I’m heading up to Vancouver tomorrow for the inaugural board meeting of a startup I recently invested in. It will be the entrepreneur’s first ever board meeting.   It made me think about what I’ve learned about conducting good board meetings.

Donuts by VeganWarrior (Flickr)

1) Bring an informed point of view

Startups can be thought of as a never -ending set of decisions and risks.  It’s a big part of the CEO’s job to anticipate the most important ones, think through a set of options and (importantly) prepare a point of view on the matter.  When faced with a dilemma, don’t just say to the board, “okay, we have this issue and need to make a choice.  What should we do?”

Instead, come prepared with what you think are the possible alternatives and your recommended choice — with supporting data to back it up.   Leverage your board and your advisors to come up with the alternates in the days before the meeting, and of course be open to further investigation or even changing course based on the discussion.

2) Be upfront, open and honest

This may be your first startup, but it won’t be your last.   Listen when your stomach starts telling you something is not going well in the business, or there’s something you need help on.  Be up front about it.  There’s no point to hiding anything or glossing over negatives.

Lay everything out and rally people to help solve.  Taking a “we’re on the same team” type approach goes a long way towards building rapport and support.  It’s helpful to have the people who hold the purse strings on your side, especially when the shit hits the fan.

3) Establish a template and stick to it

Much of the structure (product metrics, finances, hiring updates and so forth) doesn’t change – only the contents do.  The same metrics you use to manage the business should be the same metrics you’ll use for the board presentation.  If you’re spending lots of time just pulling the basic board deck data points and formatting things, it’s a sign that your metrics aren’t automated enough or you’re not looking at the right metrics day to day.

4)  Send the materials out in advance

When your board members have a couple of days in advance to review the basics, then you’ll have more time to spend on the most value-added discussion during the meeting.  If you find yourself awake at 2am the night before the board meeting, try blocking some time out well in advance of the next board meeting to finish your prep early.

5)  Serve food to lift spirits

Studies show that eating certain foods can improve one’s mood.  Enough said.

I probably should have posted this all a few days ago.  I’m really craving donuts right now!

In 2006 when we launched Snapvine’s first viral widget and phone app for teens, it went viral overnight. We were overwhelmed with success within 3 weeks: our servers were swamped with signups – 1 million of them within the first 7 weeks. This was one of those “good problems to have” — so “good” in fact we had to turn off sign ups 25% of the time over those first few weeks. The problem was, our entire team turned into a band of maniacal database tuning, code-optimizing, high scale server junkies.

So my dilemma became:  How do you take a team that’s swamped with work and make them become incredibly customer focused overnight?

Our solution? every day, print out a few hundred new user photo thumbnails and post them on the walls.  As the days passed, the number of photo pages grew, and even if you were an engineer consumed with debugging some MySql indexes, you became intensely curious about the users: real people with faces, smiles.  Who were they?  Why were they signing up?  What did they want to see next?

As a result, everyone pushed for more focus on user stories and learning more about our users and what they wanted to see next. We instituted a weekly standing focus group, sourced from Craigslist by our do-it-all office admin, and watched them use the product and listened to their reactions to our new feature ideas.

Print out your user’s photos and line the walls with them.  I think any startup can use this simple technique to make everyone on the team more user focused. If you don’t capture photos as part of your product, pick some new users every day, email them and ask them to send some in. I promise, it will pay off.

Thanks to Pete Warden, Mark Maunder, Tony Wright, Dave Schappell, Bryan Starbuck, Scott Porad, Galen Ward and Fai Leong for editorial input on this post.

Last Wednesday I hosted a video-link at WhitePages to the Crowdsourcing Meetup that Dolores Labs put on in the Bay Area at the Samasource offices.  Check Justin.tv/crowdflower for a video of the event (coming soon).

First off, THANKS to Michael Toomim for tipping me off to the event and to Lukas and Zack of Dolores Labs for setting up the microphones, webcams and screen sharing on their end.

Secondly, to everyone in Seattle who couldn’t make it but expressed interest — and there were a lot of you — I promise to arrange and host these in the future and to provide more than 12 hours of advanced notice

Here are my notes…

Aaron Koblin is a well known artist who has used crowdsourcing to create works of art.   You may have seen The Sheep Market, a project that used thousands(?) of workers to create 10,000 sheep cartoons.  It was interesting to hear how some of the contributors became angry when he put the sheep for sale, and to think about the IP implications of crowdsourced art. Check out his other projects.

