Tom Krieglstein

Hindsight - 08/31/10 - Entrepreneurs Roundtable

The Entrepreneurs Roundtable brings together one guest speaker who talks for a few minutes and then opens the mic to four startups to pitch their idea and receive feedback from both the guest speaker and the audience. This was my third time attending. I always gain value from the guest speaker and critiquing the various pitches, but the real value for me actually comes during the networking time before and after the scheduled events. I find myself honing in, and getting more comfortable, at pitching who we are, what we do, how we do it, and why we do it. It's surprisingly not easy to give a compelling elevator pitch. For us it probably stems from a mix of the complexity of the problem we set out to solve and our vague marketing strategy. I'm far from a home run pitch. It's more like a single right now because at least within a few sentences, I can get the other person interested enough to want to talk more. 

It's funny how I still get nervous though. After speaking so many times to audiences around the country, and even the world, you'd think I would be a master of coming up with something amazing on the spot and be great at delivery. Not true. The more experience points I have under my belt, the better I get at something though. Three down, plenty more to go...

Side Note - The guest speaker, John Frankel of ff Asset Management, talked about his excitement for a company they funded called Mogotix. Funny thing about Mogotix is its co-founder is Scott Thorpe, who was our main Red Rover developer for several years. Great to see good fortune come his way and John singing his praises all the way on the other side of the county.

AwardWallet's Creative Pricing with Motivations

AwardWallet is the online app that just keeps getting better. First it solved a real pain of mine by organizing all my travel reward points into one place. Now they've impressed me again with their creative pricing structure.

Naming your own price for a product or service isn't new, but the second page of putting a little friendly competition and ranking into the mix is what is interesting. I'd love to see some A/B testing to see if people pay more by including page 2. I did.

Twitter As A Free Campus, Group Text Messaging Provider (Updated)

In May 2009 I wrote a post on how to turn Twitter into a free SMS alert system for your campus. Back then, the major hang up was people had to have a Twitter account for it to work. With student adoption of Twitter hovering pretty low at colleges, this was a problem.

Last week Twitter recognized the issue and introduced an updated tool called Fast Follow.

"The mobile team here at Twitter has rolled out a new feature called Fast Follow, and its genius lies in its simplicity: text “follow [account]” to 40404 (Twitter’s U.S. shortcode) and you’ll immediately start getting that account’s tweets via SMS—without ever signing up for Twitter."

Eric Stoller, writer for Inside Higher Ed, reported on Fast Follow and how it could be integrated into the campus culture.

"You could place your school's admissions Twitter account name and the Twitter SMS number on your marketing collateral. A school could even have multiple Twitter accounts that could then be included on strategic mailings or promotional microsites. Campaign tracking would be a snap! Prospective students do not have to be on Twitter to use Fast Follow."

Enterprise SMS tools will have a hard time justifying large price tags when competing against...free. I suspect an advantage they will have is back end assessment data. Though, knowing Twitter's history of openness, might be provided by a third party tool soon.

Curious to know if anyone has tried mass, or even departmental adoption of Fast Follow at their campus?

Hindsight - 08/30/10 - Diaper Change

My journey towards fatherhood continued on this morning when Noah informed me that he had "dropped the kids off" in his diaper. No one else was around, so it was time for me to change a diaper on my own. I asked Noah (2 1/2) to help me as I'd never done it before. He held my hand and led me into his changing room, showed me which diapers were his verses his sister's, then laid down waiting for me to do the rest.

Days earlier, Annie mentioned to me 'back to front' for boys and 'front to back' for girls. With one hand I held his feet in the air, with the other hand I grabbed some wet-naps and began wiping back-to-front. He sure made a mess in his pants, but slowly everything returned back to a state of clean.

Last step was putting on the new diaper. I asked him which side was for his butt (again I'd never done this before). He pointed to a side, so I laid it down and strapped him in. All done!

A couple hours later, I'm sitting on the couch when I hear Annie ask from the other room, "Who put Noah's diaper on backwards?"

What A CEO Does [QUOTE]

"A CEO does only three things. Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders. Recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company. Makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank."

- Via Fred Wilson's Blog

Hindsight 08/29/10 - Being an Uncle

Stay tuned Look below for photos of our newest art collection of enlarged naked body part images that Annie snagged from a Pittsburgh favorite: Construction Junction. Their motto, "Has Old Stuff."

We're winding down our time here in the Pitt and having spent the last two weekends playing with my niece and nephews in San Francisco and Pittsburgh, it's no lie, babies are A LOT of work. Being an Uncle is fun though. I get to pop in for a little while and play lots of games, but when it comes to diapers, crying, feeding, more diapers, more crying, bath time, feeding, and more diapers, the parents take over. I suspect they don't even realize how much more work they do because they are used to it, but it sure is a lot more work. I can easily see how people strongly consider not having babies.

On a final cuteness note - Evabelle fell asleep on me today while I was humming her a tune. Dopamine released :-)

HIndsight 08/28/10 - Noah Love

My nephew, Noah, warmed up to me quickly today as we played with cars and planes. It reminded me of the countless hours me and my brother, Daniel, would stage elaborate action figure battles on our living room floor. Kids' imaginations are amazing. A car and a plane can turn into a 45 minute adventure.

 

At 2 1/2 Noah's very responsive to what you say and understands about 80% of it. Though there's still a bit of deciphering his slurred sentences.

 

Noah does seem a bit confused about calling me 'Thomas' or 'Uncle Mas,' I prefer Uncle Mas, so I'm pushing him in that direction and pointing to Thomas the Train Engine every time he says Thomas.

 

Towards the end of the night, he curled up on my lap and we watched old school Mickey together. It's not something you can get on TV any more, so we watched several episodes off of Youtube on my iPhone. I also showed him how to press a few buttons so he could advance to the next episode on his own. It's amazing to see how quickly he picked up such an advanced technology like an iPhone so naturally. My parents are still figuring out theirs :-/

 

And so ends 08/28/10

Brooklyn Grocery Store Name Fail [IMAGE]

Hindsight - 08/27/10 - Like

Annie and I bussed from NYC to Pittsburgh today with the popular bus company, Megabus. We left at 7am and arrived at 3:30pm. Round trip tickets can cost as little as $3. Crazy cheap, but what's even more amazing is every double decker bus is equipped with wifi and outlets for each seat. There's also plenty of leg room between the rows. Though it takes, all said and done, twice as long as flying, the ability to work the whole time with wifi easily makes it worth it. Thought the wifi wasn't perfect as it rapidly dropped in quality in rural areas.

We're spending the weekend with Annie's sister (Amy), brother-in-law (Aaron), and their two little ones, so there's sure to be plenty of pictures to post afterwards.

Before I close out the day, I noticed I'm starting to say the word "like" a lot as a filler in my sentences. I don't know where it came from, but now, like a weed, am trying to  'weed' it out and get back to not sounding like a teenage girl.

Hindsight - 08/26/10 - Growing The Team & Weddings

Having only one day "in the office" before I head out again tomorrow automatically sets up some challenges as to what to focus on. The fires in the kitchen tend to need the most immediate attention. So I plowed through my emails/tasks and knocked out everything marked with "high priority, high urgency." This is a common pattern after a few days of traveling, stuff just builds up. Good news, I was quickly able to bring my inbox back down to zero in minimal time.

With a growing team, I opted to spend the rest of my time focused on them. I set Megan up with taking on the larger role of customer care by defining a map of what our current customer care looks like with some open questions for her to figure out.

Megan and I then met to talk about renewing her contract and reviewing her role within Red Rover. She's a wonderful asset to us and so much of it was verbally acknowledging the great work she is doing as well as giving her a little pay bump.

We also turned the tables by asking her to give us a review of the company. Specifically we asked her to define what she thinks the principles of the company are, what we are doing that she likes, and what we can improve on. Having the newest members of a team review the company gives as close to an outside objective observer on the inner workings of the company as you can get.

I ended my day with a trip to Pivotal Labs in Tri Beca to meet the new programmers working on Red Rover as well as have dinner with Kevin to talk about several things. Every time Kevin and I meet, we have a fairly long list of topics to cover, but time never seems to be our friend as we plow through several pieces quickly to keep time integrity with other appointments. We both know the importance of prioritizing the "high priority, low urgency" tasks, but haven't put it into practice lately. We'll get better.

Lastly, on a totally unrelated note, my brother (Daniel) called last night to announce that he and his girlfriend (Andrea) were getting married today! It's kinda sorta a 9 year in the making non-pregnancy related shotgun wedding. It makes total sense for health and financial reasons, so Annie and I popped out the shot glasses and toasted them with some VeeV. It sounds like there will probably be a more official gathering soon to celebrate their nuptials, so I'll hold my emotional congrats till then. But for now, CHEERS!

And so ends 08/26/10