Kirkpatrick: Were you thinking that you’d create such a tool for empowerment when you started Twitter? [not sure of this question. fudging it!]

Dorsey: Empowerment wasn’t in my mind when I built twitter. It was a just a technology I wanted to use. To go anywhere and be in contact with people I care about. Turned out to be more of a utility…Shortening the gap of feedback between [all kinds of entities].

Kirkpatrick: Why are so many leaders/organizations still operating in the old way [top down]?

Dorsey: Stubbornness and ignorance. As humans we resist change. It’s not fun all the time to be reflective/self-aware. It means we have to do work.

Kirkpatrick: How do you balance the two companies you run, Twitter and Square?

Dorsey: Discipline and practice. I theme my days.
Monday is for management meetings and running the companies.
Tuesday is product day.
Wednesday is marketing/communications/growth day.
Thursday is partnerships day.
Friday is recruiting day.
Saturday is for hiking.
Sunday is for reflection.

Kirkpatrick: How much time do you spend on each company?

Dorsey [quips]: Each company gets 8 hours a day

Kirkpatrick: What unites the two companies?

Dorsey: Both are utilities that an individual or organization of any size can use immediately. Twitter you can broadcast to the world, figure out what’s happening in the world right now. Square, anyone can instantly start a business. Currently, 90% of people pay with plastic cards. Small businesses can’t tap into this. Square enables you to immediately start accepting credit cards. Individuals can do this.

Both Twitter and Square are true utilities. Everyone comes to each and defines the service and what they want to do with it. [Dorsey states that he wants to keep Twitter/Square a bit amorphous. Doesn’t want Twitter to just be for entertainment. Doesn’t want Square to be just for taxicabs.]

Kirkpatrick: Why should I not be skeptical about Twitter’s prospects for revenue [really being worth its multi-billion $$ valuation]?

Dorsey: The business model is focused around serendipity. You are searching for certain things, all of these searches and interests expressed equal intent. It’s a signal you like certain things….Promoted tweets, promoted trends, promoted accounts. Through those, you see introductions to topics that are deeply meaningful to you…What matters most is user experience, if experience fails, we have the wrong model. When adwords first launched with google, people were resistant. Google has found it makes search better. Advertising should be content. Targeted well enough, it’s something you want to see. How do I introduce you to something you want to find, another algorithm or more curation.

Kirkpatrick: How do you imagine Square in 5 yrs? What will it do in five years?

Dorsey: A point of sales system that handles every single payment device in your pocket. Interesting channel with receipts. It’s a publishing medium. Square is about that communication channel. Cardcase [new product Square recently introduced]…links credit card. Can see merchants around you. You can automatically open a tab with that merchant.

Kirkpatrick: What about NFC – near field communication — aka Google Wallet? [the competition]

Dorsey: I would rather just use my name to pay. From the technology standpoint, NFC only gives a merchant the person’s name after the transaction … With Cardcase, the merchant can know and delight the customer. That builds loyalty.

Be Brutally Focused

Boil down to 1 point you want to control. Something simple like revenue growth.

Practice at home. Time your answers at home in practice

Have answers and comments you can expand and contract

Prepare with the media organization

Do a pre-interview with someone at the organization, the booker or the anchor herself

Provide visuals to tell your story, charts, graphs, etc.

Google your anchors to see their style

Execution while on air

Stick to your talking points

If you don’t understand what the anchor is asking, change the subject back to your comfort zone.

Tweet out your appearance. Know the show’s official name for maximum RT potential by the organization.

Put your TV clip on your own web site/Facebook page for more exposure

Receiving the Exceptional Woman In Publishing Award

We all know the numbers:
Women may own 40 percent of the private businesses in the United States, but they create only 8 percent of the venture-backed tech start-ups.

Women account for just 6 percent of the chief executives of the top 100 tech companies, and 22 percent of the software engineers at tech companies over all.

It doesn’t help matters that of all venture capitalists, just 14 percent are women.

I am not going to be able to speak on the topic of women and technology, why there aren’t more of us in the tech business, why we aren’t running more companies, etc.

I can only speak about my own experience and observations starting and running one small tech-ish company in New York City, mediabistro.com
I am not an engineer; but I did learn how to build a company heavily reliant upon tech and I did learn how to manage engineers.

I’ll tell you what I learned, but first a little background on who I am and how I developed mediabistro.com.

Not so long ago, I was an editor and writer who had worked for many years in the media and who saw my calling as something halfway between beat reporter at BusinessWeek and a novelist, monkishly writing atop some mountaintop – or (more likely) in a local East Village café.
If someone had told me “one day, Laurel, you’re going to start a company, hire and manage 40 people, grow it to millions of dollars in sales and sell it for millions more?” I would have said “You’re out of your mind! I don’t even want that. Just give me a shot at Harper’s.”

I had developed a very mild interest in business, because I was writing about small business, management and career issues for various publications, as kind of my “day job.”

Because I was lonely — working from home as a freelancer — a friend and I started a series of cocktail parties at bars. Mainly to meet guys, but ALSO for career reasons. My second secret agenda was to get to know editors who might assign me stories. I had been in the NY media scene for 7 years and knew about fifteen people in the media. Barely enough to make a kaffee klatsch, much less a rockin’ party….

At first just a few people showed up, then 20… 30… 50 and before long I had thousands of people entered into a database. In 1996, I started a web site to serve those same people. I had discovered they wanted bulletin boards, job listings, event listings and other community services.

TODAY, strictly through THIS kind of word of mouth, more than a million people have signed up on the site, making more than 12 million page views per month. Tens of thousands have in some way engaged with the brand – many to purchase one or more of our services.

They have attended the parties, posted jobs for a fee to our popular job board, taken classes with us, gone to one of our Conferences, joined AvantGuild to read our premium content OR just lurked on the bulletin boards.

The view from the podium.

So, how did I cross over from Party Girl to Tech CEO and what did I learn along the way? I have 10 lessons, so get ready!

Lesson 1. NO AMOUNT OF TECH MAKES UP FOR CUSTOMERS. PUT YOUR AUDIENCE FIRST AND THE BUSINESS WILL FOLLOW
Why, back then, did all these people show up and why did they bring friends and have their friends bring friends? They weren’t ALL single.
It was because, they, like me, truly wanted to make friends and business contacts and to feel part of a community.

That’s what the party provided. Making people feel taken care of and warmly greeted wasn’t being done at your standard-issue New York party. I wore a colorful feather boa and went around and personally introduced people. In fact, I forced people to meet. Go ahead, call me a Party Dominatrix. But, folks seemed to love that. The feedback I kept getting was: Don’t stop these parties.

At this point, I had no business though. Just a successful party and a growing community. And the guests kept saying “You need to make money at this somehow.” But I suspected that they weren’t going to pay to attend a party. And, how do you turn community into a money-making business, anyway. We’re talking pre INTERNET (not to mention Pre-Facebook). This was 1994.

But, from the very beginning, I LISTENed to my community of customers. I found out what they wanted and gave that to them. Over the next few years, I turned each party, each conversation, each point of contact, with my media “customers” into a focus group opportunity. And, in fact, I did have a few dinner parties that were specifically designed as listening exercises.

Anyone can do this. Whether you stand outside of a mall with a clipboard and ask people in your target demographic to answer a few questions, or hang out at some local bars and quiz people there! LinkedIn or Facebook can connect you with friends of friends of friends. SurveyMonkey stands at your service. There are so many more tools today then there were when I started.

When I listened, I discovered that my media customers had a lot of needs in common. They wanted more work (both freelance and full-time), they wanted more ways to meet each other and to stay connected, they wanted to be up on the news and gossip in the industry, they wanted to be continually learning and improving their skills.

I made a bucket list of possible services that I could give away or sell to my customers: Monthly parties in other cities, Health Insurance for Freelancers, cheap monthly Lexis-Nexis access, a Freelance Marketplace and much much more. I didn’t get to every single item that first year or even by the fifth. But years later, I looked at that list and I had come pretty close to creating every single item on it.

The very first thing I began to produce after the monthly parties was an email newsletter (once people were USING email, that is). The emails contained information that was extremely helpful and targeted to the community – mainly media job listings and media event listings, and announcements like “Apartment for rent” “part-time office needed.”
After all, these were some of the core functions of the parties. Along with the occasional work assignment and job offer, the parties generated multiple deep friendships, 5 marriages, 3 babies — one out of wedlock – and countless one-night-stands!

The next step for me was in 1996, when someone in the community suggested that I put up a web site so that the party could continue 24-7. The person who made the suggestion was an editor; her boyfriend was a programmer and he already had the code for a basic community website. His downtown hipster community was called TagMag. So, being a good sport, he offered me his code for free – as long as he could use all the banner ads in perpetuity. I said “Sure! …er, what’s a banner ad?”

No matter, in 1996, I had my first web site. In fact, I had one of the first Social Media Sites for Media People (talk about meta!). It wasn’t much to look at – just a few pages, but it was extremely useful to the community.

————–
LESSON 2. BE AUDACIOUS IN YOUR VISION
So, fast forward a few years to 1999. Within 3 years of launching, I had one of the more popular media web sites out there; it was growing at 30% a year. And I was already cash flow positive because my customers had started paying $100 a pop to post jobs on the site.

Now, my story could have ended there. Party Girl makes good on the Internet, earns herself a nice, steady income from her apartment in her pajamas, with her cats jumping all over the keyboard. In fact, I think that story exists even now at JournalismJobs.com, which started a bit later, has a small staff and isn’t really known for much more than job listings. I’m not even sure if they have cats. (Was that catty of me?

But I had other ambitions. I didn’t want just a job board, I thought this community thing held pretty exciting possibilities. So, I came to a decision point. How do I take this thing and make it BIG, Go global, go Galactic — go anything but postal? Do I get funding or not? Do I solicit a partner to help me make decisions or go it alone? What is the very next step?

Luckily, my background expertise in business writing came to the rescue. I had edited stories like these before for Executive Female magazine and written features like this for Working Woman. “Entrepreneur launches empire on a shoestring – well-financed competitor comes in to eat her lunch.” “CEO takes on wrong business partner and business crumbles in a bickering mess.”

SO, I decided I needed a business plan, a more sophisticated web site, more parties to market everything — and that meant raising money to hire people to make the magic happen.

LESSON 3. WRITE a plan.
No matter how ill-equipped you are to do this, no matter how simple you think your business is, write a business plan. You can buy books guiding you through the process, there’s software to help. I hired someone who had professional experience doing this. (I paid him a very small fee and paid him the rest in stock options). Go through your network. Ask for help from small boutique bankers in your industry; B-school professors can recommend students who might do your plan as a class project.

A plan helps you clarify your ideas, your market, your marketing, your product and your prospects.

LESSON 4. GET FUNDING, whether from a bank, from friends and family or from professional money.

Never make the mistake that most founders — especially women — make, which is to starve their baby businesses. You’ll need breathing room; 6 – 12 months of capital in the bank.

If you are getting money from any type of investors, take as little as you need in the beginning from the smartest, richest people you know. Keep as big a chunk of your company as possible – there are exceptions to this rule, of course. If you are rushing a product to market that is mass-market, is easily copy-able and/or requires a heavy marketing budget to grab market share, then you may have to raise more upfront and give up a lot in equity. But you’re betting on the fact that you’ll have a smaller amount of equity in a much bigger pie.

And if you don’t know smart, rich people – find them through your network. I offered a finders fee of 5% of any capital raised, plus some stock options to get my $1 mm investment in 2000. I didn’t know any people with money, so I tapped into the old boy Harvard network through a guy who had dated the daughter of a guy who taught there.

LESSON 5. BLUFF WHEN NECESSARY
Very important for women to learn this. When we were entering the Internet Bubble of 1999, I remember going to an event called CyberSuds. The name of that event would have been foreshadowing in a bad Hollywood Flick about the Crash: Cybersuds? All the startup guys and the investors who would fund them were in the house. It was one giant exciting sausage fest and I desperately wanted to be one of those guys. They were predominantly young, white, male, privileged and funded — or on the cusp of being funded, or about to be re-funded.

