Friday, October 04, 2002

Bruised and Beaten. Bruised and Beaten Andy over at www.347.com has an excellent article on things you should know and do if you are starting a business.  It's short and totally worth reading.  I liked this the best: If you're not willing to finish the marathon, don't start the race. He is so totally correct about this.  Businesses are marathons, not races.  They take time to build and once you are successful, the hardest thing to understand is that it can often take the same amount of time to be successful in a different area.  Here's an example: I sold my first company, NTERGAID / HyperWriter,  to Dataware Technologies in 1996, a company which had gone public on the strength of their CD-ROM tools. We were to be their new entry level web tools division.  That plan was scrapped 3 days after the acquisition closed.  (I kid you not).  Happily there was no "30 day return policy" (or perhaps unhappily given how it all ended up).  On my advice the company decided to focus on Knowledge Management as it's new area.  This was in November of 1996. Dataware had been founded in 1986 and gone public in 92 / 93 (if my memory serves me correctly).  It took roughly 7 years to be really successful and just barely made it. The CEO of Dataware really expected instant success in Knowledge Management where "instant" might be  12 to 18 months.  We had told him up front that this was really an enterprise business and an 18 to 24 month sales cycle.  It actually has turned out that Knowledge Management is still not really successful for vendors -- to this day.  And it may never be. The CEO, also the founder, had been willing to sweat it out for more than 5 years to be a success the first time.  So, why did he expect to be successful so much more quickly in what amounted to a new business?  Sure he didn't have to build a sales force, create a company, etc, but he did still have to build credibility as a vendor, learn the market and those type of tasks -- which aren't transferrable between different businesses. The bottom line is that building businesses takes time.  They are marathons not sprints and it can take years and years.  While we all hear about the instant over night successes, these are the rare exceptions to the rule.  They are very, very rare.  They just make good stories for the media but they are not indicative of the reality. [The FuzzyBlog!] 6:51:23 AM    comment []

Russian Engineers Teach America. New York Times: Science -- Moscow may have lost the cold war, but its companies are beating Western capitalists at the game of making rocket motors. With technology that is simple and reliable, powerful yet relatively cheap, the Russians are winning over not only commercial customers around the globe but the American military as well. What's more, the Russians have outperformed their technologically advanced rivals by relying on a strikingly low-tech fuel: kerosene. ... A Russian company, NPO Energomash, formed an alliance with Pratt & Whitney to make a new engine for Lockheed Martin. The result is the RD-180, a new Russian design that experts say has a performance edge of at least 10 percent over its Western rivals. "We're getting the crown jewels," said Charles P. Vick, an expert on the Russian space program at the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington. "It makes up for 30 years of not doing the appropriate amount of engine research ourselves." The trick is that the Russians learned during the cold war how to excel without pushing technological limits — the opposite of the West's approach. For instance, Moscow often relied on kerosene, an inexpensive fuel that can work at room temperature. In contrast, Washington pushed to perfect the use of liquid hydrogen. This costly, high-energy propellant must be refrigerated down to hundreds of degrees below zero, a temperature that can freeze, shatter or otherwise play havoc with fast-moving parts. (09/27/02) [Synergic Earth News] 6:32:24 AM    comment []

Need Any Uranium?. CNN News -- Turkish officials said Saturday they have seized 34.6 pounds of uranium and arrested two Turkish men in Urfa, a town in southeastern Turkey. U.S. officials are in touch with authorities to get information about the seizure. The men were arrested carrying the material in a box as passengers in a taxi that was en route from Urfa to the nearby city of Gazi Antep, police said. They were identified as Salih Yasar and Mehmet Demir. The driver was interviewed and released. Authorities displayed the material, which they said was worth $5 million and originated in the former Soviet Union, to reporters in Urfa. It will be taken to Ankara for analysis, police said. (09/29/02) [Synergic Earth News] 6:30:49 AM    comment []

IRAN Demands that the U.S. Give Up Its Nuclear Weapons!. Yahoo! News -- NEW YORK: Making the case for United Nations intervention against the United States, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami told the organization yesterday that military action will be "unavoidable" unless the U.S. agrees to destroy its weapons of mass destruction. ... "Nearly two years ago, the civilized world watched as this evil and corrupt dictator subverted the world's oldest representative democracy in an illegal coup d'état," said Khatami. "Since then the Bush regime has continued America's systematic repression of ethnic and religious minorities and threatened international peace and security throughout the world. Thousands of political opponents and ordinary citizens have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. Basic civil rights have been violated. This rogue state has flouted the international community on legal, economic and environmental issues. It has even ignored the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war by denying that its illegal invasion of Afghanistan --which has had a destabilizing influence throughout Central Asia--was a war at all." ... "Bush has invaded Afghanistan and is now threatening Iraq. We cannot stand by and do nothing while danger gathers. We can't for this tyrant to strike first. We have an obligation to act pre-emptively to protect the world from this evildoer," Khatami said. (09/30/02) [Synergic Earth News] 6:29:31 AM    comment []