Tag: #stress

Terrific Tech Trends on Our Radar

April 17, 2018 / Hannah / 0 Comments

On Episode 63 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with entrepreneur Greg Arnette, about some of the latest tech trends and gadgets that are on our radar.

Show Notes

Greg Arnette’s Website
Find Greg Arnette on Twitter
Contact Greg Arnette
Find Greg Arnette on LinkedIn
Sonian’s Website
Barracuda’s Website
Apple AirPods
Apple Iphone
Android Phones
Amazon Fire Tablet
Verizon Wireless
AT&T
LED Light Buying Guide
Amazon Music
Apple Music
Sonos
Sonos – The Wireless Home Sound System
Amazon Alexa
Amazon Echo Data Called Upon In Criminal Case
“Alexa device helps solve string of break-ins” – An article Paul Parisi commented on
Link SaviorLabs Cybersecurity Assessment

Sections

Sonian Acquired by Barracuda
A Lot of Hard Work
Apple AirPods: The Coolest Technology This Year
Iphones Versus Androids
Phone Reliability and Quality
Verizon or AT&T?
The Latest Lighting Technology
Replacing Florescent Bulbs With LED Bulbs
How to Store Media
Sonos Audio System
Home Automation
Amazon’s Alexa

Terrific Tech Trends on Our Radar

Sonian Acquired by Barracuda

Paul: And so now you were just acquired.

Greg: Right.

Paul: Sonian was just acquired by Barracuda, which I think at the same time, got acquired by somebody else, or there was a sort of cascade of acquisitions there?

Greg: There was. So in early November of 2017 Barracuda completed the acquisition of Sonian, and then about a month later, they announced that Barracuda would be going private. So Barracuda was a public company at the acquisition of us, and then a private equity firm in San Francisco called Thoma Bravo took Barracuda private. And well, now we’re a private company. So it’s a common trend you see these days.

Paul: Yeah. Dell did it and…

Greg: Rackspace did it and GoDaddy did it.

A Lot of Hard Work

Paul: So you were an overnight success that took–

Greg: 10 years.

Paul: And I would say, as a distant observer, a lot of hard work.

Greg: It was.

Paul: You guys did some hard work. So you were tired after IntelliReach. Were you tired after Sonian? Not that we’re after it yet, but was it as tiring, or had you learned more or dealt with it better?

Greg: Certainly had better mental tools to deal with stress, startup world, raising capital, dealing with board of directors, dealing with investors, growing companies and so forth. And, I wouldn’t say tired; maybe a little fatigued. I’m always excited about what’s next. It was excited about finding that next problem to solve, taking the latest in technology trends and turning it into a business service kind of thing.

Paul: So, do you have things that you’re excited about now?

Greg: Oh, so right now I’m focused on helping Barracuda go to the next level. They’ve already achieved quite a bit of success. I mean, they’re known around the world, a brand name and so forth. But there’s a bit movement to migrate everything to the cloud and what attracted them about Sonian was our cloud platform, just the fact that we have sort of “born on the cloud” kind of a company. Back in 2007, 2008, there were a lot of projects that kind of started right around the same time, and they all kind of ran for about 10 years and got acquired or went public, so it’s sort of a traditional path, the enterprise SaaS.

Paul: So, okay, so let’s shift it a little bit. So that’s sort of your professional background. And we talked a little bit about growing up in technology and the right end of a soldering iron.

Greg: Yeah, that’s important.

Apple AirPods: The Coolest Technology This Year

Paul: So what’s the coolest piece of tech, physical piece of tech, you’ve seen this past year?

Greg: Oh, interesting. It was probably just this past year, the coolest piece of tech are the Apple AirPods.

Paul: AirPods. Okay. And why? What’s…?

Greg: They just work so elegantly. It’s kind of a weird little thing. I just got a pair that, after looking at them for a long time and trying out different wireless earbuds, Bluetooth-based earbuds for listening to a podcast or talking on the phone, for my iPhone. I just think the product – the packaging, the seamless usability, just everything is just magical to me. They’re so tiny.

Paul: I was really impressed.

Greg: It’s hard to pick one thing. I’m just so…a big appetite.

Paul: We’ll get into some others. But of all the things, that’s really the coolest that you think. It’s sort of the newest for you.

Greg: Yeah, it’s pretty new. New for me, for sure. They’ve been around for a while.

Paul: I thought it was really… The little package it comes in or the charging case. That’s ingenious. That’s really cool. Well, well done.

Greg: Yeah. Just the way it connects so seamlessly to your iOS device and this is after backing probably three or four different Kickstarter campaigns for various other attempts to do what the AirPod has done well. And even I have one of them…it’s just like is it anchor or…? The really popular USB company.

Paul: Yeah, I think you’re right.

Greg: They have a division that’s focused on audio. They came up with their version of this and I’m just drawing a blank on the name of it. So I finally got my Kickstarter reward. I was like “Oh this is going to be great.” This is before I got the AirPods. And I couldn’t fit the darn things in my ear. They had those complicated gel-based inserts, and it just felt so uncomfortable. I said this is not going to work. So I said I’m going to go for the AirPods.

Iphones Versus Androids

Paul: So now, you obviously use an iPhone. Do you have an iPhone X? What do you have?

Greg: I have a really old in that function. I have an iPhone 6s.

Paul: That’s what I have. That’s what I have in Plus.

Greg: Oh, the Plus, the bigger size.

Paul: Yeah, the bigger size.

Greg: This is after having the original iPhone for way too long.

Paul: Okay, why do you not have a 7, 8, or X?

Greg: For some reason, around my phones, I don’t know if I’m being conservative or just being thrifty. I just…

Paul: Well, you’re a New Englander, so you gotta be thrifty.

Greg: Yeah. So, I saw an article recently. It said don’t get the iPhone 8 or X, just get the 6s. It’s just really all you need for it. So I bought a refurb 6s, and it’s been great.

Paul: You bought a refurb one on top of it?

Greg: From Apple. Yeah. I just bought it outright. Didn’t do the phone, the phone leasing or whatever. For some reason, I like to own my phone.

Paul: Yeah. Me too. I know exactly what you mean.

Greg: And I don’t want to spend a lot, because I’m afraid I’m going to drop or break it. And at some point, I do lust after that iPhone X, but I’ll get one eventually, I’m sure.

Paul: There’s going to be the X plus 1 soon. I mean, they gotta come up with the 11. That’s fascinating. So have you ever tried Android phones?

Greg: I have. Yeah. So before the iPhone 6 I had an Android for many, many years. Yeah, various different Android phones. And I’m a latecomer to iOS, the iPhone. I’ve had iPads for a long time, and iPods for a long time. And I was just kind of wanting to bridge the Android-iOS device gap. I have an Android phone but just got tired of it and said I’m just going to–

Paul: Tired of what?

Greg: It just seemed like it… Let’s see. It was a Verizon Android phone. So it had all the Verizon apps on it were all kind of crappy and it didn’t feel as tight. I was less interested in fiddling around with phones. I just wanted it to be a really good utility device that I could count on and work. I was getting more and more into the Apple product family. I have a Mac and iPads and I just thought, I’ll just go that direction.

Paul: A good friend of mine who is a security researcher, announced on Facebook – this was probably four years ago – “I’m switching to Android.” And he was a real fanboy for Mac and iOS. And I was like really? I just can’t believe this. So I watched, and I kept asking him every few weeks, “How’s it going? How’s it going?” And he was enthusiastic initially, but then about a year later, he said, “I’m switching back.”

And I’m like, “What happened, Dan?”

He says, “The apps just aren’t as tight.”

Greg: That’s a great way to say it.

Paul: It’s like quality control isn’t there. And it is profound thing, but on the opposite side of that, I have seen – which really shocks me – is the willingness for people to switch between iOS and Android based on a sales decision in a phone store. I mean that aren’t techy geeks like us. I mean, I had to deliberately switch and say I’m going to tolerate this for a while and ultimately went back. But I was surprised at how willing…

I have a friend who’s a housewife, and she said, “Oh, I went in and looked at all the phones, and I bought a Windows phone.” This was three, four years ago.

And I went, really? Why would you do that? And then she went back a bought an Android phone a couple of years later. And she – I don’t know if it was good sense but – asked me, “What should I buy?”

I said, “Get an iPhone.”

She went and bought an iPhone, and it wasn’t that crises of changing in their mind. I’m surprised at that. That the people are willing to make that change. I mean, there’s people like us who have a real hard time with it but…

Greg: Yeah. No, I completely resonate with how you’re describing that. Seen similar examples, the phone kiosk at Costco or something. People are just, “I’ll just take that phone” and not thinking about it. Like, I would analyze every app, and I would like overthink this.

Paul: I did the same thing.

Greg: But in general, it just feels like just Android apps aren’t as crisp or tight or something. And maybe it’s there’s less rigor or less…the frameworks aren’t as good. I’ve never built a mobile app, so I don’t know, or built an app that was designed for mobile. I’ve done the what’s the platform for that phone? Something, phone gap or something.

Paul: Oh PhoneGap. Yeah.

Phone Reliability and Quality

Greg: But, for example, so I have a couple of those Amazon Fire tablets around the house because they’re really inexpensive, little devices to have around for controlling things.

Paul: Oh okay. So you’re using them for a task.

Greg: Yeah, like the Sonos controller or the Hue Lighting. I have some Hue bulbs in the house. And I can compare and contrast the iOS version of the app versus the Android version, and they just feel different. Like you said your friend said. It doesn’t feel as tight or crisp. And so that’s one thing that kind of works against me on thinking of Android.

I do follow people in the tech space who switch kind of as part of their wanting to be up-to-date, they switch back and forth every year between each device, just so they can live in the other environment. And I don’t have a need to do that for like my education or I’m out building products for those. So I don’t think it’s important. But I just need a really good phone that’s going to be reliable. I’m on the road all the time, and that’s what I count on the most.

Paul: Yeah. That’s the biggest frustration. I bought a OnePlus, and I bought the second version and the third version. And there’d be times when I couldn’t answer the phone. And I was just like…

Greg: That’s frustrating. It’s failing in its prime directive.

Paul: Yeah, exactly. It’s like this is a utility, you know. It’s like thinking about the old Telco guys who did it a certain way. And that’s the way we did Telco. And it always worked, you know. And now we’re in this Wild West of Voice over IP where it works sometimes.

Greg: Yeah, it’s funny that with all the great technology we have, the quality of the connections has really gone done in terms of like plain old POTS lines, plain old telephone service.

Paul: But I have noticed when somebody calls you from an iPhone, and you’re on an iPhone, the quality is incredible.

Greg: It does some like some magic happens. Some kind of like special handshake.

Paul: My brother called me one day, and he’s like, “It sounds like you’re right here.” He was calling on his iPhone. He called my iPhone. But, man, I was just like, wow. So there is some magic. I think there is. There must be.

Verizon or AT&T?

Greg: HD voice or something I’ve seen.

Paul: Is that just a marketing thing or is that real?

Greg: I think it’s real. I think it might be kind of what you’re describing in terms of a higher fidelity or more crystal clear connection. So, at home, on the Outer Cape, and Verizon cell phone service is kind of spotty. In the early days, I bought one of those network extender devices from Verizon to have a little mini cell tower, but it didn’t really work that well beyond a sort like 20, 30 feet from the device. So it kind of defeated the purpose. But with the newest iPhone, I found that I can… it uses the Wi-Fi connection over my Comcast for voice. And it just sounds really clear when that happens. So I’m not sure what’s going on, but it’s a positive experience.

Paul: So now I’m interested. You mentioned you’re using a Verizon phone?

Greg: Verizon iPhone. Yeah.

Paul: So why that? Why not AT&T?

