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Matt Linderman

About Matt Linderman

Now: The creator of Vooza, "the Spinal Tap of startups." Previously: Employee #1 at 37signals and co-author of the books Rework and Getting Real.

Why underdogs should take more chances

Matt Linderman
Matt Linderman wrote this on 26 comments

In an email exchange with Malcolm Gladwell, ESPN’s Bill Simmons wonders why NBA teams rarely, if ever, take chances — specifically: Why don’t more underdogs try full court pressing opponents? The conversation then extends to the NFL too.

Gladwell’s response:

Is there any other industry in the world (well, outside of Detroit) so terrified of innovation? I went to see a Lakers-Warriors game earlier this season, and it was abundantly clear after five minutes that the Warriors’ chances of winning were, oh, no better than 10 percent. Why wouldn’t you have a special squad of trained pressers come in for five minutes a half and press Kobe and Fisher? Worst-case scenario is that you exhaust Kobe, and make him a bit more vulnerable down the stretch. Best case is that you rattle the Lakers and force a half-dozen extra turnovers that turn out to be crucial. And if you lose, so what? You were going to lose anyway…

I feel the same way about the attitude of professional football teams toward the no-huddle offense. Right now, great teams (such as the Colts and Patriots) use the no-huddle selectively, as a way to maximize their dominance. But why don’t bad teams use it? If you were the Lions, why not run the no-huddle this season? Why not put together a lighter, better-conditioned offensive line and a radically simplified playbook and see what happens? It’s not as if you are risking a Super Bowl if it backfires. Your offensive line is lousy anyway, so there’s no harm in tearing it down, and your fans aren’t going to turn on you if you get killed while you work out the kinks. Last I checked, your fans have already turned on you. On the plus side, maybe the no-huddle exhausts the other team’s defense so much you slow down their pass rush in the second half. And maybe giving your quarterback a bit more autonomy helps develop his knowledge of the game, and his leadership skills.

The consistent failure of underdogs in professional sports to even try something new suggests, to me, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the incentive structure of the leagues.

Obvious parallels to the business world here too. (“No one ever got fired for buying IBM anyone?) Sometimes the riskiest thing to do is not take any risks. If you’re outmatched by the competition, isn’t it silly not to take a chance? If you’re an underdog in your niche, the Warriors or the Lions of your industry, playing it safe and imitating the established players will probably doom you to failure.

One or two-person businesses that think they need to follow “common sense” advice that’s worked for the big guys are missing the point. When you’re small and risking less, you don’t need a business plan. You don’t need a board of directors. You don’t need to study the techniques of Fortune 500 CEOs. You don’t need to know Six Sigma ideas. The strategy that’s right for heavyweights has nothing to do with how welterweights should fight.

Related pieces on underdogs who use innovation to compete: “How David Beats Goliath” is Gladwell’s piece in the New Yorker about the topic. Michael Lewis wrote about the unorthodox success of Texas Tech’s football team in “Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep” [NY Times]. When Texas Tech reached the No. 2 ranking in college football last year, Lewis followed up with a piece that discussed how Leach knew he had to be different to have a chance.

To appreciate what he’s done you have to appreciate how hard it is to get players—he gets third or fourth bite of apple down there. He’s working with everyone else’s rejects. Generally, he’s doing so much more with so much less.

Lewis also covered similar ground in Moneyball, which analyzed the Oakland A’s success despite its limited payroll.

How we use iChat and SubEthaEdit to collaborate on a book despite being in different cities

Matt Linderman
Matt Linderman wrote this on 20 comments

How do you collaborate on a book when one author (DHH) is in San Francisco, one’s in Chicago (Jason), and one’s in NYC (me)? Last week, we did a joint writing session and pulled it off. Here’s how we did it:

We all log into iChat and start an audio chat. That way we can discuss what we’re doing.

Then we work on one essay from the book at a time and paste the current version into SubEthaEdit. While originally designed for coding together, its collaboration features work great for co-writing text too.

All you need to do is drag a person’s name from iChat into SubEthaEdit and then they’re collaborating on the document with you. Color coding lets you see who’s editing what. It works so well that you can have multiple people editing at the same time and it doesn’t get (too) confusing.

subethaedit

We even use this setup to collaborate on text when we’re all in the same room together. It’s a great way to let everyone take a crack at text without it leading to chaos.

The only downside is that tone can get a little inconsistent when different people are editing. After the session is wrapped, I go through the text again and make sure everything flows well and the tone is consistent.

subethaedit
A screenshot from the SubEthaEdit site.

If you review your first site version and don’t feel embarrassment, you spent too much time on it.


Reid Hoffman, as quoted in Mark Goldenson’s 10 lessons from a failed startup, a post-mortem of what PlayCafe’s founders did right and wrong.
Matt Linderman on May 21 2009 13 comments

Interview with CEO Peldi Guilizzoni about the growth of Balsamiq [Bootstrapped, profitable, and proud]

Matt Linderman
Matt Linderman wrote this on 20 comments

Balsamiq Studios is “a fresh little software company, focused on adding flavor to your Web Office suite.” The company page describes Balsamiq this way…

Micro-ISV Yes, a couple of guys in a studio

Profitable and Well Funded We’re in this for the long haul

Clear Focus We only bite off what we can chew

Outstanding Advisers We are so lucky!

Contagious Passion We absolutely LOVE this!

