What Did I Learn?

Last week Open Labs launched two products. Music OS 3.0, a music creation and live performance software optimized for a touch screen, and an Open Labs laptop solution powered by Dell were the end results of quite a bit of hard work over the past four months. As I look back on it this weekend, I was reflecting on the items that I learned.

- Small motivated teams are fun and can achieve huge endeavors. I have been involved in business for over 25 years. During that time, I have led organizations with two people and organizations with 900 people. The nice thing about a small team is that you can have a personal connection with each person and they can identify their contribution at a visceral level. The Open Labs team performed above and beyond all reasonable expectation on this project. It is fun to work with great people.

- Everything takes longer than you think and costs more. When I was in a venture capital firm the rule of thumb was divide by two on the revenue projections and multiple by two on the time to first ship and money needed. I am happy to say that we were only off by a couple weeks on the launch. Hopefully, we will be off even less on the revenue.

- Focus wins. Open Labs has an unbelievable number of opportunities and a limited set of resources. We spent as much time deciding what we were NOT going to do, as what we were going to do and that focus paid off with quality products that were able to ship within a week of announcement. However, it was, and remains one of the biggest challenges for us.

- We worked too much during the last four months. One of my friends said that sometimes I go into stealth mode when I get involved in a project; he does not hear from me and certainly does not see me. Undoubtedly, friends and family of all of the individuals involved in the launching of the two projects would probably say the same. It is challenging for me to find that work family balance in the middle of a compelling project. Apologies to all impacted parties. Next time we will have more people and less work.

- Software Is Ready to Ship……… When? This is a real dilemma that many others have faced. It is easy to define when a feature set is complete. It is also easy to say that we are not shipping when there are meaningful bugs that crash the system. Auto updating has made it easy (maybe too easy) to say that we will fix the small bugs in our next update. There is a dynamic tension between shipping something that is great and shipping something on time (for Christmas sales). This was a topic that generated a lot of discussion at Open Labs. The final decision was to send four of the employee musicians home and see if they could have fun making and performing music for two hours. I am pretty sure that this formula will not be found in any MBA textbooks, but it worked for us.

We hope that it will work for you as well. Download our software, make and perform some music. If it is fun; buy it.

Thanks,

Cliff