I remember trying to converse with a few of them. So, what’s your product? “Blah, blah blah technology that will change the way people do blah, blah, blah activity.” Cool. How does it make money? “Oh, we’re not worried about that. We’re just going to capture market share and we’re going for our B-Round now. Our burn is like $60k a month.” I don’t know what happened to that guy, but I suspect he was toast when his investors pulled the plug — like so many VC’s at the time — later that year.

Still, there was a takeaway there. The guys were writing business plans to raise multiple rounds of money. Yet, they weren’t afraid to lose that money. They were fearless. I admired that.

So, when I wrote my plan and went for funding, I brought the same sense of bravado. The plan was a guess. But in investor meetings, I acted as if it were a done deal.

LESSON 6. THINK OF TECH AS A MERE TOOL.
I have always been one of those people who likes to read the manual that comes with an appliance I buy. But, I never graduated to reading the manuals for my PCs. Still, I did learn to think of tech as nothing more mystical than any tool (a hammer, a tweezers) to get the job done — build the house, remove the splinter, create the product, serve the customer. And women are fantastic at serving (aren’t we?):)

One of my first challenges after raising capital was switching to a bigger tech platform. That meant figuring out how to sort through the vast array of software tools available. Would I build out the site using SQL server or Cold Fusion? Would our HTML code have nested tables? Would I need a relational database and what does scalable mean anyway? There was no free blogging software back then (we’re talking 2000).

I couldn’t exactly go back to school and learn all these things — and search sites like Google barely existed (but I sure didn’t know about them). I used my journalistic training instead. I started calling random strangers I met on tech bulletin boards on the internet to find the answers. I didn’t believe the first person’s answer. I always asked a variety of skilled people before trusting in a direction.

I cannot emphasize this point enough. Don’t be cowed by tech. Consider tech a tool towards achieving a further aim. Ask for help from multiple expert sources. Don’t be afraid to seem stupid. Act like a journalist. Flatter the source. “Hi, I am next to an idiot when it comes to database design. You on the other hand are a genius. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind my taking you for coffee and showing me the difference between relational databases and other kinds….”

LESSON 7. KNOW YOUR STRENGTHS
Most successful small companies are NOT ones started by MBAs with years of experience as CEOs or entrepreneurs. They are ones started close to home. Meaning: something in an industry you understand deeply or for which you are a domain expert. It could be a hobby, even. Start with an area you know and worry about adding business skills later. It’s more important that you know the PRODUCT, SERVICE or CUSTOMER than that you be an Excel Monkey.

In my case, I was a journalist and I knew journalists. Only later did I figure out what products or services journalists wanted. I never went to business school, but I hired people who had those skills and listened to them.

Also, it’s important to know what kind of founder you are. Are you operational or outward-facing? I discovered the hard way that I am Outward Facing, not interested in operations and should never manage people. I’m impatient, demanding, unrealistic, too direct and aggressive for a female boss. If I were male, I’d be worshipped. Early on, my employees actually appointed a fellow employee to “do an intervention” and tell me that they were about to quit unless I left them alone.

Being a strong/opinionated/direct female, I learned I always needed a buffer manager between me and the staff.

However, when it came to dealing with the customer, advocating for the customer, doing partnerships, rainmaking, speaking and anything external, I was the Company’s “It girl.”

LESSON 8. HIRE HELP, NOT A PARTNER
Why do many people start businesses with partners? Fear, loneliness, small amounts of startup capital, supposed expertise, the desire not to make a decision by themselves.

Don’t team up with a partner for the wrong reasons. If the business is your idea, keep it that way. And keep the power in your hands. When you get a partner who has nothing to offer but keeping you company, you’ve basically given away a bunch of your equity for something you could have gotten cheaper through advisors or through a trusted employee.

In the short term, rely on the kindness of strangers. Ask people to be informal mentors and advisors. I had no money and I just asked many smart, talented people for their time and advice. They happily gave it to me – even lawyers and accountants. In some cases, I offered to pay folks “later, after I raised money.” In other cases, I offered small amounts of stock options in exchange for help. People like that [lawyers, accountants, etc.] are in the business of building relationships with up and comers. Make yourself appear to be one of the winners and everyone will want to be associated with you.

Later, when you have money, hire staffers or consultants to do the jobs you’re NOT good at.

LESSON 9. DELEGATE WELL
Delegating is hard. It’s hard to find someone you can trust, hard to train the person, hard to hand stuff over to her and then once you do that, you kind of want to say “Okay, that’s done. Now, I don’t have to bother with that any more.” Then you wonder why all your priorities aren’t being met.
In the beginning, when you’re too small to hire a COO, unfortunately, you do have to manage people. You can’t get away from that. If you’re lucky – as I was, you’ll find a couple of people early on who can operate the company and to whom everyone else reports – and then you only have those one or two to directly manage.

With any employees you manage, even those who are senior-most and trusted, you STILL need to keep them accountable in very strict and formal ways.

Schedule regular weekly meetings in which you are updated on the progress of every project. In those meetings, you will see the entire scope of the tasks being done, where each one is in its cycle and whether or not new priorities are pushing important projects to the back-burner. That way there are no surprises.

The last thing you want is to tell your best employees to do something and three months later, when you finally get around to checking in, you discover that nothing was done. “But you told us to do these other things first,” they retort. You are furious that the priorities were rearranged and projects got lost in shuffle. They are furious and hurt that you didn’t understand what was being given up when you sent them all those Urgent, Must-DO task memos.

LESSON 10. KEEP YOUR HANDS DIRTY
While I’m a big fan of hiring experts and letting them do their thing, I also feel that you need to know what their “thing” is, what goes into making their “thing” happen and why their “thing” works the way they say their “thing” works. I was terrible at finance and knew nothing of tech, but I made sure to sit down with the people in charge of those areas and get to know intimately what decisions they were making and why.
For example, you’d be surprised at how divergent your ideas can be from those of your technical people, based on simple misunderstandings. And Techs can be pretty convincing when they tell you “Oh, that can’t be done.”

