Thoughts in Time

Image via Wikipedia One of the great things about the start of the UPENN MAPP program has been having conversations with my classmates and with the founder of the positive psychology movement, Martin Seligman. One of the core things I’ve gotten from speaking to Marty and appreciating how he thinks is that he has uncovered a basic opportunity across many different domans. That opportunity I’ve stared to think of as “looking at the plus side”.

I’ll give you the example that relates to his launching the positive psychology movement. Marty realized that traditional psychology, or “psychology as usual” examined what is wrong with us. It was interested in pathology, disease, mental illness, and basically how to fix those of us who have something wrong. What Marty realized was that there were very few people studying the other side. If people with mental illness were say -5, and people who were depressed were -3, the goal of traditional psychology was to understand this so that we could get you back to 0. What about helping normal people go from 0 to +5? That’s what is now termed positive psychology. It’s the scientific (and let me underscore SCIENTIFIC) study of 0+ in the psychology domain.

The neat thing is that one can apply this thinking to other domains. Think about Physical health. Medicine primarly is concerned with fixing people with illnesses. There is work done on the plus side, but not nearly as much.

Think about business management. We tend towards thinking about cutting costs, fixing processes, etc. The study of the plus side isn’t done nearly as often. After all, we tend to think - if it’s aint broke, don’t fix it! This lack of research and attention (outside of books like good to great) presents an interesting opportunity.

I’m sure that there are other areas where Plus Side Thinking(tm )… may open up many new research and applied avenues. I look forward to discovering them!

This week, I started the Masters in Applied Positive Psychology program at UPENN. The program caught my interest for a number of reasons and so far I have certainly not been disappointed. To some up quickly, and I’ll write more in the future, the idea of Positive Psychology is that while traditional psychology has studied what’s wrong with us, and how to intervene to fix us, there has been a lack of study of what makes us great, happy, etc. We’ve approached the world with an idea that happiness is the absence of unhappiness. Intuitively, we know that’s not the case. So positive psychology is the study of the plus side of things. Whether that’s performance in business, parenting, pysical well being, or other domains, there are so many areas where we have studied what goes wrong, but not enough about what goes right and why. An important basis of positive psych is the emphasis of empirical, scientific research. This is not a “let’s be happy all the time” self help guru training program .

The program will unfold over 40 days on campus (mostly those are Friday -> Sunday to avoid missing the work week), and then there’s lots of distance work. It’s going to be a fun challenge as we continue to build Pikum at the same time!

Image via Wikipedia
I haven’t seen the new clone wars animated feature yet, but the ads reminded me of how much I enjoyed the original star wars features. Star Wars provides several great lessons for startup founders.

Do or Do Not - There is no Try
Action is the lifeblood of a startup. There are many ideas, it’s the doing and execution that counts. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how hard you try - did you do? If so, your chances of being succesful will be much greater.

Use Jedi Mind Tricks
Often with a startup, it’s important to remember that perception is reality. This doesn’t mean be untruthful (a jedi would never do that), rather it means that it’s important to understand perception, and work to change it. When you’re selling first customers, talking to the press, etc if you can convince them that “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” even when they’re staring at them, you’ll have a good chance of being able to shape perception and help your startup get the advantage it needs to get ahead.

A few dedicated individuals can bring down the empire
The death star was the most powerful weapon ever built - able to destroy a planet with a single shot. A couple rebels with spaceships they hacked together were able to destroy it. They found the weak point. No matter what industry your company is in, the dominant “empire” has a weak point. Find it, and you can win. Just look at the history of tech and you’ll see this time and time again (DEC -> Microsoft -> Google).

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you?
Like Yoda, you aren’t big (YET), but you’re nimble as all hell. Strike fast, hard, and often and remember that like Yoda, people will underestimate your ability due to your size.

I’m sure there are other great lessons for startups that can be gleaned from Star Wars. Look forward to hearing your ideas in the comments.

Lightyear Capital Makes Significant Investment in Higher One Holdings, Inc. - MarketWatch

Exciting…. When this deal funds, it’ll be my 1st liquidity event (partial - but hey, it’s still a liquidity event) . Really excited that we were able to build Higher One to the point where an investor such as Lightyear wanted to become involved. Early investors were able to realize more than 20X on their investment and better yet, this deal provided everyone involved with the opportunity for some diversification, while also being able to choose to maintain ownership and participate in the upside as the company continues to grow and increase operating leverage. Congrats to everyone at Higher One. I look forward to seeing the continued growth in the coming years!

15 Additional Colleges and Universities Implement Higher Ones OneDisburse Refund Management

Been really busy and travelling a lot, so haven’t blogged in a while (Kellee’s been giving me a hard time about that)… so here’s a link to an update on Higher one.  They keep rolling along.  Some updates on Pikum and life in London coming soon (excluding rants about IKEA).

Now this is what I’m talking about. Johannes has created two pikle pikums on German football… and I’ve won both of them. I guess I know more about Bundesliga football than I thought.

Actually, what I’ve really been enjoying is the feedback we’re getting on Pikum! It’s not the nice notes (”Pikum looks great, lots of fun”), but the notes, twits, and blog posts where we’re learning what people think we can improve. There’s a lot to the Pikum! product and getting into private beta gives us the opportunity to learn how we can best refine and simplify the interface, user paths, and help content to make it really easy for users to understand the game, get started, and start competing… so they can Pikum and win too!

Yesterday we decided to release Pikum! into invite only beta.  The core site processes are working, and we felt the best way to go from here (a good product) to a great product is to get users into the site so we can get feedback.  It’s all about getting feedback and iterating.

