Danielle Morrill

I just learned via Seattle Metblogs that, miracle of miracles, Starbucks has come up with yet another inventive drink. This one is near and dear to me, because I am a frequent customer of Fran’s Chocolates where I like to buy the dark chocolate covered grey salt caramels. Swoon!

So Starbucks, in their infinite hot beverage genius, is launching the Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate. Apparently its already out too, because someone over at Starbucks Gossip said they tried it for the first time yesterday but the Seattle PI reports it is available starting today. I’ll try one tomorrow morning on my way into the office and report back.

My prediction is that it is going to take a lot of positive buzz for this to take off. I often meet a lot of resistance when I try to get someone to try a sea salt caramel for the first time, but more often than not once they’ve had one they’re hooked. Any combination of salty and sweet is okay by me (think Coke and McDonald’s french fries - the ultimate combination).  I’d be shocked if I don’t like it, but like so many of their inventive drinks I’m going to be desperately sad when they take it away at the end of the season.

I have to top this homemade zombie costume I wore in 2006 (last year I borrowed a fairie costume from a fashion designer, but that was cheating). This is a 1960s evening gown from Value Village.

I’ve noticed many 30-second elevator pitches indicate a company’s size and scope, such as “Expeditors International is a Fortune 500 global logistics provider” or “Pelago is an early stage company building Whrrl”.

When does a company go from being a startup to being “early stage”, or a ”small business”?  Milestones for making the jump could be:

• X number of employees (30? 50?) and/or someone dedicated to HR full time
• Heavy funding, or no expectation of taking additional funding
• Existed longer than X period of time (4 years? 7 years?)
• Enough revenue to keep your business alive, or profitable (now or in the past)
• Publicly traded, or are part of a merger or acquisition

Keeping the “Feel” of a Startup

I can understand the desire to identify your business as a startup, even when you’re technically not one anymore.  Maybe some companies call themselves startups for longer than they should because they want to project a particular company culture:

• Fast moving (running 100mph every day), with a sense of racing the clock
• Scrappy and frugal when it comes to spending money
• Open to new ideas, new directions, and able to seize opportunity quickly
• Innovative and inventive, nothing is set in stone yet, no bureaucracy

You Can’t Deny Reality

So why does this matter? It matters because saying, “It’s okay, we’re a startup” becomes a cop-out eventually. Saying this to potential employees, investors, or customers when it isn’t true comes off as disingenuous and smacks of enormous denial of reality. Denial of reality (think ostrich with its head in the sand) is my number one red flag when dealing with other people.  I find the inability to see the world as it truly is, is rarely a one-time error.  Usually, it can be found to be a systemic flaw in thinking that rarely results in success.

Some companies cling to the title of startup even when they are heavily funded businesses, hiding behind the label as an excuse for not having reached profitability.  Being a startup is like being an entrepreneur, it’s a temporary state.  You can be entrepreneurial but not an entrepreneur just as you can be scrappy and innovative without being a startup.  In the best case scenario the entrepreneur becomes a successful businessman and the startup becomes a successful business.

Breakdown of Business Types

Startup:  a new company, working on building proof of concept

Early Stage:  has achieved proof of concept, working on building revenues

Business:  a company with revenues, working on achieving profitability

Successful Business: a profitable company

In the upper left-hand corner there’s a text blurb where I describe myself, and it says, “23 year old entrepreneur…”.  Well, actually it said ‘entreprenuer’ until an anonymous commenter was nice enough to point out my spelling mistake on my bio page.  This same commenter asked what makes me an entrepreneur, and my first reaction was to jump to the defense of all my projects and work; instead I looked up the definition of ‘entrepreneur’.  The Wikipedia entry is probably the most useful for getting a good definition, as well as some interesting references:

An entrepreneur is a person who has possession over a company, enterprise, or venture, and assumes significant accountability for the inherent risks and the outcome. The term is a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to the type of personality who is willing to take upon herself or himself a new venture or enterprise and accepts full responsibility for the outcome. In common understanding it is taken as describing a dynamic personality.

As I wandered to the shower (where I do my best thinking) I asked my husband, “am I an entrepreneur?” and he responded, “Well, life has a lot of risk”.  After my shower I asked him again and he said, “no, you’re not right now”.  He’s right.

