I was talking to Chris Casey at last night’s NGP happy hour about the fact that Meetup will start to charge a monthly fee for their services—services which facilitate the creation and management of groups and their meetings online. In the world of political campaigns where my company has expertise, Meetup has become a fairly common addition to political websites. But the new fees have already produced controversy and will apparently move many people away from the product and hasten the development and adoption of alternatives.
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Robin Hood was a Democrat
Posted by
Political Mammal
in My personal history, Personal, Politics, Values
When I was a kid, I read and reread the adventures of Robin Hood and his merry men. I knew every detail about quarterstaffs and longbows and Will Stutely, Will Scarlet, Little John, and Guy of Gisbourne. In third grade, I wore a green shirt and green pants to school day after day because I knew that Robin Hood and his merry men preferred “Lincoln green.” I read different retellings of the stories and came to strong opinions about which were the correct versions.
As I become more comfortable with writing online, I am tempted to write about things that have higher stakes for me, for my family, or for my company. So this post is to help me consider what I should not write about—a quick exploration for my own purposes about the proper boundaries should be for public writing by the owner of a company.
Over a year ago now, NGP Software, Inc., purchased its second foosball table, a very nice Tornado Cyclone II. We retired our earlier $200 Sears model after a serviceable but unimpressive career.
Last night I went to see Michael Gerber, author of the E-Myth series of books, talk about small business. In Gerber’s view, there are three business roles: technician, manager, and entrepreneur. According to Gerber, most people who start businesses are not entrepreneurs—they are “technicians suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure.” A technician looking for independence builds the business around his skills and immediately goes to work. This, Gerber says, is just a job (a job working for a crazy boss). An entrepreneur, in contrast, makes a business that can work without him and creates real independence.
Self-promotion and marketing: black and white -- or color
Posted by
Political Mammal
in Entrepreneurship, Personal, Values
There is in me something highly resistant to self-promotion and marketing. For years, I have been comfortable—to a fault—with anonymity for myself and with a low profile for my company. It took me years to move from a plain black and white business card to one that had two colors. Most of my company’s business proposals have been simple one page black and white letters. The user-interface for our software and the format of our software manuals have been as unflashy and monochromatic as possible. We have not produced fancy marketing material to sell our products and services. I do not wear a suit and tie to a demonstration. In somewhat the same vein, my humor tends toward self-deprecation. I have wanted success to come from the substance of our work, not from our presentation skills. And it has.
On perfect weather days, such as we have had of late, I want to be outside, doing something athletic or active. As a boy, my best days were outdoors: playing soccer, basketball, catch, touch football, softball, volleyball, tag, whiffle-ball, ultimate, box-ball, ten-step, and other games made up on the spot.
NGP Milestone: Incorporation, January 1997
Posted by
Political Mammal
in Company history, Entrepreneurship, My personal history
I just returned from a NGP happy hour at Chadwick’s in Friendship Heights (it is April 7th, 2005 , my half birthday, but no one noticed). I felt proud as I looked across a series of tables packed with attractive and energetic employees who were clearly enjoying each others’ friendship. I thought back to the month when I first incorporated the business and how little I foresaw—or aimed intentionally for—in what has transpired.
In the spring of 1984, when I was a senior at Boulder High School, I interned for a short while at the Westminster, Colorado district office of then-Congressman Timothy E. Wirth. I still have a letter from July 2nd of that year—on Congress of the United States stationery (recycled paper, no less)—thanking me for “being so much help to Jickie and my staff.”
Most books on business have one main idea that can be absorbed pretty quickly. I have just scanned through two books on business competition and they both fit that characterization: Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant and Hardball : Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win. I reacted very positively to the first, and pretty negatively to the second.
I have learned that “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai,” a cult classic, is an acquired taste. I acquired it when a college roommate quoted from it occasionally. But You have to love a movie where: the Defense Department is queried about “the possibility of war in the eighth dimension, Mr. Secretary?”; the President of the United States sputters: “I, uh... I don't know what to say. Lectroids? Planet Ten? Nuclear? Extortion? A girl named John?” and contends with “Declaration of War - the Short Form”
I guess I am a sucker for a “Darryl versus Goliath” story. Otherwise it is hard to explain exactly why I am such an abiding fan of the Australian comedy “The Castle.” Maybe it is because it is a gently political movie, a funny one, where you root for the working class heroes against the powers-that-be. Maybe it’s just the vibe of the thing.
As a Democratic partisan, candidate selection and primary politics fascinates me—how to recruit and nominate the best candidates for office; whether to aim for the apparently strongest general election candidate, or an appealing outsider, or the most ideologically compatible; whether a vigorous primary is a good thing for democracy or a costly mess to be avoided. The calculus for picking the right candidate is complicated, includes many factors, and is subject to contentious argument and should often simply be put in the hands of the voters.
On March 21st, NGP Software, Inc. had a blast bidding for the first-ever eBay auction for banner ad space. We won, and you can see our ad on PoliticsOnline’s upcoming April Newsletters.
