Invert, Always Invert

 Early on in my career, I had two choices regarding how to make decisions

• I could listen to what could go right.  I could listen to what I was supposed to do, and I could follow these suggestions.  I found this wasn’t a good idea.  It worked in 80% of the time, but that other 20% of the time resulting in mistakes.
• I could ask “what should I not do?”  I could learn the mistakes that had happened, understand the mistakes, and then make decisions on how to not repeat these failures.  I found the things to not repeat, not repeat the mistakes, and then get the job done.

My father always said that I focused too much on the negative.  No, I was trying to focus on what caused failure and then to not repeat those mistakes.  He always said I needed to focus on the positive.  As you can guess, he focused on the first item above and I focused on the second of the two items listed above.  My father was a sales guy.  I’m an engineer.  The two viewpoints are hopefully seen.  

With item #1, I would focus on the positives.  However, when something went wrong, I was powerless to fix what had gone wrong.  The problem is on how people evaluate you.  If you have a 20%:failure rate, you are labeled a failure.  The 80% of success is forgotten as the easy wins.  The 20% is seen as the default position of being a loser.

What happens if you do the second option?  You are looking to see what can go wrong and then not repeat those mistakes.  You are also prepared for those mistakes.  You can not repeat the mistakes of the past ecause you learned what not to do.  You learned how to fix those mistakes as well.  I’m a fan of listening to interviews on YouTube.  One of my favorite interviews are old interviews of Charlie Munger.  He called this system inversion, learn what not to do and don’t repeat those mistakes.  He said he learned this in the army.  He said he worked in flight scheduling in the US Army Air Force during WWII and learned what not to do.  Iirc, he was involved in scheduling flights in and around Alaska.  As you can imagine, the weather in Alaska can be rough.  He learned what weather conditions caused problems flying in Alaska and he wouldn’t clear flights under those conditions.  He said that flight issues dropped under him and that this is a lesson he took into business.

I remember the only major purchase I worked with my father on.  I actually dreaded going into it because I just knew our different viewpoints would cause problems.  I was shocked when he asked me what I saw as the downsides and told him and added in how we could manage those risks so that we could mitigate those risks.  We had other partners.  We presented this to them.  We all agreed we should go ahead.  It was shocking to me.  We didn’t get started on the project until after he died, but I was surprised how we did get thru it.

I like what Charlie Munger said when he discussed his decision making.  He said, “Invert, always invert.”

What Turns Investors Off - Part 3 - This Is A Business, Not A Hobby

 I often see this.  Founders of a company will often misunderstand what is going on and how things are going to work.  Startups, for all the talk about “making the world a better place,” are an economic work in progress.  

Let’s talk about this from the stand point of reality.  A startup is a business trying to build a product that somehow will be monetized.  The problem is that some founders think it is “their company” and we’re just living in it.  People don’t work for smiles and equity that might be worth something in 7 to 10 years.  People work in startups for money today and the hope of more tomorrow thru equity.  Somehow, somewhere, someway, founders somewhere have gotten this idea that they can command work be done for no money, and this is mistake I’ve made long ago in the past.  Reality is much, much different.

The reality of life is that life cost money.  The grocery store costs money.  Filling up with gas costs money.  A night out costs money.  Life costs money.  Somehow, this idea that you can’t get paid money while at a startup is awash in the startup world.  No, life doesn’t work that way.  Not only do people have to get paid, they aren’t going to work for free for 7 to 10 years with only the hope of equity at the end.  

My point in bringing all of this up is not that I think startup founders think they are in a hobby.  No, the problem is actually much worse.  Founders too often want to push their risk onto the worker bees and other cofounders.  Let’s here about two startups and their founders that I interacted with

• A startup had floundered thru about $500k with some offshoring (cheap) company that promised the moon and delivered rocks.  Nothing worked right at all.  Simply creating an account was a problem. They were in the fashion space, so creating an account for their target audience was a hurdle to get over.  This had to be really simple, and it wasn’t simple and it was bug ridden.  A friend of mine asked me to help them out, so I did.  I did it more to help the friend than for this floundering startup.  I rebuilt their system to the point where it worked.  Creating an account worked.  The lady leading it was married to a guy with a personal wealth of somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars, my guess was about fifty million.  She wouldn’t take any of his money even though he had committed to me that he would put it in.  Why?  Because she wouldn’t take any feel embarrassed if it wasn’t successful.  She is married to a guy with $50m in net worth, expected me to work for several years for equity only, and felt it in her rights to berate me for demanding to be paid something.  Everything finally came to a head one Sunday when once again, this lady wouldn’t do the work necessary.  She once again berated me about her failures, as if I was the guy that they had wasted $500k on and gotten nothing.  She threatened me and said that if I didn’t work for them for equity only for the next few years, they would fail and she threatened to sue me.  Iirc, I said she was walking around blind without a cane and that if she thought she could make that stick in court to bring it on.  And this doesn’t even count her idea that I should send my existing customers to the cheap offshoring shop to pay off her debts to them.  No, the boys from Brazil and I work on entirely different levels with entirely different clientele.
• I went to a startup weekend and did the development for a team that finished third.  We’d have finished second, but the girl leading it wouldn’t take feedback and presented an awful business plan that I had told her was bad.  Anyway, she claimed she got $100k in investment from my code.  She was going to keep the $100k and was going to work for free and pay for all of the technology infrastructure and my travel to clients.  Out of the goodness of her heart, she was going to give me 5-10% equity to build the solution.  This didn’t go anywhere.  A few months later, I read a magazine article this girl was featured in.  She didn’t talk positively about the people she met at the startup weekend, as if her keeping $100k made sense in any universe.

I’ve met and interacted with bad software founders.  I can pretty much tell who can make things go and who can’t.  The problem is that too many don’t take things serious enough or understand that this is a real business.  You have to treat everyone like this is a business.  That’s where people tend to fall down at.  I don’t think that all software founders are bad.  However, you can tell a lot based on what people say, so listen carefully.

What Turns Investors Off Part II - Ruling from Beyond The Grave

Now that I got Part I out regarding what turns investors off, I wanted to get into Part Ii of what Turns Investors Off - Ruling From Beyond The Grave.

I listen to a lot of financial talks and one of my favorite listens is Warren Buffett.  He talks about he has very little instructions for his children, the executors of his will.  He has a saying that I love that basically says, “ruling from beyond the grave has a poor record.”  I translate that into startups as pre and post first investments from outside professional investors.

I’ve seen things that turn investors off.  One of them is what I call “Ruling From Beyond The Grave.”  I see start founders thinking it is their company.  If you don’t have investors, I can see that.  That does seem to imply that you are the one making the magic happen and doesn’t value the rest of your team.  Unless you are by yourself, a solo founder, it isn’t your company, but that is semantics.  I once had a minority founder call a startup that he was doing very little on “his startup,” but you really have to let those go in the moment.  

What really matters is when you talk to investors.  When you go to investors, you should not think of yourself as it being your company.  It isn’t your company.  It will be our company.  That includes the management team, the board, the employees, and the customers.  When you think of the company as your company, it looks like you are only thinking of things along the line of you and what is best for you.  When your decisions are centered about you, this is a big red flag.

How do investors know you want to rule from beyond the grave?  There are a few signs I’ve seen.  One is the term “my company.”  “I’ll be glad to turn over the reigns to a seasoned ceo if that ceo is right for my company.”  No, no, and no.

A second issue where this comes up is in a fixation on control and 51%.  Investors aren’t about kicked entrepreneurs out.  However, this thinking and fear of being kicked out keeps them very concerned and will drive mistakes based on the wrong thought basis.  Once again, even at 51%, it is not your company.  It is “our company.”  Once you take any outside money or distribute the first stock, you have a fiduciary duty to those other share holders.  Decisions must be made with an eye towards what is right for all shareholders, not just the shares that a founder owns.

What Turns Investors Off - Part 1 - Understanding, or More Importantly, Not Understanding Your Valuation

I was at the gym this morning and I overheard a discussion that it took all of my effort to not join in on.  So, if you were at Fort Sanders West Gym in the locker room in the back at 7:30am this morning talking about business and startups, I was listening to every word you said.  I’ve seen this all through out my career, and I have to chime in with a few things that really turn investors off.  The following list is in no particular order, so here goes.

• “Ruling from beyond the Grave”
• Not Understanding your valuation and more importantly your competition for investment.
• This is a business, not a hobby.

I’m going to start with understanding valuations, or more importantly, not understanding valuations.

Valuations are important.  What is the value of your company?  What is the value of a startup in the early stages?  Public markets are pretty good about getting to valuation, but even then, things do go haywire.  Recently, we’ve seen this with the valuation of memory stocks in the AI/semiconductor phase of life with the growth of datacenters.  Is Micron Technology, the largest US producer of memory, really worth 9 times what it was worth in August a year ago?  Is Micron Technology really worth 15 times what it was worth in April a year ago around the time of the Liberation Day tariffs?  Is Marathon Petroleum really worth double what it was worth on January 1, 2026?  Who really knows.  What we do know is that over the long term, the public markets do tend to flesh out the value of a company to something being realistic to their actual realistic value.

