Category Archives: General

Review: Is the tech entrepreneurial community in Cape Town alive and kicking?

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Monday evening this week saw a “Great Debate” hosted by Neal Gandhi at the iPlex co-working space in Cape Town. I attended out of personal interest because since I’ve been based here for 11 months now but still trying to work out what’s going on with the tech “scene” here.

It was meant to be a formal debate with a few people in favour and a few against the motion that “The tech entrepreneurial community in Cape Town is alive and kicking”. However, it started a little oddly as those against the motion proceeded to announce the were asked to be against rather than it being of their own choosing! It sounded like they were a little cautious or burnt be recent flames aimed at them from non-attendees who had seen the announcement prior.

The “for” motion was put forward by Daniel Guasco, one of the joint-CEO’s of Groupon in SA who put forward a number of success stories both of buyouts and inflowing development through things like Google Umbono as proof that it was. Unfortunately as he closed there was a heckle rough speaking that “you’ve named them all”!

This led nicely into the “against” position delivered by the supposedly “pressured into it” but surprising-lucid-and-passionate Eric Edelstein from Evly. His argument was nicely built upon the foundational statement that the community was alive but by no means kicking. He raised a number of excellent points that showed how you differentiate between the two states using Silicon Valley as a benchmark. A number of the audience challenged this as unfair afterwards in the open questions session but I personally think that firstly if you aim low, you deliver low. Secondly, calling the initiative to ignite the region “Silicon Cape” says that most people identify with that focus as being critical. I think his best point was that the ecosystem of related businesses and systems are just not here at the moment in Cape Town. Its not just the finance eco-system (though that could do with an injection of life) but the lawyers, accountants, education, etc. that need to be there to support the entrepreneur in their endeavors.

Eric was so brutal in his delivery and the follow-up debate ended up dragging in a few of the “for” panellists into making “against” statements!

However, there were a few things unsaid that stick out for me as the deciding factors in this debate right now. The first was that though this event took place at 4.30 in the afternoon, as I drove there I did so against the massive rush hour traffic out of the CBD! At 4 in the afternoon. Those people are generally not going home to carry on there like the crazy Americans. They’re going home to watch bad TV. I think the overriding culture amongst the educated middle-classes of Cape Town is one of quiet contentment, which is fine and nice, but not conducive to a hunger to leave comfortable corporate land and risk all on a start-up. The majority of those with a fire in their belly to create the companies of the future are not sitting on a body of knowledge and experience that will set them up for success.

The second thing that stuck out for me as unspoken is the requirement for South African businesses to wake up and adopt 10 to 15 year old technologies (such as a basic catalogue style website) to allow the next generation of South African based companies to build upon it and get quick, local, visual feedback on how their technologies are being used. Yes, the digital world allows us to throw something on a server and have people in China, India and Iceland try it out but in the world of user experience there’s somethings best done in-person.

The debate ended with a question time which was wasted mostly with people making statements (fine if that’s the deal, but that’s not a question time) but I got to ask one on the feeling of the experts around the concept of the “pivot” being acceptable here. Blank stares from around the room led me to think the concept is not even truly understood here but another one of the Evly guys, the verbose Eran, did and told a funny story about a South African investor who was outraged that a (successful) pivot had seemed to strongly indicate in favour of returning to the unsuccessful model!

The vote was overwhelmingly “against” the motion at the end, I think mainly to do with the excellent “alive but not kicking” point. I hope when the time comes for me to complete my “start-up sabbatical” in corporate land and reenter start-up land that its alive enough still and I can help make it a little more kicking.

Thanks to the iPlex for hosting, looking forward to returning and sorry for not eating the food but I was going out for dinner and it would have been rude to show up full!

The failure path of “over scoping”

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In my previous post I talked about Communication failures and now I want to look at “over scoping”, particularly as it pertains to setting your daily work agenda.

Over scoping was as term I used a lot previously when I was involved in my role as a “pivotal provider” (a term someone invented for the person or team who liaised between a customer onshore and a development team offshore). We used it a lot because at that time (around 2000) as project-based offshore development was becoming popular there was a temptation by customers, as a result of the lower day rate, to try and cram more and more features into applications. Our job was to try and push back the scope to the core requirements and ensure we didn’t start with a functional specification that was going to lead to a massive deliverable. This approach generally came out of a desire to ship a version one of the project or program with everything in it in order to demonstrate why this project should be funded and delivered.

