style of Schultz and Musk in the same way I value the media empires of Murdoch and Zuckerberg.

    Howard Schultz

    Starbucks CEO and former owner of the Seattle SuperSonics, Schultz joined Starbucks in 1982 as director of Marketing after a sales trip to Seattle as a general manager for Hammarplast drip coffee makers, which Starbucks was buying at the time.  While working at Starbucks, Schultz travelled to Italy to buy coffee and noticed not only were they selling coffee, but espresso too.  He also noticed a new dynamic, one he would later embrace, “The third place,” after noticing Italians ‘hanging out’ at coffee shops all over the country.

    The Third Place

    The ‘third place’ is a phrase coined by contemporary sociologist Ray Oldenburg.  Oldenburg in 1990 that postulates that the third place is a term referring to a public place where people gather for the social satisfaction that they can’t get from the first two domains of the home and the workplace.  Oldenburg argued that the availability of such gathering places in America was lacking and so, inspired by Oldenburg’s observations, Schultz turned America’s ‘lack of place’ into a business opportunity encouraging loitering and turning Starbucks into a cozy home-away-from-home.

    The Great Experiment

    When Schultz got back from Italy he convinced the management team to add espresso to the menu.  They agreed to try it out in one store and although it went over well, the management refused to roll it out explaining that they didn’t want to get into the ‘restaurant business’.  Frustratated, Schultz started his own company to serve coffee, Il Giornale, in 1985.  Two years later the original Starbucks management team decided to focus on their Peet’s Coffee & Tea brand and sold the Starbucks name to Schultz and Il Giornale for 3.8 million.  Schultz renamed Il Giornale to Starbucks and aggressively expanded the brand across the United States.  In 2000 Schultz left the company, but rejoined as CEO in 2008, taking the company to new records in profitability.

    Elon Musk

    Co-founder of Paypal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors, Musk is currently CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors in addition to being chairman of SolarCity.  Musk was inspired by Thomas Edison to solve three “important problems”: the Internet, space, and clean energy.

    His first company was Zip2, which Musk cofounded with his brother, Kimbal Musk. Zip2 was acquired by Alta Vista in 1999.  That same year Elon Musk cofounded X.com, which later merged with Confinity, which owned the domain, paypal.com. This helped him solve his first problem, the Internet.

    Paypal.com was originally used by Confinity for email payments by Palm users, but after 2001 became known for what it is today and X.com changed its name to PayPal.  Just one year later, in 2002, Ebay acquired PayPal and that same year Musk founded his third company, SpaceX. This helped him solve his second problem, space.

    Musk was still building SpaceX when he cofounded Tesla Motors in 2004.  He later became CEO in 2008.  Tesla Motors make all-electric cars, which use much less energy than traditional gasoline-powered vehicles.  Lyndon Rive, Musk’s cousin, founded SolarCity in 2006 of which Musk is chairman of the board.  Together with Tesla Motors, Solar City helped him solve his third problem, clean energy.

    In 2007 Musk won Inc.’s Entrepreneur of the Year award and his fortune is estimated at over 300 million dollars. This serial entrepreneur and father of five works 100-hour weeks and is passionate about what he does.  His passion is an encouragement to me and that is why is one of my CEO heroes.

  • Read Pads Renews Focus on Tablet PC Pads

    Read Pads, our reading pads web site, has changed its focus to covering tablet pc pads. There are many different types of tablet PCs as covered on our tablet comparison web site, but Read Pad PCs focuses on tablet PCs that are specifically called ‘pads’, which include the Android aPad/ePad, Apple iPad, ASUS Eee Pad, Lenovo IdeaPad, and the ViewSonic vPad.  Read Pads covers the pad PCs themselves and their corresponding accessories, cases, and covers which help protect the increasingly popular tablet PC devices.

    Cost Publishing Editor and Watershawl, Inc. CEO, Erich Stauffer had good things to say about the site stating, “I believe this site has the potential to be really helpful for those people who are looking to find tablet PC pads and the accessories to go with them.” He continued by saying, “Sites like Amazon.com are not organized as well as they can be and that’s where we come in. We help organize things you can find at Amazon.com in a way that you as a consumer might browse for them – not how Amazon.com organizes them.”

  • Bulldozers: 5 Serial Entrepreneurs That Only Know How to Push Things Forward, Make Meaning, and Change the World

    Bulldozers, a term coined by Jason A. Cobb in January 2011, refers to employees who do one thing and one thing only: push things forward – and if their company doesn’t let them, they leave, but continue pushing forward.  Employers need to learn to recognize bulldozers and fuel them, not throw stumps in their way (stumps don’t stop bulldozers anyway, they just make them leave faster).

    Let’s take a look at five bulldozers – employees who pushed forward, right on out of their former company:

    1. Ian Rogers – left Yahoo! to form his own business when Yahoo! failed to heed his advice.
    2. Joshua Schachter – left Yahoo! after they failed to upgrade (and eventually killed) Delicious.
    3. Lars Rasmussen – left Google for Facebook after Google killed Wave he helped develop.
    4. Jyri Engeström – left Google to “make meaning” after Google dropped support for Jaiku.
    5. Dennis Crowley – left Google to form Foursquare after Google killed Dogdeball for Latitude.

    Ian Rogers, the former General Manager of Yahoo! Music, left to form Topspin Media, a company that makes marketing software for music artists to maximize their fanbase and brand exposure.

    Rogers bucked the industry trend to ‘shove bad products down consumers’ throats’ like in October 2007 when he addressed a number of music executives. He explained that consumers aren’t willing to adopt inferior products (namely subscription music services) saying, “I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.”

    This fits the model we’ve seen with serial entrepreneurs, which seems to also apply to bulldozers: they want to change the world for good and won’t put up with the bad ‘cause ‘life’s too short’.

    Joshua Schachter, created Delicious (a social bookmarking site), GeoURL, Tasty Labs and was co-creator of Memepool. Schachter released the first version of Delicious (then called del.icio.us) in September 2003. The service actually coined the term ‘social bookmarking’ and featured tagging, a system he developed for organizing links. On March 29, 2005, Schachter announced he would work full-time on Delicious. On December 9, 2005, Yahoo! acquired Delicious for an undisclosed sum, but according to Business 2.0, was close to $30 million – with Schachter’s share being worth approximately $15 million. Prior to working full-time on Delicious, Schachter was an analyst in Morgan Stanley’s Equity Trading Lab. He created GeoURL in 2002 and ran it until 2004.

    Schachter left Yahoo! in 2008 after Yahoo! refused to move forward on Delicious development and began working for Google from January 2009 to June 2010. In November 2010, Schachter acquired startup funding from Union Square Ventures for Tasty Labs. Yahoo! announced plans on December 16, 2010 to shut down Delicious, but as of January 26, 2011 is in talks with Kevin Rose of Digg about Digg possibly taking over Delicious.  Rose asked Schachter if he would be interested in working on it, but Schachter was too busy with Tasty Labs.

    At Tasty Labs, Schachter is joined by co-founders Nick Nguyen and Paul Rademacher. Rademacher is a former Google and Dreamworks engineer who will be heading up engineering for Tasty Labs. Nguyen previously worked with Schachter at Delicious and just recently left Mozilla to serve as VP of product for Tasty Labs, which plans to put “the useful back into social software,” according to their website. Since then, Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreesen (a serial entrepreneur) and Ben Horowitz’s venture capital firm, has also invested. Schachter says about Tasty Labs, “I’ll grow it organically,” said, noting that the company is called “Labs,” and not a specific product. “This could end up being multiple applications.”

    Of course it will. That’s what you do.  You’re a serial entrepreneur and a bulldozer.  No one is going to stop you from making things useful.

    Lars Rasmussen, co-creator of Google Maps and Google Wave, announced on October 29, 2010 that he had left Google, and was moving to San Francisco to work for Facebook.

    In 2003, Lars and his brother, Jens, with Australians Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma, co-founded Where 2 Technologies, a mapping-related start-up in Sydney, Australia. This company was bought by Google in October 2004, to create the popular, free, browser-based software, Google Maps. The four of them were subsequently employed by Google in the engineering team at the company’s Australian office in Sydney.

    In October 2010 Rasmussen was hired by Facebook to create a “Modern Messaging System” after Google killed Wave just under a year after publishing it.  Facebook’s new messaging system, which combines wall posts, email, and SMS (text) messages, was codenamed “Titan”, and rolled out on November 15, 2010.  As of January 26, 2011, Facebook Messaging is still invitation only.

    Rasmussen said about his move to Facebook, “Obviously they’ve already changed the world and yet there seems to be so much more to be done there. And I think that it’s the right place for me to be.” Once again we see this desire to “change the world” as a key characteristic of serial entrepreneurs and bulldozers.

    Jyri Engeström, co-created Jaiku, a Twitter-like service, which was sold to Google in 2007 when it was the leading European microblogging service. After the acquisition, Engeström continued to maintain Jaiku but Google focused his efforts on creating systems that power Google Buzz and related products. The original Jaiku code base was ported to Google App Engine and released as Jaiku Engine, a free open source microblogging platform, but in January of 2009 Google announced it was no longer going to support the platform, although the site would live on.

    A sociologist by training, he has also developed the term social objects – a label for “things that people socialize around,” including text, images, videos, and other shareable Web content.

    Prior to Jaiku, Engeström worked as Senior Product Manager of Internet Handhelds at Nokia. At Google he was responsible for mobile applications including Mobile Calendar and the Gmail Mobile client, while also spearheading Google’s efforts in social media, starting up Google Buzz, Google Profiles, and Google Latitude. He left Google in October 2009 to become an angel investor and start his own new company, Pingpin, but is also active in the following companies: Appsfire, Betrabrand, Mobclix, Superfeedr, Xiha, Sofanatics, and Thinglink (his wife’s business).

    Engeström wrote on Twitter in October of 2009 that the reason he left Google was in order to “make meaning” out of another project, which is another characteristic sign of a bulldozer.

    Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Dodgeball and FourSquare, both location-based social networking services. Dodgeball was sold to Google in 2005, which discontinued it in 2009 in favor of Google Latitude (partly thanks to fellow bulldozer, Jyri Engeström). Crowley co-founded Dodgeball with fellow student Alex Rainert in 2003 while attending New York University. Both were hired by Google in Dodgeball’s acquisition in 2005 and both left in April 2007, Crowley and Rainert left Google, with Crowley describing their experience there as “incredibly frustrating”.

    In January 2009 Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering at Google, announced that the company would “discontinue Dodgeball.com in the next couple of months, after which this service will no longer be available.” Dodgeball was shut down in February 2009 and succeeded by Google Latitude.

    After leaving Google, Crowley, with the help of Naveen Selvadurai, created a service similar to Dodgeball and Google Latitude, which became known as Foursquare.  While Dodgeball was available in limited cities (Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Diego, Phoenix, Dallas–Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, New Orleans, Miami, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis–St. Paul and Denver), Foursquare is available everywhere. Crowley later hired Rainert as Chief Product Officer (head of products) in 2010.

    Rainert, a co-founder of Dodgeball, is also quite the bulldozer and is quoted as saying, “We’ve found that people with judgment trump rockstars. You need people who can make decisions. You hire smart people because they want to make an impact, but everyone can’t weigh in on everything because then you’ll never get anything done.  Our employees have had to learn not to take things personally; things just need to keep going.” That’s another perfect example of a bulldozer: “make an impact” and “keep going [forward]”.