Greg: Coverage, just for me. Maybe it’s just all marketing and it worked well, but they just say the best coverage.

Paul: Well, how about the fact that on an AT&T iPhone, you can do something while you’re on the phone. You can use the internet while you’re on the phone. I don’t think you can do that on a Verizon.

Greg: It’s really weird. Sometimes you can and sometimes you can’t. I’m not sure why. But previously that it was a big drawback is that – what is it? – CDMA didn’t allow for voice and data at the same time. But with LTE and something else, I’ve–

Paul: Okay. Maybe that’s an edge.

Greg: But I have seen times where I’m on the phone, and I have no data. And I have seen times when I’m on the phone, and I have data. So I haven’t been able to figure out why that works but it’s not as good as the GSM-based systems like AT&T. I don’t know if 5G changes all that again or not but whether we should be able to voice and data at the same time.

Paul: Or something. Or we can cook, do voice and data at the same time.

Greg: It could be in some cases I’m doing a VoIP call and don’t realize it, so it’s just all data anyway. So that might be why it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

The Latest Lighting Technology

Paul: Interesting. Okay so what other things and technology are real cool and zippy?

Greg: Beyond AirPods?

Paul: Beyond AirPods. Yeah.

Greg: Let’s see. Well I mentioned the lighting stuff again. Getting into sort of the latest generation of lighting.

Paul: So are you reinvigorated about that, or was there a lull in it? Sort of you put it in, it worked, it aged, and now it’s… I mean, there’s a whole new world with the lighting. It’s quantum difference.

Greg: It is. It’s amazing how fast it’s changing now. It feels like every six months there’s new advances in that area, just in time to help us save our planet.

Paul: Right. Exactly.

Greg: Low watt, low wattage, high fidelity bulbs…

Paul: Well, I have a 2004 Acura MDX. Works great. One of the lightbulbs burned out, the headlights. I put an LED in. It’s just stunning.

Greg: They have a retro kit fit for that? That’s really cool.

Paul: Snaps right in, and you plug it in. It took me five minutes. And, bought the pair of them for $33. The most difficult thing was figuring out which bulb I needed to get. On Amazon, I don’t know why, but all of a sudden, they have this thing that says, “Oh, tell us about your vehicles.”

I type in it’s an Acura MDX, etc.

“Well, here’s all the things you can buy for your vehicle.” So you can register your vehicle there. And they had suggested the wrong bulb. They sent it to me. Couldn’t fit it in. Sent it back. Got a different set. Popped it in, and man, it’s brighter. It’s whiter. It’s just fantastic. A real pleasant experience. Really better than I thought.

Greg: That’s interesting. I was wondering when that was going to be a possibility as to retro fit, yourself, to LED bulbs.

Paul: Yeah, and it happened without us even knowing it. Nobody gave us the memo. I don’t know why.

Greg: Yeah. Just sort of stumbled upon it.

Paul: Exactly.

Greg: Or Amazon surfaced it for you with their machine learning, artificial intelligence.

Paul: Yes, yes.

Greg: Because they know everything about you.

Paul: Yes, it was like, wow.

Greg: Yeah.

Replacing Florescent Bulbs With LED Bulbs

Paul: So what other cool things? What are you tinkering with around now?

Greg: So setting aside cloud and the business side of technology, which is where I spend most of my time right now, uh, let’s see… So retrofitting LEDs in the house, switching out a lot of fluorescents with LED tubes. Those are really cool. It’s like hit or miss as well. It’s kind of a weird thing right now because you have different ballasts in the fluorescent bulbs. Some work; some don’t. I stumbled across a brand of GE tubes that seems to work best across a wide variety of applications.

Paul: With the old ballast?

Greg: With the old ballast. But they’re never in stock because everyone else has figured that out too.

Paul: So you made the choice of changing the bulb to work with the old fixture, old ballast. What about stripping the ballast out and putting in just a… Like if it were 10 years from now, you wouldn’t be looking at a retro fit kit.

Greg: No, no.

Paul: So why not go with what we would go with in 10 years, in two years or whatever it is? Because I’m making the same decision. My wife has a plant light. It’s a tiered plant light, and it has all these expensive bulbs in it that are 15″ long, and they cost $20 or $30 a piece – grow lights. And I’m saying, well, I can buy new grow bulbs, or I can buy LED grow bulbs that work with the current ballast, or I can just retrofit the whole thing. What would you do?

Greg: So I just went the exact same process–

Paul: Ah, see? This is perfect.

Greg: I was planning – this is after studying a number of different websites and trying out some things that Costco had. They have some LED kits now that, from the FEIT company which didn’t really work out for me so well. So I was on a plan to basically bypass the ballast in my ceiling fluorescent fixtures in the garage, and I bought the replacement they call them… What do they call those? The things the bulbs plug into? I can’t think of the anchors or the…

Paul: Oh, uh…

Greg: The tombstones.

Paul: Tombstones, yeah. I just learned that yesterday.

Greg: So I bought the right tombstones. It’s probably a 15-minute rewire per fixture. And then a friend of mine of said, “Hey, I found these bulbs that…” Someone had told me that you don’t have to do anything. You just put them in, and they work. I tried them, and it actually worked and said, okay, I can save myself the time now. Down the road, I’m sure these ballasts will eventually give out, I’ll just do that rewiring trick then. And so it’s basically just saving some time right now. I would prefer to get the ballast out of the picture. I think they’re probably zapping some of the electricity so… But these lights don’t go on for very long, so I’m not too worried about that, so… I do like the purity of it. I want to just get things out of the way.
Paul: Exactly. Exactly. Less failure points.

Greg: Yeah. Less failure points. So I’m kind of kicking down the road a little bit of more work I’ll have to do. But this way I can just literally plug in new bulbs, and I have it. It’s all working fine.

Paul: Right. And it’s also hard to work above your head like that and change those tombstones is not trivial.

