By now, I’ve been part of many dozens of product launches and it hasn’t been boring yet.  It is my pleasure to announce the public availability of Boxxet. Dan and I spent today smashing down a bunch of bugs today, talking with bloggers and press and generally making everything presentable.

You can read more about the launch and the product at the Boxxet blog and you can experience Boxxet yourself, may I suggest: The Amazing Race, Green Day, New York Yankees, The Office, Second Life, Supernatural or Ultimate Fighting.

So the race planning is behind us (product design), warmups are done (beta) and now the marathon has begun.  Thanks for watching.

There are stories that need to be told because they are great stories.  The Blackberry orphans story is one of them.  This is the Wall Street Journal article that depicts kids whose parents are so addicted to their Blackberry and email that the kids are essentially orphaned.  Great story: innocent kids, parents who just can’t help themselves, technology run amok.

Well, I am a Blackberry Dad (actually, I use a Treo, but let’s stick with the Blackberry theme).  And I confess to doing some of those things mentioned in the article.  I sneak many peeks on my Blackberry, sometimes at inappropriate times.  I like to stay in touch and not fall behind.

But technology has made me a better dad.   Here is what I know: I am a hard worker and very focused on work.  My dad was this way; I am this way.  Earlier in my career, it made for tough going with friends and girlfriends.

But the Blackberry and its tech cousins have made it possible for me to work when and where I want.  I work hard, but I am able to work the hours I want to work in the location where I want to work.

So I wake up late, work hard during the day, grab my 6-year-old son in the late afternoon and we spend a lot of time together.  We have a great time: we play spies, we cook dinner, we go shopping, we design all sorts of stuff, we have a family meal, we do some math and reading.  When he goes to bed, I read him a story and we talk for a few minutes.  We talk about the day and that’s when we talk about the “why’s” (why it is important to treat everyone well; why bullies bully; why being afraid to lose means you may not get the chance to win).

After he is tucked in, I spent an hour or two with my wife and a little relaxing.  Then I work late into the night (don’t ask how late I go) on my next big thing.  Before the Blackberry, I would be putting in my long days at the office, since that is the only place where work can be done.   I would probably run through the door hoping that he was still awake.   It would have been Cat’s in the Cradle for me.

[By the way, I know I am lucky to be able to do this.  Technology has not given everyone this choice.]

And while only time will tell the ending of this story, I am thankful, truly thankful, that technology has allowed me to try to be the kind of dad that I wish to be. 

I am a San Francisco Giants fan and we are now in a seven-game losing streak (6 of those loses against two last-place teams). And over the last seven frustrating games, it was clear by the first third of each game that WE WERE GOING TO LOSE. There’s the foreboding feeling and, even if things start to turn our way, you got the feeling that team was going to find a way to lose. And we did.

Now, businesses can fall into that trap as well. You do something that backfires. Next time, you think twice. Then your colleagues lose confidence. And then, pretty soon, nothing goes right. All bad things are to be expected. The good is nice but won’t last long. It can be a terrible place. See poor Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees.

The good news is that the opposite is true as well. Players and teams and companies can win when they don’t seem to have the talent or resources to do so. Call it faith, the Red Pill, stupidity, luck, or gumption. In this place, losing is not an option, setbacks are merely obstacles for us to exercise our excellent jumping ability and those who snicker at us are, unfortunately for them, a few steps behind.

Bottle up that confidence and let’s give it to my poor Giants.

I am a loyal reader of Brad Feld’s blog. He not only has thoughtful posts, but he does an incredible service to entrepreneurs with his Term Sheet series, where he explains many of the crazy terms that you can find in a Term Sheet.

Earlier today, he had a post titled When Does An Entrepreneur Need “Experienced Help”. Give it a read. I left the following comment:

From the wording of the question, I would have guessed that your friend has not had success working with entrepreneurs. The obvious clue was the judgmental “real smart ones that know when to bring [him in]“.

And his lack of success says to me that he has come into his COO/CFO roles with the wrong attitude. If I can rephrase the question as an entrepreneur with his similar wording, I may say this:

“I was interested in your thoughts on when experienced Series B executives realize they are part of an existing team and culture that needs to bring an additional perspective to the ones the entrepreneur and other executives have at the company. The real smart ones that understand know that they are bringing their experience to an existing table and are not the next great hope of the company.”

