Lincoln Nguyen’s Blog

Its all about “getting the right people on the bus” right? If theres one thing I’ve learned about 2+ years of being a Entrepreneur/Chief Slave Driver its that you’ve got to give your employees incentives to do good work. Sounds simple enough. But it’s an incredibly difficult thing to do when you are a startup and cannot match the salaries of companies that are 3X your size. So what do you do?

You evangelize the shit out of your company vision. For us it is “reforming health care through information technology”. If your company has a cause-based vision, it is much easier to make meaning of the work that you do because at the end of the day you feel that youve done work that has contributed to society in a meaningful way. If you get too far away from your cause, it definitely dampens morale and thats when companies start enforcing those complicated compensation schemes to use money as a the primary driver for good work. In my experience, I’ve found that recognition, a sense of accountability, and learning opportunities are the most effective means of recruiting A-players.

Until joining the Founder’s Institute, I hadn’t thought too much about the market characteristics like growth rate, total revenue estimates, and avg company size mainly because I haven’t had to do too many investor pitches. Sales presentations are a lot different than investor pitches, but they do share one thing in common which is Return-On-Investment. In the electronic health records space, solar installations, or enterprise software your customer is primarily interested in what the rate of payback is and how much your product will increase their productivity. When you approach investors they want to know a lot of the same things. VCs want to know at a macro level what the market looks like and whether your company can reach $100M in revenues in 2-3 yrs, but they also want to know about the value of your product to the customer.

This market research exercise brought up a lot of macroeconomic questions that I’d never really thought about before. I look back now at all the industries that I’ve jumped into, and it wasn’t because I did some formal market analysis, it was because of buzz and trends. I entered the medical staffing industry because I saw a niche opportunity in the senior health market. I didn’t know exactly what the market capitalization was, nor did I care. I entered medical informatics because I felt like there was an opportunity to provide a reliable low cost alternative to proprietary software, know in some sense that it was a big industry.

I think the hype curve that was brought up today was a good concept. You definitely want to know where you are in the curve. If you’re in the web, you probably wouldn’t want to be doing a social network. In CleanTech, you wouldn’t want to be in thin films. I can say with certainty that Electronic Health Records is on the upswing. Come the beginning of 2010, there will be a torrent of medical practices adopting EHR systems because they will need to be positioned to qualify for the meaningful use criteria in 2011.

Although there are a ton of vendors out there, mass adoption is not occurring because most medical practices are taking a wait-and-see approach. They are waiting for “meaningful use” to be clearly defined as well as waiting for other doctors around them to adopt the technology. Technology has evolved to a point where physicians can “cross the chasm”. Early adopters ran into a lot of problems that have scared the majority of physicians from adopting the technology.

In an Oreilly article that was forwarded to me yesterday, they related the problems the medical industry is now experiencing in adapting workflow to computerization to problems with waterflow development in the 70s and 80s.

Some things I learned from market research:

Market Segments: Peds 29,170 OB/GYN 19,750 = 78,000 immediately addressable market

Growth Rate: 11% combined annual growth rate continuing through 2013

Total Revenue: $8-10B/ year

Adoption rate: 250,000-300,000 physicians over 3 years

Untapped market: 80% primary care

It was very useful to look at competitor website and review their investor page. I haven’t read the 10Ks yet. I’ll most likely look into GE Centricity, Allscripts, McKesson, and AthenaHealth.

So last night was the first night at the Founder’s Institute in Del Mar Heights. There was an eclectic group of people there mostly in the web space with a smattering of people in nanotech and biotech. Got put on the hotseat unexpectedly. Thanks Adeo. Got grilled. Met great people.

Meditations:

Ideas don’t mean much

Launch a project

Act Now: Biggest mistake entrepreneurs make is that they wait too long

Innovators Dilemma

Wow. It’s been a rough couple of weeks. Had my first demo last week, loads of feedback on my executive summary, and a VC call me yesterday to chew up my plan. Wasn’t the first time and certainly won’t be the last.

