Life In The Expanse

Well, we’ve worked hard and have pulled off another one. Today we announced that DataSync has finished our first round of investing with $1.2 million in venture capital. Not bad for a company from ’silicon grassland’. To top off our big day, we also announced that we have entered into a strategic partnership with SugarCRM to offer fully supported solutions to small businesses for an attractive price.

Personally, this journey has grown my faith, my drive, and my belief in hard work. Without a solid grounding in my faith I would have bailed out. Building a company like this is tough, and this journey has cemented my belief that God brings us through challenges to grow our faith and make us more effective people.

This week I realized that I recently hit my 5 year mark working in the technology world. It’s been an interesting 5 years, and a lot have things have changed. Here’s a quick summary of my journey and were I’m at today.

Where I started…

My journey in technology started in high school repairing home PC’s and doing some basic business computer networking. I quickly figured out that communicating with the people I served was very important. Most of the time us techies fix things that no one has problems with, and create issues where they don’t exist.

I later worked at a bank software company for a few months and learned a lot about how software is built. This taught me how important software design and architecture was for the long-term viability of the company. Small changes in design had a major impact on operations down the road. Sadly, this company should have thought more about design. The company went under a year after my internship ended.

The past few weeks I’ve been burning a lot of time searching for talented people. This search is sometimes a frustrating process. People who are good at what they do usually aren’t looking for a job. If they are, it’s for a very short period of time. Recruiting great people takes a lot of effort (usually networking) and a solid pitch about why they should join our company.

I’m also learning that these people care a lot about culture. They have to ‘like’ the company and how it operates. It also has a lot to do with gut instinct. Even the most talented people seem to trust their gut when making a big career decision.

I’m often asked why I’m so focused on the seemingly boring idea of software integration. The reason is simple: “because my life is already too complicated!”. I entered the business world with a very utopian view of technology – software should do all the mundane work so humans can their minds to do interesting, innovative work.

When I entered the business world, I was shocked and saddened to find that most corporate workers were a slave to their software. They spent a lot of their day pulling reports from one system, manipulating (often manually), and then inserting into some other system. On the business development side, highly effective salespeople still kept piles of business cards on their desk, had no way to manage their tasks, and did sales initiatives with a pen and a pad of paper. Their reason? Their CRM didn’t talk to anything and didn’t produce any useful information.

I’ve noticed that very few people focus on doing what’s important; ideas that actually matter in the big scheme of things. Most people do whatever is next on some list, or just fill time with whatever task is easiest. I’m often guilty of this myself at times. We focus on working hard and getting lots of tasks done, but focus very little time and thought on the actual impact of what we’re working on.

Focusing on what matters changes how we think. Instead of showing up each day to get tasks done, we must show up to make an impact. DataSync is my primary form of reference for this. We constantly battle ‘getting stuck in the mud’. It’s a term we use to describe getting distracted by details and ideas that don’t really impact the bottom line. They are good ideas, but they don’t have maximum impact on our future.

This year’s Open Source Business Conference was the best I’ve seen. Shocking, considering it’s my first one. I was definitely at the bottom of the totem pole in the room – most attendees of this conference are industry leaders. OSBC was run on the highest level I’ve seen at a business conference. Kudos to Matt Asay for putting together some of the smartest minds out there.

OSBC has a CEO track – so I was in my element, soaking it all up. I met some amazing people and gained valuable insight into running DataSync more effectively. Here’s my summary of the event:

• The leaders – Red Hat, Novell, and Sun all had their CEO’s present, and all did a solid job articulating the open source vision and direction. I was most impressed with Red Hat’s new CEO, James Whitehurst, who actually came from Delta Airlines. He has an uncanny understanding of how to monetize open source effectively, while still maintaining a vibrant community.

The weather was warm, the people were outstanding. The 3rd annual SugarCon conference was a great experience, and a lot of fun to be a part of. SugarCon is SugarCRM’s annual developer and partner conference that’s held in the valley. I always enjoy a break from South Dakota cold this time of year. SugarCon is a place where I’m surrounded by people who hold a lot of the same ideals on how better software will make a major impact on business.

I was privileged to speak on a panel for the partner track at SugarCon, and got some excellent feedback about what we’re doing at DataSync, and how it fits into Sugar’s channel program.

The conference had an very polished feel this year – Sugar obviously understands its market space extremely well, and has assembled a solid team and group of partners (which we’re excited to be a part of!). This year’s conference was obviously slanted towards selling in a bad economy. However most partners, like DataSync, haven’t seen a downturn in business. Open source is a tremendous value play in today’s marketplace.

I love big, audacious ideas. Ideas that could quite possibly change the world in their own way. As a result, I surround myself with people who have similar big, audacious ideas. We spend a lot of time discussing how to make our Big Ideas happen. The problem with our Big Ideas (and probably yours) is that it takes a lot of time and energy to accomplish our Big Ideas, and there’s a lot of things we need to do to make our Big Idea a reality. A good example is the company I run, DataSync. It’s going to take us 5 years and countless hours to make our Big Idea a reality.

The main issue at stake is how to break your Big Idea into manageable, daily tasks. The problem about us humans is that we can only think about things in small pieces. Trying to solve a giant problem all at once simply can’t be done. Our brains choke on that. Instead we must break down big challenges into manageable task that each help (in their own small way) to accomplish our Big Idea.

Thank you all for your words of encouragement regarding my recent posts about DataSync. In the mist of the thrill of what’s going on, I feel I need to recognize a couple key truths:

1. This happened because of God’s blessing and hard work by a large group of people. It didn’t happen just because of me, but I’m honored to be a part of it all.
2. This is just the beginning, we have a long, difficult road ahead of us.

I firmly believe that this project is working because God’s hand of blessing is on it. At most times it wasn’t deserved. Success is built on so many ‘chance’ encounters that I choose to believe stuff like this isn’t chance. God chooses to give and take away, and in this season he’s blessed our work.

For those of you who are watching the company I run, DataSync, you’re probably aware that we raised our Series A venture funding back in December, 2008. It was quite the journey.

According to a recent article by the Angel Capital Assocation, early stage investing went down in 2008, and will probably drop more in 2009. Because of the recession, angel groups are focused on ensuring existing portfolio companies survive, so they are spending less on new startups. Raising capital wasn’t easy to begin with – fewer than 1 in 100 companies actually acquire venture funding (src: Launch Utah). That number is probably worsening every day.

So how did we do it? The answer, in my opinion, is found in more than one factor: