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Who:
Sutha Kamal, founder and CEO of
AmbientVector
What: a wireless software start-up that makes it easy to create, share and view pictures and videos on your cell phone
Where: Toronto
When: Founded in 2005
Photo gallery:
90 days in the life of AmbientVector
Friday, July 21
Why culture matters
Cindy Gordon commented recently (thanks Cindy!) asking about keeping the team motivated, and said, "The leadership of the company is a huge component to the success of the employees in the business."
I agree with her: leadership here is important, but I think there's something even bigger: culture.
We're all excited to be building Nakama. We think it'll change the world. We've been "infected" and are driving towards near-term ship-dates and longer-term milestones. Salaries aren't as high as other places, the risks are high, but building something we're all excited about, with a few specific ship-dates we're driving towards. There's a lot of day-to-day tracking on the project side: filing bugs, checking up on milestones, status updates, etc. We also spend some time thinking about the big picture stuff: how does what we build change people's lives? Why are they going to use it and why our solution instead of someone else's? But what we don't do is spend a lot of time actively *trying* to get the team revved up... We already are :-)
David and I had breakfast with Cal Henderson , the architect behind Flickr , yesterday. He's a smart guy that gets excited about the problems he gets to solve, and the people he works with... a lot like our guys. Then we had lunch with a fantastically talented person in the wireless space, talking about our Europe/Asia strategy. Just a few minutes into lunch and she had us excited at the opportunity and the strategy to get there...
The more people we meet, the more clear this becomes: Working with great people on problems that interest you, creating solutions that have the potential to have an impact on people ... that's what's gets people motivated, and excited.
We're looking for great people. People who provoke us. People who see the opportunity, the value, the dream, who push us further and are truly self-starters ... that's our culture... it's what reinforces our culture ... it's why David was up at 2:30 last night working on something, and why Dan's routinely *still* up at 9 a.m. debugging one thing or another.
So maybe the most important part of leadership is setting the right culture and hiring the right people. It's the reason Jack Welch talked about "differentiating" your team, and picking the right people, and why Google and Microsoft fly hundreds (thousands?) of bright young grads out each and every year to meet dozens of people internally ... only to hire the brightest few that stand out.
P.S. the Globe's told me that RSS is coming really soon! :-)
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90 Days in the Life
Updated Friday, July 21 at 12:09 p.m.
Tuesday, July 18
Thoughts for a talk...
This afternoon I'm heading up to my alma mater, U of T, to give a talk about building a start-up and raising money. It's to a group of computer science and engineering students that are looking to learn a bit more about business, do something entrepreneurial, or figured "The Business of Software" sounded easier than "Advanced compiler design for highly-scalable heterogenous memory and computational subsystems" (I didn't actually make that up). Maybe they're onto something :)