It is rare that I am an unabashed fan of anything. But the Daily Show with Jon Stewart is a gem that makes my purchase of TiVo worthwhile. I set that ever-alert machine to snag every episode for me. Then, at my convenience, I can indulge myself on a helping of skewered hypocrisy and exposed idiocy. Each day has something that makes me celebrate wit; the delivery, intonation, and genius for cutting through bullshit are rarely off key and often perfect pitch.
In early 1997, I had recently moved to Washington, DC and incorporated NGP Software, Inc. I was looking around for work for my one-person firm that might help Democrats win elections. I had a degree in computer science and some professional programming experience; I was working on a doctorate in Political Science; and I had designed and built—for other companies—two pieces of political software that were fairly successful in the early 1990s. I had some ambitious ideas about statistics, political mapping, data management, and high-level political analysis that I wanted to pursue.
In late December of 1999, I got an urgent call from a staff member on the Hillary Clinton for Senate campaign. She reported that the Clinton campaign was having major problems with the database they were using, Aristotle Campaign Manager. She told me that they had an FEC report due the next month—January—and that they were concerned about filing it properly because of those problems. She told me that Aristotle had sent a series of technicians to their DC office, but none of them had succeeded in fixing the campaign’s database issues. The staff member, who was the campaign’s compliance director, was very calm and serious. She wanted to know if we could possibly convert their data to our system in time for the filing and whether we were confident we could help them.
The strategic aspect of business consists in having a long-term vision, and pursuing that vision, regardless of how formally it is documented. This post is about something different: tactical decisions that seek to coordinate client and project acquisition with company capacity. I have always juggled two concerns: first, whether there is enough work for us to do; and second, whether there is too much. I contend simultaneously with both of those questions nearly every day.
You can usually tell very quickly whether a client will be a good partner with whom to work. Small things are good indicators: billing is one example. If you submit a clear, honest and straightforward invoice to a client for a job well done, most will pay it promptly and with appreciation for your efforts. Some clients, however, will take forever to pay it, or contest you unreasonably about it.
Doing new things, particularly activities or undertakings that you have avoided for psychological reasons, takes courage. What is interesting to me is how many obstacles seem large and imposing when they are in front of you but turn out to have been quite modest in size and surprisingly easy to surmount after you have passed them by.
It is hard for me to break my routine and take a vacation. I do not know how I got this way. During my first years of self-employment the only time I ended up taking off was a single week in the summer with the family in Vermont or occasional brief visits to see family.
As a junior in high school I attended Colorado Boys’ State, a weeklong citizenship program run by the American Legion. The Legion selects hundreds of boys from across the state and brings them together to build a mock government complete with elections for various offices. The idea is to instruct the participants about the structure of government and the glory of American democracy.
Bloggers, journalists, political scientists, and political practitioners need to stop disparaging each other’s work and learn about the strengths and expertise of others in the reporting and analysis of politics in the United States.
I spent two high school summers, 1982 and 1983, as a computer programming aide/instructor and camp counselor at the Rocky Mountain Computer Camps in Wild Basin, Colorado. I had always spent summers with my family in Vermont and I missed that, but instead I got paid to have fun, hike, teach, and hang out with a bunch of kids and other counselors and teachers in a beautiful national park setting. It was an extraordinarily gentle transition toward working life and a great experience
I just read an brief article on corporate CEO blogging. Apparently the new corporate blogs offer mostly PR. No surprise there. (I do know that there are some terrific blogs sprouting up all over, written by experts within companies.) As the now blogging owner of a political technology company, I am not interested in writing corporate PR crap.
We will have several score visitors at our company today -- in a few hours -- so I should be sleeping, rather than up in the middle of the night.
I own two pieces of “found metal” sculpture by the same artist, Bill Heise. He made both objects from a variety of rusted metal parts. One is a more than seven-foot-tall iron man who bears a sword and shield and is called Don Quixote. He stands in the corner of our dining room. The other is an ingeniously caped and spikily winged spirit figure, also iron. As a result of overzealous baby-proofing, that one sits outside my office at work.
Joe Trippi re-launched his idea of a $100 "revolution" at the Politics Online conference last Friday March 11. He plans to establish a website where donors can pledge $100 to the first Democratic candidate who promises to accept no more than $100 from any single donor. I was present at the conference to speak on the less glamorous topic of integrating political campaign databases, about which my firm knows a great deal.
Came home at 9:00 pm tonight from a meeting, hoping to catch a glimpse of my kid (two years eight months) before she went to sleep. I was sad when Connie cracked the bedroom door and whispered “Shhhhh, your daughter’s asleep.” I peeked in the door – and there was suddenly a commotion of giggling -- they had tricked me. Ella was still up, excited to see me; so cute, so much fun.
Nobody has ever accused me of being ordinary or conventional, but I try to cultivate some deliberate idiosyncrasies so that I have something to talk about when the conversation flags. For instance, I collect potato chip bags.