Today FamilyLink became the #99 most popular US web property, according to Quantcast:
http://www.quantcast.com/p-86YkM5oSeBMSE#summary

Congratulations FamilyLink for your phenominal growth.  Thank you for letting me part of this amazing ride.

The Terrafugia Transitionis scheduled later this month to take its maiden flight.  If all goes according to plans, it may be in show rooms within 18 months.  This flying car was designed by former NASA engineers.  It transforms from a car to a plane in 15 seconds, fits into a normal-sized garage,  uses unleaded gasoline, can fly up to 500 miles on a single tank of petrol at a cruising speed of 115mph, has been tested at driving speeds of 90 MPH, and sells for an expected retail price of $200,000.  

Many issues must be resolved before the flying car will reach main stream.  For example, all flying car drivers will be required to obtain time-intensive FAA pilots license, no state but Alaska allowing pilots to take off from roads, and the price is still out of most of our price ranges.  However, if this flying car maiden flight is successful, it signals that the future of the flying car for the masses may be closer than we all expected.  

Read more about it.

Made to Stick talks about a research study that compared the effectiveness of donation requests using different approaches.  One donation request provided statistics about the masses of people in one region of Africa facing hunger and poverty.  The second letter simply told the story of one needy girl from that region and said that all money donated would go to her.   Obviously, the second letter was tremendously more successful.  

People are much more willing to help if they know of a specific need, instead of just helping a cause.  In other words, when people learn of a huge problem they often feel that “someone should do something”, but they feel the problem is too large for them to solve themselves, so they do nothing.  It’s kind of like a room that is so messy you don’t know where to start, so you go do something else.  However, when we connect with a specific person with a specific need, we are much more likely to sacrifice and help, because we know we can do something to make a huge difference to that person with whom we are connected.  The specific connection makes the service much more real and meaningful. 

The Adoption.com Photolisting is an example of this principle that I have observed first hand.   When prospective adoptive parents are able to see pictures and read bios of orphans they often connect with and then adopt a specific child.  Many parents choose to adopt internationally after connecting with a specific child, who otherwise would not have adopted. Many parents who thought they only wanted to adopt a healthy Caucasian infant in the U.S. end up adopting an older, special needs child from a foreign country because of the connection which they formed with that child by using the photolisting.

If I came to your church congregation and spoke about the many foster children in your state who need to be adopted, I might have a few families come talk to me after the service.  However, if I brought 12 of those foster children with me and explained that I needed emergency foster homes for those children that night, ALL of the children would be taken in (if the families were qualified), and most of those children (if not all) would be permanently adopted by families in that congregation.

Think about it.  How many of us would, without a second thought, take in a starving orphan who showed up on our doorstep needing a place to stay?  I believe there is enough food, money, compassion, time, and great people in this world to solve huge social crises such as the world orphan crisis, hunger, needless death to curable diseases, and poverty.  The problem is not a lack of resources, but instead is effectively connecting those resources with great people who would be willing to help.  

So, then the question is how we can create those connections on a scale large enough to solve the otherwise insurmountable social problems in our world.  Kiva has showed us one of the large pieces of this solution by helping to everyday people, like my family, connect with and lend to entrepreneurs in third-world countries.  On-the-ground organizations help qualify and administer the loans.  And, their repayment rate would put to shame EVERY major bank in the United States.  My family tried to make a loan around Christmas time through Kiva, and the system was a little too effective.  There were more than thousands of people making loans and only four entrepreneurs seeking loans.  By the time we read through a newly posted loan and tried to participate in the loan, the full loan had already been fully funded.  There were more people at that time trying to loan than people listed seeking loans.  I just looked at Kiva as I wrote this blog entry, and it looks like there are now 208 active entrepreneurs listed seeking loans.  However, just in the last week more than 2,000 loans have been made by people like you and I, totaling more than $750,000.  This is another example that there is an abundance of great people, food, money, compassion and time to solve the world’s greatest social problems.  We just have to figure out how to create the specific connections.  

I want to build my future career greatly around this concept of creating connections to solve world social crises.  How can we more effectively build connections between great people in need and the great people who would love to help if they were just connected with specific situations? 