It’s been great to see people getting in, entering pikums (we already have a couple with double digit entrants), and sending out invites.  We’re also accomplishing what we wanted in that we’re finding the key issues and pushing them to the top of our list to fix (for instance, we’re finding that we still have a lot of work to do on email deliverability - something we thought needed work, and realize we REALLY want to focus on!).  I was also the first person to win a Pikle Pikum on the live site (Johanne’s “German Quickie”) … We’ll see who the first winner of a real money Pikum is.

We’re going to be blogging ongoing at blog.pikum.com  as we find issues, implement updates, etc.  Stay tuned!

Entrepreneur magazines Hot 100 Company Rankings - Higher One

Great to see that Higher One has gotten onto another hot company ranking list… this time - the #12 fastest growing private company in the U.S. according to Entrepreneur magazine. Recently, the company signed it’s 100th university client. Glad to see that things continue to go so well. The great thing about Higher One is that because it’s business serves colleges and students, it’s actually counter cyclical, meaning that if the U.S. does head into a recession, the business should do better, rather than worse.

The business is also growing inorganically, having just purchased EduCard and setup a major partnership with Evisions (http://www.higherone.com/media/2008/acquire_educard.shtml). This will make it easier for 900 Evisions clients to get up and running with Higher One. It’s pretty amazing that something that Miles, Mark, and I founded in 2000 now serves 5% of US college students and has managed over $4 Billion in payments.

I read Mike Butcher’s post on Zemanta (at Techcrunch UK) and thought I’d give it a try.  Installation was a snap.  Now, it’s telling me it will update and provide suggestions in 110 characters (make that 96).

Something I setup yesterday for Pikum was a twitter profile that will be focused on twittering about sports.  Twitsports.  Twitter is an interesting platform for discussion of sports as things happen during a game, day, etc… Check it out.

An interesting thing about Zemanta.. It tells you when the next update will be, but it doesn’t tell you that you can click on that area and it will update immediately. If they changed the text to “Update in 275 characters or click to update now” - it would increase usability.

Overall, I really like the product. I know it will help me increase the number of relavent links in my blog posts.  Great product guys.

JOIN THIS FACEBOOK GROUP: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=12256012493 

IKEA told me that the only way I can complain or possibly get compensation for getting mistreated is by writing to some address in the UK.  That’s no fun, I’d rather find everyone else who IKEA has treated this way and get us together through Facebook.  If you’ve been treated poorly by IKEA, join this group - or if you just want to show a big stuffy corporation that doesn’t value service that customers do matter and that it might be worthwhile to listen to customers rather telling them they “need to write to blah blah UK to register a complaint”, JOIN THIS GROUP- http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=12256012493
The rest of the story….

IKEA had told us they would deliver our cabinets on Tuesday(for the first parts of the story see here, here, and here).  Remember, I ordered this stuff in the middle JANUARY.  On Tuesday, we never got the delivery, and finally were told that “they were at your place at 7:30AM, but didn’t know which flat the raised ground floor one was and were afraid to ring the wrong bell so they left” -

Are you serious?  How incompetent can one company (or it’s outsourced delivery reps) be?  So, Kellee called them and  they promised that they would then deliver our order before Saturday, or at the worst, first thing on Saturday (before 9AM).  It’s now Saturday at 5:20… Do we have the order? Of course not.

At about 3, I get a call from DHL saying IKEA has moved the order to some other courier (no reason known).  Sorry, they can’t tell me who or what’s going on - I have to call IKEA.

I call IKEA.  The girl says “I don’t know why your order is being switched from courier to another - there aren’t any problems on your route” - I run out of pay as you go minutes on my Orange phone, and thus get cut off.

top up phone minutes (remembering that IKEA has cost me something like 10-15 pounds between the times I’ve now spoken to them through this drama)

I call back.  A new girl asks me to hold on while she finds out what’s going on. Remembering the pence ticking away as I’m on hold, I respectfully decline, asking her to call me back.  A couple minutes later, I get a call back. “Don’t worry, all the orders will be delivered tonight, including yours. They’re just running late.”

Me…” So, you expect me to sit around all evening as well?  I’ve got family visiting from the US and wanted to take them out.”

“her - I really do apologize”

At this point, I started asking for compensation.  She said they can’t do anything beyond giving me the delivery cost back (which they already had done when they messed it up last time.  I said that wasn’t good enough. I asked to speak to a supervisor.  She put me on hold and came back saying the supervisor said that’s all they can do.

At this point, I was getting very agitated.  I ask again to speak to the supervisor. I’m told I can’t do that.  I ask for a supervisor’s name -I’m told I can’t have it.  I’m told that what I’ll need to do is write to their customer response team (they mistreat customers so often they have staff dedicated to this!)… I try to explain my position to the rep in a way that personalizes it…”what if IKEA told you to come in to work today at 9, had you sit until 5, then said - oops, we don’t need you, we’re not paying you, and your only recourse is to write to some office in Ipswich”… She says - “sorry, I can’t do anything else”.

This is where I explain that I can. I can write about it online, I can start a facebook group, I can become a pain that is going to cost them well north of whatever compensation they could have provided (I would have been happy with even a 50 pound voucher). She has nothing to say, so I hang up.

So here I am - IKEA, you are the first company to make me a determined detractor. I will share this story with anyone who cares to listen, and it has gotten me so annoyed that not only have setup a facebook group, but I’ve budgetd $25 towards buying ads on facebook to spread the word about that group.  That’s right, your service has been so bad that I’m choosing to spend money to tell people how bad it is.  And all this could have been avoided with some reasonable service and someone at IKEA taking responsibility when things did go badly.