The problem is that startup founders don’t understand is that they are not public market companies. For the sake of discussion here, we’ll limit discussions to the software technology world.  Startup founders are in a situation of having a product that they are trying to build.  They must overcome (derisk) some things that they don’t understand

• Can they actually build something?  Just deciding what should be built ina monumental task and is based on a very slippery slope with the goal posts changing.  Can they get an MVP out the door that someone somewhere will use? Do they understand code and customers to the point of being able to build something that satisfies customer needs?
• Can they make a sale?  Understanding technology is great, but do you understand customer needs?  Can you understand their problems and turn that into code?  Do you understand the sales process?
• Can you take a customer problem, turn it into code, and do it in such a way as to use that same code for other customers?
• Are you growing your number of users?  Are you growing the number of users that come back each day?  How do you monetize those users?

Given all of the above, and assuming you’ve gotten over these potholes, what are you worth?

I’m going to give you a hint, it’s mostly likely not as much money as you think.  Why?  Because of the following

• You haven’t proven anything at scale.  You might think that you’ve proven a lot, but you haven’t.  You have to prove yourself to investors every day, even when they aren’t looking.  Go and start to scale the number of users and scale the product to solve more problems.
• Investors don’t invest in potential.  They invest in the here and now.  Yes, yes, yes, you can and should get a bump for growth, but you don’t get 10x your current income if you are currently bringing in $200k with no growth.
• If an investor were to invest, their money becomes locked up in your business.  They can’t access the money until there is a liquidity event.  Getting founder led businesses to a liquidity event is really hard.

Those are the things that you can control.  You can make the choice to invest in more marketing and sales.  And you have to budget for that. And you have to go out and do it.  Founder led companies have a hard time breaking the founder out and getting them out of their comfort zone.  So, if the founder is in technology, they are going to have a hard time investing in marketing and sales.

There are also things that are outside of your control.  Answer this question, “what is your startup a better investment than just buying an S&P 500 index fund and sticking the money in that?”  Investing in a simple index fund will basically double its value over the next 10 years with very little risk (let’s not get hung up over the lost decade for the moment, we’re talking averages).”  How are you going to increase the value of this investor’s money is an important question to answer.  Because the money is going to be locked up until there is a liquidity event, you have to increase that value and you have to offset the risk of investing in a startup.

Now, the next point to make is your valuation.  If you can prove that a startup is going to be worth big money in the future, say $100 million, that doesn’t mean that you are currently worth $100 million.  Investors aren’t going to invest in your startup at the fully fleshed out price today. I know I don’t put $100 into in an index fund and expect to get $100 out in the future.  If I do put that money into an index fund, I’m expecting to get $200 out in ten years.  If I put $100 into a startup today, I’m expecting to get a minimum of $1,000 out in ten years.  So basically 10x is a return that I want to see.  This will take care of my money being locked up for ten years as well as the risk of the startup failing.

So, this is a lot of data for me to throw at you.  I’ll get around to Parts II and III shortly.

What Caused The 2008 GFC?

The following is an answer that I just put out on Reddit regarding a question of what caused the 2008 Global Financial Crisis..  I wanted to share this because I think I’m fairly detailed about it.

Coming out of the 9/11 attacks on the WTC, a huge fear gripped the US.  When fear happens, the economy slows down.  Bernanke and others lowered the FOMC rates down to 1% or so.  This drove home building, home buying, etc.  some of this home buying was done by people that didn’t have the financial resources to actually buy a home.  This was driven by subprime home buyers who were pushed into adjustable rate mortgages.  The poster child for this was New Century financial.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Century_Financial

There was a general push starting under the Clinton administration to push home ownership.  Bush43 continued that push.  Late night ads for mortgages that appealed to low end buyers were rampant.

There was a general assumption that housing prices always go up.  They don’t, but no one knew this at the time.  Housing prices topped out in mid 2006, but no one knew that until it was too late.  That’s an important point because interest rates were going up.  People that got into new homes assuming that they could refinance their mortgages actually couldn’t.  Their rates were resetting and they couldn’t get out.

Coming out of the dotcom bubble, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were awash in accounting scandal as as they tried to keep up with and beat the markets, so they were in the sidelines.  That’s important.  They tended to set the market for what were acceptable mortgage loans. Without them to set the market, Wall Street jumped in with no experience and pushed for lower subprime mortgage payers since the people with good credit already had mortgages.

I’m about to be really hard on some groups when a lot of groups should carry a lot of blame in this.

Starting in about 2006, loans and mortgage rates started to reset and these low end mortgages couldn’t pay.  The problem was that no one knew were the bottom was, so it was assumed that everything was bad.  A tidal wave of fear splashed over everything.  See, the problem was that mortgage lenders didn’t lend out their own money.  They lended out money from others.  They sold mortgages packaged together to others.  Not one story tells the complete picture.  It was a real sh@tshow.  The people that were the real instigators of this, the New Century Financials and similar companies were the real villains and they got off scott free.  They never once stopped and asked if someone making $50k a year could afford something, no, they just grabbed their fees and sold to the next set of people.  The next set of people didn’t do the due diligence necessary to know what they were buying and didn’t have the time and skills to know what they were buying.  I believe in accountability at the scene and the New Centuries of the world were the main cause of the problem.

CNBC did a special report called “House of Cards” in 2009 that had a really in depth analysis of this that was excellent.

HBO had a pseudo documentary called “too Big To Fail” following the government and Hank Paulson in his efforts to keep,the US economy from going into another Great Depression.

Margin Call tells the story from inside an investment bank.

“The Big Short” is a movie about this told from the standpoint of people that bet against the housing market, like Michael Blurry.

My father saw this problem in 2004 and was aghast at some of the people that were able to get mortgages.  He often said there were major problems and he talked about it at the time.  Why did he know this?  He was a real estate developer so he saw the people coming thru to look.  He also sat on the loan committee and the board of a regional bank, so he saw the aggregate numbers of loan applications.  There is a great line in “too big to fail” where people are sitting in Hank paulson’s office and someone asked the question “why did no one stop this?” And one guy responds “because they were all making too much money.”

Home buyers were at fault for not understanding what they could afford.  Heck, there were “stated income loans” where the applicant only had to state what their income was, no checking on this, no validation, no nothing.  There were NINJA loans, no income, no job loans.  Income was left blank on mortgage applications.  Why?  Because  the loan would be sold off to someone else within a few weeks so it doesn’t sit on anyone’s books for too long.

Tens or hundreds of thousands of people were guilty of something and should have gone to jail.  The problem there is if you do that, you would destroy the American and world economies.  The juice wouldn’t have been worth the squeeze and that would have left us in a worse place.  Dick Fuld, the last ceo of Lehman brothers is probably the guy that was the most guilty of anything, but what laws did he break?  He was guilty of stupidity and arrogance.  As much as we hate him, stupidity and arrogance are not crimes.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_S._Fuld_Jr.

Hopefully, some of that is helpful.  There is a 1000x more to the story than this.  I’ve just tried to distill this down to some basic thoughts.

The solution to a business problem is not “more code.”

I spend a lot of time reading what people are doing with regards to startups.  One of the continual issues I see is that people will start an idea, build something, never talk to the first potential user, and then quit because they got burned out, or no one would use their product.  They didn’t spend time on talking to users.  They didn’t ask them what would bring them value.  They didn’t ask users what they would pay for.  They tend to think “I need a new feature.”  No you don’t need more code.  You need to go talk to some users.  Go interview 10-100 users.  Talk to as many face to face as you can. See what themes come out of the discussion.  Build the first theme that comes out, that can be your mvp1.  Then build your second theme, that can be mvp2.  Keep building, keep talking to users, keep iterating. At some point in there, you need to have a hard conversation about money, both with yourself and with the users.  Should this be a subscription service, or should it be an advertising supported service.  Users tend to say ad service because it is cheap for them, but you need to run some numbers and see what works.

The point I am getting at in this, don’t just run to writing more code.  The solution to a talking to the user problem isn’t to just write more code, but to have a conversation with users to see what adds value to them, and how you can capture a fraction of that value.

The Hypocrisy of Reddit

I used to hang out in Reddit and try to help people in startups and investing area.  I tried to help in the .Net, c#, Maui areas, but I find that people don’t want to talk about these things, they want to argue the points, but moving on.

I’ve found that Reddit is full of hypocrisy at the level of the system itself.  I was recently banned for a “history of flagrant abuse.”  What?  Yeah, that’s what I said.  One of the questions asked was “what would you do if you were President of the US?”  In my smartass kind of way, I said “I would lockup all socialists in concentration camps and blare Adam Smith over the loud speakers until they repented.”  Clearly a joke.  I was reported for threatening people, challenged it, and I was denied.  Ugh.  When that ban was lifted, I responded to a question about Jay Powell not leaving the Fed board of governors with “there is about to be a cranial explosion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”  I was permanently banned after that joke.  I eventually received an email saying my ban was lifted, and it has not been.

I do go into Reddit to look at what people are talking about.  I saw a statement of “I would put all Trump supporters in concentration camps and murder them.”  It had many upvotes and had not been deleted, so that poster had not been banned.

Reddit, the home of the militant left and hypocrites.

Stepping Up To The Plate

step up to the plate

phrase

You are willingly accepting an opportunity.

tactical

adjective

tac·​ti·​cal ˈtak-ti-kəl 

A tactical solution means that it solves a problem today, but everyone is meh about the solution.  They could be meh for any number of reasons, but most likely fear of career failure by liking it.  When I was at coca-cola, tactical solutions were solutions that solved problems today, but that went against strategic solutions that were at least a year away.  Tactical solutions were also solutions that someone important hated and were against their pet ideas.

What I Expect From Engineers

Everyone doesn’t need to be an engineer.  But, if you are an engineer, you need some feel for the basics across all disciplines.  I saw a post where engineers weren’t expected to know what I would consider to be basic engineering.  Wrong, boy is that wrong.  That means, you better know not only your own field of engineering, but you need to know some amount of the basics in

Accounting.  You aren’t an accountant, but you need to know some basics.  What is income?  What is an expense?  What is an investment?  Understand the basics.

Sales and Marketing.  You better understand the basics of putting together concepts that will reasonate with the people you need to sell to.  This includes colleagues, management, and external customers.

Software.  No one is going to to expect you to write complex applications, but you had best understand the basic process of business rules, discovery, and putting that into code that solves problems.

Math.  Going along with software are databases.  Databases are complex math set theory.  You had best understand the basics.  We aren’t implementing multi-dimensional differential equations, but the basics of math, calculus, and set theory are actually important in life and business.

Mechaninical engineering.  Hopefully, you understand the basics of statics and dynamics.  If you don’t, well, I don’t want to be in a building you were involved in.

Electrical engineering.  Once again, I don’t need you to understand quantum effects of sub 5 nm vlsi design and how they effect design rules, but knowing what resistance, capacitance, and the basics of power are is a good thing.

Thermodynamics.  You aren’t designing an hvac system for a datacenter, but it would be great if you understood some basics.

Material science engineering.  You aren’t being asked to create new compounds or a new material design for a space craft.  I do expect you to know that the more you use a material, it will eventually wear out.

I also expect you to know your field of engineering.

We seem to live in a world we’re vibe coding is now somehow mistaken for software development and a professional service.  No, vibe coding is a quick solution to an immediate problem today, not a permanent solution to a serious problem.  I don’t want vibe coding doing product design, building in security for a user portal designed to process financial transactions, the electronic version of a a real estate mls listing form, the fuselage of a plane, the systems management of a 32 engine based rocket, or anything else that is serious.  

You need to bring some level of expertise to a job or project if you want to be taken seriously.

strategic

adjective

stra·​te·​gic strə-ˈtē-jik 

A product is considered to be strategic if it gets someone important excited.  That excitement can be either positive or negative.  For example, when I worked at The Coca-Cola Company, the former CIO hated lotus notes.  Whenever the subject of lotus notes came up, he would run around and tell the business unit that this was a strategic product and was 100% under his control.  Since he hated lotus notes due to one comment that a lotus salesperson made, he was going to kill any discussion of lotus notes.  Lotus notes was a strategic issue that only he was able to answer.  His name was Ira and he was moved to “special projects,” and Coca-Cola eventually had lotus notes.

Opportunity

opportunity noun

op·​por·​tu·​ni·​ty ˌä-pər-ˈtü-nə-tē  

-ˈtyü-

An opportunity is a big fucking problem coming your way.  

“This is an opportunity to show your value to the team.”

How to Pitch Me Bro

I’ve mentioned on my LinkedIn page that I do some small scale angel level investing.  I’m just a little guy.  Heck our group is just a bunch of little guys.  That’s ok because angel investing is for the first amount of investment into a company.  Angel investing is for providing enough money for an entrepreneur to spend some money on development after they’ve already had lots of conversations with customers.  Angel investments  aren’t for major investments.  Angel investments aren’t meant for millions of dollars.  Why anyone would want to take the time to pitch me, I don’t understand.

I get tons of messages every week over LinkedIn.  I got two today.  Trust me, I know what a pitch looks like even if you don’t call it a pitch.  What I don’t like, and others don’t like, are the LinkedIn message bombardment, and even going beyond that.  I’ve had multiple phone calls to me offices and to my cell phone.  I’ve gotten plenty of emails to all of my email addresses.  My father used to get emails with pitches meant for me.  I’m not alone in this. I’ve watched a phone call on a cell number at lunch wanting $10m in the first contact.  Don’t hassle people on the weekends, don’t call their personal cell phone numbers. Entrepreneurs think that this shows enthusiasm and initiative.  No, it doesn’t show anything good. To me, it shows desperation and the fact that you are uncoachable.  There are ways to act to get to a pitch, so don’t blow it before you have started.

I invest via an angel group called Community Equity Partners.  My max for any investment will be $5,000, so I’m insignificant.  What I do expect is you to go to their web site.  I expect you to fill out forms.  I expect you to call them.  They will perform the necessary due diligence on your startup.  That is why I pay them to be a member, to check you out.  They are designed for this process.  There are a few people there that will check you out, check out your social media, make some calls, check your credit report, check to see if you’ve been arrested (I’ve seen people that have been arrested do shady things with other people’s money), have you skipped town with the startup’s money (I’ve seen that), etc.

Here are my suggestions.

• Don’t go on LinkedIn and blindly message people that have the terms angel, investing, venture capital, or similar words in their bio asking for money.  That is not the right way to start a relationship.
• Don’t go call a phone number because someone gave it to you, or you found it via some data broker.  For some reason, this is popular amongst the Reddit crowd of entrepreneurs, or maybe it’s just the data brokers that sit in those groups.
• Do go to Google and search on “angel investors near me.”  Search on various versions of this term.  If you live in an area that is rural, expand your horizons because investors expect you to come to them, not the other way around.  Heck, I don’t expect you to come to our angel group, you can pitch remotely.
• If you are looking international for investment, good luck, but our group won’t invest.  You need to go find an investment group that will invest internationally.  There are plenty of good investments that are in the same country where I don’t have to worry with laws, regulations, a different legal system, etc.
• Do pick up the phone and call the offices of investment groups doing normal business hours.  Do email them.  Do whatever is necessary to get ahold of them. Ask questions like, how does your process work, how much money does your group typically invest, can I get started with your group.  These offices want to hear from entrepreneurs that want a two way street.  Your attitude will go a long way to help you in this.
• Be coachable.  Don’t just nod your head when you are told something.  I’ve been on the entrepreneurship side, so I know what needs to be done.  If I give you a contact, in a couple of weeks, I’m going to follow up with my contact to see if you contacted them.  I’m not a marketing expert, but I know the importance of talking to users, customers, and clients.  That takes money, time, effort, and energy that I expect you to do, and by you, I mean you as a founder.  Marketing is the biggest problem area I see for startups, and I’m talking about one on one founder directed marketing.  Be coachable about marketing.  One of the best lines I ever heard from a VC is “we’re looking for founders that can sell!”

So, do the above, and you’ll be in a good spot where our angel group will talk to you

PS.  Why do I say “Don’t pitch me bro!”  There is a time and a place for all things business related.  I went to an investor/pitch conference once.  I listened to the conference organizer talk about how to act.  He had a great line where he talked about the right and wrong times to talk to investors.  “When I’m standing at the urinal, don’t pitch me bro.”  There is a right and wrong time to contact someone and make a pitch, and when I’m standing at the urinal, that’s not the right time.  It’s a long story, but I made a similar mistake once (not pitching), so I remembered his line.

Algorithms Matter, mostly

I often hear about language wars where my language, such as c++ or another c derivative language, is better than your language, like Visual Basic.  There will be all kinds of basis for this, from letter counts to compile times to the man in the moon.  no, no, and no.  In my 30+ years of development, for the work that I do, languages do not matter.

First, let’s look at the kind of work that I do.  It is the same as 99% of developers.  There is some type of code that sits in front of some type of datastore.  This can be as simple as a web application sitting in front of a database. In general, there is some type of application that talks to some type of datastore.   There tends to be all kinds of plumbing between the application and the data store.  The application could be any type of application from a user interface standpoint.  It could be a web interface, a windows app, an iPhone app, or something else.  The datastore is most like a database with some type of intelligent processing happening, so it could be the database, a messaging system, some central processing, web services, or a host of other things.

You want to use your datastore as much as possible.  You don’t want to have a lot of communication between the database and the rest of the application.  Those are chatty apps, and can be really slow.  You also want to optimize your database, a good schema, a good indexing set based on the queries that the application runs are a good thing.

Now, a lot of algorithms don’t lend themselves to operating within a relational database.  A good Loic layer close to your database while only sending results to your front end application, now that is what is important.

Create optimal,algorithms, and your performance problems tend to solve the,selves.

Be Careful With The Marketing Bros

One of the things that I see that is counter productive is that startups are treated like “little companies.”  No startups aren’t little companies.  I see this a lot with economic development organizations.  

