Why Joe Kraus is Cooler than Me

The San Jose Mercury News did a piece on wikis today, and featured Joe Kraus of Jotspot. At Atlassian, we admire Joe and Jot and like the way they evangelize wikis. Interestingly the Mercury News article highlighted five cool things about Joe. Wondering how well I would do if I had to supply this kind of personal information, I realized I would never stack up as cool as Joe. Here’s why…

Cool Thing No. 1

Joe: Would be a pro surfer if he did anything else
Jeffrey: Would be a pro musician if I did anything else

Analysis: Joe gets the edge here because surfers generally look pretty good, have great physiques, and don’t die at a young age from overdoses. Surfers can die getting slammed into a rock at a beach like Mavericks, but that’s cooler than choking on your vomit like Jimi Hendrix did. Although musicians are certainly reegarded as cool, and this is a close call, Joe gets an extra cool point here.

Cool Thing No. 2

Joe: Was seen in his underwear at age 12 by Actress Rachel Hunter
Jeffrey: Has paid $9 to see actresses in their underwear

Analysis: Joe is way cooler here. TV actor, Bryan Cranston, who is the Dad in “Malcolm in the Middle“, taught me to sing “So Much in Love” and sang it with me when we were at a friend actor’s wedding. But, Bryan is nowhere as hot as Rachel Hunter. Plus, I had my clothes on. I pay regularly to see actresses in their underwear at the movies, but that’s lame in comparison.

Cool Thing No. 3

Joe: Blogged that he first met Bill Gates at the urinal
Jeffrey: Larry Ellison has driven to my house and flown my daughter on his private jet

Analysis: Once again, Joe clearly wins. I never met Larry Ellison but he dropped his daughter off at my house a couple of times. My daughter, Brittany is much cooler than Joe or me because Larry flew her and in his private jet to New Zealand for a week on his boat. I, however, have not peed next to him or Bill, and I would probably not even be able to pee, let alone blog about it.

Cool Thing No. 4

Joe: Was a political science major
Jeffrey: Was a music major

Analysis: Whew. I finally am cooler. Political science majors are not complete losers like say, business majors, but music majors are significantly cooler. There are different degrees of coolness in music, but because I went to a jazz conservatory ,Berklee College of Music, for one year, I think I am cooler on this one.

Cool Thing No. 5

Joe: Once played drums in a band called “Where’s Julio”?
Jeffrey: Played in bands named the “Universal Space Choir” and “Bozos on Broadway”

Analysis: I think I get an edge here. I played in a lot of bands, many with cool names I can’t really remember. “Where’s Julio” is cute, but “Universal Space Choir” is out there. “Universal Space Choir” has a certain Stanley-Kubrick-Tibetan-Monk-Zen thing happening. Plus, “Bozos on Broadway” is funny, and had some guys in it that went on to do really well, like my friend Dan Siegel, who has serious chops and has recorded with some heavy dudes. But given this is about the band’s name, I only get a slight edge here.

Final Score: Joe is cooler than me. Hats off to him. His company also is great at PR, which is something we don’t do at Atlassian intentionally.

I am glad Joe did his Mercury News interview before mine because that gives me time to adjust my life and prepare for a cool “Five Things to Know” about me. For example, I think I need to plan on jumping out of a plane (with a parachute). Also I need to call some of my old musician buddies and see if anyone can remember the name of the band…

50,000 Pound Software

My friends at SRA Capital in San Francisco invited me to their Winter Technology Conference last week giving me a hall pass to sneak out of the Atlassian office and check out some public software companies. For those of you in private companies, if you ever wanted to disabuse yourself of the idea of being public, go to a financial conference.

The drill is: companies pitch themselves to investors as a good investment without…

a) sounding like Ken Lay or Jeff Skilling of Enron,
b) saying anything that has not been sanitized to smithereens by their investor relations consultant, internal counsel, law firm, accounting firm, and any other anal-retentive person in the decision hierarchy,
c) making any future statements remotely interesting
d) saying they are a good investment.

This last fact is a bit hilarious. Isn’t the whole point to believe these companies are a great buy?

All this means the presentations can be exceedingly dull. To make it even more boring, two out of three of the following people give these presentations: the CFO, the investor relations person, and the CEO. The CEO has some chance of making the presentation interesting because in theory he or she has the brass balls/ovaries to say something slightly edgy.

But if you were to pick out of a line-up exciting presenters, you probably wouldn’t pick any CFOs. Think about what they do: make numbers add up correctly. Personally I would be incarcerated right now if it were not for some great CFOs like Bill McDonagh (now at Walden Venture Capital) with whom I worked in the past. CFOs are critical guys, but they are not the go-to guys for spine-tingling excitement.

The other weird phenomenon is what the companies and investors focus on. I call this a self-fufilling prophecy. The investors want to know how big the Average Selling Price (ASP) of the software is. The bigger the better, naturally. One thing I noticed that is somewhat new since I last did these presentations is that companies talked about how many deals were over $100K in size. The more the better. This is dysfunctional in my mind because there are ways to make money and produce great margins without huge expensive software. But an endless loop exists with investors wanting this and companies feeding their lust.

Another dysfunctional metric is how many sales people do you have and how many are you hiring. As if huge sales forces were the only answer. Investors are looking for the leverage. Meaning: you spent all this money developing the intellectual property, you can sell it now, so now ram it down the throats of more customers.

I think the opposite is a lot more exciting. Once you understand the power of really good, lightweight software sold at a great value with lower distribution costs, you understand a much more efficient and exciting business model. But people who think this way aren’t real common at investor conferences. Some day I think this will change.