It is the very difficult job of the entrepreneur to create and the equally difficult job of the “experienced help” to come into a startup and have the entrepreneur and the rest of the team want to listen and follow. The “real smart” entrepreneurs do not roll over and the “real smart” experienced help do not expect a handover.

So how to avoid? Your advice to your friend is fine, but that may test the social interaction of the participants rather than their working style. While it does not always work, I try to set up a few business scenarios (from mundane to difficult) that we can discuss (say, how to launch a difficult product, how to turn around a difficult but loyal executive, the merits of a particular go-to-market strategy) and see how the discussion goes. Do we reach the same conclusion? Do we reach different conclusions respectfully? Does one person always give? Do we give build on top of each other or do we debate?

It is unlikely we will be friends, but we must become great business colleagues.

Bringing “professional” executives into a startup is the one of the most delicate stages of a startup’s development. I have not seen a consistently good best practice for this. If anyone else has, please share with the world.

I am uploading an Excel file into the new Google Spreadsheet.  Of course, I am sending it a big, bad-ass, complex Excel file.  And, as it is slowly uploading, I started to think that we are now trying to do pretty unnatural things inside the browser.

Yes, I am a fan of minimizing the page-loading experience in a browser, so I generally like using AJAX.  But is the browser a robust enough operating system to support productivity applications? 

At Boxxet, we are asking a lot from the browser, with a fair bit of AJAX-y interactivity.  And we think it’s the best way to build web apps.  But when I look at a web-based spreadsheet, I wonder if we asking way too much from a browser.

So here’s what happened.  Google Spreadsheet would not accept my killer Excel file.  It accepted my simpler ones but not perfectly. 

But the application is pretty snappy and may change my mind about how far we can go with the browser as a platform for productivity apps.

For now, I will try Google spreadsheet for light spreadsheet duties that need sharing: timesheets, to-do lists, project plans.  But for financial modeling and interactive spreadsheets, I’ll stay with Excel.

But small steps in making unnatural acts more natural is how big changes start to happen.

This post is a departure but I think it is worth getting the word out. Since my son was born five years ago, I had to make sure that my wife Mary was taken care of on Mother’s Day. There had to be a gift from both me and my son. I found a terrific gift that you can do year after year.  A photo book.

With tiny digital cameras, I find it very easy to take lots and lots of photos. I, however, still have the problem of too many photos and not enough uses of those photos. A photo book helps take care of that. Mary looks forward to it. I like it because it has become the family’s “year in review.” And now my son is old enough so he can contribute to the creation of the book.

The structure of the book is pretty straightforward: fun things we did with mom over the course of the year. Lots of photos, a caption here and there. The last two years, I’ve scanned in one of my son’s drawing so we can watch his own writing and drawing develops. Overall, it is a fair bit of work, but it has been worth it.

So how do I do it?

Of course, take lots of photos. When I am ready to produce the book, I choose the photos I want (I’ve done as few as 12 and as many as 100) and, this year, I used Picasa (http://picasa.google.com/) to “fix” the photo (they have a “I’m Feeling Lucky” one-button fixer that goes a good job 80% of the time) and they really made the photos look better.

Then I use one of the photo-book vendors out there. I’ve tried a bunch over the years; I am sure some of these have changed, but I will give you my impression on each:

A hardcover from: MyPublisher
The photobook looks very nice and I like the linen cover. Will stand the test of time.

A PocketBooks from MyPublisher
The pocketbook is inexpensive and easy to get started.  You can even do multiple copies for grandma, etc. It is also very basic, but it gets the job done.

Snapbook from Shutterfly
Like the PocketBook above, the snapbook is casual and easy.  I like the feel of the Snapbook and would go for this one for a durable product.

Photobook from Sony Imagestation
I did this last year. The book looked good when we got it but the pages are starting to curl after only one year. The software was hard to use and buggy and it was pretty pricey. I would probably skip.

Personalized Book from Blurb
I used blurb for this year’s gift. They are in beta and the software was problematic.  Crashed a lot, wasn’t as flexible as I wanted and had a few bugs that caused printing problems (which they are fixing for me: their customer support has been very responsive).  It was also the most expensive book of the lot. However, the final product was the most impressive of the lot.  The photos are gorgeous and the layout of the book was very professional. This book makes the others look amatuer-ish.

No matter what service you use, I highly suggest this gift. I expect to do this with my son for many years to come.

A few weeks past, I returned from a trip to Shanghai. This was my first trip and I was very anxious to go. With all the talk about China and the explosive growth, innovation and opportunity, I was feeling left out. And coming from Silicon Valley, which looks like it is going through a new boom, I have high standards for excuberance.

Hurdle cleared. Take Silicon Valley in 1999, New York City, Hong Kong, the Jetson-like 50s optimism of the future; mix it up and you’ve got Shanghai. It isn’t that Shanghai is the city of the future. Shanghai is the city with the brightest future. Construction cranes dot the skies; every block was bustling; the people were walking with a purpose; there was real excitement in the air.

Get yourself over there.

For entrepeneurs out there, are you a leader or manager?

• Leaders point the way
• Managers decides the route
• Leaders start the fight
• Managers calm the nerves
• Leaders pump others up 
• Managers help others grow
• Leaders say yes
• Managers searches for the yes
• Leaders favors far-sightedness
• Managers favors near-sightedness
• Leaders creates work
• Managers complete work

Organizations need both; precious few of us can do both.  If you can’t do both, look for someone who can be your counterpart.

Many people have asked me what it is like to do a startup again.  It feels pretty different this time around.

The difference it has little to do with the marketplace or timing. (There is an agrument about whether it is a bad or good time to start a company; I will defer that argument to others). From my view, the challenges to a startup are huge no matter when you start; they just happened to be different. With Biz360, it was educating a market and getting people to spend money when no one would. With Boxxet, I expect it to be getting about all the noise that is currently in the industry. 

So I expect challenges and I expect them to be different. Therefore, challenges aside, I was surprised that the level of stress and excitement to be pretty different. Call it experience or whatever, I have not experience the same level of stress that I did in previous businesses.

I expect progress. I expect setbacks. I know when it is time to worry about financials, bank accounts and incorporation. I know that both positive and negative feedback need to be taken in perspective. I expect some days where life will suck. But it is much harder to get me worked up anymore. I guess I’m confident in our ability to make decisions, make progress and understand mistakes.

So it feels different: easier in most ways, less intense in others. I hope it is wisdom and not boredom that is creeping up on me.

I grew up in New York City. My first job out of school was as an urban planner. When my wife and I (and kid) moved from San Francisco to the peninsula further south, my requirement was walking distance to a downtown area. I am a big fan of the urban and town spaces.

While the towns along the San Francisco Peninsula (e.g. Burlingame, San Mateo, San Carlos, Menlo Park, and Palo Alto) are pretty great for shopping, eating and socializing, they are terrible for a growing business.

Biz360, where I am founder and chairman, started in downtown Redwood City. That downtown turned to be too quiet (barren) for my tastes so we moved to downtown San Mateo. Everyone at Biz360 loved it. We had all sorts of lunch options, coffee options, shopping options and park options. Our location was feasible for employees from San Francisco to San Jose to the East Bay.  The office we had was pretty poor “B” space and parking was a pain and not free, but when I did a survey of the employees, they were more than willing to make the tradeoffs.

It was pretty clear, however, that when we started to grow beyond 25 people, we would have to move out of San Mateo and into the only place on the SF Peninsula that can handle growing businesses: the office park. That’s just too bad. Besides the obvious spike in lost time and the waste of more traffic (to/from lunch, to/from chores), I think an office park gives a workplace a sad, isolated feeling. I find this to be true of almost all office parks, whether it is the current Biz360 offices, the Googleplex or Yahoo-ville.

Redwood City has an opportunity to solve this problem as it is revitalizing its downtown, which is quite large and has lots of infill areas to create a vibrant social downtown that can support the growing tech business. 

The plan calls for accommodating “small-scale office buildings (5,000 to 10,000 square feet)” and while that helps a company up to about 50 employees, growing to any larger than that gives us the choice of the office park (or tough Bay Area commutes to the cities of San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland).

It’s a shame.