Banky For President

Why do we wait for days like Thanksgiving and the entire holiday season to reflect on what has impacted us the most? I guess the short answer is that we don’t. We do it everyday but those of us who blog give voice to it today. So to that end, I’m thankful for:

TheThunderbolt: I’m thankful that she’s a writer, a teacher, and she seeks to inspire both herself and others. She crashed into my life and it will never be the same. Ever.

My Mother, Amy Vaughan: This wonderful woman still surprises me at ever turn with her graciousness and compassion. I wanna be more like her when I grow up.

My father, Eddie Vaughan: I haven’t seen this man in years thanks to a terminal disease called Cancer, but I’m thankful that he let me watch him live his life for 13 years. I still strive to become more like him (Not an easy task)

My brothers and sisters, T, Terry, Chris, Ginnie and Johnny: I’m thankful that we have such a close family . . . that we don’t fight, that we are so supportive and that, because I’m the youngest, I get to choose which nursing home that you’ll all end up. Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!!

LightThread crew (Simon, Lisa, Zena and Jonno): For giving me a vehicle and an outlet to make my dreams come true.

NSAU represent (Karen, Paulie, Mary, Sheri, Kiki and Dougie-poo) Some friends may travel different paths, as I have, but I’ll always be thankful for what we shared together and the person it made me today. I’m even thankful for Dougie-poos propensity to expunge gas and his delight in the expunging. It makes me thankful for clean air.

the extraneous: a roof over my head, new experiences, a desire to challenge myself, this blog, my day job and a wonderful extended family both new and old, and that this athiest can feel blessed.

And last but not least, Ringo: A dog really can be Man’s best friend.

more animals

Once you’ve decided to enter the courageous and frightening world of the Start-up, and you’ve surrounded yourself with the right team, you need to know what technologies exist to streamline your collaboration. Working online with your team-members is crucial because today’s entrepreneur is typically balancing family, friends and a day job that’s paying the bills for tomorrow’s dreams. There isn’t a lot of time to meet face-to-face so having technologies that enable online ideation can make a huge difference in your start-up’s maturity. Special thanks to @peterthomas for helping with this post.

So, what technologies exist that can really help your start-up?

Free stuff

37 Signals — 37 signals is almost like Siebel for startups with applications like project management, CRM/Contact Management, chat and a document repository. It is rated highly and perfect for small businesses.

TracTickets — With Trac you can create tickets, assign tasks, and monitor accountability.

Wikis — There are plenty of free wiki services on the Web (Wetpaint and pbwiki to name a few). This should be one of the first pieces of software you start collaborating with. You can start building all the intellectual properties of your business from mission statements, ideas to methods and procedures.

Free Web Conferencing — Try googling “Free Web Conferencing” and you’ll see a plethora of options. Our team recently tried Vyew and, while not incredibly intuitive, we were able to figure out how to share desktops and the ability to do it while talking on our phones made for one of our best meetings to date. When you can’t meet face to face, conferencing over the Web really is the next best thing.

Blogs — having an internal blog that you can password protect is great for carrying the ideation and brainstorming online. Blogspot and Wordpress are easy references for you to set one up.

Prototyping– at creator.zoho.com you can prototype a database application. While you’re there, check out the rest of zoho.com offerings. For html forms, check out wufoo.com

Google Apps — having a gmail account allows for you to use blogger, calendar, google reader but also a place to collaborate with documents too. Don’t have Microsoft Office, Neo or Open office products? Use Google documents and collaborate to your hearts content.

Cheap stuff

Answering Service — services like OneBox allow a small business to set up a 1-800 number, a personalized answering service and to have voicemails translated to email. Services like this can be found for around fifty dollars a month.

Virtual Office — being able to provide a professional address and being able to invite clients to an office setting can set you apart and create an atmosphere of respectability. Leveraging existing office sharing services means having access to a conference room and office space. Depending on where you live, this service can range from 200 – 700 dollars a month.

Amazon Web Services — Amazon provides a scalable platform for building a new application. Pay for only the bandwidth and server capacity you’re using at the time. If you reach a point that dedicated hosting becomes more attractive or you want more control, consider rackspace.

Other reading:

• Homework for the perfect startup
• If I started a company today
• If I started today

What am I missing?

In late October, I took my annual trip to Vegas with friends to hang out and play lots and lots of poker. Traditionally I stay downtown at Binions because its affordable, I love downtown and the old Horseshoe is historic home of poker. It’s always good to see the dealers again like Rick, Joe and Renee and play a little cards.