Greg: Yes. Yeah, and so I might have underestimated, actually, how long it would take. But I have all these instructions and–

Paul: And there’s sharp metal up there. You’d think it should be easy. When it’s down on the desk, it’s easy to work on a trough or a fluorescent light. But in the ceiling, your head gets, your neck gets all twisted.

Greg: You’re right. Yeah. So it would have been those projects that I probably have never have gotten around to had I not found the plug and play model.

Paul: I’ve never done that. I’ve never, not gotten to a project.

Greg: And also, I’m kind of a stickler on color temperature of lighting, and I didn’t want like different color temperatures. That would drive me crazy. So got all the same bulbs, and they seem to have a long lifespan. As long as they initially work, they should work for as long as I probably will have to deal with them. So, yeah. So there’s the light retrofitting project. And then sort of pulled out a original whole-house audio system and replaced with Sonos.

How to Store Media

Paul: Oh, okay. Cool. Where do you store your media? Your audio and… Well, let’s talk about that for a minute. So I’ve never been one of these people who wants to rip all these movies and store them on hard disks. I, I don’t understand the use case there. I mean, maybe you can offer insight there. And people use Plex to watch their movies. And I’m like I’ll stream it. I mean you can stream just about anything. Now maybe that’s a holdover from five years ago.

But the one thing I do sort of get is, I want to store all my music. Now, as my daughter has Apple Music, which she loves. She’s only 14, so she’s got a lot less library to think about, and I’ve got stuff that’s pretty esoteric. So I’m thinking, well gee, I want to store everything in the cloud. What do you do for music storage, video storage – that take of stuff?

Greg: Yeah, it’s an evolving conversation at home, but the core anchor is a Mac that has iTunes on it with a very large music library that, over time, as CDs have been ripped and stored electronically the last few years – I mean, maybe the last four or five years – I don’t think I’ve bought anything physical. It’s always been just mp3 files either through iTunes or Amazon Music. And now more recently, it’s everything is just streaming.

Paul: You don’t buy it. You just rent it for the time you’re listening to it.

Greg: Yeah. Sonos has been a good. It lets you kind of look out across all your sources with a seamless consistent interface, and I don’t think much about whether I have it as a local file on my mp3 or whether I’m getting it from the cloud, whether I’m entitled to it forever, I’m just sort of renting the song as part of a subscription. And Apple Music has been the primary music subscription service we use at home after sort of looking at Spotify and Pandora and stuff like that.

Paul: Interesting.

Greg: I think Amazon Music is too, I think.

Paul: Yeah. So how do you differentiate when you choose to play something at home? Do you just say, “I want to play this song” or…? And it goes, figures out where it is or…? I’m wondering how Sonos deals with these online libraries the streaming libraries.

Greg: Think of it sort of an Uber directory around, over it, or, or index of it, if you will, which melds together your stuff you have locally. So you build playlists of local and stuff in the cloud or stuff that you stream. Oftentimes I’ll choose a song and, say, build a playlist around this kind of thing and just kind of be serendipitous about it.

Paul: And Sonos is that, does that?

Greg: I might actually be Apple Music that’s doing that, part of it. But Sonos is giving me access to it. They’re getting better and better about the integration between the Sonos software and the controller and iTunes or Apple Music services, after a long time of being not really working well together, which was kind of a shame because it appeals to the same audience – the high-end Sonos and people that are probably iTunes fanatics.

Sonos Audio System

Paul: Okay so you ripped out a whole-house audio system and put in Sonos.

Greg: Yeah, sort of. Yeah. So that kind of weird time frame around 2004 when home automation was was dominated by these brands called Crestron and Elan and, and stuff. We were fortunate to be able to put a system in when the house was built and kind of just rolled it into the cost of the house. Now that I look back and what we paid for that thing discreetly, it just blows my mind. We have touch panels in some of the rooms that cost like a thousand dollars. And then we hardly ever used them either. They just demoed really well in the showroom.

Paul: Yeah, it looked cool.

Greg: It looked cool.

Paul: But it didn’t transition to usefulness.

Greg: Yeah. You could actually watch a TV on the touch panel. Like we never ever did that.

Paul: Right, of course. You’re standing at the door watching the touch panel. Yeah.

Greg: Like, yeah. Just choose that ABC show or something. So paid a lot for something we didn’t use and, in hindsight, it turns out the quality of the music, the quality of the audio that was being processed through these big mega room controllers was much, much more inferior to sort of just a traditional amp that would power a nice set of speakers. So that system sort of developed problems because it became kind of aged and these system weren’t built, probably, for long-term durability with really good manufacturing. So, just making some big, gross exaggerations here, but…

Paul: Yeah. No, I understand.

Greg: So, they’re very expensive to next. So when, in consultation with a home audio consultant, pulled all that stuff out and put Sonos in, but leveraged the existing amps, the existing speakers, and now we have keypads and controllers on the wall that we don’t use, and I think eventually, we’ll just have them ripped out and just sheetrocked over just so we can make it nice and clean and so forth.

It’s funny. Sometimes you walk into a house that might have been built in the ’60s. They have those intercom systems in, and they look just very dated, and these keypads and controllers will look that same way down the road when it’s all wireless and tablet-based and so forth. So, yeah. So I was able to replace all the control system with Sonos, and it’s the Sonos that doesn’t have the amp. It just drives an amp. So they’re called bridges or controllers or something.

Home Automation

Paul: So do you do much with home automation? Are you using Z-Wave or Zigbee or Insteon or any of that?

Greg: I think I will in the future.

Paul: Oh really.

Greg: I’m not sure which one yet, but right now the home was built.. So the audio system was separate system on controllers. And then the lighting system was based on Lutron, a RadioRA, which was pretty state of the art a long time ago. But you couldn’t control it with a computer. It’s a kind of a closed system. And I’d like to replace it with the modern version of all that down the road.

Paul: Well, when you’re ready, let’s talk.

Greg: I’m going to.

Paul: We had X10 for the longest time, and we switched to a combination of Insteon and Z-Wave. We basically support all the protocols. You can get any device and integrate it. It works really well.

Greg: Yeah. I’m curious around that. I had a big X10 thing prior to the Lutron, and with the bridges and the controllers, I actually just have a whole box of it I want to bring to the place to recycle electronics because it’s just not useful anymore.

Paul: That’s right. It’s true. It’s very true.

Greg: Yeah. The programming and the macros and all that kind of stuff for turning things on and off… It was hit or miss though.

Paul: Yeah, well, it’s gotten a lot better. So it’s gotten a lot better.

Greg: Yeah, there’s a lot of improvement there. And then it, then it’s kind of figuring out what system to be the anchor. Right? What’s your hub strategy? What Amazon is doing with Alexa is pretty cool.

Amazon’s Alexa

Paul: Yeah. Do you have an Alexa?

Greg: Yes.

Paul: Do you use it?

Greg: Yeah. For simple things.

Paul: Did you hear the story in Gloucester? I was asked to comment on this. It happened a young six-year-old boy broke into in neighbor’s house and stole some money. And the woman who was the owner of the house, got home, and her house had been broken into. For some reason, she thought to go to Alexa and listen to what was spoken during this time. And it was clearly this little kid talking.

Greg: Oh, because it, it…

Paul: He was muttering in the room, and Alexa picked it up.

Greg: Wow.

Paul: And the police used that to go to his parents and say, this is not good and all that. But if it were an adult, I don’t know. A conviction? So I’m intrigued by that, and sort of that unintended consequence there. So now you can go home and worry, I guess. You know, whether what you say…

Greg: We joke around all the time with what’s being recorded, where does this stuff live? How much get uploaded to the cloud? How much is discoverable later, down the fact, after the cash gets purged?

Paul: Yeah, exactly. Well there’s another story. A husband and wife were arguing about something. And one of them said to the other – I think this is probably embellished but “What are you going to do – call 9-1-1?” Police showed up.

Greg: Oh, wow.

Paul: So, it was just like, oh, wow. That was an unintended consequence. So you use Alexa. Do you use any of the others?

Greg: No. Like Google Home or Siri? Alexa just started off as… I think I got like a free original, the tower Alexa from AWS or something and said, oh, this is pretty cool. And then I replaced that with the one that has the digital, the LCD, the Alexa Show for the kitchen. So it’s countdown timer, what’s the weather, you know. Simple things. Haven’t mastered the how to talk to it effectively to get it to do things. And haven’t really got it to figured out how to do control Sonos yet because you just have to use a specific order of words to get it to do what you want. As we’re training them, it’s also training us.

Paul: That’s right. Exactly. Exactly.

Nothing is Stopping You From Becoming an Entrepreneur

February 6, 2017 / Hannah / 0 Comments

Today on the Edge of Innovation, we’re talking about entrepreneurship and the challenges that entrepreneurs face.

Show Notes

The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard

The Myers-Briggs Personality Test

Elon Musk lives in a Virtual World

The Challenges of Entrepreneurship

Jacob: Welcome to The Edge of Innovation, hacking the future of business. My name is Jacob. I’m here with Paul, and we are talking about one of my favorite topics today. We’re talking about entrepreneurship. What are challenges that entrepreneurs face? I have been involved with entrepreneur work. Paul has been involved with entrepreneur work since I was in diapers maybe.

Paul: Probably, yeah.

Jacob: Probably. So we’re going to be talking about the challenges that face entrepreneurs today, and so just to get us started, Paul, would you just talk us about, talk to us about what entrepreneurship is? What is it about?

Paul: Well, at its fundamental, it’s starting a business and it’s all of the things that are involved with that. And you might think, “Okay. You know, what’s a business?” Well, a business, you really have to define. I mean, we’re starting a business. What is a business? And I think that the – I’m going to make up my definition for a business and say that it is a service or product which you’re offering to people that they will pay for. So you exchange value for money.

Jacob: Yeah, it’s a value proposition for financial gain.

Paul: Right. So… You know, in the postmodern, might I say, millennial mindset, there are some people that believe you should just give me money because I exist. That’s not what business is about.

Jacob: It’s not about that?

Paul: No. Not currently. It might change, You know, in Star Trek—

Jacob: I thought you were just going to give me money because you liked me.

Paul: I might. I might. But you can’t necessarily plan on eating next week because of that.

Jacob: Based off of that. Yeah.

Paul: Based off of that. You know, and in Star Trek, you know, there’s this altruistic, everything is provided and it’s an interesting paradigm shift.

But that’s not where we’re at least yet. So what do you do? And there are lots of businesses out there. All of those had to be started by somebody. The person who started that, or the collection of people that started that are called entrepreneurs. And that is something that is a deliberate choice. Many people might back into it. And I think on one of our earlier podcasts, we talked about the idea that….So many people might back into this idea of entrepreneurship because they want to bake cakes.

Jacob: Right. We were talking about that earlier.

Paul: Right. So you want to bake cakes, and you say, “Okay, so I’m going to open up a cake shop.”

Jacob: Right. Because I want to do this on my own.

Paul: I love it. Very quickly, it becomes not about baking cakes. It’s about, well, how do I get the flour? How do I pay for the flour and the sugar and the icing and all these different things? And how do I do that?

Jacob: What are the legal ramifications of the company?

Paul: Legal and how do I get a store? And how do I paint the walls, and what are the legal…

Jacob: Yeah. What are the qualifications for the employees and how do I keep everybody on task?

Paul: Well, yeah. I mean, not even… But even just the fact that I have to file taxes. You know, the fundamental business license and all these different things that are… It’s like peeling an onion, you know, that you need to… Oh, well, if you have more than 20 people, all the rules change. And so how do you do that? And there are these sick people out there that enjoy discovering that and I’m one of them. It’s a challenge that I get energy from. But it’s, you know, and there’s always a new thing.

Like we were talking about, “Well, we should do this and this and this.” Well, I, you know, based on my experience, like, well if we do that, we have to get this kind of license and we have to do this and this implication for reporting. And we might have to pay extra taxes on that. The person who had that idea didn’t have a clue about those things, and it’s like, “Oh my gosh. That’s sobering.”

And, and so there’s a lot of wantrepreneurs out there. It’s a well-worn—

Jacob: Is that a phrase unique to you?

Paul: No, not at all. But there’s a lot of people who believe they want to be an entrepreneur, a wantrepreneur. But the fact of the matter is that there’s nothing stopping you from being an entrepreneur. A lot of people say, “Well, if I had money,” or “If I had this,” or “If I had this.”

And I heard a talk recently by an executive, Bob Doll, and he was saying, you know, “We’re all given the same amount of time.” You know, so if you’re aware of the different circles out there, Bill Gates and, you know, they took something. They had the same amount of time. Bill Gates wasn’t wealthy, you know. He was upper-middle class but his parents weren’t, you know, rich. They couldn’t give him a million dollars or something. And he made something happen. He went through the hard work.

And I say, being an entrepreneur is the hardest thing you’ll ever do.

Jacob: Yeah. It is. It is… I mean, in some ways, it’s a bit of a grind, but it’s constant work. It’s constantly innovating, pressing forward…

Paul: Yeah. You wake up every Monday, and you’re unemployed. Because see, when you wake up and you have a job, whatever it might be, all you have to do is get yourself there and reasonably perform, and even if you don’t feel like it, it will happen.

With an entrepreneur, you can’t just show up.

Jacob: That’s interesting. I never quite put it in that category. But that’s definitely how I’ve felt with the entrepreneur work that I’ve done where it’s… If I don’t show up, nothing happens, and then there’s no money.

Paul: Right. Exactly. And…or goal. You know, you’re not meeting your goal. You’re not moving towards it. And one of the, the most difficult things for an entrepreneur to deal with is that transition from doing it all yourself to getting other people to do it. And that’s one of the biggest lessons you need to learn, is you need… It’s not about doing it yourself. You need to figure out how to get other people to do stuff for you. Because if you do it all yourself, you’re limited. You only have 24 hours in a day.

Jacob: Yeah. In this whole category of delegation is what you’re talking about. Actually, I have on my desk because I’m going to be reading in the next couple of weeks, The One Minute Manager.

Paul: That’s a short, good book.

Jacob: Oh, man. It’s super short. But even just the first few pages have been super helpful because this whole category of delegation, I mean, I personally never went to business school, but it doesn’t seem to be very well sufficiently covered in the entrepreneurial literature because it’s… The moment you go from month one to month two, and you’re building momentum, you have to start delegating.

Paul: Absolutely. And it’s the key, I think, stumbling block for a lot of entrepreneurs. So a huge challenge there is that you need to change the way you do things, because now it’s not about me coming up with the best idea and I’m going to paint the picture. That would be great, you know. And I create a business that paints one picture a week. But if I really want to move past that, I need to get other people painting the pictures for me.

And that’s a hard thing, you know, to do. So I think it’s also… You know, a lot of people… Well, I think a lot of people in this sort of wantrepreneur have a romantic notion of what an entrepreneur is. And that’s because, you know, like everybody wanted to be a rock star, wants to be a rock star, because they see the romantic notion of the successful rock stars.

Jacob: Yeah. Or they see, for example, like Steve Jobs was fantastic and he was a visionary, and he did these great things. It’s like, well bro, first off, you aren’t Steve Jobs, no matter who you are. You’re not Steve Jobs.

Paul: Yeah. That’s true.

Jacob: But, I mean, it was, you know, regardless of all the, you know, the ways in which you could critique Steve Jobs, he was a force of nature in terms of just the amount of work that he produced.

Paul: Well, that’s true. I don’t think it’s that helpful to look at him as a model.

Jacob: Yeah. I don’t either. I would agree.

Paul: Because he’s an outlier. He’s an anomaly. You know, you need to look at… And I think this important for smaller businesses. You know, you have a photo… You’re a photographer. And you’ve got your store, and you know, or your studio or whatever it is. And you’re largely doing that. You will inherently be limited by that fact if you’re the only photographer. And so there’s an aspect… There’s wantrepreneurs who just talk about it. But there’s the wantrepreneurs who are in business who want to be bigger than that but aren’t doing anything to make themselves bigger than that.

Because the first thing you need to do is hire another photographer and say, “Okay. This is how you do it. This is how you do it. This is how you…” And then hire another one. And hire another one. And you know, you can’t just be doing it yourself. The minute you do it all yourself, you’re doomed, because it’s not going to scale.

Jacob: So that’s some of the challenges that present for people wanting to be an entrepreneur. What are some of the questions that they should be asking? So what are some of the questions that they should be asking to move themselves towards entrepreneurial work?

Paul: Well, I think first of all, you need to assess whether you’re wired to be an entrepreneur. And do you… How do you react to stress? Do you thrive in it? Does it compromise your health? I mean, stress is bad for everybody. So it’s really, is it stressful to be going through and dealing with cash flow or dealing with the people doing the work.

Jacob: Have you ever done, like, a personality test?

Paul: I have. Yes.

Jacob: I found that really helpful just in terms of, like, a practical thing. I think people with… So if somebody is listening to this and they’re like, “Okay, how do I respond to stress? Oh, I binge on ice cream.” Well, that’s an effect of how you respond to stress, but actually, you can kind of get some keys from, like, a Myers-Briggs personality test. So I did a Myers-Briggs personality test, and when you start reading through what they call the shadows of your personality, so what you respond when things get difficult where do you go? What are the shadow that…? And it’s helpful to understand.

So, for example, my personality is I’m very relationally-based. And so when I experience the stress of entrepreneurial work, my personality goes to assuming that that’s personally intended, like, so that I inject… Because of my, the positive side of my personalities, I build relationships easily. It comes naturally. But when things get stressful, my stress level takes me to thinking, “Oh, this is personal.” And so—

Paul: Well, it probably is in your case.

