This month marks a milestone for Pure Incubation in the medical market - we just launched our first directory-based site: Orthopedic Product Guide. The site features more than 400 product categories with 1,200 companies, 6,000 products and hundreds of orthopedics resources, including white papers, surgical techniques, case studies, videos and product literature. Come on over the site and browse around if you’re interested; and if you’re really interested and have any feedback or suggestions, those are defintiely welcome, as well.

 

Up next - 16 more sites focused on various medical specialties.

The beginning of September was the one year birthday of my company Pure Incubation. And last week, my friends surprised me by throwing me (and my company) a surprise party to celebrate! I had no idea that they were planning this party (who would?!) but it was so fun to have a bunch of my friends, some of my family and a variety of egg-themed food to celebrate.

Everyone wore a Pure Incubation label on their shirt, and some of them (like Moe and Kim) wore blue and white.

The egg cake was as delicious as it was cute.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Â

I am a firm believer that it’s important to celebrate milestones. Anniversaries, birthdays, project launches - in my opinion, they all need to be marked and noted, with proper gift giving, eating & drinking, and celebratory toasts.

Today is the first birthday of Pure Incubation. To celebrate, I’ll have a glass of wine with dinner. But perhaps the most fitting tribute was that today was also my first full-time employee’s first day of work. Today I spent four hours out of the office in meetings, but even so, we got more done today together than I get done in most days of working alone, even when I put in 12+ hours.

The timing was coincidental, but it turns out that a new employee was probably the best gift that I could have given Pure Incubation on its first birthday. Here’s to many more (birthdays AND employees)!

Mothers have a way of making truthful statements that bug the heck out of their kids. My mom was no exception. When I was growing up, one of her favorite things to tell me was “patience is a virtue.” Even writing the words today almost make me growl with disgust and slam the door. That’s the teenager inside of me, of course.

I have fought a life-long battle with patience. I know that this story is not unique - very few people like to wait. But I’m writing about this now because I have enduring a trial that is requiring patience that I never thought I could muster - the patience needed to start a company.

I had heard rumors of this before. My old boss Barry, a serial entrepreneur who was the CEO of Connexus Media, the start-up company that I worked for that was sold to Ziff Davis in 2004, has told me stories of his need for patience when we started Connexus. He used to drive to work in the mornings, and instead of turning into the parking lot, he would force himself to stay on the road and go to a diner, or golfing, or to run errands, or to do anything other than going into work. He did this because he knew that he could do nothing to move things along any quicker, and he feared that being in the office would only hurt progress instead of helping it.

I have been working on Pure Incubation for almost a year. In that time, we’ve built a bunch of sites. But until this week, I had yet to launch any of the Web applications that we have been working on building for the past year. These delays rarely had to do with anything that I was working on personally. In most instances, I was just waiting for other people - application developers, designers, researchers - and they needed time to finish the work that they were doing. I should also mention that they weren’t taking a long time - they were taking a reasonable amount of time. I just had a hard time waiting when I was so eager to get going.

Over the course of the past year, I have developed a series of strategies to help myself be more patient. These are just band aids. Honestly, most of them are just distraction techniques - they aren’t solving the root of the patience problem. But these strategies have really helped me stay steadier in the midst of waiting. And my hope (and fear, if I’m being honest) is that waiting will one day teach me patience for good.

Here are some of my strategies:

Get a hobby. This summer, I started taking tennis lessons. The lessons were two times per week, 10:30am-noon. This chunk of time out of the middle of the day didn’t really take away from the amount of time that I worked - I just put in the hours later into the night - but getting away from the office helped to readjust my attitude. I was able to remind myself that if things were moving faster I wouldn’t have been able to take tennis lessons in the middle of the day. And since I enjoyed the experience, it made the waiting more tolerable, as well. Not to mention that it helped my tennis game.

Start a blog. Quick disclaimer: I didn’t start this blog to help myself be more patient. But this blog has helped with the waiting, and has also turned into a powerful tool for my business. Taking the time to think of posts and write them out has been instructive, and having the time to dedicate to my blog reminds me again that moving slowly isn’t such a bad thing. My blogging productivity seems to wane and wax depending on how busy I am, but developing the discipline of blogging has been a way to stave off impatience - while benefiting my business at the same time. 

Do consulting. If you pick the right projects - the kind that teach you something new while paying you to learn - consulting will help you be more patient about the rest of your business. Consulting will give you more work to do (filling some of the hours of waiting), and will also fill the bank account with some cash. For me, part of the difficulty with waiting was the delay in making money, so having something to do that also gave me some much-needed capital was a double win. Even though consulting can be difficult at times, it has helped me have more patience in waiting for my core business to become profitable.

Travel. It’s difficult to take a week away from the office when your business is busy and things are moving quickly. So taking the opportunity to travel - even if it’s a trip in which you’re working from wherever it is that you travel to - and get a change of scenery and have some fun. 

Remember that you’re part of a team. Because I work alone, and have part-time people, consultants and contractors working with me, it’s easy to begin to feel like I’m the only one that cares - which leads to a great deal of impatience. When this happens, I have to remind myself that I’m not alone, that my team is in this with me. I usually give one of them a call (preferably a team member that is supportive and will understand the up’s and down’s I’m going through). This not only helps me reconnect with my team, but it also reminds me that the people I’m waiting for are human, too. This helps increase my patience as I wait for them to get their work done.

Connect with friends, and talk over your issues with them. This is my favorite solution to impatience. I am lucky enough to have some great friends who are always willing to listen and talk through any issues that I’m having - including issues related to starting a company. And last week, when I was at my lowest, feeling the most frustrated, I got this awesome email from my friend (thanks, Moe!):

“I was feeling the need to tell you not to give up five minutes before a miracle. Once on the Today Show this woman lost her huge diamond ring in the hospital trash (she had been in the ER). A nice worker went through huge piles of garbage looking for it. It took forever, but he found it. When they asked him about it taking so long to find he said “you don’t give up five minutes before a miracle.” Cara mentioned that you’re at a very stressful time with your website. You’ll get the website up and running and it’s going to be awesome! Maybe some problems will even lead to better ideas.” (Here is a link to the story, and here is a link to the video. As a side note, at the end of the video the older woman says “they’re really nice” about her family, and reminds me of my grandma, who always used to say the same thing.)

At the end of the day, entrepreneurs need to remain dedicated to their vision and plans through all the ups and downs and changes that take place. And having a little bit of patience - OK, a lot of patience - is really important in reaching the final goal.

Photo by Geekgirly

As I’ve documented many times on this blog, I work alone, from my home office. This is usually great, but sometimes the house gets too quiet or constricting, or I’ve spent too many days in a row with the same walls around me. When that happens, I usually head to a local coffeehouse that has free Wi-Fi, usually Panera Bread.

Today I’m working at Starbucks in the Barnes & Noble near my house. I needed to buy a book so it was more convenient to stay here rather than make the 10 minute drive to Panera. But here the Wi-Fi’s not free. Granted, it’s only $3.99, but instead of buying the 2-hour pass, I’m opting to do all the offline work I can, and then send everything when I can connect again at home. Not ideal.

All of this has started me thinking about the trend of remote working and the virtual company. The more wireless devices we have, the more places that have access to broadband, the easier it is to work from home, vacation…anywhere really. And companies like Sun Microsystems are even starting to make moves to dismantle entire offices in favor of the cost savings that they get from having an at-home work force.

I am clearly in favor of telecommuting and working from home. But I realized today, in my imperfect, impromptu Starbucks office, that the at-home worker is up against a number of challenges that a better workplace coffeehouse could help fix.

First, the obvious source of the trouble is that humans have issues with isolation. People are born into communities and we are geared toward being around people. Even the extreme introvert likes their aloneness more when they have recently been around people. There are days when the solitary at-home office is too much and we just need to see little kids doing handstands in line while their frazzled mom waits for her Vanilla Latte. (Yes, that is happening in front of me right now.)

Second, the current options to escape that isolation aren’t really working. Aside from the coffeehouse with Wi-Fi, the only option that I have is the library. But both of these options have problems – the library doesn’t allow the conversations and social interactions that at-home workers are craving, and the coffeehouses aren’t equipped for workplace needs (and there are people trying to enjoy a cup of coffee or lunch without having to be immersed in other people’s work).

Finally, there is another problem with the at-home worker that isn’t often talked about. There is a hole that is left by the lack of idea interchange, the constant refining and tweaking of ideas that happens in an office environment. Even with social networking tools and technology to keep us connected at our disposal, at-home workers do the majority of our thinking and planning and decision-making in a vacuum. It’s not our fault – the majority of decisions that are made day-to-day are too small to set up a conference call to discuss. But without the constant input from our co-workers, and the benefit of the collective brain of the group, our decisions are going to lose some edge, some brilliance will be lost that could have been found if we had a group around us to help us refine our visions.

My suggestion to solve this issue is a workplace coffeehouse. My imaginary coffeehouse would have:

- Free unlimited Wi-Fi.

