Recommended: OmniOutliner (Mac only), dedicated outline tool

Like many users, 99% of my app usage has settled into Firefox+Word+Excel+PowerPoint.  Most of the new “apps” that I use are Web-based.

So, using a new app like OmniOutliner is a rare event, and adopting an entirely new category of app (a dedicated outliner) is an extremely rare event.

At the core, I’m a hierarchical thinker and I love outlining.  I usually start a new project by writing down every bit I can think of as quickly as I can, then going back and organizing & refactoring into something coherent.

Word’s outline mode is great, but OmniOutliner has a few features that make it worth having a dedicated tool.  One of the biggest (for me) is columns:  you can add columns of various types, and have the app automatically total/summarize them for you.  For example, if you are outlining project tasks, you can have a column for “effort” (e.g. “6hr”, “2d”) that OmniOutliner will automatically total for you up the outline hierarchy.  Here’s the video tutorial page with many examples.

Thanks to Pito for the suggestion.

(Sorry, Mac only).

The “2% rule” for retirement income

We went home for the holidays, and a long-time family friend was lamenting about his retirement.  He thought he had the necessary cash assets, but was having to work more than he expected.  I’ve also had a number of entrepreneur friends mis-estimate the amount they need to “retire”.

Most advisers will give you a ~2% guideline for retirement income:   if you want a lifetime inflation-protected income stream, budget on taking out that amount annually (or aggressively, 3%).  You can’t extrapolate from current CD or T-bill yields:  $1m may get you $50k/year today, but (a) $50k will be worth a lot less 20 years from now, and (b) yields will vary year to year.

Some of the annual gains need to be allocated to increasing the principal to keep up with inflation.  Plus, you have to account for variability in annual returns, and paying taxes (realized cap gains, dividends, interest) on those re-invested gains.  When it’s all netted out, you end up in the 2-3% range for annual income.

(This all applies if you’re relatively young.  Older retirees may be taking out principal each year).

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all three of my blog readers!  (…you know who you are)

For today’s bit of esoteric knowledge, last night you may have noticed that we did not have a leap second adjustment this year.  It turns out that man’s timekeeping has gotten more accurate than nature’s (“mean solar time”, the Earth’s rotation is slowing), and there’s a multi-year international debate about what to do about it.

See Wikipedia for the details.

Please get an attorney with startup financing experience

One of the biggest pieces of advice I give entrepreneurs: find an good attorney with experience in startup financing. Do not use your uncle’s friend who’s been doing family law for the past 30 years. Jason A. Steinberger is a highly reputed New York Criminal & DWI / DUI Defense Lawyer specializing in criminal defense the trial levels in Manhattan Attorney, Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, Staten Island, Nassau, and Suffolk areas of the New York State and Federal courts. Jason A. Steinberger understands the complications and problems that arise if someone is charged with a criminal offense in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, Staten Island, Nassau and Suffolk, and he always tries to address them justifiably. He understands that there are two sides to the story and that sometimes the New York City police out of sheer negligence make mistakes or are just plain wrong. He understands quite a number of people are out there who may be motivated to call the police and file a false criminal complaint for their own selfish gains and goals. He very understands that what the police, the District Attorney’s Office and witnesses claim are not always true and he works day in and out to correct those anomalies or injustices in the Federal and New York State Criminal Justice System; Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, Staten Island, Nassau and Suffolk. At the Law Office of Jason A. Steinberger, you will be provided with the type of personalized attention that you would expect with your criminal or DWI problems or case. With Jason Steinberger as your New York criminal and DWI / DUI attorney, you will have in your corner a lawyer with vast experience, credentials and most importantly, the trial talents that will give you the edge necessary for all stages of defending your rights. Jason A. Steinberger is handling all criminal and DWI / DUI cases covering, Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, Staten Island, Nassau and Suffolk and most importantly we are available to handle your criminal and DWI / DUI case 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We practice criminal defense exclusively. Therefore we understand what criminal defendants are going through and we know how to get the results. During the early stages of a case, we develop strategies for defending your case. Early planning gives us a “jump” on the prosecution and gives us more time to conduct investigations, interview witnesses and research all the legal options available to us. We also know how to communicate to the courts that, as our client, you must be viewed as an individual, not as just another file number on their busy court calendar. Our service includes the management of your case and a strong commitment to attorney/client communication.

