Category Archives: Business

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From Forbes:

Here’s how it works. Members buy plots of land on Powder Mountain (early lots were rumored to have sold for $1 million a pop), build a home and get access to a private lodge and thousands of acres of skiing, riding, biking and hiking.  Membership to Summit also brings a year-round program of speakers, conferences and concerts. The goal is to create a community of like-minded entrepreneurs who dig the Summit ethos of innovation, art and social impact with some hard partying mixed in.

You had me at skiing. And hiking. And community…

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Here’s a great article on the shift in technology popularity and values from Francisco Dao at PandoDaily:

In San Francisco, one need only look at conference speaker line-ups that often consists of people who haven’t accomplished anything except raising an angel round and amassing Twitter followers to see that we’re doing the same thing [as Hollywood]. The result is we’ve created a culture of tech celebs who, like Paris Hilton, are famous for little or nothing.

Reminds me a bit of what I was talking about with Charlie back in 2010 about those attempting to find success in celebrity.

As Mike Davidson elegantly put it:

If you want to be influential, lead by doing, not by talking, and certainly not by duping. If what you create is really good, other people will talk about it for you.

Is a consultancy also a startup?

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In honor of Denver Startup Week, I’d like to try to answer a question we’ve thought about at Crowd Favorite: are we a startup?

In the most traditional sense: no. Startups, as they’ve come to be known, can typically be seen as small technology-centric companies founded by a handful of individuals to build a produce or service, sometimes for businesses, other times for consumers. Most startups grow quickly, add employees, take on investments, and have some sort of exit planned.

On the other hand, design and development firms (or consultancies) like Crowd Favorite share a lot of traits with startups:

Talent

We hire from the same pool of smart individuals: designers, developers, and even managers. These people typically sit at a computer, work on the web and solve interesting problems.

When hiring a designer, we’re all looking for someone who can create user experiences, solve business problems, and communicate visually. Developers are folks who see technology as a series of moving parts that need to work together to achieve the designed solutions. Managers can take various requirements and goals, turn them into milestones and deliverables, and see the process through.

Technology

We work on the web or, at the least, in the technology space. Designers use the same applications and share the same skills: Photoshop, Illustrator, HTML and CSS, etc. Developers speak many programming languages and often have worked with a handful and can move into others: PHP, Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, Objective C.

Culture

We work hard and like what we do: solving interesting problems with technology. We value freedom to get the job done, we understand the value of research, we appreciate resourcefulness. But we also feel that anything worth doing is worth doing well, and our work reflects that. What we put out into the world is a big reflection of who we are. We provide valuable services and we get paid for it.

Lifestyle

We come to the office to maximize the time we spend with our colleagues or we work remotely in a way that suits everyone, but we don’t clock in. We wear shorts, jeans, slacks, ties, polos, hoodies, t-shirts, sandals, sneakers, slippers. We have ice cream in the freezer and beer in the fridge. A team lunch together to talk about technology is a regular occurrence. We work until we’ve put in a good day’s work and never consider working an 80 hour week.

While startups and design and development consultancies are often working on the same kinds of problems in the same space with the same kinds of people, we’re different in at least a couple of ways:

We don’t typically work all day, every day, including weekends. We have families and outside interests and those are more important than “hustling” to get to launch or investor day. While we love helping a client launch a product, or website, or campaign: we manage reasonable expectations, timelines, and budgets and stick to them without sacrificing our lives.

We also don’t aim for a huge exit, we tend to grow at a steady pace, learn more as technologies and companies evolve, and plan to continue doing the work that looks most interesting to us at any given time.

Was Apple ever a startup? I don’t think so. Is a large agency like Crispin Porter + Bogusky? I wouldn’t say so. Is Crowd Favorite? No. But we’re all working together in an ecosystem that’s no longer an isolated community of designers and developers. This is the new “industry” and the lines between “being” a startup and working “amongst” startups are becoming blurry. The community in Denver know this which is why you see a lot of participants you might not expect: MapQuest, EffectiveUI, SpireMedia, just to name a few.

I look forward to visiting some of our neighbors at the startup crawl later this week.

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Ben Bleikamp, a designer with a very respectable and enviable design career:

I respect founders immensely—I’ve worked for them my entire career. But me not founding a company is not a question of risk, a lack of ideas, or that I don’t want to change the world. I simply value other parts of my career more.

If you find the right group that’s well established and a fun place to be (culture, again) then why isn’t that seen as a success? Why must everyone be entrepreneurs to be successful?

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From Alex MacCaw:

Culture can be hard to define, and it certainly can’t be created with mission statements and performance reviews. However, there are certain steps that founders can take to create an amazing place to work.

I think this is true. Culture evolves by people doing what they do naturally in their given environment. But, thinking about what that environment looks like and how its shaped has come to mind a lot more lately…

I’m not quite sure I follow what happened here, but I think I get it:

The Windows logo is no longer a flag, it’s a window (twisted to an angle) with added prominence to the word mark. It no longer incorporates the multi-color, signature style of Windows and has becomes a single color.

The Microsoft logo, for the company that sells the Windows product, is no longer a plain word mark but has a symbol. The symbol incorporates the four colors from the Windows flag, and the straight-on look of a four-pane window.

If it wasn’t clear before: Microsoft is Windows, and Windows is Microsoft. This is not a new Microsoft, nothing is changing, in fact, they’re only becoming more locked in to the status quo.

Why, contrary to traditional marketing, is the product marketing and the overall company marketing now so intertwined? Microsoft is further limiting their ability to market new products unless its Windows-centric (mobile, desktop, tablet, internet, etc.). I fully expect the Xbox to be renamed Windows Game Box.

Travel Tip: bring an AirPort Express to hotels

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Here’s one of the best things I’ve learned while staying in hotels: bring an Apple AirPort Express wifi base station. I can’t take credit for tip this at all, this is all Alex, but the reason you do this is so you can connect multiple devices through a single access point.

Ideally, you set this access point name and security to be one your devices already know (like the one at your office or house) so you don’t have to go re-enter passwords all over the place. Plus, most paid hotel services just see the one device (AirPort) and charge you once for that connection, not for your iPhone, iPad, and notebook. Yes, I’ve once accidentally charged $14.95/day multiplied by three devices to a hotel room. And finally, it helps if you have more than one person traveling.

It’s a small, lightweight device (hardly bigger than your notebook charger) with easy configuration and a way to save money and hassle while traveling.

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I’m very proud of the team at Crowd Favorite and the great work they did alongside the Simpson College PR team. Everything from the design, to the way the content is managed is exactly the kind of elegant work we’re excited to work on every day. Check out the new site at Simpson.edu.