Panos Ipeirotis of NYU gave a talk about his research into bias detection and correction in mTurk worker output.  In short, Panos’ work can help you eliminated work spam in your mTurk systems — very useful.  He has even packaged up his findings into a code lib so others can benefit.   Be certain to check out his blog!

Leila Janah, a social entrepreneur who runs Samasource gave an inspiring talk about their work bringing work from the 1st world to the 3rd via crowdsourcing.  Microwork done in the 3rd world over basic computing infrastructure and SMS can be done well for $1 to $3 per hour, which is 10x what the workers would be making in those areas (and for many can be an alternative to unemployment).   A great quote:  “clearly if you someone can orchestrate a sophisticated Nigerian email scam, then they can do mTurk tasks.”

Sharon Chiarella, who runs the mTurk group at Amazon talked about some of the trends the are seeing on mTurk. 1) more workers coming online from countries around the world.  Currently just under 50% of all workers are based in the US. They are seeing more growth from countries outside the US.  2) mTurk being used for business critical applications such as data cleansing, UGC content management, blog sentiment analysis and translation.  I found it interesting to hear her say that companies using mTurk often keep it secret because it has become a competitive advantage for them.  3) More sophisticated workflows (iterative flows with turkers checking the work of other turkers, or processing along a series of steps).   I have a feeling that the majority of tasks are single-step, but I’m a huge believer in the advantages of iterative turking.  Check out the work being done with TurkIt out of MIT for a sense of what is possible.

It was a great night overall.

Stay tuned! I’m going to take take action to put together a Seattle-hosted Courdsourcing meet up and invite some of the folks in this area who are doing great work with mTurk to present, for example: Nathan McFarland of CastingWords, Dan Weld, professor of Computer Science at UW, Brent Frei from SmartSheet and any one of the many folks here at WhitePages who are doing interesting work with mTurk.  Please contact me if you’re interested or have ideas for speakers or topics.

Back in June of 2006 after having closed a small series A, it was time to move out of our spare rooms, get some basic startup office space and hire a couple of employees so we could move fast and get on with our mission.

One of the best decisions we made at the time was to hire a “Do-It-All Office Admin” as one of our very first hires.  The point was to free up everyone else to focus exclusively on building the business. Basically, we needed someone to tackle all of the “distractions”:  anything that isn’t a direct action related to a core goal.  The list of distractions was growing fast:  find office space, determine what kind of office space we even wanted, get a cheap (used?) fridge, get a laser printer, plan a party (for recruiting purposes, of course), figure out what kind of benefits we should offer and then get something priced out, sweet talk the neighboring office into sharing their wifi connection for a few hours, etc.  All important things but also all things that are incredible time sucks and aren’t going to make or break the success of the company at the early stage.

In the two and half years until we sold the company, we had two successive people fill this role.  Neither had more than a year of professional experience when they started, but both did incredibly well in the role and have moved on to greater success (one was just accepted into an MBA program and interned at BCG and the other is currently in law school full time).

Here is some advice on hiring a Do-It-All-Office-Admin.

Personal characteristics to look for:

• Self-driven, tenacious, energentic – this person will need to be able to take a loose project description and drive it to completion, with little help.
• Eager to gain experience – they may not have experience but they are eager to prove to the world how they can shine.  Startups are great places for these types.
• Smart – because smart people will respond to challenges like “figure out a way to get free pastries from that new bakery downstairs for our next board meeting”
• Trustworthy — this person will invariably have access to sensitive information like cap tables, employee records, bank statements and your email inbox (if you let them)

I could write an entire blog post on how to suss out these characteristics during an interview, but for now the critical things are (a) call multiple references and ask direct, frank questions and (b) give situational interviews and ask the candidate to problem-solve and walk you through how they would execute on example tasks (intentionally vague/challenging example tasks).

I can’t say enough about how important and valuable our Do-It-All-Admins were and how grateful I am for their work.

