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Time magazine has a great story titled The Men Who Stole the World about Shawn Fanning (Napster), Jon Lech Johansen (15 yo who broke DVD encryption), Justin Frankel (WinAmp and Gnutella aka LimeWire) and Bram Cohen (BitTorrent).

This quote from Frankel was pretty poignant

It wasn’t a great match. With Nullsoft, Frankel’s modus operandi had been to write the best software he could, then give it away for nothing. At AOL the business of selling software threatened to overwhelm the software itself. “The products that I worked on, it was very much like, We want to make this money out of this. We’re doing this deal with these other companies, and so the product is going to do this as a result,” he remembers. “No one cared about how users actually experienced it.”

Now granted, not all of these guys have hit it super rich and Time correctly points out that other big companies (like Apple) succeeded in monetizing media over the internet while they didn’t, but the fact remains it’s nearly impossible to innovate in a constrained environment.

Stupid browser fragmentation and stupid IE6 (and IE7 for that matter) making it so hard to just make a simple webpage look like it’s supposed to. We’re trying to clean up the web interface of liquid now (and build out a mobile one) and it’s just so frustrating as we try to get this working under every possible scenario.

For an example of the problem, below is the breakdown for this site according to Google Analytics.

And if you dive a little deeper, there are 14 different versions of Firefox, 11 different versions of Chrome, 10 versions of Safari, and then 4 versions of IE which is actually the worst because all of those versions interpret style sheets COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY. Shoot me in the face.

To get around most of this I’ve started to play with a couple different CSS frameworks to try and take as much crap out of the equation as possible. My first experience with a grid system was The Square Grid, which is a pretty nice introduction. I’ve since moved on to Blueprint CSS because of the built in IE compatibility, plugin capability, and social proof from sites like Mint.

So yeah, I’m learning quickly but still pretty clueless. Should be a fun next couple weeks.

Whenever people ask me about my background leading to me starting a business I always tell them the same thing:

I started out college as an electrical engineer for a year, did a co-op semester and hated coding all day. Switched my major to industrial engineering, worked a couple years in logistics/supply chains but couldn’t wake up every day passionate about moving boxes. Went back to get my MBA to learn about business and focused on marketing and entrepreneurship.

And now I’m here, coding all day to help people move boxes.

Yeah, I know.

I think the big hang up for me wasn’t so much that I hated what I was doing, it was that I hated being able to see what was wrong with the process but having no way to change it. I mean, I could (and did) make little changes here and there but the major inefficiencies still sat there unaddressed, and it was way outside of my sphere of influence to initiate those reforms.

And so here I am; back to working on the things I once thought I hated, and loving it.

The other thing I always seem to come back to is education. I grew up around family members who were educators at all levels (aunt – elementary school, mom – high school/elementary, grandfather – college professor, step-aunt – college professor) and it’s always had a huge appeal for me. In fact, we’re actually working on a slight redesign of liquidWMS right now to make it the most useful and cost-efficient inventory management tool (tracking things like books, furniture, computers, etc) for schools.

There were two articles I came across today thanks to my twitter feed that got me thinking hard about education changes again. Take a few minutes to check them out and try to think about how you can help redesign education in this country.

1. The Rise of ‘EduPunk’ (Inside HigherEd)
2. The Education Manifesto – Michelle Rhee and Adrian Fenty (WSJ)

According to an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, new businesses.

Unfortunately, in troubled economic times the language of recovery is too often tilted toward large, established companies or to “small businesses,” a broad term that traditionally applies to businesses with fewer than 500 employees. The conventional wisdom is that such businesses account for half of the labor force and are therefore the engine of future job creation.

That’s not quite the case. The more precise factor is not the size of businesses, but rather their age. According to the Census Bureau, nearly all net job creation in the U.S. since 1980 occurred in firms less than five years old. A Kauffman Foundation report released yesterday shows that as recently as 2007, two-thirds of the jobs created were in such firms. Put more starkly, without new businesses, job creation in the American economy would have been negative for many years.

Just another example of how the Georgia Legislature stifled economic growth in this state by making it harder to start new businesses with the passage of Amendment 1.

So, instead of passing laws that make it harder for people to develop new jobs in this state, what should we do? Well, I’m not necessarily a huge fan of all of the ideas listed in that article, but this one is something I’ve been passionate about since being introduced to it by Brad Feld’s blog some time ago.

If an automatic green card is not politically feasible, then let’s expand and rename the current “entrepreneur’s” visa, which is limited to immigrants who bring at least $1 million to this country. Let’s drop the $1 million capital requirement and award a renewable “job creator’s” visa to immigrants who have founded a company here and demonstrated they have at least one employee.

I and many others much smarter than me love this idea. If you want to support it too, check out Startup Visa. Hell, England just did it.

Brad Feld, of Foundry Group fame, wrote a post recently titled How To Create a Sustainable Entrepreneurial Community. It’s a very interesting first hand look at what Boulder has done to grow itself into a startup hub in the last 6 years.

While reading this I started wondering how he would grade Atlanta’s slowly maturing startup scene. Here are his main recommendations and my feelings of how Atlanta scores on them.

First is the recognition that Silicon Valley is a special place. It’s futile to try to be the next Silicon Valley. Instead, recognize that Silicon Valley has strengths and weaknesses. Learn from the strengths and incorporate the ones that fit with your community while trying to avoid the weaknesses. Leverage the natural resources of your community and be the best, unique entrepreneurial community that you can be. Basically, play to your strengths.

Atlanta’s pretty well aware we are not the valley, right Stephen? You see a lot more B2B startups than consumer plays, a lot more bootstrapping than idea-stage fundraising, and specialized clusters like internet security.

Next, get ready for a 20-year journey. Most entrepreneurial communities ramp up over a three- to five-year period and then stall or collapse, with the early leaders getting bored, moving away, getting rich and changing their priorities, or just disengaging. It takes a core group of leaders — at least half a dozen — to commit to provide leadership over at least 20 years.

Well, we’ve had a few people sell high, and another few that could if they wanted to.

While some of these people haven’t found the need to participate in a lot of the startup events now that they’ve got theirs, there is a clear group of key people who are driving the community forward. People like

David Cummings
Stephen Fleming
Sanjay Parekh
Lance Weatherby

[D]o things that engage the entire entrepreneurial community. Over the years I’ve been to many annual entrepreneurial award events and I’ve gone to endless cocktail parties for entrepreneurs. These are nice, but they get boring quickly.
…
You need to take the next step and create real events that have entrepreneurs work together on a regular basis. Meetups and Open Coffee Club type events that occur on a regular basis are a great start.

We’re pretty good here. Breakfasts at St Charles, Startup Drinks, Open Coffee, etc.

Hackathons, Startup Weekend, and Open Angel Forum events are the next level.

Not bad, but not great. We’ve done Startup Weekends, but no events really like Open Angel Forum. We have pitch events, but they tend to be more about either perfecting your pitches or more of a presentation showcase than a real event to gain funding

Events at the local university, such as CU Boulder’s Silicon Flatirons programs, including Entrepreneurs Unplugged and Entrepreneurial Roundtables, involve the entrepreneurial community with students who are the future entrepreneurs in the community.

Hmmm, now we’re getting a little worse. There is a great program called TI:GER that involves Georgia Tech PhDs and MBAs and Emory JDs. To my knowledge there isn’t a similar program for undergrads at Tech (yet) but there are things like the Edison Prize and GT Business Plan Competition that encourage entrepreneurship and innovation among the young folk.

It would be great to see more opportunity out there, especially at schools other than Georgia Tech (although clearly that’s where my allegiance would lie).

And programs like TechStars — which engage the entire entrepreneurial community for 90 days a year — are the icing on the cake.

The previously mentioned Sanjay Parekh and David Cummings introduced something like this with Shotput Ventures.

Next, you have to continually get fresh blood into the entrepreneurial ecosystem. It has to be easy for a new entrepreneur to emerge in your community and get connected with the experienced entrepreneurs and investors. If someone moves to your community, it has to be easy for him or her to engage. Experienced entrepreneurs and investors should want to work with new entrepreneurs and new entrepreneurs should have their minds blown when they move from their otherwise dull and disengaged community to your exciting, welcoming and engaging community.

This is probably where we are weakest. It takes more effort to find the Atlanta entrepreneurship crowd than it does in other cities. Some people like this, they see it as a self-selecting mechanism. If you aren’t willing to put in the effort to actually find the people you seek, are you really going to add anything after all?

I humbly disagree. I think we should be reaching out to as many people as possible when they show even the slightest interest and hope for the best. This is not intended to call out anyone individually, or even the community as a whole. There are a lot of people who make themselves as public as possible and respond to unsolicited emails or twitter messages (I know, I’ve sent them). However, there’s serious improvement that can be made here that will have a huge effect on the ecosystem as a whole.

I love TED Talks. It’s one of the few podcasts I subscribe to on iTunes and, while I only actually watch about 40% of them, they are almost always great.

This 7-minute presentation by David Bismark seemed pretty topical, with it being election day yesterday and all. He goes over a pretty ingenious idea for how to do electronic voting with increased transparency to everybody involved (voter, poll-watcher, news media, etc) while actually making the process more secure.