Doing Words

My new Northern Beaches co-working location

// August 8th, 2011 // 0 Comments // Me, My life, My work, Other news

Luck makes itself sometimes, don’t you think? I’d just moved up to Newport on Sydney’s Northern Beaches with my wife and son, looking for the sea-change lifestyle and figuring we’d work out career and work once we’d made the move. Then luck made itself, and I met Simon and Karen from NewportNet.

First, the background: as a mentor and investor in tech startups, there’s only so much time I need to spend face-to-face with people, and since clients are as likely to be in Lausanne, New York or San Jose as Sydney, I don’t really need to maintain a city office, or spend more than a day a week in the city if I plan ahead.

But working from home has drawbacks for such a distractable guy. My productivity plunges if I get distracted by hanging out the washing and finishing the newspaper, and I miss the chance to bounce off other creative, entrepreneurial people.

This is how I'm often distracted: by kayaking

I was keen to try and solve these two problems, and was investigating establishing my own co-working space in the neighbourhood if need be.

One phone call and an hour later, I was being given a guided tour of the creative co-working space…

The day after we moved house, I was at ZUBI Bar, one of the best locations in Newport, an extremely funky and fun coffee shop on the main strip. Big, charismatic South African Steve and his team of loud, cheerful, playful baristas and waitpeople are happy to share their Wi-Fi connection if you order a meal.

I told Steve about how I was considering starting a co-working space. Steve knew somebody I had to talk to: “Simon Bond, a guy up the street who’s got a space with really fast internet access and a few spare desks”. Sounded intriguing!

Got Simon’s contact details? No, but Steve thought the owner of the local Apple reseller, Mac&Me could help, so I went looking for Margot. She  had Simon’s number because she was also setting up a training room and Apple service centre in Simon’s space.

One phone call and an hour later, I was being given a guided tour of the creative co-working space, NewportNet.com.au from Simon and his wife, Karen. I’d gone from worrying about finding someplace to work to finding the perfect workplace in an afternoon.

ZUBI Bar, like the best of Surry Hills transported to the Northern Beaches

Thanks to St George Bank opening a branch downstairs, this brand-new building has high capacity optical fibre all the way from Newport back down to Sydney. When stockbroker Simon was looking for office space to relocate his busy broking business, he happened across the developer at [address] and discovered that much of this optical fibre cabling was sitting un-utilised.

Simon’s connections run far and wide, including senior management at Internode, the Adelaide-based internet service provider. Simon knew just the people to help him put in the hardware required to utilise all that unused high-speed bandwidth.

Simon needed some high-speed, reliable internet access for his broking firm: if Internode could install and configure the necessary internet plumbing, could he build the Northern Beaches’ first high-speed internet access point for small creative entrepeneurs? Would Simon Hackett of Internode back that idea with some technical people and hardware? The answer was a resounding yes.

He’s a bit of a visionary, is our Simon, and he and his wife Karen have an admirable vision for the Newport business community: “build it and they will come”. That is, create a bright, open, collaborative business environment for the creative entrepreneurs of the Northern Beaches, give them access to the services they needed, make it affordable and too good to refuse, and they will come.

That certainly appears to be the case so far at NewportNet, with video production company Stem Media and Mac training and retail business Mac&Me joining me as anchor tenants in the new space.

The entry to NewportNet

As well as high-speed internet access (currently 10Mbps up and 10Mbps down, with both Wi-Fi and Ethernet available throughout) the premises includes elevator access, secure car park, meeting room, kitchen, bathroom and several lockable offices about 4m x 4m. All the desks are IKEA and the chairs are Herman Miller.

One of the offices

Downstairs you’re a block or two from banks, chemist, post office, supermarket, organic produce market, several great restaurants and cafes, and the wonderful ZUBI Bar.

A typical desk (in this case, mine)

Space in NewportNet is available by the desk or by the office, by the day, week, month or longer commitment.

Meeting room

If you’re on Sydney’s Northern Beaches and you’d like to share a workspace with other professionals in a casual and collaborative environment, get more details at NewportNet.com.au  au, follow us on Twitter as @NewportNetAU or drop in at Office 1, 341 Barrenjoey Rd, Newport Beach 2106 (Google Map)

By the way, if you’re lower down the Northern Beaches, I’d recommend you check out Co-Worka in Dee Why.

The team from Mac&Me in their training space

Bugherd adds 500Startups to investor roster

// June 10th, 2011 // 0 Comments // Funding, My work, software, Startup

I’ve been working with Melbourne web startup founders Alan Downie and Matt Milosavljevic of Bugherd since they were accepted into the Startmate startup incubator program, in which I’ve been an investor and mentor. Bugherd graduated from the mentoring program with flying colours, securing additional investment backing from Startmate, and other investors, including me.

Bugherd experienced a brief outage early Friday morning AEST which apparently was unrelated to the fact that they’d been mentioned in the morning’s US tech press including TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb and AllThingsD.

Some of the coverage on the investment announcement

It wasn’t news to me exactly, since there’s been talks with the 500Startups team since Alan and Matt pitched in the 500Startups Mountain View office with the Startmate crew back in April, but it was great to be able to talk about the deal finally, and especially gratifying to be mentioned alongside some other really promising startups.

Alan and Matt will be over in Mountain View in July and August, for demo days with the 500startups team and other meetings. But Bugherd’s not attending for the full incubator program because it’s further along in its journey towards hugeness.

500Startups’ decision to invest means they’re excited in the potential of the product and the company, particularly when it comes to delivering a service all early-stage web startups need: a great issue tracking tool. Interested enough that being on the other side of the Pacific isn’t too far away, even. Hope we can get Dave McClure and Christine Tsai out here soon to visit and meet some of the other great people in the startup community here.

I’ll keep track of any further coverage of the announcement at http://bit.ly/500startupsinvestsinbugherd

Try Bugherd now if you need the world’s simplest bug and issue tracker. I have it on good authority the free beta period is about to close, but beta users will get a big discount when pricing is announced in the near future.

Social media guidelines: procedures

// May 26th, 2011 // 0 Comments // My work, Social Media, TEDxSydney

Post 2 in a series about my work as social media director for TEDxSydney.com, this one about how to do the actual work. Hope it helps you craft your own social media procedures.

Has someone already tweeted this?

We share official TEDxSydney Twitter and Facebook access and it would look dumb if we tweeted, say, a housekeeping announcement more than once. So, when tweeting/FBing from the official TEDxSydney account, check the tweet/FB stream on the profile page first to make sure your information hasn’t already been tweeted, and if you think it’s necessary, also check with other frequent users of the account first to make sure they haven’t already tweeted/FB’d it.

Personal account versus official TEDxSydney account

It’s fine to tweet or FB about TEDxSydney from your personal account — please do. But please remember to do it from your own perspective, not from TEDxSydney’s perspective. Similarly, when communicating from the official TEDxSydney account, try to remember to do so from the perspective of TEDxSydney, not your personal perspective. For example:

@bigyahu Just bumped into the most interesting artist while in the queue for coffee at TEDxSydney (personal perspective)
@TEDxSydney morning tea is now served in the foyer. One brownie per person, please! (TEDxSydney perspective)

Use your initials on Twitter

It might make TEDxSydney less like the impersonal, elitist organisation we’re sometimes accused of being if we inject a little personality into our tweeting, but as we all have different personalities, it will help if we also indicate who’s tweeting from the @TEDxSydney account. Use your initials, prefaced with a carat (“^AJ”) to indicate your identity.

However, being exciting, engaging and informative is more important than clarifying your identity, so if you need more characters from your tweet to get your point across, please omit your initials.

Use an URL shortener with tracking

Later we can come back and measure how many people clicked on the links we’ve tweeted/FB’d to our followers, so we can learn how to do this even better over time. But we can only measure this if you use an URL shortener with tracking built-in. Bit.ly is a great service for this.