• Startups need to find customers.  No, customers aren’t just there in your web browser.  Startups need to go find customers early on and look at them face to face.  Startups need to knock on doors, introduce themselves, have conversations regarding pain points, talk to enough customers to get a broad understanding of of industry problems, figure out how to tailor solutions to meet those customer and industry problems.
• Too often, I see startups that are afraid to go talk to people face to face.  They make every excuse to not do the leg work.  I hear this argument against this “customers don’t know anything….blah blah blah, talking to customers is a waste of time, etc.”  customers have pocketbooks and money.  Ignore their needs at your own peril.
• Build a solution that is for one customer thinking it will work for everyone.  Writing code that is for a particular customer, just to get a sale is incredibly common, but leads you down the wrong path.  I did an inventory at one customer that had at least 100 reports, each report doing what one customer needed specifically in a search report.  That’s 100 pieces of code that must be supported, but you are only getting paid for it once.  Why not build a report that allows for customer customization so that each customer can build the query that they want?  I’ve done this and it isn’t very hard.  Instead of 100 reports that must be supported for the lifetime of a product/company, I built four screens that allowed a customer to tailor the search criteria involving 100+ criteria.  100 screens of custom code that has to be supported and can’t be shared or four screens of code that can be customized by the client to their heart’s content and when one improvement happens, everyone gets the update.
• Marketing is a great thing to do, once you have a product that is worth selling.  You’ll need to get into the Minimum Viable Product area and way of thinking.  I see these economic development organizations that push startups to do more marketing.  I get it, economic development organizations are marketing people.  That’s not the most important thing early on in a startup.  Economic development want to grow and think everyone else should to.  Until a startup has a defined product and a defined target market, marketing is like the ICBM that you launched but you didn’t tell it where to go.  You don’t have a recall button and you never get that second chance to make a first impression.  The marketing bros might be great once you have a defined product, a defined market segment to target, but early in, marketing bros of economic development whether independent marketing bros or the self proclaimed experts that do talks and have classes tend to do more harm than good.  You have limited resources.  Sure, take some shots early in, but don’t just blindly spend money, which is a problem I see.

This isn’t a condemnation of economic development organizations.  They can be good if you use them properly.  There are a lot of decisions that have to be made before you should spend the first dime on marketing.  As a startup, you don’t have infinite resources or money.  Stop, pause, and think thru what you should do first.  Engage with a few local customers that you know personally.  That will get you going better than anything else.  Once you’ve done that and proven that there is something there, then engage with economic development groups, angels, VCs, etc.

Does you startup need some help?  Do you have ideas, but don’t know how to get started?  I can put you on the right path, just contact me.  https://www.linkedin.com/in/wallymcclure/

Will AI actually kill software companies and developers?

 I'm hearing a lot about AI "killing" software companies. I just wanted to share some experiences and thoughts.

I worked at The Coca-Cola Company 30+ years ago. There was this idea that Coke should build its own software internally because it gave us total control over every feature we could ever want and that this was a competitive advantage. I would argue that for one off applications, this is true, but that for commodity applications where there is a large marketplace for multiple products, building on your own makes little sense. It is hard to understand the few that building your own database ODBC driver or MAPI driver for application automation provides a competitive advantage. For many years, many applications have provided the necessary integration today into the the necessary industry standards that have widespread support. We had a set of internal apps called KO/Office. Its key feature was email and discussion (threaded discussion). There was a DOS version and a Windows version. It worked ok. It didn’t work well in situations where there were disconnected offices, or rarely connected. This happened with offices in Africa as well as Asia at the time. We think of a standard internet connection as the default today, but it wasn’t back 30 years ago. While we could handle the issue with email, the discussion boards were not easily resolved, if they ever were. We spent millions trying to get “distributed bulletin board” to work and I don’t remember it working. To keep email working, we had rows of dos based computers that all they did was to login to various servers, look at email in a file based system, and then to transfer email. We had to have people that worked 24x7 to literally reboot these dos based mailmen. I tell the above story to say that I don’t believe in this idea that customers are going to build their own software for companies and stop using Saas based systems or third party software. While AI companies want to push this idea, they are really pushing themselves as the solution to a problem that really doesn't exist. I don't see where customers should staff up the necessary technical expertise to host their own applications, because when you take on your application it must be hosted somewhere and that is up to the company/customer. I’ve seen no evidence of customers building their own solutions to commodity problems. If they are doing it, i don’t know that and they aren’t prepared for the complexity and cost of what is going to happen. If a company is going to write their own software and not use Saas based systems, they need to think about the above story and all of the hidden costs. There tend to be a lot of hidden costs that they don’t see coming until the commitment is made. I also want to be clear that I believe that AI can help with tasks. I don't see it as taking over. Btw, from what I hear, Coca-Cola has a commodity smtp email system now, probably based on Microsoft Exchange Server, but I don't know that.

The California Wealth Tax

 Over about the past month, the California wealth tax proposal has filled various feeds of mine, whether it is Google, LinkedIn, or just articles in cnbc.  I’ve got some views on that that I’ll be sharing.

What is a wealth tax?  Quite simply, a wealth tax is a tax on assets.  In the US, we tend to tax based on consumption and transactions. Mao, if you buy a house, a car, groceries, gasoline, etc, there are some taxes associated with it that you must pay the government.  These taxes go to provide various services that we as a society have determined collectively that we think should be provided.  These services are like roads, education, police, land use management, defense, etc.  These services must be paid for.

