Hey folks,

I know I know… I’ve been neglecting your attention. I got very busy, and had to make some choices and put my attention on other things. I figured my rambling isn’t as important as the stuff that comes up daily.

To be totally honest, I find this space very cathartic even if it’s just a handful of people following it. Many of those people I know, or know of. Others I have yet to meet some day. And that’s what I really miss about blogging, getting my thoughts across and in the open.

There are other reasons I suppose. It’s easy to blog when things are going great, or there are good news to post. Lately we’ve been hearing doom and gloom around us. I dug in, had to concentrate, and it didn’t feel right spending time blogging while others are working away.

Well I will try and change that, and post more often. Even if it’s not nice, I think that may provide more insight anyway.

So what has been going on?

As you know, the bubble industrial economy is imploding a bit. And it is going to affect all of us directly, at some point if not right now.

At work I had to cut down some staff, something that I’ve never truly done before.

Here’s the thing, back around March I got some nice lines of credit from Citibank. I have used a lot of that cash, to hire more people than our revenue can account for. Times were okay, I was hoping the projects we were working on might come to some kind of fruition, or at least a promise of fruition. On top of that, I spent a lot of those loans on ahem, domaining.

So as the market started to collapse, it was clear that times are really changing. I let one guy go, who has been working for us for a few years remotely. He was a developer. Though he moved to a third world country (long story) and was “cheap”, it was very hard to work with him, and the work was mediocre. At times like this, there’s no room for even average, let alone mediocre. It was time to go.

Similarly we had another person working last 6 months here. Unfortunately, some of the stuff he was involved with was not going to start bringing in more revenue as I hoped. And the other stuff, well I just wasn’t impressed with the full list of skills that were supposed to be used. So that was another layoff.

On top of that, Duy and I were, and are, hard at work re-organizing and playing musical chairs with streaming servers to cut costs. Been emailing some vendors, asking for 20% discounts (it works), cutting out extra services we use, etc. Things add up, little by little.

Overall I think next month we’ll be back to mostly a proper burn rate. That is, we spend no more than what we make. Unfortunately I think advertising will start to slow down for us, I just hope that gets delayed enough for other stuff to come into play here.

The Team

Either way, I am more or less happy with the team we’ve got now. Well, I am very happy with the folks and they are top notch guys, but I think productivity can definitely be better. Many times I feel the productivity for some is nowhere near what it should be for people in a start-up. With others, productivity is not reliable or predictable, which causes other problems with planning and scaling responsibility. This is a post in itself for another day.

And I am really frustrated sometimes as guys don’t seem to “get it” or know how it is in other places. At most “start-ups”, people are hanging on by a hair, and that was even before hard times hit. Not doing enough means being on the street. It just pisses me off that so much time is spent on some things when it clearly shouldn’t. I hope that’s not too cryptic. I don’t need to start naming people, as it applies to probably everyone at some point or another – but a few more often than it should.

Anyway, I don’t want to make this bit longer. But I promise to try and let it all out bit by bit going forward. I don’t care if someone gets upset on my team as they read any of it. I hope people can look at things in a different way, or realize how it may look from a side. I’ll try and call things the way *I* see them, you know, the a**hole boss

Hard Times Are Actually Exciting

I want to leave you on a different note though. No doubt we’re entering tough times in the economy now. Most people are scaling back, some are panicking, others just have their mouths open in disbelief. With all the doom and gloom you hear – personally I am extremely excited and optimistic.

Don’t get me wrong. I am scaling to the basics too, but I will post in near future about why I am so excited. Tough times is when things actually start playing out, changing, and loosers start to go away. It’s a good time to push on and lean ahead.