Jacob: Probably.

Paul: Sorry. I’m playing to your insecurities here.

Jacob: Yeah. But I would say in terms of trying to figure out how do you respond to stress that’s an easy step forward, to try to determine…get an object analysis.

Paul: Yeah. I think you’re right. You know, I can’t tell you what you’re problems are and what’s going to stop you, what you’re stumbling blocks are going to be. And it’s interesting, I’m working with somebody who is starting a business, and I’ve given them some advice, and they are not following it, you know. So it’s not within their perception that that is the right path to go. And it’s easier to do what they’re doing. And that’s fine. And they will probably get a business that will grow to a certain point, but it will stop at that point.

Either there’s a vast difference between building a small business with like a couple of people and a big — not a big business, but, you know, a 50 to 100, 200 person company. Those are mostly done through deliberate actions of the entrepreneurs, of the founders. It doesn’t just happen. It’s deliberate systematic work that you do.

Jacob: Yeah. So what are other person questions that entrepreneurs should be asking themselves?

Paul: Well, are you focused? Can you—?

Jacob: I’m sorry. What were you saying?

Paul: Yeah. Who were we talking about? Again, you know, there’s lots of shiny things in the world. And you’re going to be interested in that, and man, it’s a lot easier to be distracted by that. You need to have a singular focus on what you’re goals are. And you need to be constantly re-evaluating that, you know. Do you doubt your ability? You know, in some ways, you need to doubt your ability, because you’ve got to go and get help. And you have to get that help to invest in you. But then there’s the other extreme of that is if you doubt it, you’ll become paralyzed. “I can’t do anything, because I can’t do that. I can’t do that.”

Jacob: I wonder as well if a question for you to personally wrestle with moving towards being an entrepreneur or being an entrepreneur — what’s your support network?

Paul: Yeah, that’s a good point.

Jacob: You know, whether it’s your wife, your husband, or your friends or family, it seems to me that people who have healthy networks thrive, even in difficult entrepreneurial situations. Whereas people who don’t, they seem to flounder in a way.

Paul: Yeah. It would be interesting. I think that’s accurate for the majority of people. But I think there are the loan wolfs. I think Steve Jobs was probably a lone wolf. And Elon Musk, I get the sense that he’s a lone wolf.

Jacob: Yeah, but he’s in a virtual world of a lone wolf.

Paul: It’s a construct in his own mind.

Jacob: Construct. Right.

Paul: Yes, that’s true.

Jacob: Sorry.

Paul: No, I agree, you know. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, look it up. It’s fascinating.

Jacob: Yeah. It’ll be in the show notes.

Paul: Alright. Okay. So, you know, and as you’re starting a business, there are so many things that you need to do. How do you know those? Well, you can buy a book. That will tell you some of them, tell you one person. But you’ve got to have mentors and people out there that you can follow and ask questions. And I’ve found that it’s a joy to share that with people, you know. “Oh this. You should do this.” Or, “You should do this.” Or, “You should do this.”

Most people want to share information.

Jacob: Yeah. And I think for truly successful entrepreneurs, some of the double joy of being an entrepreneur and seeing something build and thrive is then being able to turn and help other people.

Paul: Well, because you now get to be involved in building and thriving again.

Jacob: Exactly. Yeah. There’s the Russian… Or there’s a Russian proverb that joy shared with a friend is double joy. It’s, I think, especially entrepreneur work, that’s definitely true.

Paul: It is. But I do know that there are a lot of entrepreneurs who have had to go it alone because nobody saw their vision. And, you know, that’s really true. And that being alone is hard with that vision, and it’s a bet that you’re making. And you’re all in. Because you’re either going to be proved right or wrong.

Jacob: It’s a pass/fail—

Paul: Well it’s a pass/fail, but it’s loaded with fail because if you miss on any number of things, you could, you will fail. Whereas pass, you have to be successful on almost everything, you know, so it’s not pass/fail. It’s like, I’m either going to be… If there’s 100 questions on the test, I’ve got to get them all right. And that’s just hard.

Jacob: Yeah. That’s very difficult. So what are some of the external questions that people should be asking?

Paul: Well, I think, you know, this is more work than you can ever imagine. And if you imagine it to be a certain amount, double or triple or quadruple it. It is relentless.

Jacob: Yeah. I’ve had friends talk to me about “Oh, I want to start a company,” and I… Great idea. I’d love to see them start a company, but just making the external observation, I think when they think of work, they think of 35 to 40 hours a week.

Paul: Yeah. It’s not at all that. I, in running my businesses, you know, maybe to my fault, you know, I’ve spent 80, 90, 100 hours thinking about my business every week. You know, it’s you’re always on.
Jacob: Yeah. Especially if you are, you know, the CEO of, or the lead on an entrepreneurial work, your headspace is the business.

Paul: Yeah. Absolutely. And there’s a cost to that, that your family, to your friends, and you need to weigh that cost. Is the money I’m going to make, going to outweigh that. And you know, my kids are in their teens, I don’t want to sacrifice that and having looked back and say, “Oh, I missed their teenage years.”
Well, yeah. Now we’ve got a lot of money, but they don’t know their father. So, you need to count that cost.

Jacob: Cat Stevens wrote about this. Didn’t he?

Paul: Yes. No…

Jacob: “Cat’s in the Cradles”?

Paul: No. That’s not Cat Stevens. That’s Jim Croce.

Jacob: What?

Paul: Yeah. The cat, “The Cat in the Cradle” is—

Jacob: Cat and the silver spoon.

Paul: Yeah. That’s Jim Croce.

Jacob: Jim Croce. Are you kidding me?

Paul: Yeah. Cat Stevens is a man who has a name that says “Cat,” but oh my gosh. We will have remedial class in pop culture and music on our next podcast.

Jacob: I’m sorry. I got those wires crossed.

Paul: Boy, you did.

