Mark Cuban's rules for a successful start-up

Mark Cuban is an Internet billionaire who owes a substantial portion of his fortune to start-ups. How successful is he? Well, he's listed as #133 on Forbes' "World's Richest People" list, with a net worth of $2.8 billion, and The Guinness Book of Records credits Cuban with the "largest single e-commerce transaction," $40 million for his Gulfstream V jet in October 1999.

Wouldn't you like to get inside his head? Well, you can. Mark Cuban keeps his own blog at Blog Maverick. Here's his twelve rules for start-ups:

Of course, anyone who has started a company has their own rules and guidelines, so I thought i would add to the meme with my own. My "rules" below aren't just for those founding the companies, but for those who are considering going to work for them as well.

1. Don't start a company unless its an obsession and something you love.

2. If you have an exit strategy, its not an obsession.

3. Hire people who you think will love working there.

4. Sales Cures All. Know how your company will make money and how you will actually make sales.

5. Know your core competencies and focus on being great at them. Pay up for people in your core competencies. Get the best. Outside the core competencies, hire people that fit your culture but are cheap

6. An expresso machine ? Are you kidding me ? Shoot yourself before you spend money on an expresso machine. Coffee is for closers. Sodas are free. Lunch is a chance to get out of the office and talk. There are 24 hours in a day, and if people like their jobs, they will find ways to use as much of it as possible to do their jobs.

7. No offices. Open offices keeps everyone in tune with what is going on and keeps the energy up. If an employee is about privacy, show them how to use the lock on the john. There is nothing private in a start up. This is also a good way to keep from hiring execs who can not operate successfully in a startup. My biggest fear was always hiring someone who wanted to build an empire. If the person demands to fly first class or to bring over their secretary, run away. If an exec wont go on salescalls, run away. They are empire builders and will pollute your company.

8. As far as technology, go with what you know. That is always the cheapest way. If you know Apple, use it. If you know Vista... ask yourself why, then use it. Its a startup, there are just a few employees. Let people use what they know.

9. Keep the organization flat. If you have managers reporting to managers in a startup, you will fail. Once you get beyond startup, if you have managers reporting to managers, you will create politics.

10. NEVER EVER EVER buy swag. A sure sign of failure for a startup is when someone sends me logo polo shirts. If your people are at shows and in public, its ok to buy for your own folks, but if you really think someone is going to wear your Yobaby.com polo you sent them in public, you are mistaken and have no idea how to spend your money

11. NEVER EVER EVER hire a PR firm. A PR firm will call or email people in the publications, shows and websites you already watch, listen to and read. Those people publish their emails. Whenever you consume any information related to your field, get the email of the person publishing it and send them an email introducing yourself and the company. Their job is to find new stuff. They will welcome hearing from the founder instead of some PR flack. Once you establish communications with that person, make yourself available to answer their questions about the industry and be a source for them. If you are smart, they will use you.

12. Make the job fun for employees. Keep a pulse on the stress levels and accomplishments of your people and reward them. My first company, MicroSolutions, when we had a record sales month, or someone did something special, I would walk around handing out 100 dollar bills to salespeople. At Broadcast.com and MicroSolutions, we had a company shot. Kamikaze. We would take people to a bar every now and then and buy one or 10 for everyone. At MicroSolutions, more often than not we had vendors cover the tab. Vendors always love a good party :0

These are all off the top of my head. But they have worked for me so far.

Your Second Life, no really

In the early days of the web, businesses swarmed to adopt private chatrooms and instant messenger programs as effective business tools for dealing with out-of-office communication. That's so 2-D. As 3-D environments like Second Life become more viable, is it possible that one day we may all conduct business in immersive online environments, in a sort of, well, second life? It's a definite possibility. Last year Lawrence Lessig, cyber-law professor and founder of the Creative Commons, began conducting seminars on legal, social and technological issues while on "location" in the Second Life virtual world. This month, Forrester Research released a 24-page report, Getting Real Work Done In Virtual Worlds, telling its clients that virtual worlds are on the brink of becoming valuable work tools; and that within 5 years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for business as the web is today. As Gary Trudeau said, "I've been trying for some time to develop a lifestyle that doesn't require my presence." Maybe someday soon, in the non-local Internet of the near-futre, I may actually succeed.

The good and bad of crowd-sourcing

When Google unveiled their latest project, Street View, recently, I doubt anyone over there expected such a collective back lash from privacy advocates. I mean, the service is really cool. Available in select cities, Google now allows you to zoom in on their maps and see what things look like at street level. This isn't CG. I once rented Spiderman 2 for the Xbox just so I could take a virtual tour of New York and climb to the top of the Empire State Building like King Kong. I was a bit disappointed because it didn't feel "real" enough. Google's Street View doesn't disappoint. It's actual photos spliced together and is very immersive.