However, it seems to me to be creeping into the wider world of work as a result of people trying to ensure they as an individual are seen as critical to the future health of the business and become indispensable to the organisation they work for. Rather than focus on incremental, bite-sized, valuable collections of activities people look for and try to define grand, strategic, immeasurable bloated roles. Then fail to deliver on them.

Seems like “strategy” is the one title everyone wants and actually what your co-workers and team mates want is strategic execution, not long-term airy-fairy futurism. This means you must understand and return to the epicentre of your role and build back from there. In their book REWORK (buy it) the team from 37Signals talk about the term “finding your epicentre” in regards to business startup. On their blog they talk about it like this:

Epicenter Design involves focusing in on the true essence of the page (the “epicenter”) and then building outwards. This means not starting with the navigation/tabs, or the footer, or the colors, or the sidebar, or the logo, etc. It means starting with the part of the page that, if changed or removed, would change the entire purpose of the page. That’s the epicenter.

That’s a real challenge when applied to a role in the workplace: What thing (or things) that if I stopped doing would the entire purpose of my role disappear and the ability to serve my organisation cease.

This is what I’m focused on today because I lost sight of it. Finding my role’s epicentre, pulling back on the rest and executing (not talking) against that core.

Failure? I’m OK with that… (Part 1)

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This past year has been an interesting one full of lessons for me. I’ve:
1. After 30 years in London moved to a new country (South Africa)
2. Moved to a new functional group (marketing)
3. Moved into a new role type (team leader)
4. Moved back to being an individual contributor again in the last few weeks
5. Stepped down from a leadership role at my church in the UK
6. After 30 years in the same church joined a new one (Jubilee, Cape Town)

I decided to reflect back on some of the failures I have had personally because you know what… I’m OK with that and I want to make sure I remember the lessons I learnt!

I think I’m going to make this the first of a few posts, it’s time to get back in the writing saddle…

Lesson 1: Communicate (with honesty) without failing
In a hierarchical organisation this has to be “up” and “down” the chart with equal vigour. I think the toughest thing I struggled with this year was the shifting sands of my team. I felt like there was never a time in the last 12 months when my tiny team wasn’t dealing with some kind of crisis. Whether that was personal, professional, internal, external, deserved or undeserved it doesn’t matter … It just gets very wearing after a while if people can’t (or won’t) communicate an honest view of their position. I’m lucky to have worked in some very flat and open teams in the past and though sometimes it felt like people didn’t have enough focus I think I’ve grown to appreciate some of it’s beneficial characteristics! I think there are a few frustrating things about communication challenges but two bug me especially. The first is legal complications and the second is my inability to remain true to my beliefs.

Legal Complications
One of the things I want to build up more understanding of this week is the legal communications frameworks of the major countries within the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region I work in. There are certainly cultural differences across this vast region but there also appears to be a complex maze of restraints on what can and can not be said or communicated to employees. I still intend to one day return to running my own business and have realised the importance of this complex area. I have a feeling though the process of hiring great people is more important that ever before due to the mess you can preempt by doing so. My favourite book of the year is Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh who’s company Zappos emphasises the need for “cultural fit” so highly.

Remaining True
This area is far more personal and I thank my wife Lydia for calling me out on this one. I have the joyful freedom to work from home a good portion of the time when I’m not travelling so she gets to listen to one side of my phone calls. She calls me out when I’m struggling by pointing out “you’re gossiping again” which is a personal pet hate of mine. I hate office politics with a passion but have gotten sucked in so easily this past year.

Setting Goals
So the first and most important goal for the next 12 months is to communicate clearer, more often, with honesty and respect. Time to get on with it!

Managing Trade-offs

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One of the most eye opening customer meetings I had was to watch one of our Senior Directors of Product Management (PM) talking an extremely demanding customer through a discussion of improvements the customer wanted us to make. I’d been introduced to the concept of trade-offs by another PM but I’d never seen the process used so effectively as I did that day.