Although I generate content and work on various projects beyond my day job, it isn’t part of any system that forms an enterprise.  I’ve been an entrepreneur on a very small scale in the past, when I ran little businesses like web design or teaching people how to use their computers.  However, right now I’m more of wantreprenuer with many ideas and a continuously growing stockpile of knowledge and understanding of what people want, but no business to show for it yet. 

Right now, I’m finding people I can learn from about pitching, financing, filtering through good ideas and bad.  I’m also building a network that I hope will someday consist of potential customers, partners, advisors, employees and investors.  The tech community in Seattle is a big change from the networking I’ve done in the past, in finance and in international trade.  It’s refreshing; people tell you what they really think of your ideas and they’re excited about seeing you make them a reality.  Being involved in the community helps me meet people who can give me a sanity check, or suggest problems that need solving.  I’m still learning more about myself, and what kind of business I want to work on and live with for several years.

In the meantime, I’m working for a Web 2.0 (or 3.0, whatever that means) company learning all sorts of different things.  In the past year I’ve learned how to use Linux, mySQL, manage bloggy goodness with Wordpress like a champ, and furthered my MS Excel guru status through even greater utilization of Visual Basic.  I’m also learning to give interviews and speak publicly, which I’ve discovered I enjoy and hope to someday be truly good at.  Most recently, I’ve been learning to blog to a public audience about more than just my day-to-day life.

So, am I an entrepreneur?  No, not right now.  If it didn’t have such a negative connotation, I’d call myself a wantrepreneur.  Instead, I’ll go with ‘entrepreneur in training’ - I’ll fix my tagline.

——————————————————————————

Who’s Weighing In?

Seattle entrepreneur Marcelo Calbucci says:

“The Wikipedia definition of entrepreneur is wrong, IMHO. Here is my definition: An entrepreneur must start something from nothing. Must create value out of thin air, either by creating a product or service, directly by his handy work or by aligning the right people to do so.  Risk is just a consequence and not “causation”.” 

Doing It Right the First Time

While getting my nails done today I flipped through Seth Godin’s book Small is the New Big to an essay about the Hersey theme park in Hershey, PA (of chocolate producing fame).  Godin talks about how painful it was to observe the signs around the park, because the mishmash of colors and fonts were visually grating.  He laments the fact that the park had to pay for the wood and ink to make the signs anyway, but couldn’t be bothered to it right the first time.

Sending an Implicit Message

How should I feel about the maintenance of the roller coasters, or the cleanliness of the food? What am I most likely to remark on to my friends and family after I visit?  Could this lack of attention to detail could be symptomatic of some deeper issue within the company? What if the executives running the park are only focused on selling lots of tickets and and hitting their numbers.  What if they’re busy measuring success incorrectly (this makes me think of Goldratt’s book The Goal) and missing the bigger picture around how their brand is being perceived?

Why We Care So Much

Have you ever found yourself thinking that it seems shallow for people to guard their reputations so carefully, or a waste of time and effort for them to so adamantly explain and defend their opinions in an online forum or in the comments of a blog post? I admit to thinking this a few times (and sometimes using it to talk myself of having hurt feelings), but I think there is something very legitimate to managing your reputation and personal brand.

I’m not pyschologist, but from my own experience as an extrovert I can say that I get an intellectual high from social interactions that “click”. A poor social interaction, where I feel like I just couldn’t connect or (worse) was misunderstood, leaves me grasping to understand why, as well as what I could have done differently.  Often first impressions get in the way, and its becoming increasingly frequent for those impressions to come from online content long before you meet someone.

An example that comes to mind (and I wince to remember it) was when I accidentally met a prominent writer who I admire, but confused her with someone else because her avatar on Twitter that looks nothing like her day-to-day appearance.  A painfully confusing ten minute conversation ensued, and we couldn’t completely recover from the awkwardness when it was all sorted out.  I’m sure we’ll meet again and I’ll do much better, but wow did I feel stupid (can I blame Twitter, please? or maybe Vista?).

Authenticity Is the Key

What kind of message are you sending about yourself through everything you produce and share with the world, both personally and professionally?  Are you being consistent in showing the world the true you (some people call this authenticity) or are people missing the substance of your message because of something that’s creating cognitive dissonance (like the packaging)?  If you knew what that annoyance was, and could fix it without violating any of your principles, would you?