My Advice. You need to learn what a database is and how it works; you need to know what a relational database is. You need to know how Search on your own site works and can work. You need to know what HTML looks like and HTML5, and Drupal or Ruby On Rails (or whatever they’re using).

I’m not saying program code, I am saying ask a LOT of questions like a child to find out how things work. And ask the programmer to show you things. Once I saw the difference between straight HTML and Nested Tables, *I* was hooked. Joking aside, it will help you ask the right questions later and get to the bottom of those “it can’t be done,” retorts.
To help you out, here are 7 KEY questions to ask any tech who replies “It can’t be done:”

1) Why exactly can’t it be done?
2) Is anyone else you know doing it that way?
3) Why can they do it and we can’t?
4) What could we do to enable it to be done?
5) What steps would we have to take?
6) Is it really impossible, or is it just impossible the way you’ve got things set up now?
7) How much would it really cost to do it the way I’d like it to get done? Can you please spec out: How many developers, how many hours over how many months?

On many occasions, my developers have told me “it can’t be done,” and after this line of questioning, I learned that it can be done. It was just inconvenient for them because they didn’t share my vision for the product.

That’s all folks, let’s open it up to questions.

—————–

Photo credit:

Kathryn MacDonald
www.macdonaldphoto.com
415 640 7506

Please, please, please help me get my fabulous Southern niece an internship in NYC in Fashion. She’s in school at Charleston College, SC, in the Honor’s Program. She’s smart, adorable and incredibly thoughtful. She will blissfully bring coffee or write copy, run errands or make copies — in short, she will happily do whatever is asked of her. (You don’t get that from 20-somethings anymore!)

I so appreciate your help and will dutifully report any good Samaritans in this space. My email is Laurel Touby AT G Mail  Dot Com

Hannah Touby

Here’s a short interview I did with Hannah to give you a sense of her personality. Along with a link to her resume:

Hannah Touby: The Interview

1. When did you first discover you were a fashionista?
My first-recorded interest in fashion was at the age of 6. I was determined to pick out my own outfit — along with accessories and shoes, of course — for my kindergarten yearbook picture. From then on, my love for fashion only grew: I read my mom’s fashion magazines instead of Harry Potter, secretly tried on her high heels and resorted to stealing jewelry from my favorite board game when I lost my own. For me, fashion was the easiest and best way to express myself.

2. Who are your fave designers of the moment?
It’s hard to pinpoint a single favorite designer, because so many designers inspire me in different ways. I think anyone who can envision and design a piece that will later exist in the world is a genius. However I do draw my particular style from a few designers, specifically Marc Jacobs, Diane von Furstenberg and Cynthia Rowley. They represent three different aspects of my style persona – Marc is a bit wild but always cutting edge and beautiful, Diane’s clothes are always very wearable and timeless, and Cynthia has a safe yet sophisticated line that I’ve always admired. Whatever mood I’m in or outfit I’m looking for, one of these three designers will have it.

3. What do you hope to achieve in New York during the coming Summer?
I am infinitely grateful for the opportunity to live and work in New York this summer, and want to learn as much as I can about how the fashion industry functions one of the most fashion forward cities in the world. I find every aspect of the industry fascinating and hope to leave New York with a better understanding of how each sector contributes to the whole and what part of the industry best fits my specific talents. At this point, the possibilities are endless, and what better place to explore a future in fashion than New York City!

Here’s Hannah’s resume: Hannah Touby’s Resume LT edit 2

Dear David and Bill,

I really appreciate the time and thought you’ve put into this process thus far, and I know you still have some concerns that are preventing you from taking the plunge with me. But, please hear me out before making a final decision.

1) This is a “real” business.
a) There is a huge market for mediabistro’s services.
Companies spend over $2 billion dollars a year trying to hire the people in our target verticals. Without even trying, we’ve captured a portion of that in the NY region in one vertical. And, we’re already getting many job listings from other parts of the country and in other verticals.

With your money, we can get our name out there more quickly and effectively and capitalize on a very clear market need that we’ve identified in the media industry.

b) mediabistro.com inc. has a solid and growing customer base.
Over 300 customers (from Fairchild Publications to ZDNet to The Wall Street Journal) are currently posting jobs on the web site, coming back to the site and reposting more jobs (see attached list). These customers do NOT have a personal relationship with me. They hear about the site through word of mouth.

With your money, we can reach them more directly.

c) mediabistro.com has loyal site users.
Over 80,000 journalists/media people come to the web site a month, far beyond the number who know Laurel Touby. Furthermore, news of the web site has spread virally, nationwide and even world-wide. Yes, we have loyalists, but I think you have mistaken the people who come to my parties and who know me personally for my customer base. Please allow me to disabuse you of this notion. I could not possibly be fulfilling the needs of 100 to 150 employers a month with my relatively tiny (4,000 names) database of loyal Laurel followers. They’d be doing a lot of job-hunting, if that were the case!

e) mediabistro has a brilliant marketing plan
We have clever (inexpensive) ways of reaching our target market and letting them know about our web site — through their friends, through our parties and co-sponsored events such as the one you attended May 3rd. Like hotmail.com and geocities.com and other similar business models, ours is a viral community, and a little bit of marketing goes a long way.

f) mediabistro can attract a management team.
I have absolutely no doubt that if I have some backing, I can attract excellent candidates in our verticals, who have the right experience, contacts and attitude to make our plan work.

2) I have been running a “real” business, with all the verve, chutzpah and ingenuity of any entrepreneur.
I saw a market need, put my own money into developing the web site, convinced clients to use a new type of service that was NOT the norm, delivered a superior product and serviced their accounts with speed and care.

3) I can inspire highly qualified people to join the mediabistro team.
Ask the guys at Kenyon & Kenyon, the biggest intellectual property law firm in America. They took my case PRO-BONO because they like me. Ask my business advisors, Glenn Boyd, co-founder/CEO of WebTrends (a multi-billion software company); Joseph Atick, the CEO of Visionics; Charlie Crystle, founder of Chili Soft (multi-million dollar company); David Gumpert, co-founder of NetMarquee and an author of well-respected business books; Nan Talese (who runs a successful book imprint at Random House);

Ask my 20 volunteers.
Ask my designers and programmers, who donated their time or worked for cut rates because they believed in what I was doing.

If I can get all this wisdom, expertise and man-power with NO MONEY, just imagine what kind of talent I can bring on board if I have backing.

4) This is NOT a cult of personality.
While it has elements of that, this business has its own legs, possibilities and momentum. It will succeed; someone will make it succeed. I want to be that someone.

5) You’re betting on a winner.
I’m hungry, I’m smart, I’m aggressive, I’m a leader, a natural at marketing. I am humble enough to bring expertise in (when this becomes necessary, I’ll be the first to find someone to put in place above me) and listen to it. I can delegate.

6) Remember, I came from nowhere and built a name for myself in New York city, in a cutthroat industry.
If I have to kill myself to make this business work as I envision it can, I will not let you be sorry for getting involved with me.

I do not want your time.

I want your money to leverage my ideas, to grow what is already a vibrant, burgeoning business.

7) Finally, I want you to close your eyes and imagine me with a sex change.

I mean this seriously. Picture me as a young guy: the Jeff Taylor of Media, let’s say — who has achieved as much in as short a time, with as few resources. A small Internet company in a booming market, with strong REVENUES, customers, loyal site visitors, personal charisma, a team of willing and able business advisors, etc. Would you hesitate an instant to back such a fellow?

I can’t help feeling that my chutzpah (like that of so many other female entrepreneurs who have trouble getting funding) is no match for a lack of testosterone…I am Woman. Help me roar.

Guys, I want you to know that I really treasure my correspondence with you thus far. Rarely have I come upon two people with whom I’ve felt such an instant affinity. There are lots of places I could be going to get money (we both know this). I want you.

Let’s not break the chain. Let’s make the fun happen.

Margaret Withers in her studio

From: margaret withers <mwithers.artwork@gmail.com>
Date: December 18, 2010 4:07:10 PM EST
To: [redacted]
Subject: Can Roberta come out to play?

 

Dear Roberta, 

I dropped off the show catalog for “feeling untethered I laid down my
memories”, which is up right now at Amos Eno Gallery in DUMBO (111
Front St. #202 W-S 12-6, comes down on Thursday).

Do you remember as a child pretending to be a car or a space monster,
do you remember what being in that natural state of awareness felt
like? To be so focused on play that you don’t exist in the real and
physical world – you don’t hear your mom calling you, you forget that
you need to go pee, you don’t notice it’s getting dark and that your
hungry.  That other worldliness of feeling is what I’m trying to
communicate with my art. For example, in the painting, “Tip of the
tongue slandered by ears” there are 26 white clay heads attached to
the painting and floating off to the side. The “guy” is getting ready
to either munch on or spit out a sewn in pen and ink drawing of a
round floating fish like thing, and behind him is a large dark
hovering mass… what is going on?

Come out and play with me Roberta… come see my artwork.

–
Thank You Very Much,

Margaret Withers

Not so long ago, I was one of you, an editor and writer, who had worked for many years in the media and saw my calling as something halfway between beat reporter at BusinessWeek and novelist, monkishly writing atop some mountaintop – or (more likely) in a local East Village café.

If someone had told me “one day, Laurel, you’re going to start a company, hire and manage 40 people, grow it to millions of dollars in sales and sell it for millions more?” I would have said “You’re out of your mind! I don’t even want that. Just give me a shot at Harper’s.”

But, I’m here to say that going from THERE to HERE is NOT a crazy impossible road to follow. If a math idiot with no understanding of finance, no tech chops, no prior experience managing a team — much less running a company — can do this, then anybody can!

When I say “this,” I’m talking about starting and running a company that creates good in the world, that helps people, that offers a high-quality product or service, that is profitable –ALL without selling your soul to the gods of dirty, filthy lucre.

THE BEGINNING

As I mentioned before, I really just wanted to be a journalist. No interest in business, except on a merely theoretical basis. I was writing about small business, management and career issues for various publications, as kind of my “day job” UNTIL I could get something more real, like a staff job at The New Yorker!

Because I was lonely — working from home as a freelancer — a friend and I started a series of cocktail parties at bars… mainly to meet guys – but ALSO for career reasons. My second secret agenda was to get to know editors who might assign me stories. I had been in the NY media scene for 7 years and knew about fifteen people in the media. Barely enough to make a kaffee klatsch, much less a rockin’ party.

So, after the first few parties, I began to boldly invite TOTAL strangers – who incidentally, were editors at the major magazines where I might want to work. At first just a few people showed up, then 20… 30… 50 and before long I had thousands of people entered into a database.

TODAY, strictly through THIS kind of word of mouth, more than a million people have signed up on the site, making more than 12 million page views per month. Tens of thousands have in some way engaged with the brand – many to purchase one or more of our services.

They have attended the parties, taken classes with us, gone to a seminar, joined AvantGuild to read our premium content OR just lurked on the bulletin boards. Why, back then, did all these people show up and why did they bring friends and have their friends bring friends? They weren’t ALL single.

It was because, they, like me, truly wanted to make friends and business contacts and to feel part of a community.

That’s what the party provided. Making people feel taken care of and warmly greeted wasn’t being done at your standard-issue New York party. I wore a colorful feather boa and went around and personally introduced people. In fact, I forced people to meet. Go ahead, call me a Party Dominatrix. But, folks seemed to love that. The feedback I kept getting was: Don’t stop these parties.

At this point, I had no business though. Just a successful party and a growing community. And the guests kept saying “You need to make money at this somehow.” But I suspected that they weren’t going to pay to attend a party. And, how do you turn community into a money-making business, anyway. We’re talking pre INTERNET (not to mention Pre-Facebook). This was 1994.

That brings us to the first TAKE-AWAY for you.

1) TREAT your Customers like your community and they will reward you with their love and loyalty. Those are the foundations of a great business. If you don’t have an affinity for your customers, that is a bad sign. How can you expect love, loyalty and respect from people who you don’t feel the same way about?