- Coffee and food to be purchased. Perhaps also some kind of a fee structure for use (a monthly membership, like the gym, perhaps?). This business would have to be able to make money, even with a clientele that doesn’t turn over frequently during the day.

- Tables with locks to secure laptops. Nothing is more annoying than having to pack up all your stuff to use the restroom. Locks that can be used temporarily by the person at the table at the time would be incredibly helpful.

- Comfortable chairs that are meant to be sat in for long periods of time without hurting your back.

- Different areas that can be used for different things. There should be areas for tables of 1, 2, 4, 6, and 10 people scattered throughout the room, as well as a couple of glassed-in rooms that people can use for brainstorming or meetings.

- A start-up open pitch night. Once time per week, people would be able to get up and pitch their ideas and invite the crowd to give them instant feedback – this is like an open mic night for businesses.

- A schedule of speakers who would come in periodically to give advice for the at-home worker. Help desk people to answer questions about home networking issues. Financial advisors. VCs. And even management specialist, all with seminars on how to work remotely better.

- Ways for people to meet each other. Too often people look up from their computer only to avert their eyes if they accidentally look my way. These places would need to encourage communication and interaction.

- Social events surrounding the coffeehouse. The coffeehouse’s softball team could compete in the city league, bowling teams could be formed, or maybe the coffeehouse has a bocce court next to it.

Does it seem like I’m recreating the office? Maybe I am, just a little bit. But this could be the office of the future, where people go to work with other folks from their geographic area, all of whom are working on different projects, jobs and careers. Sounds like an interesting place to me.

What other features would you like this workplace coffeehouse to have?

UPDATE: Another possibility would be for bars to do something like this during the day, when they otherwise wouldn’t be making any money. Just think – WiFi during the day, vodka tonics at night. I think that the clientele would become much more dedicated…

Photo by John Althouse Cohen

Anyone who tried to visit any page on this site since last Wednesday already knows what I am about to tell you - my blog has been down for five days. It’s back up now, working just fine, but it appears that the damage has been done. My good SEO ranking on some good terms has been lost, 1/4 of my readers have unsubscribed.

I just wanted to send a quick note out to all of you who have stuck with me through the downtime - thank you! And I’m sorry for the technical difficulties. The short explanation is that this blog is using a technology that one of my new businesses/applications is also using, and when the developers made a change to that application, they managed to take down my blog at the same time. It appears that everything is now fixed and working like it should, hopefully there won’t be any more issues.

This outage really brings to light what I think is my biggest weakness as an entrepreneur - I am not technical enough. I know a bit about technology, definitely enough to talk about it and to understand the concepts, a smattering of HTML. But I am not a “do-er” - and so, when things like this happen, I am at the mercy of others. This fact is hard to take.

I am honestly not sure what the solution to the problem is, either. As the president of my company, I shouldn’t be the one who is doing all the nitty gritty work - that would be a waste of time and resources. I also don’t have the time to go back to school and to take classes to learn all this stuff that I wish I already knew. I could regret my college major (maybe computer science would have been a better choice than English, no matter how much I loved reading those books), but then again, if I had majored in computer science, who knows where I would be now. Maybe the influences of Maya Angelou (On The Pulse of the Morning), Sylvia Plath and Ralph Ellison are part of what has inspired me to be the person I am today, to do what I am doing right now. And regrets aren’t helpful, anyway.

So I put my lack of technical expertise in the category of unavoidable things that suck. At least for now. And I try to use this weakness as a reminder that I can’t build this business on my own, that I need help and input from a wide variety of other people to be successful. And I breathe. Slowly.

Photo by solidstate

One of the best ways that I get new ideas for businesses is to listen to what people suggest I should write about on my blog.

The following scene happens all the time. 

I’m out with friends, having dinner, a couple of glasses of wine. We start talking about something, which leads to something else, which leads to a topic of interest that everyone at the table knows a little bit about - but not enough to be a real authority on the topic. Once that happens, someone usually pulls out an iPhone to look some stuff up. We either find out the answer to the question and it’s incredibly interesting, or we don’t. Either way, someone turns to me and says: “You should write about this on your blog.”

Sometimes I manage to figure out a way to work the topic into my blog - such as when I wrote about avatars, Web 2.0 and Twitter. But most of the time I don’t because the topics are so random that I can’t immediately figure out a good way to incorporate them - or I don’t have the time to do the research to write an adequate blog post.

And sometimes, when everything comes together perfectly, the topics get turned into ideas for businesses.