The way it is used is that first you go through the requests and requirements at a high level. Secondly, you describe that you have a finite amount or resources, be it people, time, money or another variable (or more likely a combination of them). Then you discuss that you will therefore be unable to deliver all of them (as much as you wish you could). So then you ask them to pick which ones they must have and start to offer up “If you have to have just one would you like this one OR this one”.

Done in a very consultative manner it is extremely effective in getting the customer to buy into a prioritised list that is a great deal shorter than the one you walked in on!

The reason I’ve been thinking about trade-offs again the last few days was mainly as a result of the revelations that one of the TechCrunch writers might have taken some free gear in return for posts about certain start-ups. What interested me most was the speed of response in regards to the main Editor Michael Arrington addressing it publicly with a post entitled “An Apology To Our Readers“. The post included this:

We are all shaken here at TechCrunch this is someone who was our friend and who we trusted to be honest with our readers. Our hope is that the intern learns something from this experience and grows into the kind of person that will be more welcome in this community.

I apologize to each one of you. I promise that we will always maintain complete transparency with you on how we operate, even when it isn’t such an easy thing to do.

Transparency is one of the biggest trade-offs people can struggle with, especially within the corporate world where you are trying to control the way the brand is perceived. Michael should be highly commended for such a rapid response and the openness with which he addressed this in a public forum. TechCrunch is a slightly odd example as its business is a public website but the process of allowing employees to air their views in public is a bold, but I think critical one.

I think one of the best ever posts from Hugh of GapingVoid fame is this the where he discussed the “Porous Membrane” that corporate blogging creates. He illustrates it with this cartoon:

Go and read the whole thing but for me a key point he makes is this one:

13. The more porous your membrane (“x”), the easier it is for the internal conversation to inform and align with the external conversation, and vice versa.

There’s plenty of great advice in that post and I hope to continue learning to put it into action.

Matt Mullenweg on TWIST

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I’m a big fan of Podcasts as I have a 5 hour commute when I go to the Symantec office in Reading spent hoping on and off trains, tubes and buses which makes it hard to work.

One of my favourite interviews recently was with Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic, who put a lot into the development of WordPress and commercialise it through things like wordpress.com. Matt is a great thinker and comes across very well in this interview…

TWiST #26 with Matt Mullenweg

Lets start with agreeing we’re doing the right thing…

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I’m sitting here on a Sunday thinking about work so I thought it best to get some thoughts down on “paper” as an outlet.

The thing that’s playing on my mind is a situation where we have to get a number of the different teams within our organisation all pulling together to make sure an upcoming launch works really smoothly and has maximum impact for our customers. I realised that on Monday when we have some calls on the subject I need to make sure we start from the position of agreeing that we are doing the right thing. Sounds obvious but I have the feeling that people are just doing their jobs and that their hearts are not really in it. Perhaps they don’t feel appropriately ”consulted” up until this point, or they actually have other more pressing things on their mind but we can’t go forward without support.

The tricky thing is going to be phrasing the question in a non-threatening manner that doesn’t make people defensive but instead drives an honest and productive conversation. I was pleasantly surprised the other day to be complemented by someone further up the “food chain” than me that I’d learnt to think a little longer before opening my mouth! Something I’ve been working hard on, speaking the truth without alienating those who I’ll need to work with for months and years to come (hopefully).

I’m currently in the process of applying for a job internally to become the Principle Regional Product Marketing Manager for Security and a lot of the challenges in this new role if I get it will be ensuring that situations like the one I’ve described don’t happen as often in future. Having a consistent flow of communication around current and future product and solution strategy with the various stakeholders internally and externally is critical to our success.

Listening to: Delphic – Acolyte

Asking and answering hard questions

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It struck me during a session at work the other day that sometimes “fear of saying the wrong thing” or procrastination seems to lead people to behave more like politicians than leaders. By behaving like politicians I’m not referring to the current inability to know the difference between a “work related expense” and “taking a sly one”, which was at first amusing and swifly became another nail in the “what are they good for?” coffin they were already lying in for me. I am more referring to their habit of answering a question with another question.

