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We just launched Web FWD

I am extremely proud and happy to announce the launch of my latest project: Mozilla’s Community-Driven Accelerator Program Web FWD.

Here’s the release blog post:

Today we’re launching Web FWD (Web Forward), the community-driven innovation accelerator from Mozilla Labs. Web FWD supports Open Web innovators by providing a space at Mozilla where they can build their products. We are creating a workshop environment where bold ideas can be realized and bare-bones prototypes can develop and go forward as products.

How

We’ll host small teams at Mozilla’s global offices for four weeks at a time, giving them access to our people, tools and resources, so they can focus on building. We’re looking for playful, useful, original problem-solving applications and tools that make the Web a better place. During the four week program, teams will work in-house alongside the Mozilla crew. You’ll receive mentorship and guidance from some of the brightest people around, allowing you to focus on bringing your product idea to life . At the end of four weeks, you’ll have a minimum viable product ready to go out on the Open Web. And together we can decide on how to take this product forward.

What we offer

• The opportunity to work alongside the Mozilla crew in one of our offices
• Access to key Mozilla personnel, introductions to interesting people and industry leaders
• Regular mentorship sessions with experts on technology, scalability, security, marketing, community, and business strategy
• Financial support during the program
• Help with IT infrastructure (servers, software, etc.)
• A great coworking experience with plenty of fun & awesomeness!

What we look for

• The product fits into one of the predefined problem areas
• The product is developed with the traits that are important for the open Web
• The team has at least the kernel of a product (i.e. some working code, not only an idea)

The program runs on a rolling submission schedule with the first spots opening in August. Head over to the Mozilla Labs Web FWD site for more information and submit your application.

An experiment - Dot Plan Files

John Carmack, legendary creator of the first and some of the finest 1st-person shooters, kept some sort of work diary in the form of .plan files. They serve as a form of microblog and capture my work and thoughts for the day (more: http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack/plan.html).

As we just launched Web FWD, the innovation accelerator program from Mozilla, I will start creating .plan files and post them to GitHub (actually I have a bunch of .plan files up from the early days of my work on Web FWD).

When I accomplish something, I write a * line that day.

Whenever a bug / missing feature is mentioned during the day and I don’t fix it, I make a note of it. Some things get noted many times before they get fixed.

Occasionally I go back through the old notes and mark with a + the things I have since fixed.

Feel free to follow along…

Cashflow matters.

If there is a single thing, a single activity and a single metric you should care about when building a business (or a sustainable open project - which you should run like a business anyway), it is cashflow.

Cashflow is simple: Money in minus money out. If your cashflow is positive your business lives, if your cashflow is negative your business dies. Simple as that.

Yet I am befuddled by the lack of understanding for this essential fact of business. I literally haven’t had a single discussion about the actions which lead a particular business to get to positive cashflow or even the notion of cashflow with any of the many startups I’ve met over the course of the last couple of years. It seems that Silicon Valley’s obsession with growth and the vague notion of “we’ll figure out the business model later” led to a culture of people building companies with the single goal of selling them. And as Silicon Valley culture spreads throughout the world these days, founders all around the globe follow suit.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to get to positive cashflow as soon as possible. Unless you’re the next Facebook/AirBnB/Name-your-preferred-hot-startup and swim in heaps of venture capital (which to be honest you most likely won’t be - the cards are clearly stacked against you… just look at the stats) having positive cashflow means you are master of your own destiny. Cashflow puts you into the driver seat. It allows you to do the things you want to do. And even if you want to raise money to accelerate your growth it puts you into a position of power, not one where you need to beg for money.

So - unless you want to build your business as an acquisition target (nothing wrong with that - just know that the odds are heavily stacked against you) but want to build a business which lasts, read up on cashflow, understand the principals by heart and make it one of your key objectives!

And to that end - we’ll make cashflow discipline an essential part of Mozilla’s WebFWD program. Time to build the next crop of 100 year organizations!

P.S. Here’s some recommended reading for you - Don’t Build A Company To Sell, Build It To Last by Kanyi Maqubela and anything you can find by Norm Brodsky (a columnist at Inc Magazine), e.g. this piece on cashflow.

How to Evaluate Innovation

One of the more complicated questions we ask ourselves here at WebFWD every time we receive a new application is: How innovative is the idea? And how do you measure this in an objective fashion?

A while ago I came across Doblin’s “Ten Types of Innovation” model - although it is by far not perfect, it provides a really neat, concise way to look at (and evaluate) innovation. The way Doblin’s model works is: For each innovation (project) you check them on each of the ten factors of the model (which fall into three broad categories: Configuration, Offering and Experience). Essentially you then make a binary decision - does the project innovate on the profit/business model? Does it innovate on the network? etc. The more boxes a project ticks, the more innovative and disruptive it will be. Clean, clear and easy. Not perfect - but usually good enough.

Harvard Business Review published an excellent infographic on the model and its application and if you like long(er) form content, the W.F. Kellogg Foundation has published a paper on “Intentional Innovation” (in the context of philanthropy and social impact”.

Happy Innovating!

On VC Funding - Food for Thought

And there’s another option for startups that don’t want to go public: Forgo VC and angel investments entirely and fund the company with the profits from your business. That organic-growth option may sound quaint, but it can still be quite successful. Indeed, VC funding is by no means necessary to fund a fast-growing company. In 2009 Paul Kedrosky, a Kauffman Foundation senior fellow and venture capitalist, looked at the Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing companies in the US for every year between 1997 and 2007—a period that includes the VC boom of 1999-2000. He found about 900 companies in all, of which only 16 percent had VC backing. “Such companies almost certainly could have venture investors, if they wanted them,” Kedrosky wrote in a paper for Kauffman. In other words, the overwhelming majority of the fastest-growing companies decided that they didn’t need VCs.

Good food for thought. And here is the quoted study by Paul Kedrosky.