Think about it - the ideas that are coming from your friends and family and acquaintances are ideas that are coming straight from your future target audience. And one of the best ways to come up with an idea for a new business is to discover a need and work to fill it. Or to determine an area of widespread interest, and attempt to provide information or a tool or a service to fill in the gap.

Of course, the kernel of the idea isn’t enough substance around which to start a business. And I am certainly not suggesting that anyone should quit their job and start a company after a night out on the town with friends, based on a harebrained scheme cooked up over cocktails. My only point is that if you listen, and filter, you might be able to glean some really good ideas - not only for your blog, but also for your business.

<<As a side note, here is one random thing that someone suggested I write about on my blog, which came up recently during a discussion about the outrageous price of gas. If you look at your dashboard, where the gas gauge is located, there is a small arrow that points to the side of the car that the gas tank is on. No more straining to look in your side mirrors as you pull up to the gas station. Anyone see a business idea here? I didn’t, which is why I picked this one to share. >>

 

Wine glass photo by emdot

Starting a company is tricky because there is never enough money. There are ways to raise money, and ways to save money, but usually you are thinking about both of those things because money is tight.

At the moment, I’m doing quite a bit of consulting work to give my company a cash infusion. And this is working quite well. Luckily, the projects are interesting and the clients are delightful to work with. (They also read my blog!) Most importantly, the money is coming in.

But although I love my consulting jobs half the time, the other half of the time I despise them. Because every day, every hour, every minute that I spend doing my best work for my clients is time that I take away from working on my start-up.

I consider this to be a necessary evil at the moment. But the process of getting these consulting jobs and using this capital-raising strategy has given me some insight into how to make the process more painless than painful.

My most recent article on The Industry Standard has the full scoop, so go read it now to find out more - Consulting for capital - 5 ways to make it work for your start-up.

These are the five points that the article covers:

1. Charge by the hour
2. Watch the contract terms
3. Learn from the work
4. Network
5. Schedule around your busy times

What strategies do you use to make consulting a positive capital-generating tactic for your start-up?

Photo by *_Abhi_*

I have been working more than ever lately, but my blog posts have been scarce. This is no accident. But it is a mistake.

A couple of weeks back I wrote this post about productivity on Tuesdays. That realy got me thinking about my own productivity and what days of the week I am able to get work done. The initial inspiration for the post was this one by Penelope Trunk, which suggested, among other things, that if Tuesdays are the most productive day of the week, we should focus more on Wednesdays and Thursdays to try to make those days equally productive.

So I’ve been trying to consciously think about my productivity. And I have hit upon a great way to make myself productive. The past two weeks I have been picking one major (or difficult) item on my to-do list, and working on it the entire day until it’s done. That way, at the end of the week I will be able to cross five major items off my list. Any time that I have left in a given day, I work on the odds-and-ends that are left. Including my blog.

This strategy has worked great for getting those major projects done. (I finished four last week, one was so big that it took two days.) But the problem is, the other stuff - the everyday work - isn’t getting done. As evidenced by the sparse posts to this blog.

So this week I am going to try a new tactic. I’m going to schedule only 3 major things to get done this week and see if I can get caught up on the rest of my stuff. Because sacrificing my blog in the name of productivity is a bad idea.

This blog may be fairly insignificant in the scheme of things, but as far as my business goes, it has been essential in ways that I couldn’t imagine.

1. I have gotten consulting jobs because of my blog. Multiple jobs. When I hand out my business card, it has my company Website and my blog URL. People usually go to both. When they read the Pure Incubation site, the first question is usually “What do you do?” Followed by the statement “I don’t get it.” This is understandable because what I’m trying to do is uncommon and unusual, and I am trying to be vague on my site until I launch some products. But people get my blog. And my blog gets me jobs.

2. I am more engaged with the business community because of my blog. I don’t live in Silicon Valley, arguably the heart of the Internet Web 2.0 world that I’m trying to play in. But by blogging, and commenting on other people’s blogs (and have them commenting on mine), I am able to get involved in the conversation in a way that I wouldn’t be able to be involved if I wasn’t saying something. This recent post about women technology start-up founders sparked conversation from lots of interesting folks, including two who I really admire: Sarah Lacy, who released her first book last week: Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0; and Penelope Trunk, who I mention all the time in this blog and who is really my blogging idol, if there is such a thing.

3. My family and friends read my blog. Not everyone I know reads my blog, but the people who do have a better understanding of what I’m doing. I talked to my dad last night, and he told me that he follows what I’m up to with my business through the blog. And my Aunt Mary told me that she feels like she is more connected to me because she reads what I’m up to and thinking about at work. I’m glad that my dad and aunt are reading. When I go home to visit this weekend, they won’t look at me with blank stares when I talk about my business and how things are going. I like that.