Here’s a starter JD for reference…

You must:

• Be driven to accomplish a lot and learn a LOT very quickly
• Be smart and have great problem-solving skills
• Be resourceful, upbeat and enjoy getting things done on a startup budget (translation: you must be frugal, scrappy and happy)
• Have web and computing skills, including maybe a little HTML and a good command of MS Office

Example responsibilities:

• Find office space – identify criteria for office space, select real estate agent, work with agent to narrow down to 3 or 4 spaces and arrange visits
• Recruiting – Post jobs online, screen candidates for basic fit, arrange all phone screens and interview days and follow-up with candidates
• New hires – develop a streamlined new hire paperwork process, make sure employee is 100% set up and productive on their first day
• Spreading cheer – be the face of the company to the employees and all visitors, be upbeat always and keep things lively
• Office management – make sure printer ink, paper, soda is in stock, keep office relatively organized, everyday coffee prep
• Independent tasks – do whatever misc tasks are needed with minimal guidance, e.g. “get a used refrigerator here by Friday for less than $250″
• Exec admin – arrange board meetings, do lightweight word/powerpoint/excel prep and whatever else the CEO needs to keep moving quickly

Background:

• You have some professional business experience, and ideally have a college degree
• Experience with accounting, HR or recruiting a plus

About this opportunity:

• Although this is a junior role, you will play a key role at a venture-backed high-tech startup.
• You will report to the CEO
• If you are looking for an exciting, demanding job that provides unique experience and gives you a chance to shine, this is a special opportunity.

I stopped by Evoworx headquarters last night to say congrats to Aaron Goldfeder and Scott Case on reaching the one-year anniversary of their startup, EnergySavvy.com.

On the wall next to feature post-it notes, I noticed the official Evoworx Health Insurance Plan (see photo above).   Very funny!   But this made me think.   Highly accomplished, talented people leave their jobs, take significant pay cuts and invest in building a new company (in this case, one that helps consumers save on energy and therefore the environment) and yet are not able to offer comprehensive health care coverage for their employees.  Why can’t entrepreneurs who sacrifice and invest in the future of the country be given a break for health care coverage?

Most people think of negotiating as something that happens only when major transactions are taking place (buying a car, a new house, forming a business partnership, etc).  That’s a shame, because those situations are rare, and because the other side of the table has more experience, you’re at a significant disadvantage (which could cost you lots of money).

It doesn’t have to be that way though.  Negotiation in a skill, and with more practice you become better.  Why not negotiate everyday things?  The extra practice could be worth a ton.

Try to see the world through this new lens.  The rules are simple (and important):

• must be friendly
• must be ethical
• must obey the law
• …anything goes

The goal is simple:

• gain something if the negotiation succeeds, lose nothing if it doesn’t

Just practicing, and pushing yourself out of your comfort zone is a benefit even if you don’t succeed.  Plus it can be fun to challenge friends to negotiate for things.

Here’s a couple of recent examples:

1)  Driving out of the REI parking lot and really don’t feel like paying the $6 parking fee, so I challenge my friend to negotiate for free parking.  Upside: $6 parking.  Downside:  none!   Winning strategy:  asked for the discount and found a way to relate to the parking attendant on a personal level (my friend and the attendant are both immigrants, so he says “hey you’re an immigrant too, right?  cut me a break”)

2)  In a 7-11 and want a slurpee, but think sugar + ice is a rip off at the price.   Upside: save money.  Downside:  none.  Winning strategy:  my dog was with me and seemed curious about the counter attendant, so I said “I think my dog likes you” before simply asking for a discount.  Result: 50% off slurpee plus a free hot dog for my dog.

3)  DSL service.  Upside:  save money.  Downside:  none.  Winning strategy:  called up my DSL provider and said “Hi, I was just calling because with the economy and everything…um, can I get a discount on my service?  Or else I might switch to another provider”  Without any hesitation, the person on the other line took $5 / month off my bill.   Less than on minute of my time for a $5 / month annuity is a fantastic ROI!

4)  Bought a bike and negotiated the price to come in below the lowest online price I could find, plus had them throw in another $70 worth of gear free to “close” my sale (tire kit, seat bag, water bottle mounts, water bottles).  Arguments used:   I’m advertising to my friends since the water bottles are branded with the store’s name and throwing in the tire kit and bike seat would “close me right now.”

Honestly, I wish I would push myself more to look for everyday negotiation opportunities.

Complaints can be annoying, but when paired with solution ideas are valuable.  Failure by itself is a negative but when it comes with honest learning is the foundation of innovation.  Ideas by themselves can be worthless but when accompanied by follow-through can be worth millions.

Therefore, next time someone brings you any of these things alone, see if you can get the person excited to come up with the positive follow-up.