Giacomo ‘Peldi’ Guilizzoni, Founder and CEO of Balsamiq, used to be a Senior Software Engineering Lead at Adobe. He recently wrote a post about why he’s blogging less and how Balsamiq Studios is growing and maturing as a company. In it, he says…

I am trying to build what DHH calls “a little italian restaurant on the web”…so while it’s good to know the owners and know that they are doing well, that shouldn’t be the reason you go eat there: it’s the quality of the food (ehm, product) that matters most.

We liked the sound of that and decided to interview Peldi about Balsamiq and the choices the company has made (e.g. focusing on small problems, eschewing outside investments, being in it for the long haul, etc.) Here are his answers…

peldiHow did you start working on Balsamiq?

In 2001 I moved to the US with a 5-year plan: learn as much as I could about how to make software from big corporate America, then move back to Italy to start something on my own. After 6.5 years at Macromedia (then Adobe), a confluence of factors made me decide that the time was right to make the jump.

Some of these factors were personal (I describe them in detail in this what’s your story? post), but others were more technical:

  • I saw the power of “web office” (being able to save and edit your data from anywhere, revision history, native collaboration abilities and all that good stuff…) and I was hooked. It’s a paradigm shift, which meant loads of opportunities suddenly opening up.
  • I couldn’t find a good enough solution to a problem that I had (i.e., early stage collaborative wireframing), and the solution I was dreaming of happened to both require my skill set to implement and was small enough that I could do it all on my own.
  • I also read Bob Walsh’s Micro-ISV: from Vision to Reality and Erik Sink’s The Business of Software, which showed me that being small is OK, and of course Getting Real, which provided me with a real example of a new generation of software company: small, ambitious, transparent, fast, daring, fun. It painted a pretty compelling picture: if you guys were doing it, why not me? ;)

Why do you choose to focus on small problems?

From the beginning, I wanted to do it all myself for a while so that I could really understand every aspect of running a business. In fact, figuring out all it takes to bring an idea to market was one of my main goals in starting Balsamiq Studios. As a professional programmer in a large company, I was only peripherally involved in “the numbers,” design, marketing, sales and support issues during my career, but I was always fascinated by the business-side of things. I contemplated going to business school, but was lucky enough to be surrounded by great advisors (Erik Larson, Fang Chang, Michael Fitzpatrick, all MBAs, and my bosses Dennis Griffin and Robert Tatsumi) who talked me out of it. Instead, they pointed me a bunch of great books to read. And read I did! (Here’s my bookshelf if anyone’s interested.) After a few months, I realized that reading would only take me so far. If I was really going to learn it, I was going to have to do it. I had about a year’s worth of saving, so I jumped.

Continued…

CarsForaGrand.com: Simple idea that's generating big bucks

Matt Linderman
Matt Linderman wrote this on 28 comments

CarsForaGrand.com shows all cars currently on eBay for under 1k. Simple idea, yet Chris Hedgecock, the site’s founder, is earning a high six figure a year income from it. He recently managed to get nationwide attention for the site by driving cross country in one of the cars too.

After we hit New Orleans we noticed the coverage kind of snowballing. For example, the news story we shot in San Diego got picked up by their sister station in LA, the one we shot in El Paso aired in San Francisco, etc. By the time we were done in Miami, the story had gone national… on the largest day we did over 110,000 uniques – all for free…

So to recap, if you have an idea get off your ass and just go for it. The worst thing that can happen is you will learn something new, and you might just succeed beyond your wildest expectations in the process.

The whole thing is a great example of how you can take even the simplest of ideas, execute the heck out of it, market it creatively on the cheap, and see big rewards. Nice job Chris.

carsforagrand

A baffling checkbox at Orbitz

Matt Linderman
Matt Linderman wrote this on 65 comments

Orbitz offers an “I prefer non-stop flights” checkbox…

non-stop

...which I have a tough time understanding. Are there really people out there who don’t prefer non-stop flights??? Does anyone say, “Yeah, I’m going from Chicago to Dallas…but I really hope there’s a 2-hour layover in Atlanta along the way!”

Seems akin to offering checkboxes that say:
“I prefer flights without screaming babies.”
“I prefer flights that takeoff and land safely.”
“I prefer web sites that don’t ask ridiculous questions.”

netflix-email.png

Ian Hall writes: “Last night I was passively watching (or more listening than anything) to Eco-Trip with my daughter while we fixed dinner.  All of a sudden the sound gets all garbled.  I figure the encoding is off and think nothing of it until this morning I receive the following email. Now THAT is customer service. Netflix knew I might be upset (or at least have noticed) the interruption and so, proactively, they allowed me to request a credit for a small amount of my bill.  Now while 3% of my bill isn’t really going to add up, it makes me FEEL 100x better.  And here I am gurgling over my feelings and the attention Netflix pays to their customers.”

Matt Linderman on May 15 2009 16 comments

There is something infinitely touching when an artist, in old age, takes on simplicity. The artist is saying: display and bravura are tricks for the young, and yes, showing off is part of ambition; but now that we are old, let us have the confidence to speak simply.


Author Julian Barnes
Matt Linderman on May 14 2009 5 comments
mother_s day street view.jpg

Spotted on Google Maps street view this past Sunday. They replaced the typical dude for a mother and child for the day.

Matt Linderman on May 12 2009 6 comments

Approval, though, is not the goal of investing. In fact, approval is often counter-productive because it sedates the brain and makes it less receptive to new facts or a re-examination of conclusions formed earlier. Beware the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns.

Matt Linderman on May 11 2009 Discuss