Let me answer that by asking you this…

I’ve seem to have a reputation at work for speaking my mind without holding back, whoever the recipient may be, peer or exec. This may get me into trouble one day (and probably already has) but I’d rather deal with occasionally clearing up a mess than sit there in a perfectly clean but static environment. I think especially at senior levels within larger organisation the feeling that the people on the ground who come and quiz you know more than you do about some areas of the business. As mentioned before the fear of saying the wrong thing and looking like an idiot leads to skirting round the question. I believe this stems from a mis-perception that great leaders have all the answers. When I ask someone in a role that has a great span of control than mine their opinion on something, I’d rather have their view based on that span of control they have as it will help me in a few ways. Firstly, it will give me an insight into areas that I don’t have (e.g. I think numbers are up and they may be 300% in my area but that is cancelled out by a 10% drop in a much larger area than mine). Secondly, they teach me about the information flow and any improvements that may need to be made to help people make more informed decisions. Thirdly, people just see things differently based on their background and career. I would rather have the benefit of hearing that and add it into my understanding and experience.

So next time I ask a tough question, don’t reflect it back to me as a question please. I’d rather …

You know what, I don’t know for sure but based on my understanding …

Pretty please.

Wading through the layers

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I’ve started reviewing the presentations and messages we’ve developed internally around the security product set and talking to the people in our company with more experience than me in this area. There are a couple of things that instantly strike me:

  1. Too much, too much, too much. A.k.a. the 50+ size monster PowerPoint files.
  2. Related, the customers don’t care about half of the “features” we talk about.
  3. This is so similar to the position Brightmail was in a year and half ago when I joined the company (or the Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series with AntiSpam and AntiVirus as it was lovingly known then)

First task has got to be simplification and a focus on three or four key areas that people actually care about. I have a meeting this afternoon to make a first pass at trying to get some thoughts together. I can’t wait for the Big Corp HQ to give this to us because we’ve got to get moving now to get back in our stride and off the back foot.

Grabbing the Symantec Endpoint Protection nettle with both hands

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For the last year and a half at Symantec I’ve been working on what we call Information Risk Management. At its most basic level it’s four key pillars:

  1. Keeping the bad stuff out
  2. Keeping the good stuff
  3. Keeping stuff as required
  4. Finding stuff easily when needed

I love the using the word “stuff” when I’m talking to people, it always surprises them! However, it nicely sums up the fact that data or information is largely unstructured and unclassified these days and not immediately identifiable based on what system its in.

My focus has been largely the first two pillars in the context of messaging security. For Symantec that means the Brightmail family of technologies. My team mate Jaap has focused on the second two which fall under our Enterprise Vault related products.

However as you can see from the title of this post I’ve had a slight change of direction in the last few months and been pushed towards a stack of solutions in our security products that include the infamous Symantec Endpoint Protection (a.k.a. SEP). SEP is our desktop and server anti-virus product that is what most of the world probably associate with Symantec and it’s yellow boxes. If you use the twitter search site and search for the keyword “symantec” you’ll get an insight into what a vocal group think of that product. You’ll soon understand why I called it a “nettle”!

The reason I’m now working with it is my main focus, Brightmail, is now included in a bundle called Symantec Multi-tier Protection (SMP, must have acronym for everything in technology). SMP contains amongst other things, SEP for the endpoint, SMS for Exchange/Domino (anti-virus for the mail stores) and Brightmail. It’s designed to give complete coverage for end-to-end protection.

SEP has gained a bad reputation because we essentially rushed it to market and didn’t do adequate testing on all ranges of customer sizes. As a result we killed some of our smaller customers servers (who generally don’t have high-end dedicated machine per application). My challenge is that a bad reputation is quick to gain and doubly hard to shrug off. It also doesn’t help when idiots from PR companies try and replicate “comcastcares” on twitter and offer to help “fix peoples problems”. Just makes us look like we don’t have a clue.

The reason smart people though will realise from my title that “grabbing” a nettle is actually not a bad plan. Brushing up against a nettle will result in a painful rash, but grabbing it quickly results in no pain. Now you see my task: dive in, get knowledgeable as to what our customers want, speak honestly and make it work.