Who is Farhan Lalji?

It’s funny how when you’re trying to raise capital for a start up an investor, whether VC or angel or any other investor, will probably want to know how big the opportunity is. How scalable is the business?

To be effective and successful though you have to execute, and to execute you have to provide someone with a great experience. This requires focus.

These two processes seem like opposites to me. So as an entrepreneur you have to simultaneously be thinking about how to execute your operation at a very granular level, but how to scale or ramp up the business effectively in order to raise finance.

I guess the trick is to know when to wear the execution hat (and focus on detail) and when to where the scale hat (and know when to think about scale) and not get mixed up between the two.

I’ve loved 37signals for years. I’ve used their products, and blogged about how great their products are. I’ve followed their story as they got funding, from Jeff Bezos no less. And today I was reminded why I really admire them.

37signals has announced that they are undertaking a series of “workplace experiments”. They are doing these experiments to make their workplaces a more fun and engaging place. They are trying to make their workplace – in their words – “one of the best places in the world to work, learn, and generally be happy”.

So what are they doing? First they’ve introduced shorter work weeks – 4 day weeks, no work on Friday. Second their funding people’s passions (hobbies, interests, curiosities), the examples they’ve given are cooking lessons, learning to fly, woodworking classes. And third they’re giving discretionary spending accounts, with the simple requisite that people are reasonable with their spending.

If you’re asking what’s so great about that? Who are you Scrooge McDuck?

Seriously though, they’re trying to make their workplace, rewarding, engaging, dynamic, and responsible and in a two way dynamic. They’re responsible to their employees and in return I bet their turnover is minuscule. Plus they’ll get some more pub/press about being really cutting edge in how they run their business. I can’t see other organisations picking up this, it’s too risky, doesn’t show financial returns easily, and… well it’s just too good.

But I do know that if/when I do the “start up thing” I’d like to follow their lead. Hopefully, other companies will too, and when businesses that my generation have started are the norm, maybe this will be the norm too.

Is innovation in a big company a paradox? Or does it exist but need to be structured in a certain way to be successful? What is that way?

I’ve been thinking a lot about over the past year as I’ve been working at a big co for the first time.

This is not a new conversation, I always think of Xerox and the GUI and how Xerox isn’t in the conversation anymore.

Should big companies even bother? Or should they invest in start ups that show promise and then acquire?

Reminds me, I need to pick up the Innovators dilemma from the school library.

If someone offered you a widget for free would you try it and then if you wanted a bigger widget later you would have to pay for it or if you wanted 1000 widgets later you’d have to pay for it would you agree to the deal?

I started thinking along these lines when I came across Fred Wilson’s blog this morning where he pointed his readers to a great article on Wired today, “Free! Why $0.00 is the future of business”. It’s a decent article, well worth a read. The money quote for me is where he takes on Milton Friedman’s “No free lunch” concept, with “a free lunch doesn’t necessarily mean the food is being given away or that you’ll pay for it later — it could just mean someone else is picking up the tab”.

I’m a big believer of heavy users should offset costs for lighter users, in society as well as in business. Making things free for basic service and asking the market to pay for premium services works. 37signals.com is a great example of this, I’ve used their basecamp and tadalist services and worked on projects where we had the premium version.

One thought, London could give free tube rides from 10 – 4 during the week, this would increase tourist spend in London and the commuters could offset this. You’d also be less likely to get tourists holding commuters up on a daily basis. From a market and supply side this concept makes a lot of sense. Why more business and societies don’t use free or the freemium business model more is beyond me. Free can be a great business model, just ask MySQL.

Where’s the money for people with a dream and a plan? I had an interesting conversation with a couple of people last night about starting up in London. Then this morning I was reminded that 3i is pulling out of early stage and a bunch of angel networks that actually operate more like venture capital funds. So where do people with a dream and a plan go for start up (seed) capital? I know you should start out with friends, family members and fools, but what if you don’t have access to capital through this channel?

Sure there are things in Europe like Seedcamp and other hubs as well a friend of A friend of mine is trying to address this through matching private individuals and other angels to entrepreneurs through his site lift-finance.net/. Is this enough capital for tech and logistic ventures that have heavy capital costs to start up? Personally I don’t think so.

Is this a common problem in places not called Silicon Valley?