Social media guidelines: overview from TEDxSydney

// May 26th, 2011 // 0 Comments // My work, Social Media, TEDxSydney

This Saturday 28 May I’ll be Social Media Director for TEDxSydney, which is developing into one of the best-known TEDx events in the world. (How big is the TEDx movement? There are 12 TEDx events happening all around the world on 28 May!) With a small volunteer we’ll be using social media tools — primarily Twitter, Facebook, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Instagram — to help the organisers, speakers, venue audience and online audience connect, enrich their experience, and share.

TEDx is about sharing, so here’s some excerpts from the guidelines we’re using, which I’ll chunk up into several blog posts for easier digestion. Hope you find them useful when planning your own social media strategy.

Why are we using social media?

• Extend and enrich our relationships with our community;
• Encourage interaction and exchange between community members;
• Feedback channel, customer satisfaction barometer;
• News and information distribution; and
• Brand reinforcement

When representing our organisation online, be:

• Informative
• Engaging
• Exciting
• Courteous
• Witty
• Humble
• Accurate
• Timely

Remember

• We have our brand (and those of our partners, sponsors, customers and suppliers) to protect
• Nothing is ever truly deleted from the web

Joining Pollenizer Ventures: Australia’s newest tech seed fund

// December 18th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Funding, Industry, My work, Startup

Mick Liubinskas at Pollenizer is “Mr Focus” — much of the value he brings to clients is his ability to create and maintain laser-like focus; on the problem a startup needs to solve, on finding customers, on raising capital, on recruiting the right team.

Me? I’m more “Mr Shutterspeed”, “Mr Aperture”… basically, anything but “Mr Focus”. I wield my firehose-like lack-of-focus on many projects, many products, many problems and many ideas. Not all of them at once, either, it’s more of a wild spray across from the first to the last and back again.  Sometimes this frustrates me, I know it can frustrate Mick when we work on something together. But it’s who I’ve always been and I’m making progress, really I am.

But enough about me, let’s talk about what I’ve been doing lately…

Earlier this year I snuck in as one of the mentor/investors participating in the early-stage tech startup seed fund Startmate.com.au but, since I’m Mr Shutterspeed, how could I possibly stop at just one early-stage tech startup seed fund? So now I’m delighted to say I’m also a mentor/investor in Pollenizer’s new Pollenizer Ventures fund (no separate website for it but here’s Pollenizer’s announcement).

The $500k seed fund is made up of some of Australia’s most experienced technology veterans including:

Scott Farquhar, Atlassian
Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian
Matt Macfarlane
Stuart Richardson, Adventure Capital
Adrian Vanzyl, Adventure Capital
Matt Dickinson, Growth Angel
David Cooper, Deloitte
Mark Greig via Elevation Capital
Adam Broadway
Rob Antulov & Nick Gonios via 3eep Ventures
Chris Hitchen, Getprice.com.au
Domenic Carosa, Dominet Digital
Phaedon Stough, Mitchell Lake
Tony Faure

…and yours truly, Mr Shutterspeed.

Whereas Startmate is a seed fund for technical founders looking for business advice, Pollenizer Ventures is a seed fund for business founders looking for technical advice, so the two ventures are quite different and compliment each other nicely. After all, how else could Mr Focus also be involved in both funds?

Social media for TEDxSydney

// December 17th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Issues, My work, TEDxSydney

TEDxSydney 2010 was Sydney’s first direct experience of TED, the innovation festival phenomenon. Now TEDxSydney is back for its second year, scheduled for May 28, 2011 at Redern’s Carriageworks complex.

TED’s reputation has grown partly thanks to an open and engaging approach to sharing ideas with the internet community. TEDx is an endeavour designed to spread TED even further and give people not just the chance to attend a mini-TED event, but to plan and host their own TED-like conference, reflecting the spirit and purpose of TED while addressing their own local cultural values and issues.

I was fortunate enough to attend TEDxSydney 2010, and it blew my socks off — the calibre and the scale of the event went far beyond my expectations, encompassing science, politics, gender and sexuality, design, art, music, indigenous culture and more. Although auditorium space was limited, TEDxSydney included a second stage outside the auditorium with live crosses, vox pops and post-presentation interviews with speakers, as well as an active Twitter stream. For a first effort from the organisers it was hugely impressive. You can still watch the presentations, available on YouTube.

