Business

Just a little unintended give

I’ve learned over the past 5 years, business is a funny thing. It’s sort of like piloting a boat without any real certainty of where the final port will end up being. You aim for ports that you know of; either from journeys others have taken, or from rumours of lands unexplored. The part where it ceases to be like piloting a boat is that you aren’t at open sea, you aren’t able to predict the weather, and to be honest, you can’t see the stars nor have GPS.

One person I’ve spoken to said, “it’s like tap-dancing.” You have to keep the beat and just keep on going, light footed, skipping past all of the issues, and not letting a stumble break your step.

That could be true too, but the problem is it’s like tap-dancing, where the music may suddenly turn into a polka or a samba at any time.

What I’m finding is it is, for better or worse, a martial art. You can learn from the masters and work your way up, and yes, some people have a natural knack for it. You start by learning the rules and the strictest throws and punches, being judged exclusively for how exact you perform them. However, as you go up the ranks you learn that being strict and rigid is a darned good way to break your arm. Following the specific steps you’ve learned is a good way to get thrown to the mat pretty quickly. Why? Because those are the specific steps everyone has learned.

What you realize is that it takes a little unintended give, sometimes.

Some people call it pivoting, but to me that implies a bit too much forethought. The decisions you make are too quick and too responsive to be simply a pivot. Spending a lot of time on a decision is a good way to waste money or, to use the martial arts analogy, quickly be thrown out of the ring.

We’ve probably all heard the “Kung Fu” slogan that you want to be like a reed, able to bend in the wind, not a stick which snaps. We also probably think we’ve taken it to heart in various areas of our lives. Probably true for the ones you can think of. Similarly. most people forget that a reed also had some rigidity, otherwise it cannot stand at all.

It’s not being a wet spaghetti, it’s a little unintended give.

Sometimes it sucks, but at the end of the day, it seems to be the best way to survive, grow and move forward.

A broken reed dies in the pond.

KJR

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Business is product.

Business is product.

What does that mean though? First and foremost, it means that business is not ideas because ideas without action is not product. Ideas alone are simple mental masturbation and until they are written down or acted upon they have no physical form, no point. They cannot be product. Ideas can become product if they are patented, copyrighted or otherwise written down and protected legally, but then they are no longer simply ideas.

The greatest idea in the world won’t matter if it’s not acted upon.

Business is product.

What else could this mean? Well, it must also mean that the idea created is sold. Why? Because to be a product, someone needs to buy it. An object that is not sold or purchased is simply a rock, a oddity, perhaps even a piece of eccentric art (albeit, I’m sure someone could debate that art itself is not art unless someone other than the artist recognizes it as such, perhaps by purchasing it.)

Again, the greatest idea in the world made material is not business if no one wants it. You can make a machine that in 50 years will change the world, but if no one now understands it or can use it, it’s not a business. It is not a product.

Business is product.

Now here is where I start to split hairs. Product isn’t just a sale. It’s enough sales that the product can be manufactured as more than a one off. This doesn’t mean that business cannot be an art business, it means that the product in an art business is the artist herself, not the art. The purchasers who support it are buying her output, not her individual pieces. In the end, she’s the product.

In a similar fashion, a great idea, made material, and sold to one person, cannot be a product. It is a prototype, a trifle, an artifact, however it is not a product, it is not business.

When you create a business, the hardest thing to come to terms with as an academic or someone just coming out of school is that business is product. You need to not only have a great idea that you can execute on, but you need to be able to sell it, and not just once, but repeatedly, to many people. Create a product that may not last the ages, but will last long enough to pay the bills and help materialize the next product.

Business is product. Plain and simple.

Now go and build it.

KJR

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My dream for PR.

This article reflects my personal opinions, and not the opinions of Panda Robotics

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I’ve had a few very interesting conversations and the organizations I’ve managed have had to make a very difficult decisions this last week.

Panda Robotics’ target market is primarily the general consumer, I personally believe that it is time to get 3d printers out of the labs, out of the workshops, right into the homes. Essentially, the exact same thinking that happened in the late 70s with personal computers.