  • 20 Serial Entrepreneurs: An Analysis

    Serial entrepreneurs want to change the world and “make meaning” but successful ones also make money, and lots of it.

    Here is a list of 20 serial entrepreneurs and the companies they helped create:

    1. Andy Bechtolsheim: Sun Microsystems, Granite Systems, Arista Networks
    2. Biz Stone: Twitter, Xanga, Blogger
    3. David Duffield: PeopleSoft, Workday
    4. Dennis Crowley: Dodgeball, Foursquare
    5. Elon Musk: PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors
    6. Evan Williams: Blogger, Twitter
    7. Jack Dorsey: Twitter, Square
    8. Jason Calacanis: Silicon Alley Reporter, Weblogs Inc., Mahalo, Launch, OAF/TWI
    9. Jim Clark: Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon, MyCFO, Neoteris
    10. Kevin Rose: Digg, Pownce
    11. Marc Andreessen: Netscape, Opsware, Ning
    12. Mark Cuban: MicroSolutions, Broadcast.com, 2929 Entertainment, HDNet, Magnolia Pictures, Landmark Theatres
    13. Mark Pincus: Tribe.net, SupportSoft, Zynga
    14. Max Levchin: PayPal, Slide, WePay
    15. Nick Grouf: Firefly, PeoplePC, SpotRunner
    16. Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis: Kazaa, Skype, Joost, Atomico, Rdio
    17. Scott Jones: Boston Technology, ChaCha
    18. Sean Parker: Plaxo, Napster, Facebook, Causes, Founders Fund
    19. Steve Jobs: Apple, NeXT, Pixar
    20. Wayne Huizenga: Blockbuster, Waste Management, Auto Nation

    Birds of a feather flock together

    Of the companies listed, you may have noticed some repeated names. When we sort the list by the companies with at least two serial entrepreneurs from our list, we get three companies:

    1. Twitter: Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey
    2. PayPal: Elon Musk, Max Levchin
    3. Blogger: Biz Stone, Evan Williams

    Similar Industries

    And of the companies listed, another trend emerges, which is the similarities in industries.  The companies can be narrowed down into a surprisingly small number of groups, which could be categorized as ‘Technology’ and ‘Other’, but broken we see a large amount of Web 2.0 and Entertainment companies as well as Transportation:

    1. Software: Twitter, Blogger, Xanga, PeopleSoft, Workday, Dodgeball, Foursquare, Netscape, Ning, Plaxo, Napster, Facebook, Digg, Paypal, Slide, WePay
    2. Hardware: Sun Microsystems, Arista Networks, Granite Systems, PeoplePC, Apple, NeXT
    3. Entertainment: Pixar, 2929 Entertainment, HDNet, Blockbuster, Zynga, Magnolia Pictures, Landmark Theatres
    4. Transportation: SpaceX, Tesla Motors, Auto Nation

    This follows a pattern in economics called ‘barriers to entry’ of which software has the lowest barriers in terms of cost and transportation, the highest.  Hardware and entertainment, it seems, falls in the middle, which is what you would expect.  So in the future, we can probably expect more serial entrepreneurs in the software arena, probably culminating up through app makers, which has the lowest barrier of entry and the highest audience: a combination ripe for the next round of serial entrepreneurs.

  • Purple is the New Black

    In art class they will teach you to never use black as black rarely occurs in nature. Instead, when a dark hue is needed, purple is used. Even in web design, a dark gray is used instead of black as black itself is harsh and unprofessional.

    What is Black?

    If black is never ‘black’ then what is black? Black is brown, gray, and purple. It’s dark and contrasting. It’s bold, but much the same way any solid color is when used appropriately. But how often are solid colors found in nature? Almost all colors are mixed and changing, just like the definition of ‘black’.