Now I’m utterly stoked to post that I’ll be a member of TEDxSydney 2011′s all-volunteer organising committee, helping as Social Media Director.

I’ll be working on helping people who can’t attend TEDxSydney get the most out of the live and archived content we’ll be publishing, helping people interact with each other and the speakers, and using social media to learn about what people like/don’t like about TEDxSydney 2011.

If you’ve got thoughts about that, please let me know, follow @TEDxSydney on Twitter and join the Facebook Page.

Here’s one of my favourite sessions from last year, featuring Michael Kirby on the separation of Church and State.

Startmate seeks startups: apply now!

// October 16th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Industry, Me, My work, Startup

Are you a technically-focused startup founder looking for a little funding and a lot of advice to help you get to that crucial point of a Minimum Viable Product and then on to an introduction to investors in Australia and Silicon Valley? Startmate.com.au wants you (or someone just like you).

Startmate is a new early-stage startup seed fund initiated by Niki Scevak. I’m an investor and mentor in the program, and there’s many more impressive names than mine on the roster.

Our first program will fund five startups and begin in January, 2011 in Sydney. We’ll spend three months helping you launch your company and win your first customers.

Applications are open now and interest has been very strong so far, so please do your best work and give us all you’ve got.

Drop me a tweet if you have any questions. They better be good ones…

Startmate: Australia gets a new kind of startup capital

// August 19th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Industry, My work, Startup

I’m part of a new technology venture launching today at Sydney’s Tech23 conference. I’m one of many startup founders who’ve bemoaned the lack of Y-Combinator-style investment in Australia, so when Niki Scevak asked if I’d like to get involved in something similar (with tweaks for the local market) and told me how he’d already done the bulk of the difficult strategic thinking, I was keen to get on-board.

Startmate wants to help technically-focused founders get started, with a small amount of capital, advice and a mission to Silicon Valley.

Startmate is a pool of funds and a roster of mentors who’ve all built hands-on successful web startups that began in Australia. We’ve been where you’re going and most of us are still on the journey, so we think we bring some useful perspective and experience to the challenges of getting an Australian tech startup up-and-running.

Our first program will fund five startups and begin in January, 2011 in Sydney. We’ll spend three months helping you launch your company and win your first customers.

Startmate is a bit different because:

Interviewed on E-Marketing Insights podcast

// August 2nd, 2010 // 0 Comments // As featured in..., Content, Industry, My work, platform, Social Media

This week I was interviewed by Owen of the E-Marketing Insights Podcast. Listen in for a little background history of Doing Words, as well as my perspective on what happened in the early days internet content publishing, how the Web 1.0 bubble grew and burst, why social media has changed the content publishing industry irrevocably, the continuing democratisation of content, and which brands I believe are best-equipped to succeed in future content markets.

Surgeon-General’s Warning: I hadn’t taken my brevity medication before the interview so you may find I rattle on for quite some time.

You know what’s great about this podcast episode? It’s only episode four of a brand-new podcast. It was recorded on a portable digital recorder, in my car, and the total post-production probably took Owen only an hour, from importing, editing and through to hosting on Soundcloud.

Despite the market-dominating power of iTunes and News Corporation and Facebook, more unique new content is being published every year by the people who would have been considered “the audience” twenty years ago.

Check out Owen’s E-Marketing Insights podcast, it’s early days yet but shows great promise, and that’s the best kind of content there is.

Some thoughts on product management

// July 18th, 2010 // 0 Comments // My work, Products

Just realised I never shared this presentation I gave at product management consultancy Brainmates. It was a while ago but many of the points I made are as valid (or invalid) now as they were then, including:

• Product management is mostly about translation
• Managing product development teams is easier if you can rephrase business requirements as interesting, challenging puzzles
• Good product managers are top-level guys, but with a detailed subfloor

Hmmm… some of that may make more sense if you view the presentation below. Let me know what you think…