Jacob: Anyhow, a “Cat’s in the Cradle” moment. You don’t want to have that as an…

Paul: Well, yeah. That’s dramatically portrayed in that song, you know, that, it basically talks about what your priorities are and one of the things that’s, you know, key to me is I work to live. And that is not necessarily compatible with being an entrepreneur.

Jacob: Right. It certainly… If being an entrepreneur is narrowed enough in terms of life goals, saying, “I want to work to live, rather than live to work,” making that distinction narrows the field even further.

Paul: Yeah. Absolutely. It’s very difficult to be a part-time — you know, working 40 or 50 hours a week — entrepreneur. That’s part-time. You’ve really got to be all-in on this. And you know, come into this with your eyes wide open.

Jacob: Yeah. So, any other external observations before we start closing up?

Paul: There’s so much, you know. There’s legal, procedural, marketing, technical, competition. Just the product, the customer service, customers, love them or hate them, you know, you need them, and they’re great when they’re great, and they’re hard when they’re hard. And you’ve got to deal with that. And you’ve got to be a counselor to your employees. And you know, it’s very difficult, and you can’t just have one thing that you do, like making the cakes. You’ve got to deal with the fact that your baker that you just hired, is now sick. Who’s going to do the cakes today? Well, I know I can, but that isn’t going to scale a business, you know.

And so there’s lots of these crises that occur, and you have to be wired so that you don’t go off the deep end and be, “Oh my gosh. The world’s going to end here.” Or, that can’t be stressful, you know. So I think that’s the biggest thing, is that it’s hard. Not everybody is wired to do it.

Jacob: So it seems like maybe some people shouldn’t be entrepreneurs?

Paul: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You wake up every Monday, and you’re not employed. Nobody is going to do it.

Jacob: And that’s a helpful principle or reality, I guess, to keep in mind with being an entrepreneur. Can you, as your make up as a person, it’s not necessarily a diminishing of your value in the least, but can you handle that sort of, you know, going to bed Friday night. You will be unemployed by Monday morning.

Paul: Right. Exactly. I mean, you know, not everybody can be a linebacker in the NFL, but some guys are wired that way, and they love it. And the hits don’t bother them, at least initially. But, you know, it does take their toll, you know. But, but I would not enjoy that. I would not find that exhilarating, you know. So we’re wired differently.

Jacob: Yeah. So we’ve been hitting a little bit of the negative side of…or just the realities of being an entrepreneur. It does some to me that if somebody has the wiring and composition, I think they can either grow into or be coached into being a fully thriving entrepreneur and somebody who embraces the realities of what’s engag— what they’re engaged in. But can you give us kind of a final, like, positive note for entrepreneurs?

Paul: Well, I think that, you know, I work with a local school, college that has an entrepreneurial area. And what’s interesting is, you know, I’m not a Steve Jobs. I’m a… you know, If Steve Jobs is an A-level, I might be a C or D-level entrepreneur, you know. Maybe even an E. I don’t know.

I understand some of the things about it. I haven’t done as… I haven’t been willing to compromise in a lot of ways or sacrifice. And what I find is, you know, people have this idea for this new widget. And then I say, “Well, is there any competition? Who else is building it? “And they’re like, “I don’t know.”

You know, so this is your tiger to take by the tail. And you need to pour yourself into it. And you know, just like you hear stories of musicians or book writers, “I sent it to 10 companies, publishers, and they all rejected me. And the 11th took it.” Well, you’ve got to keep going. And you’ve got to have that faith. You know, that story of the 10 is J.K. Rowling. You know, she sent it to 10 publishers. They all said no.

Jacob: Well, even… We were talking over lunch today about Stranger Things. And I believe it’s the same type of story where they presented to several major networks, you know, did their own.

Paul: You’ve got to believe in what you believe in and go after it. And, you know, there will be setbacks. I want it to be all peaches and cream, but it’s not. And I would, I would venture to say that I don’t know if the risk-reward payoff is necessarily worth it for all entrepreneurs. I think it’s probably the exception that it’s worth it, because in our own human nature, we will do too much and spend too much time away from our families. And if you could rewind that life… So the successful entrepreneur and they go through, and they have a terrible relationship with their children and their spouse and they are very successful money-wise.

And I’ve met a lot of these guys — Wall Street guys and a lot of the people in, you know, Connecticut outside of New York. And boy, they have worldly standards. They’ve succeeded.

Now, if we rewind that and go back at that critical moment where they choose to be the entrepreneur and redirect them, I don’t think their life would be all that much worse, and maybe even better.

Jacob: Well, and you know, honestly, this is maybe a topic for another podcast, but you and I were talking about this earlier, that at the core of, I think, maybe genuinely good entrepreneurial work, is not the widget or the product that you are trying to achieve or the business you’re trying to build, but it’s the people. So and that includes the whole range of people from your family to the employees to your customers. Are you trying to better them? Are you trying to serve them, help them thrive? Or is this just basically about you and your widget that you want to get out there and get your name up there?

Paul: Yeah, I mean, you know, it is. If Steve Jobs was reduced to the iPhone, I think that would be pretty sad, you know. He was a person. He had a wife that loved him. He had kids that loved him. You know, he had relationships, and I think those are what’s really matters, you know. Yeah, the iPhone is really cool, but I wouldn’t be that, you know. It’s interesting how we sort of, you know, the Wright Brothers, they invented the plane. Well, they were people too, and I’m sure things made them laugh and smile and things like that. And it wasn’t all around the plane.

Jacob: Yeah. Well, I think that’s a great note to end on. Entrepreneurship is about starting a business, but we want businesses and entrepreneurial work that serve and help other people to thrive.

Paul: Absolutely.

Jacob: Thank you for listening to this episode of The Edge of Innovation, hacking the future of business. I hope that this was helpful for you. We’d love to hear from you if you have any questions, or if you have any comments. Please visit us at Paul Parisi.com where you can find the show notes for this episode and all of our previous episodes and where you can get a hold of Paul if you would like to talk to him personally.

Thanks again. Have a great week.