Perhaps that's the problem. It's a little too real. They are actual photos taken by Google crew driving around in this van, which was caught in a reflection as it was driving by a window. That's not the only thing caught on camera. I can imagine the guys in the van thinking it was funny when they also snapped photos of girls sunbathing, some dude going into an adult bookstore, some dude coming out of a strip club, and a guy breaking into a house (among others). Some photos have since been removed like the infamous guy peeing on the side of the road and the poor girl whose thong was showing as she was getting out of a truck. The privacy advocates raised the red flag when it was revealed that in some of the photos you could see into people's houses. I'm sure Google's photo-taking policies are in the process of being revised.

So how did all these photos in a haystack surface? That's the power of crowds. Google serves millions of users per day. Whole groups of users, right now as you are reading this, are scrutinizing every inch of Street View looking for interesting photos. In this particular case, that's come back to bite Google in the arse. Millions of judging eyeballs is the downside of having a huge user base. But when it works to their advantage, it's called crowd-sourcing. Huge tasks, like maintaining articles at Wikipedia and protecting them from vandals is turned over to the crowd itself. This greatly reduces the amount of time and money spent on paid moderators by replacing them with volunteers. Yahoo bought Flickr as a replacement for its photo service exactly because Flickr has self-maintaining crowd-sourcing features built-in. Though the deal cost them millions, they need less of a work force to work it, and end up saving much more in the short long-run.

It sounds like a lazy way of getting something for nothing, and it sort of is. Still, crowd-sourcing shows promise in solving real problems. Computers are great because they can automate tasks. Unfortunately computers aren't human, and there are some things only humans (currently) can do. For example, "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR) can be used to scan books and turn them into digitized text that can be searched. It works great on clearly printed books, but when dealing with old worn manuscripts and handwritten journals, OCR starts encountering problems. Is that a lower-case "a" or an "o"? Only humans can currently tell the difference. This very same idea is used in CAPTCHA, or "word verification" spam deterrent systems. Spam bots can't tell if that's an "a" or an "o" either. It just so happens that about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. This few seconds of individual human deciphering translates to more than 150,000 hours of work each day. Imagine if that could be put to use somehow, like maybe translating characters OCR can't recognize. Well guess what, it is. Check out reCAPTCHA, a service doing exactly that.

Who knows what future problems crowd-sourcing will solve? Reading books while fighting spam is new way of harnessing its power, but crowd sourcing isn't exactly new. SETI years ago started using volunteer's excess computer processing power to scan the skies for extraterrestrials. Similar projects likewise borrow processing speed to crunch data on AIDS research. The "some dudes" of the world are probably planning really complex uses we can't even imagine yet. At the very least crowd-sourcing keeps us honest, as in pointing out Google's unintentional transition to Big Brother. I'm still trying to figure out how to crowd-source my finances. If only one million people would send me a buck...

I don't want to run a coffee house, but if I did...

I sometimes toy with the idea of opening a coffee house. I wouldn't do it around here. It would have to be in a place that would attract the kind of people I'd want to hang around for eight hours a day. I'm not exactly sure where that would be, but it's definitely not here. I'm only half into the idea as well. Like Gary Trudeau, "I've been trying for some time to develop a lifestyle that doesn't require my presence." That's why I'm in the web biz. You don't actually have to be there for that. Most of my clients lately are in California.

Still, I've had a love of coffee houses long before everyone wanted one, long before Starbucks took over. I used to hang out at Sitwell's on Ludlow Ave. in the Clifton Gaslight District of Cincinnati, back when they were in the basement, back when they were dingy -er. I would hop the Metro just to hang out at Sitwell's and visit the New World Bookshop down the street.

I l-o-v-e coffee. I was totally Seattle in the '90s though I've never actually been there. I did work as a barista briefly, but that was just for a couple of days. I tried to get a job at Sitwell's once, but I don't think I had enough piercings. All my tattoos are boringly covered.

Some possible names for the coffee house [never] to be:

Revolutions - because every modern revolution came from a bunch of disgruntled guys sitting around a cafe, plotting over black coffee. The decor would be all beatnik and have at least a few black and white photos of... well, disgruntled guys plotting over black coffee. I probably wouldn't go this route. It's all a little too Marxist. Obviously if I'm running a coffee house where I'm charging $3 for a cappuccino, I'm no Marxist.

The Bodhi Tree - named for the tree under which Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment. This would be awesome because I'd settle for no less than a huge fig tree growing in the middle of the room, like twenty feet high at least, in a solarium with the coffee house built around it. Around the tree would be a carpet of floor pillows. Scratch that. That's my ideal house!

Geeked Internet Cafe - No one I know likes this name but me, and I don't know why. It's a great name for an internet cafe because you've got all the geeky toys, computers, games, whatever, and everyone's getting geeked out on coffee. Every night there'd be a LAN party. I would personally drive hours to visit a place called Geeked, but then again, I am a geek.

All of the above was to explain my obsession with coffee so I can link it to my obsession with art. I'm trying (unsuccessfully so far) to create latte art like these:



It's harder than it looks. I've got a decent espresso machine, but like any other art it requires a pesky thing called skill.

view more latte art / learn how to make your own