First, I find the term “bottom billion” inappropriate and offensive, as I have lived among many of these amazing people during the nearly two years I spent in Brazil. These people face almost hopeless poverty, have enormous challenges and we need to help them. However, they are not the “bottom billion”. These are beautiful people filled with amazing potential. These might be the poorest, most underprivileged people on earth, but I don’t agree with the label “bottom billion”.

Regardless of the semantics of the name for this group of people, I agree with Dr. Collier that we need to provide hope for these underprivileged people. Dr. Collier analyzes the role the United States took to help Europe after World War II as a model that the world can follow today to help solve this problem.

He recommends that we provide:

(1) AID

(2) TRADE – After WWII the US tore up the protectionist trade policy and totally reversed it, opening trade with Europe.

(3) SECURITY – After WWII, the US tore up it’s isolationist security policy and put hundreds of thousands of troops in Europe.

(4) GOVERNMENTS – Before WWII the US had not been willing to join the League of Nations, but after WWII we became part of a larger international community that helped create the solution for Europe.

DR. Collier spoke about the need to better utilize the resources booms in these under-developed countries. He recommended international standards to create informed societies, such as government financial transparency and competitive auction formats for contracts related to the developing country resources.

I agree with Dr. Collier that these lessons learned from the successfully rebuilding of Europe after WWII can provide us with several of the necessary pieces of the solution to end global poverty. However, many more solutions are available to help us solve this problem today as compared to 60 years ago. For, example, the power of the Internet allows us to facilitate microlending from millions of people around the world in a way that would have been impossible before the Internet.

Technology advances provide phenomenal solutions if they are shared with developing countries. For example, inexpensive solar panels can provide consistent power in developing countries that have struggled with insufficient and unreliably power supply. Inexpensive wireless technologies can facilitate communication necessary to efficiently run businesses, including access to telephones, email and the Internet. Vaccines for diseases such as malaria can help to halt the ravaging effects of these diseases.

Dr. Collier is right that we need to learn from the successes of the European construction after World War II, but let’s also open our minds to the additional innovative solutions that are available. We can certainly do a better job developing underprivileged countries today than was possible in the 1940s.

The video of Dr. Collier’s speech is embedded below:

· GoTo/Overture (became Yahoo Search Marketing) – paid inclusion search engine that was renamed Yahoo! Search Marketing after it was purchased by Yahoo to compete with Google AdSense.

· CitySearch – local city guides, acquired by IAC/InterActiveCorp.

· Commission Junction – affiliate marketing leader purchased by ValueClick.

· Insider Pages – Yellow Pages written by friends; a local search engine built around the concept that the best way to find a local business is through a personal recommendation. The Insider Pages community has written over 500,000 user-generated reviews of local businesses across the USA. The company was acquired by CitySearch/IAC in 2007.

· The DotTV Corporation – licensed the rights to the .tv domain, and sends the island nation of Tuvalu enough money from this license that it was able to join the United Nations. The company was acquired by VeriSign in 2001.

· eSolar – makes electricity generation from large scale solar thermal plants cost-competitive with fossil fuels. With mirrors that are 100 to 300 times smaller than conventional designs, eSolar’s product affords substantial advantages, including a 50 percent cost reduction. eSolar just received $10 million from Google and developed the solar power for the Google campus.

· Aptera Motors – is building lightweight, low cost composite electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles that are safe and reliable. By employing patent pending low cost composite manufacturing methods and cutting edge computational fluid dynamics, the company’s first car, the Aptera typ-1 will be available for under $30,000.

· Snap – is dedicated to getting users to results they really want faster. Snap.com delivers superior relevance and visual, rich and interactive search results to broadband users, and offers risk-free, flexible Cost-Per-Action advertising to advertisers. The company’s Snap Shots service is an open platform for delivering contextually relevant content such as stock quotes, streaming audio or video, product information and more, directly to users as they browse the web. (I have implemented Snap technology on this blog.)

· Tickets.com –a leading provider of tickets for sports and entertainment events worldwide.

· Compete – web analytics website that allows visitors to view and compare traffic to websites around the world (a site I use constantly).

· eToys.com – internet toy retailer, purchased by KB Toys.