Yes, there are always ways to improve on these existing tools from the perspective of finer resolution, etc., but, in my opinion we could spend the rest of time trying to make the very best one before we get the prices down and get it so people can use it themselves. Get it so everyone can start to imagine and create in ways that we, the manufacturers, can’t even imagine.

I’m fairly certain many of the early PC pioneers never envisioned VisiCalc, nor dreamt that something that useful for business could run on such an underpowered machine.

To get to the general consumer, we not only have to get the price down, but my dream was to get Pandabots safe and easy enough to use that we could get entire labs of these into the schools at schoolboards, or the universities throughout North America. Yes, there would still be a place for high-end printers like the Objet’s and Dimensions, but this provides a stepping stone where individuals who would never have had the opportunity to really play with a 3d printer, learn it’s limitations and possibilities, but more importantly be able to dream about how they can create a new world with it.

I know, this seems very optimistic, but I really think that Moore’s Law (to some degree) will apply to 3d printing, and by the time the kids in elementary school have reached adulthood, they will not only view 3d printing as just another part of life, but be able to enact those things they’ve been dreaming of doing since they were young.

Just as many of us did when we graduated, having started on old XTs and Apple IIs.

Amazingly, when the kickstarter started. we got lots of requests from schools and institutions who wanted it precisely for this reason. It excites me immensely, and I’m very hopeful that we’ll be able to get the first production models to them soon. So that the people in school in 2013 will be able to all start to use 3d printers daily and get as excited as me about them.

I’m working as hard as I can to make this dream come true, and I appreciate all of the support each and everyone of you has given me in reaching it.

KJR

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Dreaming of *redacted by government order* things

So, I see the stories about a bunch of billionaires seriously considering an asteroid mining venture and it always gets me wondering. They are dead-on correct that with great risk investment comes great reward. If they can find and harvest a ore-rich asteroid, the ROI could be astronomical. They inherently avoid all of the regulation down here, and own the entire asteroid so there wouldn’t be any crown taxes or the like on the goods.

However, at the same time, my mind wanders to missed opportunities we have here on Earth all the time. The ROI on investments in infrastructure is never immediately apparent to anyone. However, without all of the high-speed internet lines we have around the world, the entire industry upon which Google’s billionaires and Amazon’s billionaires, and even arguably Apple’s billionaires come from, would not exist.

Without the heavy government investment (including debt) in our interstate/transcontinental highway system, I’d argue a full 70-90% of modern commerce really wouldn’t exist. Yet that commerce essentially paid off the debt and now we are simply dealing with keeping everything balanced.

Now though, it seems that government isn’t allowed to make massive infrastructure investments, even though it is fully permitted to make massive regulatory investments — creating entire regulatory structures that need to be paid for in the long run to tell other businesses how to work and then ensure they are following those rules.

Regulatory structures, in almost all cases, only create work for the government. There may be a few small businesses that form (mostly lawyers and accountants) to help other businesses around it, but in the end it doesn’t create the massive booms of growth you see with infrastructure investment. If the government spent the money it should to properly expand Toronto’s (or any other major city’s) public transit system, you would see the payoff almost immediately in available jobs for people and less expense on road maintenance and costs.

Yet, for some reason we cannot seem to do that anymore.

Instead, we have Harper arguing over whether a fetus is a living thing, and if he has his way, creating even more regulation to tell us how to live without making our lives any better and McGuinty trying to come up with some other way to regulate our businesses without adding any value to them. Both sides are chasing up the tree of not working for us, but telling us how we should live.

And worse! The one elected politicianI can see who doesn’t seem to be immediately trying to tell us how we should live has the social skills of a cucumber and, honestly, even I really dislike him.

*sigh*

I have no problem with taxes when I can see that they are going towards things that will make it easier for me to produce value for my clients. I have no problem with taxes when I can see that they are building a future Canada we can all love and respect.

I do have problem with taxes when I can see they are going down a black hole and, even worse, when I can see they are being used to make it even more difficult for a small business to survive and produce value for its community.

We need a party or a politician or someone who can stand up and say government can do good for society, but it needs to stop telling us how to live and start helping us live better. Until then, it’s just all such a waste of time. I may as well try to get my money in with the asteroid miners.

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