I spend a lot of time on my computer and using tons of software. And there are certain software features that make me smile and some that make me grumble bad words (ask Dan who sits a few feet away from me in the office). Here are my current poster children for a terrible flaw and a delightful feature.

Grrrr…. The Annoying Flaw

I usually try not to negatively comment on irritating features. I’ve been in the software business for many years and I have been associated with my fair share of poorly implemented features and design. But this one really bothers me.

The culprit is Quickbooks 2006. It is generally pretty good but has a few shortcomings, some which seem to be there for the sole reason for you to buy one of their services (I am looking at you, Quickbooks Payroll Service).

So there is data entry in an accounting package, right? OK, there are numbers to be entered, right? And the numbers in an accounting package tend to be currency, right? So what the @#%$^%@*# does Quickbooks considers a number with a dollar sign (like $10) to be invalid???!! This really really slays me. I copy numbers from spreadsheets and online banking pages into Quickbooks all the time and I have to delete the $ sign. Come on, people!

Thoughtful Software Design… ahhhhh…

Just thinking about a well-designed feature will calm me down. Thoughtful software design is very tough and my example for a useful, clever and probably relatively easy to program (great combination here) feature is the ability to click and drag a route in Google Maps to change driving directions.

In my example below, I plot a map from San Mateo to Oakland. It recommends going over the San Mateo Bridge. If I wanted to go up the Peninsula first and then over the Bay Bridge, I merely click on the route and drag it towards the route I wish to go.

The feature is obvious, gives good feedback and is even fun. Try it; I know you will like it. Yahoo Maps also supports the same feature now.

I have been involved in several business intelligence, metrics and content companies.  This means I better love information design.  Luckily, I do.  I am a big fan of typefaces, user interfaces and information design.  A site that I visit regularly to satisfy my interest is information aesthetics.

The site led me to these two Youtube videos, both worth watching if you are a like information design and/or type.

The first video is a New York Times video on an art installation in the lobby of the New York Times of over 500 small screens which display information from the New York Times archive.

[found via information aestehtics]

The other video is a fun music video illustrated with typefaces! Check it out.

[found via information aestehtics]

This is an installment of the ongoing “Fatherpreneurship Series”, which is defined here.

When my son was about 2 years old, I repeated an experiment that my grad-school economics teacher told me about. I offered my 2 year old some candy. Then I gave him a choice. If he chose not to have candy that day, I would give him two candies the next day. He went with getting the candy right away. I upped the offer: three candies. This went on to about 6 candies when he started to think about it seriously. I quickly cut off the experiment then (Mom would have killed me) and we had a nice candy break.

As a father, a real scenario of choice is the act of disciplining a child and suffering short-term grief and trauma with the hope that this is a good long-term life lesson. This can be a very grueling experience and the easy path (giving the kid what they want) is sooooo tempting.

Business is the same way; startups especially so. The pressure to move quickly and keep moving “up and to the right” is very strong. Getting momentum and KEEPING momentum feels paramount above everything. So when a decision to take a short-term hit for a long-term gain comes up, the decision is always harder than it should be. What looks so sensible on paper feels so counterintuitive to an entrepreneur.

But take that deep breath and be like a responsible dad: live with the temporary trauma and headache of a sobbing, pouting, screaming kid so you can have a well-balanced child in the long run.

So what’s the chart? That’s our monthly unique visitors: one of the key currencies for consumer Internet startups. The pressure to grow “uniques” is very strong. Recently at Boxxet, we decided to make some big changes to our site (improved algorithms, new page link styles, moving out certain types of content) to make it stronger and healthier for the long term. But there would be a big short-term hit.

One of the benefits of being experienced entrepreneurs was that we knew we had to do it. So we took a deep breath and took the hit. And so far, we are seeing the gains. Whew.

From the Startup News site, I was led to johnplaceonline.com, where there is a terrific list of life lessons, almost all of which I think are applicable to one’s life, children and startup.  Some of the lessons are below, but go ahead and go to johnplaceonline.com to see the whole article.

2. Evaluating Relationships
3. Conversation
4. Handling Difficult People
8. Giving
10. Saving
13. Debtor Responsibility
15. Practicality
16. Politics of Advancement
18. Positive Thinking
19. Personal Accountability
20. Setting and Achieving Goals

 This is an installment of the ongoing “Fatherpreneurship Series”, which is defined here.

I just finished my first season as coach for my son’s baseball team (6-year olds).  As my wife said about the experience, “it’s like a long vacation; it was very fun and fulfilling, but we are ready for it to be over.”

The most challenging part of coaching a team was getting the kids to focus on the drill, lesson or even game.  All the stereotypes of kids staring into space, spinning in circles, playing with the dirt…  all true.  Even my most gung-ho players would lose focus.

I tried to keep the players in check but not let their lapses bother me. 

Leading a company somethings feels like coaching a kids’ baseball team.  How do we stayed focus with all sorts of distractions surrounding us.  Here’s some commonality between coaching and leading a company: 

LONG TERM and SHORT TERM GOALS

For kid’s baseball, the season goal is to keep them interested and learning enough so they want to continue next season.  Weekly goals were focused on things like specific skills (throwing, batting) and game rules and strategies (running through first, covering second). 