· Picasa – a digital photo organizer for the PC that was widely reviewed as the best product on that platform. The company was acquired by Google in 2004.

· WeddingChannel.com – a central resource for couples about to get married. The site attracts millions of unique visitors each month and contains the bridal registries of a wide variety of retailers. WeddingChannel.com merged with The Knot in 2006.

· PayMyBills.com – online bill payment service acquired by PayTrust.

· Intranets.com – provided on-demand collaboration services — an “instant intranet” — for small businesses or departments and groups inside large organizations. By the time it was acquired by WebEx Communications in 2005, it had amassed over 300,000 paying subscribers and 10,000 corporate sites.

· NetZero – one of the first companies to offer free, ad-supported dial-up Internet services. It expanded its services with low-cost access in 2001. In that same year, it merged with Juno Online Services to form United Online. United Online is publicly traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange (Nasdaq: UNTD).

· HomesDirect – quickly became the largest online auction site for foreclosed properties with more than 10,000 homes sold per month. It was acquired by eBay in 2001.

· AirWave Wireless – a leading provider of specialized tools to centrally manage large, multi-vendor wireless LAN, mesh, and WiMAX networks.

· Free-PC – an opportunity to deliver free PCs to consumers, with the costs fully borne by advertising revenue. After providing free computers and Internet access to 20,000 customers in just a few short months, the company was acquired by eMachines.

· Energy Innovations – delivers cost-effective, grid-competitive solar electric power. It is currently developing the Sunflower, the first high-concentration PV system designed for commercial rooftop and adjacent ground-mounted applications.

· X-1 Technologies – changes the way corporate information is accessed and acted upon by end users. The company pioneered fast-as-you-type searching, intuitive interface, file and email previewing, the ability to save searches, and the ability to act on the found email or files. X1 is now available in both desktop and enterprise editions.

· New.net – provides more logical web address ending suffixes such as .travel and .shop. By partnering with Internet service providers to enable these new addresses to be recognized, the company sought to expand the market for web addresses and make it easier for users to find sites of interest. The company was acquired by Vendare Media (now Connexus) in 2004.

· Partsearch – a leading provider of Outsourced Parts Management (OPM) solutions.

· Infinia – improves the quality of life by changing how the world generates and uses energy. Having developed and delivered innovative Stirling engines and generators since 1985, the company’s technology is at the core of residential combined heat and power appliances currently being commercialized worldwide.

· Cooking.com – the leading online superstore for all things related to cooking.

· Desktop Factory – developed a breakthrough desktop 3D printer with capabilities similar to traditional rapid prototyping systems costing tens of thousands of dollars more. Combining high performance and low cost in a desktop size, this printer will allow three-dimensional printing to become pervasive in business, schools and homes.

· Perfect Market – an automated search engine marketing company that helps online publishers monetize content. The company maximizes the profitability of publishers’ pages by adjusting the amount spent with each traffic partner as calculated by Perfect Market’s proprietary algorithms through a closed loop feedback system. The high degree of automation provided by their patent-pending SEMgine™ technology is the key to profitably monetizing content that would otherwise remain invisible to Web searchers.

· InternetBrands – is a leading operator of media and e-commerce sites for “large ticket” consumer purchases, such as cars, real estate, mortgages, and travel. InternetBrands operates a portfolio of websites with 34 million visitors and 458 million page views in March 2008. In April, Internet Brands purchased five new websites, including FitDay.com. Some of the other InternetBrands websites include:

o CarsDirect

o Autos.com

o VacationHomes

o ApartmentRentals

o Loan

o CruiseReviews

o BikeForums

o Vamoose

o DVDtalk

o FamilyCorner

o FlyerTalk

o HorseTopia

o HuntingNet

o World66

o WikiTravel

o vBulletin (powers the Adoption.com Forums.)

o And many others.

IdeaLab was the simultaneous home to about 50 dot-coms at the height of the Internet bubble. After the burst of the bubble, Bill and IdeaLab went through some dark times. They had taken private placement funds at a $9 billion valuation, but then dropped in value to an estimated $500 million. Both sides eventually came to terms and dropped the suit.

After the dotcom crash Gross and IdeaLab shifted their focus to “big, impactful, change-the-world companies”. They felt it was going to take at least five years to get any company profitable, so they needed to focus on much bigger opportunities to make the effort worth while. Gross says, “We slowed our pace dramatically. We still had 20 ideas a month, but we just rejected 20 a month for six months, before we started one.”

Now, IdeaLab focuses on about 16 companies in a much more diverse portfolio. Bill is starting fewer new ventures, showing more restraint in which companies he starts, holding his companies longer, and trying to stay further out of the way of his management teams while they do their jobs.

IdeaLab has been a dream for a serial entrepreneur such as Bill Gross. He has all of the entrepreneurial tools he needs to create great businesses, and the business incubator allows him to spin of many ideas simultaneously. However, even with his phenomenal resources and talent, some of his businesses have failed. He has learned from these mistakes, and has modified the IdeaLab strategy.

Bill Gross said: “We found after starting fifty Internet companies after five years, the ones which succeeded were the ones with protect-able, intellectual property. It was not time to market, it was not how fast or lightweight the company was. It was how deep a reach, how proprietary, and what differentiation and barriers to entry those companies had so that others wouldn’t copy our idea. It led us to say–that building stuff was not bad. It wasn’t that assembly lines were a bad thing; it’s just that building things without protect-able differentiation is bad. We thought we should start companies in all our areas of expertise, as long as it meets the criteria of making an important difference to the world, that it meets the criteria of having fundamental demand, as well as meeting the criteria of company structure–protect-able, differentiable barriers to competitive entry. All our energy companies have that all in spades. In all aspects, they are large opportunities, with big potential impact, and also have patent protection and trade secrets that make it hard to copy the idea. We’ll continue to start Internet companies, too, but put them through the same test — big impact on the market, big potential, and intellectual property. “

What can I learn from Bill Gross as I create my new ventures? I am particularly impressed with his focus on social entrepreneurship, as many of his ventures make the world better, such as the clean energy companies. Life is to short to spend it just building businesses that make money. There are plenty of ideas and opportunities. I need to focus on those ideas that make a large social contribution in addition to making a profit.

I am impressed that Bill Gross and the IdeaLab team discipline themselves to toss out so many good ideas so that they can pursue the great ideas. I need to focus on fewer ideas that have the potential to be really big. I need to select ventures that have substantial demand, and have protect-able barriers of entry.

(Source: I gleaned information to write this blog entry from various sources, such as Wikipedia, the IdeaLab website, and news articles.)

In examining the history of visionary companies we were struck by how often they made some of their best moves not by detailed strategic planning, but rather by experimentation, trial and error, opportunism, and–quite literally accident.

This week I read an interview in Founders at Work with Paul Buchheit of Google. Paul was the creator of Gmail and developed the first Adsense concept. He also suggested the now-famous Google axiom “Don’t be evil.” The part of the interview that stood out most to me was that before Paul began the Gmail project, he didn’t receive a detailed spec with features, as you would expect from a company such as Google and a project of the magnitude of Gmail. Instead, Paul was given the non-specific charter to work on some type of email or personalization project. They just said, “We think this is an interesting area.” Paul went on to create the Gmail email program that has helped to revolutionize email.

Google didn’t try to micromanage Paul Buchheit. They hired a very talented employee, pointed him in a general direction, and then allowed him to do something even more amazing than what they were expecting. Google has done this repeatedly. Each of the Google developers is allowed to spend 20% of their time on a project of their choosing. In this way Google tries many new projects, and then runs with the ones that work.

The authors of Built to Last call this concept “branching and pruning”:

The idea is simple: If you add enough branches to a tree (variation) and intelligently prune the deadwood (selection), then you’ll likely evolve into a collection of healthy branches well positioned to prosper in an ever-changing environment.

Note how essential the pruning step is in this process. If we just try a lot of things and don’t prune, we will have a lot of projects falling somewhere in the mediocre to good range. To have a tree filled with great branches, or a company filled with great projects, we have to discipline ourselves to continuously prune away the less healthy branches or business concepts as we continue to add new branches or ideas.