2) LISTEN to your community of customers. Find out what they want and give that to them. Even if it means providing free stuff to show your love. I’m not saying forever free, or that you have to lose money, but you might have to invest in the relationship a bit before it starts to reward you.

Have trust. People always want to pay a fair price for things they value…because they want to continue getting those valued things.

Over the next few years, I turned each party, each conversation, each point of contact, with my media “customers” into a focus group opportunity. And, in fact, I did have a few dinner parties that were specifically designed as listening exercises.

You can do this, too. And, you must. Whether you stand outside of a mall with a clipboard and ask people in your target demographic to answer a few questions, or hang out at some local bars and quiz people there! Too shy? Do it on LinkedIn or Facebook; connect with friends of friends of friends. Use SurveyMonkey to tally responses! There are so many more tools today then there were when I started.

When I listened, I discovered that my media customers had a lot of needs in common. They wanted more work (both freelance and full-time), they wanted more ways to meet each other and to stay connected, they wanted to be up on the news and gossip in the industry, they wanted to be continually learning and improving their skills.

I made a bucket list of possible services that I could give away or sell to my customers: Monthly parties in other cities, Health Insurance for Freelancers, cheap monthly Lexis-Nexis access, a Freelance Marketplace and much much more. I didn’t get to every single item that first year or even by the fifth. But years later, I looked at that list and I had come pretty close to creating every single item on it.

The very first thing I began to produce after the monthly parties was an email newsletter (once people were USING email, that is). The emails contained information that was extremely helpful and targeted to the community – mainly media job listings and media event listings, and announcements like “Apartment for rent” “part-time office needed.”

After all, these were some of the core functions of the parties. Along with the occasional work assignment and job offer, the parties generated multiple deep friendships, 5 marriages, 3 babies — one out of wedlock – and countless one-night-stands!

Today, 15 years later, if I were on the other side of this podium, I would do things in just the same way: Have parties, start a blog or a newsletter in order to collect names and begin creating relationships with the customer.

The next step for me was in 1996, when someone in the community suggested that I put up a web site so that the party could continue 24-7. The person who made the suggestion was an editor; her boyfriend was a programmer and he already had the code for a basic community website. His downtown hipster community was called TagMag. So, being a good sport, he offered me his code for free – as long as he could use all the banner ads in perpetuity. I said “Sure! …er, what’s a banner ad?”

No matter, in 1996, I had my first web site. In fact, I had one of the first Social Media Sites for Media People (talk about meta!). It wasn’t much to look at – just a few pages, but it was extremely useful to the community.

Today, with open source modules of code floating around, and free blog software, I could have started my site just as cheaply. I would have adapted WordPress or Blogger software to my needs and added out-of-the-box Bulletin Board and Job Board functionality.

But, I would have had to have been careful to remain focused. Facebook didn’t start out with Facebook Places. My business didn’t start out with 100s of offerings. Feature creep is extremely tempting; I strongly recommend starting with as few features as possible. Launch, then test the market and add more features once your users are crack-addicted to your current features and beg for others.

The next challenge for me in ‘96 was something we now call Audience Development. Back then, it was called “How the hhell am I going to get people to check out my new web site?” I’m sure this is a big question for those of you facing that blank page now.

For me, the answer was what I call Party Marketing, And I combined my party marketing with email cross-marketing. What is Party Marketing? It’s me standing up on a chair and announcing that there is this fantastic web site with Job Listings and Event Listings and Bulletin Boards that the party guests just have to check out. In the beginning I had one party a month, and people volunteered to help keep them going.

Once I had some funding, I was able to do a party a month in 12 cities, all on volunteer power. The volunteers wore boas and stood up on chairs to promote the web site. This became a key part of my strategy and enabled word of mouth to grow as quickly as it did.

I was also using the Email Newsletter to cross-market what was on the web site. It was kind of like a Trojan horse. While most people aren’t going to open any old email, who doesn’t want to open a fun community-oriented party invite? Subject line: Come to the Next Media Party~!

Every email contained bits of news, announced the next cocktail party and also linked back to the web site. People loved reading the newsletter because it really pertained to their lives and their needs and it pointedly was not selling anything. However, it became a not-so-“secret” marketing tool for everything we sell.

3) YOU can do your own guerrilla marketing to build audience and awareness of your offerings. Party marketing is easier to organize than it’s ever been. Start a group on Meetup.com for people in your target market. Meet them and get to know them. Ask them lots of questions about their needs. If you have products/services that those folks need, they’ll want to participate as much as possible to help you get where you need to go.

For me, all those years ago, I STILL had no business model but I had more of an inkling. I was happily doing mitzvahs (good deeds) for people – referring people for work, introducing people who might later marry – collecting Karma points. Or maybe, in business parlance, one might call it Generating Goodwill.

My investment in time and energy paid off nearly as well as a marketing budget would have. Within three years of launching, my baby web site was the hottest place for media professionals of all stripes. The bulletin boards got huge traffic and the job listings were the best around, rivaling those in the New York Times for media jobs. My customers loved the web site as if it was their own – and it was, because I had custom-tailored it to their needs.

That was when I listened to another set of my customers: HR people.

In 1999, HR people from all the major media companies – from Hearst to Fairchild – were using my job board to hire. And many of those HR people felt guilty that they were getting for free what they were paying for in the newspaper classifieds. Some of them wrote me to ask if they could pay me. Around the same time, Monster.com advertised on the Super Bowl. My first thought: “If Monster is making THAT much money from job listings, maybe I can as well.” If I could make just a little bit of income from job listings, I might be able to quit freelancing and spend more time coming up with products and services – and who knows where that could lead?

So, in early 1999, I sent an email around to all the people who had posted a job that month. I announced that I would start charging for the Job Listings, “Pay me $100 – but only if you’re happy – and consider this email your invoice.” I only wanted to take money from happy customers.

I went to my PO box the next month and there were 11 checks. Wow! $1,100. The next month, it was $2,200, then $1,800, then $3,100! Before I knew it, I was making more money than I had ever made as a writer.

I hadn’t launched the parties or the email newsletter or the web site with any intention of creating a profit-making business. Yet without investing any money, I had unintentionally built up several years of good will, brought together a customer base, done market research and launched ONE real product that customers had now proven they would buy!

And the story could have ended there. Party Girl makes good on the Internet, earns herself a nice, steady income from her apartment in her pajamas, with her cats jumping all over the keyboard. In fact, I think that story exists even now at JournalismJobs.com, which started a bit later, has a small staff and isn’t really known for much more than job listings.

But I had other ambitions. I didn’t want just a job board, I thought this community thing held pretty exciting possibilities. So, I came to a decision point. How do I take this thing and make it BIG, Go global, go Galactic, go anything but postal? Do I get funding or not? Do I solicit a partner to help me make decisions or go it alone? What is the very next step?

Luckily, my background expertise in business writing came to the rescue. I had edited stories like these before for Executive Female magazine and written features like this for Working Woman. “Entrepreneur launches empire on a shoestring – well-financed competitor comes in to eat her lunch.”

“CEO takes on wrong business partner and business crumbles in a bickering mess.”

Speaking of stories, I’ve only gotten up to 1999, so I’m going to fast forward my story a bit to leave ample time for your questions. The highlights for me were:

- In 2000, I got $1 mm in funding
- left my apartment and two cats for a real office
- hired actual staff, to augment my intern team
- survived the first Crash of the Internet
- Survived 9/11
- added more products and services that my customers asked for
- grew the company to solid double-digit profits within three years of raising capital
- and sold my baby in 2007 for a reported $23 mm.

Here are take-aways #4 – #9 from my story, then I’ll open it up to your questions:

4) What makes for a good business idea?

Most successful small companies are NOT ones started by MBAs with years of experience as CEOs or entrepreneurs – as I had wrongly thought. They are ones started close to home. Meaning: something in an industry you understand deeply or for which you are a domain expert. It could be a hobby, even. Start with an area you know and worry about adding business skills later. It’s more important that you know the PRODUCT, SERVICE or CUSTOMER than that you be an Excel Monkey.

In my case, I was a journalist and I knew journalists. Only later did I figure out what products or services journalists wanted. I never went to business school, but I hired people who had those skills and listened to them.

5) WRITE a plan.

No matter how ill-equipped you are to do this, no matter how simple you think your business is, write a business plan. You can buy books guiding you through the process, there’s software to help. I hired someone who had professional experience doing this. (I paid him a very small fee and paid him the rest in stock options). Go through your network. Ask for help from small boutique bankers in your industry; B-school professors can recommend students who might do your plan as a class project.

6) GET FUNDING, whether from a bank, from friends and family or from professional money:

Never make the mistake that most founders make, which is to starve their baby businesses. You’ll need breathing room; 6 – 12 months capital in the bank.

If you are getting money from any type of investors, take as little as you need in the beginning from the smartest, richest people you know. Keep as big a chunk of your company as possible – there are exceptions to this rule, of course. If you are rushing a product to market that is mass-market, is easily copy-able and/or requires a heavy marketing budget to grab market share, then you may have to raise more upfront and give up a lot in equity. But you’re betting on the fact that you’ll have a smaller amount of equity in a much bigger pie.

And if you don’t know smart, rich people – find them through your network. I offered a finders fee of 5% of any capital raised, plus some stock options to get my $1 mm investment in 2000. I didn’t know any people with money, so I tapped into the old boy Harvard network through a guy who had dated the daughter of a guy who taught there.

7) HIRE HELP, NOT A PARTNER

Why do many people start businesses with partners? Fear, loneliness, small amounts of startup capital, supposed expertise, the desire not to make a decision by themselves.

Don’t team up with a partner for the wrong reasons. If the business is your idea, keep it that way. And keep the power in your hands. When you get a partner who has nothing to offer but keeping you company, you’ve basically given away a bunch of your equity for something you could have gotten cheaper through advisors or through a trusted employee.

In the short term, rely on the kindness of strangers. Ask people to be informal mentors and advisors. I had no money and I just asked many smart, talented people for their time and advice. They happily gave it to me – even lawyers and accountants. In some cases, I offered to pay folks “later, after I raised money.” In other cases, I offered small amounts of stock options in exchange for help. People like that [lawyers, accountants, etc.] are in the business of building relationships with up and comers. Make yourself appear to be one of the winners and everyone will want to be associated with you.

Later, when you have money, hire staffers or consultants to do the jobs you’re not good at. And if you’re not the managerial type, by all means, be the outward-facing type CEO. Go to conferences, do the fun meet-and-greet stuff and hire someone strong to manage the staff stuff.

DELEGATE, BUT PAY ATTENTION

Delegating is hard. It’s hard to find someone you can trust, hard to train the person, hard to hand stuff over to her and then once you do that, you kind of want to say “Okay, that’s done. Now, I don’t have to bother with that any more.” Then you wonder why all your priorities aren’t being met.

Unfortunately, you do have to manage people. You can’t get away from that. If you’re lucky – as I was, you’ll find a couple of people who can operate the company and to whom everyone else reports – and then you only have those one or two to directly manage.

With any employees you manage, even those who are senior-most and trusted, you STILL need to keep them accountable in very strict and formal ways.

Schedule regular weekly meetings in which you are updated on the progress of every project. In those meetings, you will see the entire scope of the tasks being done, where each one is in its cycle and whether or not new priorities are pushing important projects to the back-burner. That way there are no surprises.

The last thing you want is to tell your best employees to do something and three months later, when you finally get around to checking in, you discover that nothing was done. “But you told us to do these other things first,” they retort. You are furious that the priorities were rearranged and projects got lost in shuffle. They are furious and hurt that you didn’t understand what was being given up when you sent them all those Urgent, Must-DO task memos.

9) GET YOUR HANDS DIRTY

While I’m a big fan of hiring experts and letting them do their thing, I also feel that you need to know what their “thing” is, what goes into making their “thing” happen and why their “thing” works the way they say their “thing” works. I was terrible at finance and knew nothing of tech, but I made sure to sit down with the people in charge of those areas and get to know intimately what decisions they were making and why.