As stated, we pay for government services via taxes.  Then, we add in that the more money you make, the higher the percentage of tax that must be paid.  The more money you make as income, the higher the percentage of tax on that higher income.  There are two general types of income taxes for individuals, yes there are more but we’re keeping this simple.

* There is a general income tax.  You make money via income from a job, you pay a certain amount of tax at the local, state, and national level.  The more money you, the more you pay.

* investment taxes otherwise known as capital gains taxes.  For example, let’s say you buy $10k worth of land.  Five years later, you sell that land for $20k.  You made a $10k profit on the land (20-10).  You owe tax on that $10k income at a capital gains rate.  This also happens with stocks.  Let’s assume you buy a stock at $63 per share.  Something happens and you sell the stock at $200 per share.  If you had 1,000 shares, you would be responsible for capital gains tax on $137,000.  Due to the risk involved with capital gains investments (investments can and do go to zero), that tax rate is less than the income tax rates.  You want to incentivize risk investment, since this helps with economic growth, which is what government and you want.  Economic growth is good because it grows the entire economy, which means more money for you, and me, and others.  This is in general a good thing no matter what some want to claim.

There are at least two clear problems with taxes.  

1.  Income taxes haven’t kept up with the income of higher end income producers.  On a federal basis, there is a top number for taxes that hasn’t kept pace.  For example, Greg Abel of Berkshire Hathaway will make $25 million this year.  Now, there is nothing wrong with $25 million of income in a year.  Mr. Abel is not somehow evil or anything like that.  I don’t disagree with the thought that Mr. Abel should probably pay a higher percentage of his income over $1 million in taxes.

2.  Many wealth people are borrowing against assets for income and that is not taxable.  I don’t know how big the bypassing of capital gains taxes is, but it is clearly a tax dodge.  I’m not a tax specialist, but borrowing several billion dollars against an asset, such as stock is clearly a tax dodge.  If a tax owner would need money, I would expect them to sell that asset and pay taxes on the capital gain.  

Here are the problems that I have with a wealth tax:

1.  The California wealth taxes are being used to offset cuts from the federal government. These cuts from the federal government have been ongoing for the past several years.  California was the recipient of additional payments from the federal government during COVID.  These payments were designed to be around the area of health.  Now, with less money available, the state has to either cut programs or come up with additional income, most likely from taxes.  Instead, the state should shore up its services and get the services more inline with its income.

2.  What are assets worth?  You can think, oh that’s easy, you just take the stock price and multiple it by the number of shares.  Easy peasy done.  No, it doesn’t work like that.  When I buy a stock, 10 shares or so of something, I’m not going to affect the marketplace. When Jeff Bezos sells hundreds of thousands of Amazon shares, he is going to force the price of Amazon stock down.  Why?  Mr. Bezos  is an insider.  When insiders sell a share, even if the sale is disclosed, the general thinking is that there is a reason that has not been disclosed, which is going to drive down the price of an Amazon shares.  When a few hundred thousand shares of Amazon come on the market, that will also drive down the price of Amazon shares.  Keeping Mrs. Bezos happy costs money.  Without an official transaction, it is simply not possible to value an asset, therefore it is impossible to put an accurate value on an asset.  Wealth taxes are fundamentally flawed.

3.  This is a very personal reason, that matters to me.  I spent many years in the depths of startups at the early stage.  Early stage startups need money, love and smiles will only take you so far.  Early stage startup money tends to come from individuals with significant investable income.  That’s billionaire money.  Now, I live in the US southeast, so I am not directly affected.  This wealth tax would soak up some amount of money for startups.  This is not going to directly affect Silicon Valley, NYC, etc.  They have plenty of money.  We don’t have plenty of money in the southeast for startup money.  https://sfstandard.com/2026/01/17/leave-b-billionaire-tax-backlash-spreading-far-beyond-billionaires/

4.  I simply don’t understand why government has a right to a person’s possessions.  Stocks, bonds, real estate, etc are assets.  I simply don’t understand why any government is allowed to take a person’s possessions when those possessions are doing nothing.  Stocks are sitting their doing nothing for the individual beyond validating their existence.

This doesn’t even get into the fact that wealth taxes have been tried and failed in Europe. The result of wealth taxes in Europe was capital flight.  Wealth taxes roughly failed in Europe and were rolled back.

Even though I would think that California would go for wealth taxes, the situation on the ground is less clear.  https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/20/california-billionaire-tax-faces-uphill-battle-new-poll-finds.html

That is where I am at.  I don’t like the concept of wealth taxes

.NET 10 Maui Listview -> CollectionView

 Looks like the .NET 10 Maui Listview has been marked as Obsolete.  The recommendation is to go to the CollectionView.  I'll be commenting on the changes as I make that move in some projects.  I'm going to go slow on this because the CollectionView is a fairly good sized change, but not horrible.