William McNight was the visionary CEO of 3M, one of history’s most innovative companies. 3M utilized this “branching and pruning” concept extensively to develop products such as Post-It notes and Scotch tape. 3M allowed their team members to sprout tiny “twigs” in response to problems or ideas. Most of these twigs did not develop into anything. However, each twig that showed promise would be allowed to grow into a branch or even a tree.

3M developed a system which created a culture of continuous innovation. The following elements were implemented by 3M to create this systematic innovation:

• 15% Rule – allowing people to spend 15% of their time on projects of their own choosing and initiative. 3M executive Geoffrey Nicholson said “a lot of the things [that led to the Post-it] were accidental.” However, if 3M employees had not been doodling with weird adhesives during their 15% time, 3M would not have invented the Post-it note.
• 25% Rule – 25% of annual sales need to come from products introduced in previous 5 years.
• Golden Step Award – for team members responsible for new 3M business ventures.
• Genesis Grants – internal venture capital to develop ideas.
• Technology Sharing Awards – for team members who developed technology and successfully shared it with other divisions.
• Own Business – 3Mers who championed a new product could get the opportunity to run it as her own project or division.
• New Product Forums – sharing the latest innovations across the company.
• Dual Ladder - allows technical and professional team members to move up without sacrificing their research or professional interests.
• Problem-Solving Missions – small teams sent to customer sites to solve specific problems.
• High Impact Programs – each division selects one to three priority products to get to market in a short time frame.
• Profit Sharing – to stimulate individual investment.

McNight’s philosophy was captured in the following phrases which became part of the 3M culture:

• Listen to anyone with an original idea, no matter how absurd it might sound at first.
• Encourage; don’t nitpick. Let people run with an idea.
• Hire good people, and leave them alone.
• If you put fences around people, you get sheep. Give people the room they need.
• Encourage experimental doodling.
• Give it a try–and quick!

McNight understood that not all experimentation would prove favorable:

Mistakes will be made [by giving people the freedom and encouragement to act autonomously], but… the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it is dictatorial and undertakes to tell those under its authority exactly how they must do their job. Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative and it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.

Johnson & Johnson is another example of effectively implementing this concept of trying a lot of things, keeping the things that work, and quickly getting rid of the things that don’t. R.W. Johnson Jr. said, “Failure is our most important product.” He understood that companies must accept failure as an essential part of this innovation process.

In conclusion, the process of “trying a lot of things, keeping what works and getting rid of what doesn’t work”, if understood and harnessed, can be a powerful process to stimulate progress. For this to work I need to experiment with a lot of ideas, nurture the good ideas, quickly get rid of the ideas that don’t work, and accept failure as an essential element of the innovation process.

Find Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies at Amazon.com

(source for much of this article: Built to Last)

(1) INNOVATION IS THE GOAL, NOT PERFECTION

Some programmers prefer to code for months or years on a project before launch so that they can release the perfect product.  Google prefers the “launch early and launch often” strategy.” 

Marissa says that she tells her developers, ‘The Googly thing is to launch it early on Google Labs and then iterate, learning what the market wants–and making it great.’ The beauty of experimenting in this way is that you never get too far from what the market wants. The market pulls you back.”

(2) SEEK IDEAS FROM EVERY SOURCE

Google has a list of ideas where employees can vote and comment on ideas.

(3) ALLOWING TIME TO INNOVATE

Google allows developers to spend one day per week (20% of their time) working on any project they want to.  This time for innovation has lead to many of Google’s successful new products and services, which Google owns, of course. 

(4) MORPH A PROJECT INSTEAD OF KILLING IT

If the market is not responding to a product, instead of dropping it Google tries to modify the product into something that the market needs.  This exercise becomes an exercise in innovation.

(5) HELP EMPLOYEES SHARE AS MUCH INFORMATION AS POSSIBLE WITH EACH OTHER

Each Monday employees write an email with a bullet list of 5-7 items that they did the previous week.  Then the data is made available to the other employees in a format that makes it easy to find out who is working on certain projects.  Google also shares massive amounts of data with their employees so that they know what is happening in the business and what is important.