So I’m sitting down with my buddy, Dougie-poo, to play at the Sunday night 8pm poker tournament and who else sits down at my table but Dennis Phillips, chip leader for the World Series of Poker, which continues play today. What I love about him is that, he devoted his free time to developing a hobby, to have fun, and perfect a game that he loves. And he finds himself at the pinnacle of the game’s premier tournament.

In that tournament, Phillips finished fourth, I finished third when my pocket queens ran into Dougie-poo’s pocket kings and Dougie took the whole ball of wax.

Dennis was as nice and down to earth as he comes across on Television. Playful and cool, it appears he really loves playing poker. Plus the brotha is from Missouri . . . Mad props to the old man showing all the kids how its done.

Bring it home to Missouri, Dennis . . .

** Updated ** Dennis finished third and for his trouble, took home over 4 million dollars.  Nicely done, sir . . .

It’s over!

And though I polled just slightly lower than Ron Paul in the election, I share the happiness most in America feel this morning. It’s finally time to wrest control from the most divisive and ill-equipped president, in the last 100+ years, and begin to steer this ship out of the muck and the mess the current administration has parked us.

Obama ran a very modern campaign.  He embraced the technology of today — social networking apps like my.barackobama and twitter — to run a truly grassroots campaign. And it showed among educated voters, new voters, and minorities. He was able to do what no democrat since Jimmy Carter was able to do — Build a coalition of voters across the various regions of this country to achieve a popular majority(52% vs. 46%).

Can we gauge anything from this?  I think so.  The primary knock on Obama is his experience.  But ask yourself, in a room full of people seated and listening to a speaker, who is the smartest in the room?  The speaker? or the room full of people?  Take note of this passage from his speech at Grant park:

For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime – two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century. Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us. There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after their children fall asleep and wonder how they’ll make the mortgage, or pay their doctor’s bills, or save enough for college. There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created; new schools to build and threats to meet and alliances to repair.

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America – I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you – we as a people will get there. 

We. As a people.

We’ve heard that before haven’t we?  First, for as the framers of our constitution knew, no one man can do this alone.  And isn’t that what we neglected until we were reminded by the capabilities of the Web — the best ideas are crowdsourced. Groundswelled. No longer can we remain passive and allow others to lead. And then second, from Martin Luther King, the night before he was assassinated:

“I may not get there with you, but we as a people will get to the promised land.”

We.Are.The.Leaders.

Obama needs us. America needs us.  Add value.

We can only surmise how this country might have responded if Robert F. Kennedy has lived to achieve the greatest office in the land, but consider what he said in 1961:

“Laws can embody standards; governments can enforce laws — but the final task is not a task for government. It is a task for each and every one of us. Every time we turn our heads the other way when we see the law flouted — when we tolerate what we know to be wrong — when we close our eyes and ears to the corrupt because we are too busy, or too frightened — when we fail to speak up and speak out — we strike a blow against freedom and decency and justice.”

Can we do it?  Yes we can.

Bishop Robert Finn, of the Arch Diocese of Kansas City, reacted like a true christian yesterday by cautioning that if you vote for Obama, you should “give consideration to your eternal salvation.”  No further commentary is necessary.

The midwest is a wonderful place to live.  We have a great quality of life, a lot of smart people, and a low cost of living.  As such, the midwest is a great place to create a startup.

In fact, it might be too good.

There are a lot of good startups in the midwest. Many entrepreneurs are ekeing out a nice living but don’t seem to have much of a desire to do a lot more.  I attended an “un-conference” in Kansas City last week that featured many new media industrialists from the region.  All were proud of their accomplishments, as they should be, but there was a common thread I found troubling.

So few sought to change the world . . . or create the next Google. So few hoped to garner ANY venture capital funding. When asked a panel of Start-up entrepreneurs, “What would you do with 100 million dollars?,” no one offered a response.

In fact, one respondent in the audience voiced an almost “anti-hero” sentiment that to achieve multi-million dollar status is to practically sell-out one’s ideals.  Astonishingly, altruism seems to be the primary motivator of todays technical founders, well ahead of money, which is probably near the bottom of the values held dear, along with voting republican or coding static HTML.

Are all the big dreamers on either coast?  Why is it that its typical for those in Silicon Valley to dream big and hope for owning Lamborghinis and dating supermodels, while those in the donut hole of the U.S. just hope to pay the rent?  Can’t we hope to add value to the lives of those traversing the Web AND walk around with pockets full of “phat lewt?”

Have we relegated our dreams to sitting at the kids table of the biggest venture capital opportunity of our lives? Or worse yet, are we the lap dogs of the Internet, seeking to live off the table scraps of what life seeks to offer us?

If we REALLY seek to create a silicon prairie in the middle of this country, we need to be more than we are.  We need to demand more . . . of ourselves and each other.

Wake up.