Not everyone was boring. Ali Jenab, CEO of VA Software was great. He is a sharp guy. He had led a compelling turnaround, and he gave the audience a lot of interesting content. His challenge is that VA Software’s media businesses: Slashdot, Freshmeat, and Sourceforge.net are highly distinct and have considerable potential, but their software business doesn’t seem anywhere near as interesting. You can bet that because they are public, with a guy like Ali running the show, there are strategies he cannot talk about that are in the works.

Which brings me back to boring presentations and the herd-mentality about business models. The opportunity exists for public companies to say something really interesting, rather than trudge through the same crap every other company does. Although Sarbanes-Oxley has neutered these guys to some extent, a financial conference pre-Enron collapse was not much different. I have never actually fallen asleep in one, but I need a lot of coffee and Coke.

The real troubling thing is the same-ness to the business models: expensive software requiring expensive sales costs.

But forget it. That’s why I work in a private company like Atlassian that does everything totally counter to these types of companies. And has better performance. ☺

We Weren’t Complete Babbling Idiots

Had lunch with Tim McAdam of Trinity Ventures. I have known Tim since we were both working in Chicago. When I met him, he was with a private equity firm GTCR that made real investments – say a nice $100 mil – in a variety of industries. I had nowhere near as cool a job: I ran a consulting company (Forgive Me for My Sins). Tim moved to California several years ago and is a very solid software VC on Sand Hill Road, epicenter of the venture community. Anyway I like guys from Chicago. Large plates of food, sporting events, huge quantities of beer, and honesty tend to have the right priorities with Chicagoans.

I was intrigued by what Trinity’s investment in still-stealth Wikisphere was all about. It seems the company will create an infrastructure for business communities. Think forums. Vertical Net redux, I ask? Close enough it seems. In the absence of knowing any details, this seems like a logical or inevitable use of wiki technology.

Although there has been inflated talk of VCs rummaging through dumpsters full of businesses plans from 1999, it is clearly happening as Wired’s Josh McHugh detailed nicely with his Mayfield Fund story, “Would You Buy a Used Dotcom from this Man?”. Perhaps somewhat dramatic in describing Mayfield’s “forensic analysis… to extract the good ideas trapped in the pile of dotcom corpses.” But not really. It makes sense if you think about it.

Yet how apropos. For here I am enjoying my omelet at Buck’s restaurant in Woodside which McHugh aptly calls “ground zero” for VCs. I am across the table from a Sand Hill VC, and money is flowing into the Internet, ladies and gentlemen. The crystal clear sun is shining outside on this great California day, and gee whiz, perhaps we weren’t all babbling idiots during the Boom. Crappy investors, yes. Out of control, yes. Drinking our own bathwater, check. But surely not babbling idiots. Oh no.

Because hidden in that nuclear winter that started March, 2000 were some perfectly fine ideas that were executed with some stupid combination of: a) spend money too fast, b) ignore margins, let alone spell the word, c) take money from any willing dope, d) get caught with our pants down in the spring of 2000 when the first payload of bombs hit. So many ideas were gushing out of the ground in ’98 and ’99 from reasonably highly educated people that some had to have been valid.

Business communities using wikis. On the surface: total sense. Reasonable business concept using contemporary, lightweight technology.

27.2 Billion Blogs Are Not Enough

Certainly not. Why else start a blog? Technorati searches 27.2 billion blogs. Surely the world must be in desperate need of another.

Fact is I only can think of sound reasons for not starting a blog. For starters, one should poke hot needles in their eyes before starting a blog. Why? Because…

1. I need another RSS feed like I need a rabid orangutan swinging a sledgehammer at my teeth. I have too little time to read my New York Times subscription. Long ago I gave up on the time commitment the Economist requires. I am still adapting to the stress and guilt of fifteen saved episodes of Saturday Night Live on Tivo. Right. Another blog.

2. How many of the bloggers out there actually were Journalism or English majors? Who taught these people to write? Surely most of them must own The Elements of Style, The Chicago Manual of Style, or some other handy reference on grammar and writing. Surely.

3. After you read Paul Graham, Guy Kawasaki, Joel Spolsky or a few other of your favorites, I am sure there must be a good million bloggers with something equally insightful to say. That requires only 1 in every 27,200 is brilliant. Aren’t these reasonable odds?

4. There are lots of easy to remember URLs available, so snap one up, flail away at your blog, and launch www.rutebega-wind.com. I think it’s available! Or www.dog-poop,com. Damn! It’s gone, but www.dog-poop.net or the softer, more introspective, more community-oriented www.dog-poop.org is available and can clearly differentiate you.

5. There are no shortage of opinions on the web, and upon deep inner reflection, I realize I need lots of advice from total strangers grazing out there. It adds an element of risk and excitement to take advice over the Internet from people who may have driven their own financial portfolio into burning oblivion, who recently have been released from some maximum security prison, or whose level of medication has reached the point that only blogging can release their demons. These must be people I need. 27.2. billion of them will not begin to satisfy my lust.

Yes, I can think of countless reasons for not starting a blog. Perhaps even 27.2 billion if I had the time to ponder.

So with that, I am here. Howdy.

Johann Sebastian Wiki

Whenever I have to explain to someone what a wiki is, I invariably mention wikipedia because just about everybody knows it. But the next time I have to show someone a wiki, my first choice without a doubt is the Bach Academie de Montreal…

… which clearly blows away most wikis in terms of presentation. I guess we should expect French-speaking musical lovers and musicians to do a brilliant job when it comes to user interface. It’s easy to downplay the importance of UI when we dwell so much on features in software, but wow, can it matter. Our friends at Adaptivist built this incredible version of Confluence. We love this wiki so much, it is going to be in our demos.

The Bach Academie is one of over 700 non-profit and open source licenses we have donated in the last two years, to give something back to the community and to our friends in the technical community.

What would Johann think of all this? Well, for starters, Bach would have made an absolutely killer software engineer.