(6) CREATE THE BEST USER EXPERIENCE POSSIBLE

Instead of focusing on what makes the most money, Google focuses on what is going to be the best for the users.  By putting the users first, though, the money usually follows.

(7) MAKE DECISIONS BASED ON DATA NOT POLITICS

Design often becomes a very political issue because different people have different opinions of which design elements they like better.  Instead, Google performs large numbers of tests on different ideas and elements, and select those which prove to be the most effective, regardless of who likes them.

Marissa says, “We probably have somewhere between 50 and 100 experiments running on live traffic, everything from the default number of results to underlined links to how big an arrow should be. We’re trying all those different things.”

(8) CREATIVITY LOVES CONSTRAINTS

Marissa says that, “People think of creativity as this sort of unbridled thing, but engineers thrive on constraints. They love to think their way out of that little box: ‘We know you said it was impossible, but we’re going to do this, this, and that to get us there.’”

(9) HIRE BRILLIANT STAFF

Even though Google has a thousand times more employees than when Marissa started, she feels that “the types of people who work here and the types of things that they like to work on [hasn’t changed]. It’s almost identical to the first 20 or so of us at Google.” Google is only hiring the best and the brightest, and because they have created that culture, they are able to recruit and retain those kinds of people.

According to Newsweek, the Disney brand is the 9^th most valuable brand in America, with a value exceeding $29 billion. The Walt Disney Company owns thousands of brands such as: ESPN, ABC, Mickey Mouse, Disney Princesses, The Muppets, Pixar, The Disney Channel, Touchstone, Miramax, Winnie the Pooh, Disney Cruise Line, Pirates of the Caribbean, Mary Poppins, Family.com, Movies.com, Club Penguin, The Lion King, Toy Story, Cars, Peter Pan, High School Musical, and Hanna Montana. Walt Disney has brought happiness to hundreds of millions of people.

With that said, Walt Disney was a failure. I say that with all due respect to the father of family entertainment, one of history’s greatest innovators, and one of my heroes. My point is that when we think of Walt Disney we think of his amazing successes. However, most of us have never even heard of his failures, which tremendously contributed to his phenomenal success.

Here are a few of his failures or challenges which I discovered recently from reading Inside the Dream: The Personal Story of Walt Disney.

• Walt was laid off from his first job as an animator after only one month.

• One of Walt’s first business ventures, Laugh-O-grams, was a financial disaster. Walt couldn’t pay his rent, and wound up living in his Laugh-O-grams office. He ate on credit at a little coffee shop. “I was all alone” Walt later said. “It was lonesome. When my credit ran out I was tempted to go into a restaurant and eat, and then tell them I couldn’t pay. But I didn’t have the nerve. I was so [bleep] hungry.” Laugh-O-grams filed bankruptcy.

• When Walt moved to California he wanted to be a “movie director”. He tried to get any job he could with the studios to get his foot in the door. Walt said, “I went from one studio to another and I went to the personnel departments and it was pretty cold.”

• Mickey Mouse was not Walt’s first cartoon character. Walt Disney’s company designed a character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and partnered with Charlie Mintz as the distributor. Charlie went behind Walt’s back and signed most of the top Disney artists to come work for him and took control of the Oswald character and brand. Charlie wasn’t the first to underestimate Walt Disney and he certainly wouldn’t be the last.

• Walt Disney later used another distributor named Pat Powers. Pat began withholding payments and stopped giving Walt any reports. It ended up that Powers, like Charlie Mintz, wanted to take over Walt’s operation, guaranteeing Walt a hearty salary to come work for him. As leverage, Powers hired away Walt’s best animator.

• Walt and his wife struggled with infertility.

• After the movie Snow White had been a success, the next three Disney films were not immediate financial successes. Even before the United States entered the Second World War, the studio’s revenues declined 40% with the loss of the overseas market.

• The Second World War essentially shut down the Disney Animation Studios, except for government projects. In addition to drafting many company employees, the war caught the studios in a financially vulnerable period of growth. In 1941, his employees formed a picket line to strike. This perceived betrayal from his staff was cataclysmic for Walt.