Entrepreneurship is a tough game, no doubt about that. If I wasn’t doing what I’m doing right now, I honestly couldn’t imagine what I’d be doing. Being an entrepreneur and forcing myself to be versed in sales is allowing me to grow as a person. Every time I do a demo, cold call an executive, or simply walkin to a practice I feel like I’m learning and growing as a person.

In technology, you want to assume either one of two roles in founding a company. Either you build the product or you sell the product. Best case scenario is that you have a founding team of complimentary people who are both product focused but have expertise in sales or engineering. Those two founders should also be able to hawk the shit out your product and be first class evangelists.

I was never a sales person before I started my company. Never worked retail, never sold candy bars, never sold cutco kitchen knives  but I’ve come to find that sales is one of the most essential skills you’ll need to learn as an entrepreneur.

I can see the HealthCare IT wave coming around the corner. Gotten feedback on my plan, mostly positive and mostly helpful. I just know that the idea I’m starting out with right now will be completely different from what it will end up being a couple years from now. Also got a vendor exhibition spot at the OCAAFP conference in Dec.

Things are lookin up! Just gotta keep hustling.

I don’t believe that entrepreneurship can be taught by taking a course or reading a book. I think you just learn by getting off your ass and starting a company. There is something to be said for good case studies from guest lecturers who have been there and done it. I guess thats what makes B-schools like Stanford and Sloan special. Here’s a cool resource for teaching yourself entrepreneurship here at StartUpNorth by David Crow.

We’re doing implementations of open source healthcare software like patientos and openvista right now. I called a proprietary medical software company recently and they said I’d have to pay for a resellers license. What was the price of the license to sell THEIR SOFTWARE, you might ask? $15,000 for a silver VAR label and $25,000 for their gold. Thats right. $25,000 to peddle software to hospitals and doctors.

In a time and age where Open Source rules and affiliate programs run rampant, there are still software companies that charge you to sell their software. I have no doubt that these companies will get destroyed once cloud solutions and the OpenSource medical software community runs these products out of house and home.

Been following Takashi Murakami’s artwork for a while. He’s got some pretty cool print pieces that he does in a style that he describes as “Superflat. He’s leading a new wave of Contemporary Japanese artists who represent a blend of pop and otaku culture. Otaku is known for its obsession with anime and manga.

I see Takashi Murakami’s superflat style pop up everywhere nowadays. It pops up in graffiti and seaker art all the time.

This is another stream of consciousness post, written for no other reason than to collect my thoughts. You’ve been warned.

Remember 80/20 rules in business, relationships, health and spirit

Focus on leadership, relationships, creativity. Outsource everything else.

Small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, and great minds discuss ideas. Only you can set the agenda for the rest of your life.

Cut the lifeboats. You’re young. You can fail two or three times and you’ll be find. Taking that risk puts you in the path of wealth. You’ll never regret taking those risks but you might regret it if you dont.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned with after 2+ years of working with outsourced developers, it’s that they never say no. You can introduce all the agile-scrumming-gantt-charting-waterfall-SDLC you want. At the end of the day, if you have not clearly outlined everything in clear form, visually, to three degrees of detail, you’ll be at a disconnect with where your vision of the product should be and what the developer produces. It sure does force you to become a better product manager though.

For those of you starting tech companies, do yourself a favor and include a technologist on your founding team. Ideally, you will have one business person, one product person, and one technologist. The business and product/design person can be the same person. You will want to have a business person who can sell snow to an eskimo..as they say. That person should be able to network, sell, lead, and have enough creativity to contribute effectively to product. In terms of a technologist, you’ll want a shit-hot rockstar programmer who can take idea to conception in the time that 2 average programmers can. You’ll often find that this person has been programming since grade school and is Geeked-Out to an extreme. They should live and die code. They should dream in loops, strings, and calls.

Sometimes, outsourcing your web development is your only choice. In those cases, slow progress is better than no progress. Make due with what you have and be clear with communicating your ideas. In some rare instances, you may be able to cut a deal with a web consulting company and license the technology they build for you. If that doesn’t suit you, there may be others who will do it for an equity stake.

Learn to bootstrap. Now!