    Today I saw two men wearing purple shirts. One man was my elder and the other my younger. I didn’t like either application of the color and wondered if my age or my micro-generation was somehow biased against it as it reminded me of purple silk shirts from the early 90’s – but those days are over. Aren’t they? Or is purple the new black?

  • Are You Hiding from Your Customers?

    You may have a website, billboards, and radio ad spots, but do you really want more business or are you hiding from your customers?

    Sometimes we can hide in plain sight simply because we are doing everything right – we’re not “rocking the boat” so to speak. Our hope is that if we keep out nose to the grindstone and do everything right, business will come and your business will grow. As you can probably tell by my tone that viewpoint is slightly naive. What has worked in the past may not work now. The times they are a changing and people (your customers) are too.

    What to do?

    It’s not going to be easy. In fact, it’s going to be uncomfortable. That’s because you’re going to have to stop doing what feels good and start getting outside your safety zone. Are you willing to do what it takes to grow? I’m not talking about spending more money. I’m talking about how you spend your time and how you think about attracting customers – that is if you want to. You’d be suprised at how many self-limiting business owners there are out there making excuses for why they don’t hear the phone ringing. You can make the phone ring anytime you want by picking it up and making a call.

    Put the pieces together.

    Cracker has a song that goes, “If you want to change the world, start to spin it.” How are you spinning your business? Do you blend in with the crowd or are you a solution to be sought? You don’t have to be mediocre. You can be great. If you don’t like the customers you have now, attract a different set of clients. Remember why you got into business in the first place and don’t be afraid to reinvent yourself. It’s your business. Own it.

  • Know Thy Customer

    Know who you are. That is foundational. But once you do, focus less on yourself and more on your customer.

    Who is your customer? I am not talking about your target customer. I’m talking about the one(s) you already have. What needs do they have that you are not or are not willing to meet? What are you ignoring or choosing to ignore about their needs. It could be that it’s because it’s outside of your business model or your scope and that’s okay – as long as a majority of your customers don’t have the same need. If they do, you may be seriously misaligned with your customer. Change your mindset and you could be poised for growth and a happy clientele.

    Do your customers prefer a different type of communication than you offer?

    It’s easy to send an email or paper invoice to a customer, but what if your customers prefer a phone call or face-to-face communications? Pay attention to how they contact you and learn from them, then adapt – even if it is uncomfortable for you. You are in business because of them. Without customers you have no business.

    And lastly, pay attention to words like ‘wish’ and ‘hope’ in conversations.

    Picking up on key words of wanting like ‘wish’ and ‘hope’ can be great indicators of new advice, products, or services that you could be offering.

  • Business On the Side

    The days of working as a business analyst by day and a business consultant by night are starting to wear on me.

    For those of you who don’t know, I run Watershawl Technology Consulting and do Internet Marketing for Cost Publishing “on the side” while maintaining a day job as a business analyst. I’m Microsoft Certified and have worked as a network technician in the past so I tend to understand both sides of the fence. I realize the balance that needs to exist between business needs and technical specs. This makes me a good business consultant.

    The problem is time, which is the same problem we all have. I know I am entrepreneurial by nature and enjoy solving problems, but I can’t be in two places at once and this causes stress. Its stress I put myself in, but like I said, its starting to wear on me. I’ve been working “on the side” since I graduated from college in 2005. Even before graduating I worked full time while in school. I know what it means to balance work and life goals. Every once in a while, though, you have to ask yourself, “Why?”

    Why do I do what I do?

    I enjoy watching my clients businesses grow while my business grows at the same time and I’ve learned to relish that growth, but what am I growing into? What is Watershawl? I dream of the day this company is able to employ myself and others for the good of the community, creating and updating new and exciting solutions for customers online and off. I would love for my children to have someplace to work or learn new skills as they grow into their careers. I would love to be able to work from home. Those are all the goals I am working towards. That is who Watershawl is. What can Watershawl do for you?

    August 2011 Update: My First Day of Work After Quitting My Day Job