4. Blogging helps me be more creative. I love writing, I always have, so the process of coming up with a topic and writing about it helps to get all of my creativity churning. I find that the process of writing a blog post often helps me think of new things to work on for my business, and often helps me discover new business models and stuff that’s out there that I wouldn’t otherwise have found - like Gary Vaynerchuk and Wine Library TV. If you’re not watching, you should be.

5. When I write a blog post, things happen. I’ve noticed this past week that my email from random people has slowed down, my traffic stats are a bit stagnant and I feel generally down about my business. This is a normal feeling for entrepreneurs to have on occassion, but I realize now that posting to my blog helps to lessen this. Because when I blog, I reconnect with my community, get support from the other entrepreneurs out there, and things happen. And it’s that thrill of activity that keeps me going when things get hard with the business, which happens all the time.

It turns out that I learned a bigger lesson this week than just the one on productivity - I realized just how important my blog is to my business. So if you have a blog, keep writing! If you don’t have a blog, go get one today. And then check back in three months to let me know how it changed your business (or life). I know it will.

Photo by Editor B

This week’s article for The Industry Standard is more personal than other articles that I’ve written for them in the past. It’s here: How to Make the Leap from Corporate Hack to Entrepreneur. I give some tips, but mostly the article is a first-person account of my transition from working at a big company to founding my start-up.

In the article I mention a vacation that I took to Arizona. That trip happened in May 2007 - Chris and I went to Phoenix, Sedona & The Grand Canyon to celebrate our first anniversary. At the time we went, I wasn’t thrilled with my job any longer. I was getting the itch to leave, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. I loved the people I worked with, I had a good position, relatively good money…but I wasn’t really happy anymore and I couldn’t figure out why.

Then I went to Taliesin West.

I am not a huge architecture fan. I mean, I like architecture, but I don’t know much about it. Chris studied architecture for a year or two in school before switching to industrial design, but even so, going to visit an architecture-related exhibit isn’t what we would normally choose to do. But we were on a road trip and wanted to stop wherever the wind blew us, and however it worked out, we ended up at Taliesin West.

We took the tour. It was an hour-long, guided. In the tour, we went through various buildings on the school campus - Wright’s office, the studio and gardens, the private gathering room and even the family’s bedrooms. All along the way the guide kept telling us all these cool facts and interesting things, totally creative stuff that had my mind racing. Here are a few things that I saw and learned:

- There was an observation point on the grounds where Frank Lloyd Wright and one of his wives (he had three during his lifetime) used to bring chairs to every single night in the spring and summer, to look at the valley around them. There was nothing as far as the eye could see. Standing at that point today, the entire sprawl of Phoenix/Scottsdale was visible.

- The students who attended the school actually built the school before they could attend. They used only the materials that were available on the land. All of Wright’s designs were built to make sure that the buildings blended into the surroundings, and brought the outside inside, as well. This is called organic architecture, and he was way ahead of his time with it.

- Even after the grounds were built, new students didn’t get to live in the buildings. Their first year, they had to go out into the surrounding wilderness area and build their own dwelling on a slab that was there for that purpose. This was like a crash course in architecture - if your dwelling wasn’t good, you would be living with the insects and other animals. Married students often brought their families to experience this with them.

- Frank Lloyd Wright was a major movie buff, so there is a movie theater on the grounds. It’s pretty dark inside the theater, however, so he had the builders dig small cut-outs into the rock along the floor, and installed lights - the first track lighting ever.

- When Wright was a boy, there was a certain set of blocks that he always played with - Froebel blocks. He often credited these blocks as laying the foundation for the basic principles of architecture that he used throughout his career.

Ok, so those are some random things, and you might read them and think “so what?” Or you might think that some are cool and others are mundane. But I left Taliesin West with my mind racing about all the ideas that I had heard, and with the need to be creative burning up in my chest.

It took me a bit of time before I eventually left my job to start Pure Incubation. But this visit to Taliesin West started the avalanche. After this visit, I knew in my heart that I had to leave my corporate gig.

And this visit also reminded me just how important it is to find things that inspire us. To visit new places, see new things, meet new people, take a chance on something unexpected. You never know where inspiration might strike.

These pictures are all from various people on Flickr - all better than any of the pictures I took that day. They are all from Taliesin West.

Photo by andy54321

Photo by bluecanary_dreams

Photo by bluecanary_dreams

Photo by andy54321