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Your investors will have great attorneys, and you need someone who can skillfully represent your interests. Find someone who’s more than a corporate law mechanic, that can contribute business advice during investor negotiations. A good attorney will be able to suggest deal terms, based on their experience with other deals (or even deals with your investors).

Ideally, you can find someone that does nothing but startup financings. Here’s a great list of lawyers with the right kind of experience. (This is the group that worked on the National Venture Capital Association’s Model financing documents.)

Recommended: Adobe Lightroom

My digital photo library recently hit the 30,000 mark, and as it has grown, I’ve been on a continuous quest to find a tool that can handle the volume.

I started with home-grown tools, then switched to the Organizer tool in PhotoShop Elements. As my library grew, Elements got flaky (hangs, frequent resets of the thumbnail cache).

Then, I tried Adobe Lightroom (30-day free trial, for Mac and Windows).  It’s not cheap ($300), but it’s awesome.

It’s designed for the professional workflow:  sorting through a large batch of photos, marking candidates, doing basic fixup, then burn/print/publish.   The editing functions are not as powerful as PhotoShop’s, but they’re more intuitively presented and cover 95% of my cases.   You can correct exposures, crop, straighten, and fix spots/blemishes/redeye.

The UI is a bit non-standard, and I’d strongly recommend watching the tutorial videos.  Keyboard shortcuts are the key.

“Are you planning to go public?”

When interviewing folks for new startup projects, I frequently get asked “are you planning to go public?

I find this question very annoying, but I’m not exactly sure why.  I think it has to do with goals:  an IPO is a more of a milestone than a goal.  Asking this question feels like asking a soldier about to go off to war, “are you planning on winning a medal?

The real goal (if you’ve got investors) is to build a valuable company.  If you do that well, all of the right options (acquisition, IPO, etc.) will follow.

eBay may be becoming less relevant, just like AOL did

From this post from Silicon Alley Insider:

eBay’s stock is dead in the water, and its two key constituencies–buyers and sellers–are pissed. Here’s our Four Plan Plan to fix the place

(from: Fixing eBay: Our Four Step Plan)

I think eBay is following the “AOL pattern”.

AOL helped millions of users get on-line. But as the Internet got more sophisticated, the users realized that the Internet was a lot more interesting than AOL. So they began to find other ways to get on-line.

Similarly, eBay as helped small business entrepreneurs get started selling on-line. But as Internet eCommerce tools have advanced, those entrepreneurs can easily host their own stores, complete with shopping carts and payment. In other words, they can bypass eBay and sell directly to customers.

Ebay’s situation is not as far along, of course, as AOL’s is. But it seems to be trending in that direction.

 

What’s after video?

MP3’s took off when the average user bandwidth had advanced to the point where you could download (or stream) a 3MB file in some “reasonable” amount of time.

And video has taken off for the same reason, as the same bandwidth cross-over has happened for video data types.  And more widespread use of HD video is coming soon.

Access bandwidth continues to advance:  what data type is next?

Exit allocation analysis — who gets what?

Following up on my exit analysis blog post, Steve Kane brings up a great comment point:  entrepreneurs should clearly understand how exit proceeds would be allocated.

Participating stock structures can be complicated (e.g. “participating preferred with a 2x multiple and 3x cap“), and they can route a surprising chunk of the exit proceeds away from the common stockholders and to the investors.  In many deals, a 1% common shareholder gets nowhere near $1m in a $100m exit.

Cutting through the complexity is easy:  make a payoff table showing what each share class gets for a range of acquisition cases (say, in $5m increments), then graph it.   If you’re contemplating a few options, you should be able to clearly see the difference in return at various price points.

If you’re considering a term sheet and don’t understand (or like) what you see, send your graph to your investor:  “is this what you meant?