Walt obviously rebounded from each of these challenges or failures. After the Oswald character was seized by his distributor, he created Mickey Mouse, and protected his creative work much better in the future. After struggling with infertility, Walt and his wife were able to adopt. It was on outings with his girls that Walt’s ideas for Disneyland began to develop. After being unable to get any job in a movie studio, Walt eventually became a very successful movie director. After lean years from the war, Walt Disney Studios eventually rebounded began creating even better movies than they had previously.

How often in our lives do we compare our weaknesses, challenges and failures to the successes and strengths of others? How often do we not remember that the people in our idealistic comparisons have weaknesses, challenges and failures of their own? I am guilty of doing this regularly.

After the Laugh-O-grams bankruptcy Walt said, “And I came to Hollywood. I was just free and happy. I was 21 years old. But I’d failed. I think it’s important to have a good hard failure when you’re young.”

Roy Disney, Walt’s brother said the following of Walt’s early business skills, “If Walt had gone on like that he never would have gone anyplace.”

We all have to have weaknesses, challenges and failures or we cannot grow. A tree planted in the middle of a clearing grows fat, while the tree planted in a forest grows tall because it has to fight for the sun light. Challenges help us to also grow taller and closer to Heaven. If Walt had not had challenges, he might have retired as an animator in Kansas City. His weaknesses became important catalysts and growing experience to help him achieve the great things he did.

Ether 12:27 teaches, “And if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.”

Weaknesses, trials and challenges are part of our mortal existence on this earth, and they are some of the primary ways that God uses to shape us into what he needs us to be. Through these difficult circumstances we can humble ourselves, and receive the divine assistance we need to make those weak things strong.

2 Corinthians 12:9-10 teaches, “And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.”

In this scripture, the Apostle Paul teaches that the Lord’s strength is made perfect in weakness. I believe that this means our weaknesses help us realize how much we need God, and encourage us to turn to Him to receive strength from Him. Paul even rejoices in the weakness, because he knows that this weakness is what makes him strong. God gives us weaknesses so that we can triumph over them, and He wants us to be able to recognize His hand in that victory when it comes.

Walt Disney was a failure at first, but he used those challenges as opportunities to learn and grow. Those failures were some of the most important reasons why he was such a phenomenal success.

Find Inside the Dream: The Personal Story of Walt Disney at Amazon.com.

(Source: Inside the Dream)

]]> http://gwilliam.com/nathan/walt-disney-was-a-failure-which-helped-him-succeed/feed/ 0 http://gwilliam.com/nathan/google-%e2%80%93-the-1-angel-investor-in-small-businesses/ http://gwilliam.com/nathan/google-%e2%80%93-the-1-angel-investor-in-small-businesses/#comments Sat, 22 Mar 2008 15:40:33 +0000 Nathan Gwilliam http://gwilliam.com/nathan/2008/03/22/google-%e2%80%93-the-1-angel-investor-in-small-businesses/ What did small businesses do without Google? In this blog entry I’m not referring to the Goolge search functionality, although that has revolutionized the accessibility of information. I am instead referring to the lesser known tools that Google has made available to small businesses. Nearly all of these tools are available for free, and small businesses who use them are essentially receiving free investments in their companies from Google.

Last week Google launched yet another of these free tools, Google Ad Manager, which I will describe later in the blog. This application will radically alter how we do business, how much time and money it costs us to do business and the amount of revenue we can generate from doing business.

Here are a few of my favorite web-based applications for small businesses provided by Google (and a few other companies):

Google Custom Search allows website owners to add powerful site search capabilities for free. Our companies spent tens of thousands of dollars licensing and developing technologies, such as Nutch/Lucene and Atomz to power our site search engines, and the quality of search results was never adequate. Google provides its site search solution with advanced features such as misspelling suggestions, and synonym searches. Not only does Google offer site search for free, but it also incorporates keyword-targeted ads that allow website owners to generate revenue. Competitors, such as Yahoo offer similar products, but the quality of the Google site search appears to be superior.

Google Adsense allows website owners to make money from advertising from the first day their site launches. I remember in the early days of the Internet that new websites might go years without substantive advertising revenues, which were sold in-house, as the sites grew to be popular enough that customers wanted to advertise on them. Then I remember additional years where websites flushed thousands of dollars of unsold advertising inventory down the toilet each month. I remember being elated when Google began to provide the ability for website publishers to put targeted advertising on their sites, fill remnant inventory, and make money without a sales force. Many competitors exist in this space, such as Yahoo and MSN, but Google seems to deliver a higher return for publishers because it has more advertisers bidding competitively.

Google Adwords allows website owners to run effective, targeted advertising campaigns for inexpensive prices. Other than free advertising, Google may be the most effective large-scale advertising on the planet. I remember when Yahoo used to charge $50 or more for every 1000 ad impressions they would deliver for on search results for the keyword “adoption”. Website publishers can now get targeted advertising for their sites for a fraction of that cost. Further, those campaigns can be turned on or off at any time, can be targeted based on geography and other characteristics of the visitors, and provide statistics that allow for amazing analysis of return on investment. Yahoo, MSN and Ask also provide similar solutions which make sense for publishers to use in conjunction with Google Adwords.

GoogleTalk provides free communication tools for remote staff members, such as instant messaging and voice chat. We used to pay ridiculous amounts to call employees in other countries. Now, we know when remote employees arrive and are working by when we see them log in to GoogleTalk. When they are working, we can effectively communicate with them with the instant messenger, and essentially call them and talk to them for free with the voice chat. MSN messenger does provide video chat, but GoogleTalk seems to be more reliable for voice chat, which usually is very adequate. This tool does more than anything to facilitate remote teams to work together effectively.

Gmail and Google Apps proved the ability for site owners to get free email hosting and spam filtering for their domain. We spent tens of thousands of dollars combating SPAM over the years when we hosted our own email. Not only does Google do a dramatically superior job filtering spam, but our mail doesn’t have all the downtime issues we had previously, it has a world-class web-based interface, and it is free. I also love how easy it is to find archived messages with their search feature.

Google Analytics provides free website analytics or statistics for website for free. Although this Google service still needs some improvement, and needs to run faster, the free pricing is incredible, when some of its competitors want to charge sites like mine thousands of dollars a month. Quantcast and Compete.com offer solutions which we need to test.

Google Ad Manager was launched in beta last week. It provides a free web-based system that allows website publishers to manage and deliver advertising on their sites. It has advanced features, such as geographic targeting and support for graphical, video and text ads. Our companies may have spent $150,000 or more to ad features to our ad serving technology, which Google Ad Manager now offers for free.

Google offers many other valuable features which businesses can integrate, such as:

• Google Maps (ad mapping to your website or an interactive map for site visitors),
• Google Calendar (build and share calendars),
• Google News Alerts (receive the most recent news for your industry),
• Google Notebook (clip and share info as you surf the web) and
• Google Docs (shared documents and spreadsheets like Microsoft Office).

Even though these Google applications are revolutionary and invaluable to small businesses, many other companies provide valuable free or very inexpensive solutions which are phenomenal tools for small businesses. Some of my favorites are:

• CraigsList (free classifieds),
• Backpack (shared to do lists),
• eLance (freelance project marketplace),
• eBay (auctions to buy or sell almost anything),
• DomainTools (domain name research tools),
• RememberTheMilk (task management and reminders),
• Central Desktop (collaborate, communicate and share files),
• Wesabe (money management and tracking),
• LinkedIn (networking),
• HiRise (contact and client relationship manager),
• YouSendIt (send large files),
• FreshBooks (time tracking and invoices),
• Amazon.com aStore or WebStore (get paid to sell Amazon.com products and let them handle the fulfillment),
• WordPress or Blogger (add a free blog to your site) and
• eNom (many free features with domain registration, such as world-class DNS).

Over the last eleven years, our companies have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing and supporting applications which Google and others now offer for free. I expect that if the value of all these free services being used by businesses were valued, that Google would be the largest angel investor in small businesses.

Small businesses need to thoroughly explore all of the Google offerings to ensure they are maximizing the benefits that they can receive from these amazing, free or low-cost web applications. Because of all the free or inexpensive applications which are now available, this is an exciting time to start a small business online. eBusinesses can use these tools to launch more successful projects in a shorter period of time and with a smaller initial investment. Thank you Google.