For example, you’d be surprised at how divergent your ideas can be from those of your technical people, based on simple misunderstandings. And Techs can be pretty convincing when they tell you “Oh, that can’t be done.”

My Advice. You need to learn what a database is and how it works; you need to know what a relational database is. You need to know how Search on your own site works and can work. You need to know what HTML looks like and HTML5, and Drupal or Ruby On Rails (or whatever they’re using).

I’m not saying program code, I am saying ask a LOT of questions like a child to find out how things work. And ask the programmer to show you things. Once I saw the difference between straight HTML and Nested Tables, *I* was hooked. Joking aside, it will help you ask the right questions later and get to the bottom of those “it can’t be done,” retorts.

To help you out, here are 6 KEY questions to ask any tech who replies “It can’t be done:”

1) Why exactly can’t it be done?

2) Is anyone else you know doing it that way?

3) Why can they do it and we can’t?

4) What could we do to enable it to be done?

5) What steps would we have to take?

6) Is it really impossible, or is it just impossible the way you’ve got things set up now?

On many occasions, my developers have told me “it can’t be done,” and after this line of questioning, I learned that it can be done. It was just inconvenient for them because they didn’t share my vision for the product.

That’s all folks, let’s open it up to questions.

END

C) SWITCHING ROLES: FROM INTERVIEWER TO INTERVIEWEE (Intermediate)

Whether you’re promoting a book or have penned an article that’s attracting media attention, you’ll hear the tips you need to be interviewed, become media savvy and deliver great pull-quotes, on TV, radio, podcast, Skype, or any other medium.

I’ve been contacting a number of journalists who have been on the receiving end of interviews (one such media maven was not very happy when The New York Post turned him into a blood sport). Here is the advice I’ve gathered. Do you have any of your own to add, so that I may share your wisdom with the attendees at ASJA? Thanks in advance for this! My email is Laurel AT media bistro DOT com.

1. Don’t expect excellence. Don’t expect fact-checking. Spell your name, title, etc. Ask the person to repeat the name/spelling/subtitle of your book. Then, follow up in an email and send the same information.
2. Make friends. Treat the journo as if she were your close friend, a friend who you cannot trust with a secret. Be relaxed and conversational, but do not become too chatty. The safest thing to do is to TAPE the conversation.
3. Be a little scary. Play the insider. Let the reporter know in a very nice way, of course, that you have street cred. Drop names of editor friends, or producer friends at the journo’s employer. You want this person to think “I’m going to be very careful with how I cover [X], so he doesn’t complain to so-and-so.”
4. Engage. Get a conversation going. Try to get to know the person. How did he/she get the story idea? Ask “Who else have you called? Or are planning to call?” The more information you have, the better able you’ll be to assess the reporter’s abilities, and get a bead on the arc of the story.
5. Become a resource, not just a source. Refer the reporter to other sources. Tell her at the end of the call that she is welcome to call you back with questions. Send her some sources via email, too, if you think of any after you hang up.
6. Be short, but walk with a smart stick. Speak with authority/confidence, and in short, pithy sentences. Have a list of no more than 3 to 5 points you want to get across. Gather data/facts in advance, so the reporter doesn’t have to circle back to you for necessary material. Forcing her to follow up with you at a later date decreases your chances of getting into the final copy.
7. Be nice, even if you think the interviewer is lame or stupid. Don’t correct the interviewer. Don’t sound angry or pissed off. This doesn’t mean you can’t be feisty. However, if the interview is for TV/radio, ask the interviewer/producer in advance whether or not they want to mix it up. Sometimes arguing is good, but it must be done with good humor.
8. Different media require different behaviors. Understand the form you’re in — if it’s TV news, it has to be 30-seconds and coherent; whereas an hour-long NPR interview allows you to speak in full paragraphs. Practice in advance for those short, pithy TV and radio segments.
9. TV and Radio can be especially tricky. The interviewers often haven’t read your materials and have only the vaguest idea why you’re there. Don’t take this personally. Just realize they want to fill time. Your segment was probably pitched to them by a publicist. They will ask obvious questions; sometimes they will ask questions that have nothing to do with you or your subject matter. Don’t get flustered. Instead, have your 3-5 points in mind and steer the questions in the direction you want to go.
10. Go ahead and “promote,” but do so in a straightforward manner. Say, “I hope you don’t mind if I throw in a little plug for my [project, book, etc.].” ALWAYS give a web site. If there’s an upcoming event, mention that, too.
11. Help shape the story. If the story is not fitting your facts, go ahead and make suggestions to the journo about a change of direction. If that doesn’t work, don’t be afraid to tell the journo that he/she has it wrong. Be brave. Sure, you may get dropped from the story — but more likely, your comments will appear as the “balance” or counter-arguments to everyone else’s sheep-like agreement.

Please feel free to comment here or write to me directly if you have better suggestions than these. I won’t be hurt. Thanks! Write to Laurel AT media bistro DOT com

]]> http://culturetripping.com/2010/04/21/journos-as-subjects/feed/ 0 laurel2020 journalism http://culturetripping.com/2010/02/24/amangani-roaming-in-wyoming/ http://culturetripping.com/2010/02/24/amangani-roaming-in-wyoming/#comments Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:21:25 +0000 laurel2020 http://culturetripping.wordpress.com/?p=174 Continue reading →]]> [Okay, I'm doing it. I'm trying to post to this blog again. Apologies to all of you who were promised endless hours of blog merriment from us as we travelled the world This time, I will try not to hold myself to such high standards as to prevent me from actually posting anything.]

So, for Jon’s birthday, we decided to veer from our world travels for a little local skiing — in Jackson, Wyoming. Amangani, the place where we are staying, took it upon themselves to celebrate Jon’s birthday by secreting some balloons in our room!

As you can see, Jon has really taken to his Balloon.

Is he delighted with his cake, inscribed Monkeys Rule!? Hard to say. In any case, Jon’s a big fan of monkeys. On our next journey, we are heading to places in Africa, where he will be able to experience his primate kin first hand. Stay tuned!!