Silicon valley at it’s best

Typically, I fly into Atlanta late at night, get a rental car and drive bleary eyed to a middling business hotel in the far suburbs.  I do see pine trees, and if it is summer, I feel the humidity, but that is about as far as the experience of the New South goes.  Meetings necessitate battling Atlanta’s horrendous traffic – traffic locals are secretly proud of as it matches that of Los Angeles – and the suburbs, while well laid out and efficient, do not have much charm.

This time I rode MARTA in from the airport to the Midtown district, where there is a concentration of museums and theaters  along Peachtree Street, with some handsome office high rises sprinkled in.  The neighborhood, midway between Downtown and Buckhead, has a sophisticated and settled vibe, with the urban fabric a patchwork of stately old houses, large office complexes, churches and institutional building.  In the early ’80s the area was  blighted and mostly parking lots, abandoned in the rush to build bigger and better suburbs.  Gradually though, new residential and commercial buildings were constructed along Peachtree and West Peachtree Streets and the surviving older, historical properties were restored.  I got glimpses of, but did not have time to walk through, Piedmont Park, a fine looking  urban park (redesigned in the 1900s by the sons of Frederick Law Olmstead, the designer of New York’s Central Park)  that is being lovingly restored by a conservancy organization.

In Midtown I sensed a rootedness and urbanity that I hadn’t run into in my prior commando-visits to the “City too Busy to Hate.”  And, I got a better sense of Atlanta’s Southerness of the fact that the City has a rich history.  It is good to mix things up a bit and see a place you think you know in a different light.  Remarkable how different a City can seem when you experience it through different locales and modes of transportation.

Valentine’s Day balloon sparks power outage in Fontana

In an age where we think of data centers humming 24/7, 100% uptime and our society as an unstoppable, energy gobbling organism, an unplanned event can change everything.  Funny, the utility spokesman said “It happens every year.” so evidently the event was anticipated just not worth planning for.

“Can Apple continue to roll through industry after industry, soak up all the profits, and leave everything it touches as a smoking wreckage?” asked Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. “They’ve done it with music and handsets, and now they’re doing it to the carriers.”

The wireless carriers buy iPhones from Apple for about $600 and sell them, with contracts, to consumers for about $200 – a $400 loss on each phone.  Verizon sold 4.2 MM iPhones last Quarter, which implies a > $6.0 BN annual loss on those sales.

Treat Your Candidates With Respect.  Return their phone calls, respond with an email when you receive their resume.  This will set you apart from 99.9% of other employers vying for the best candidates.

Be Focused.  Be very clear about the skills and experience you need and differentiate these from what you would like to have.  What sort of lateral transitions can you accommodate?  How much vertical experience do you need?  I tend to hire for skill set match and assume that a good sales person can learn a vertical, but that is just my taste.

Avoid Cliches in Your Job Description.  This is remarkably difficult to do.  ”Hungry self-starter”.  ”Exceeds expectations.”  Well, yes and “Jumps buildings in a single bound.” would be nice too.  If you wouldn’t respond well to the job description your have written, neither will potential sales recruits.

Notwithstanding the prior point, Sell the Position.  Salespeople like to be sold, and you want candidates pumped up about the opportunity.  Much of what will make your sales team successful is a belief in the product, in your vision.

Be Realistic About Comp.  Discuss numbers with candidates that are credible and competitive; Salespeople can smell hype a mile away.  And, be sure that your comp plan structure matches the kind of individuals you want to retain.  Want a peddle-to-the-metal, take-no-prisoners, pound-the-phones kind of guy?  Then keep the base low and the commission high.  Want a farmer, a nurturer?  Make the base high and the bonus achievable and modest.

Have Your Finalists Make a Pitch.  Give your finalists an assignment to pitch your offering that involves demonstration of writing, presentation, powerpoint and demo skills, and have them make this pitch to members of your team.  Salespeople are amazingly good at selling themselves, but you may be surprised at what you learn about each finalist when they present.  Without this step, you may hire someone who cannot write, or chokes when presenting, or is mortally sloppy or doesn’t “get” what you do.

Beaches some otherwise scenic locales are littered what plastic refuse that has swept onshore.

And, there is a fair bit of microplastic debris along our shorelines and beaches: An article in Scientific American notes that this is created by domestic washing machines cleaning synthetic fabrics: microscopic pieces of you favorite polyester sweater break off the garment when you wash it and are ultimately flushed out to see via your municipality’s sewage treatment plant.

The Vortex has a sister patch in the North Atlantic and environmental groups are searching the other major gyres for similar accumulations of trash.

Pervasive pollution of the air and water, in ways that harm humans, does seem like something that society as a whole needs to tackle.   Things like trace heavy metal emissions from coal fired power plants or the dead zone in the gulf of Mexico, caused by fertilizer runoff from farms through the Midwest, are items that even a moderate libertarian can agree will not be solved by individuals alone.

It is not unusual for an early stage CEO not to understand the importance of both components of this effort:  some put an almost magical faith in the power of marketing to generate not just leads, but deals that close, and close quickly.  Others view marketing as hokum and think that getting a few sales guys pounding away on the phone will generate deals.  Both groups tend to be highly optimistic about how short the sales cycle will be.

Actually, most people are highly optimistic about the sales cycle; but that is part of the fun and challenge of building an early stage sales effort.