In business, I’ve set such long-term goals such as “Making marketing and communications a more accountable department” (Biz360) or “Finding the best content on the web’s most popular subjects” (Boxxet).   Short-term goals would include “Capture 25% of the Fortune 200″ or “Grow web visitors 1% per day every day.”

EXPLAIN | DEMONSTRATE | PRACTICE

The best practice for doing a baseball drill is Explain | Demonstrate | Practice.  I wrote that phrase down on the top of all my practice plans.  It was a not-so-gentle reminder to not rush into drills but to be deliberate. 

The business version of this is probably: EXPLAIN | LEAD | MANAGE.  I posted a while back about Leaders vs Managers, and the best startups have some of both.  Too many times, I hear people not knowing what the goals of the business are.  It is up to the leaders to set the goal and the managers to communicate thoroughly.  In a perfect world, your executive staff have a lot of both leadership and management skills.

Tell them what you’re going to tell them.  Tell them.  Tell them what you’ve told them.

This is the sales and Powerpoint cliche.  SOOOOooooooo true though.  You’re think you’re being boring but repeating yourself.  Nope.  Do it.  True for 6 year olds and 60 year olds.

Until next season…

This is an installment of the ongoing “Fatherpreneurship Series”, which is defined here.

Money gets people all twisted up, both in business and families.  My wife and I got tired of negotiating with our six-year-old son everytime we went to the store to buy something, especially for a birthday gift for a friend’s birthday party.  It was time for an allowance.

Generally, we would think pretty hard about something like this.  We would talk to friends, consult books, ask the ouija board.  But we came to quick conclusion on how to proceed.  We were pretty aligned on the value and purpose of money as well as the responsibilities we wanted our son to have.   We decide that we would try something quickly and make adjustments if needed (for which we made sure we warned our son).

The allowance had the follow attributes:

•  The allowance was not tied to chores or behavior.  He gets his allowance despite behavior and outside chores.  Bad behavior led to lost privileges (GameBoy, sweets, etc).  Chores are part of family life and we all do them without direct monetary compensation.

• The allowance is to pay for all the kid’s discretionary spending.  With few exceptions, we no longer buy him discretionary items.  If he wants to pump quarters in the video arcade at the pizza place, that is his money.  If he wants to buy something at the museum store, he needs to buy it himself.

• We give him $10/week.  We do this on Saturday.

• Of this allowance, he must do the following:

  • 25% of the allowance goes into savings.  I don’t have a great explanation to a kid on the benefits of savings, but he seems to understand the rainy-day and future nature of savings.
  • 10% goes to a charitable fund, which he can dispense to a charity of his choice
  • That leaves $6.50/week for spending.  It seems like a lot to me, but so far, it seems to be working OK.

Some nuances, which I have not yet broken out (and may not break out) include:

• Matching 1:1 any money he moves from spending to savings,
• Adding an interest rate to savings.
• Adding an interest rate to any borrowings. 
• An old friend from college, when she heard about this plan, said that she certainly was taught how to save, but not how to invest.  Good point.  I’ll need to think about that as well.

We’ve put the responsibility on the kid to make decisions on what to buy, which is fascinating to watch.  I hope that he understands the value of savings, the discipline of spending, and the warmth of giving.  So far, it’s been a very positive experiment and, thank goodness, has stemmed the nagging at the store.

Note: we use Google spreadsheet to track the simple calculations.  I’ve put up a template, which you can copy and use yourself:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pyRRMru19_p6OCJ3s7kZcWA

I try to keep my blog to my professional life but I find many parallels between raising a child and business.  From big-picture items like values to daily things like time-management, I find my thoughts often overlap.  Well, I am starting the “Fatherpreneurship” series, where I will discuss fatherhood issues that have some overlap with my business thoughts or where I use a similar part of my brain. 

I may not always make the direct link between fatherhood and business in these posts, but at least an overlap ought to be obvious.

I’ve marked some older posts as Fatherpreneurship and will write a bit more about fatherhood in the future.

If you are make, sell, or invest in software, you know that the LAMP stack is the heart of your application, the Internet is the nervous system, but what is your brain?  Sorry for the strained analogy, but I think entrepreneurs should think about how to take advantage of Wikipedia to make their software better. 

 I wrote a contributing piece on Venture Beat that makes the argument.  Check it out.

The Metrics Series continues over at the Boxxet blog with…

1. The lesson behind losing 3/4 of interested users

Of the people who came to our front door, 40% signed up and 60% returned when we emailed them. That means 76% of the people who stop by to a closed beta did not immediately return to see Boxxet when we let them in.

2. A rant about Alexa and the scrooge of bad data

Bad data is more than an inconvenience, it can be downright hurtful to a business. Great web sites may be shut out of advertising, business deals may never happen because a company did not pass a fictional Alexa test, potential employees may choose not to join a company b/c of its Alexa numbers, adversaries may aim their resources at the wrong competitors.

Over at the Boxxet corporate blog, where I’ve been blogging more, we’ve started the Metrics Series. In this series, we plan to share some fun and hopefully useful metrics around Boxxet.

Posts that are already up:

* Google’s search share is > 90% ?
* Jennifer Aniston vs Web 2.0

Check it out!