Kevin P. Taylor

Video: How Business Owners Can Balance Work and Life

Here is another video segment extracted from my interview by DePaul University's Raman Chadha.

How Business Owners Can Balance Work and Life – Coleman Entrepreneurship Center – DePaul University.

To summarize the video, there are many ways to change the world and do meaningful work. Entrepreneurship is one such way. But, as an entrepreneur you also have the opportunity to create and structure a company to fuel you reaching your life goals.

I also reference the E-Myth Revisited, a book that I read soon after founding Obtiva and one that fundamentally changed my outlook on entrepreneurship and business ownership.

Video: Building a Strong Company Culture

Here is another video segment extracted from my interview by DePaul University's Raman Chadha.

Building a Strong Company Culture – Coleman Entrepreneurship Center – DePaul University.

To summarize the video, create the company that you would want to work at as an employee. Then, hire people that will self-select into that culture that you have intentionally created.

Video: The Responsibility of Being a Business Owner

Here is another video segment extracted from my interview by DePaul University's Raman Chadha.

The Responsibility of Being a Business Owner – Coleman Entrepreneurship Center – DePaul University.

To summarize the video, what keeps me up at night as a business owner is that the decisions I make have serious implications. They affect not just the company's well-being but the well-being of our employees and their families.

Also, entrepreneur must get good at failing frequently and in a recoverable manner, because failing is the first step to learning and eventual success.

Lean Machine Chicago Weekend

Friday night, 40-some hackers and startup entrepreneurs gathered for Lean Startup Machine Chicago at the Illinois Technology Association's TechNexus.

Kick off keynotes by Eric Ries, Patrick Vlaskovits, Brant Cooper and myself started the weekend event and gave the contestants a crash course in Lean Startups and Agile software development.

Then the fun started.

Contestants gave 60 second pitches to the group for their startup idea. Everyone cast votes to bubble up the top ideas. The contestants then self-organized into teams and commited to spending the next 54 hours doing customer development and prototyping. The goal? Build out a winning business model and Minimum Viable Product (MVP) by Sunday afternoon.

I'm sitting in the lobby write this on Sunday afternoon. The team presentations are only a few minutes away and I am hearing intriguing tidbits from the teams.

How many pivots can a team do in 54 hours? How many actually got out of the building to talk with potential early adopters?

Here are some pics from the event:

Video: The Fulfillment of a Business Owner

Here is another video segment extracted from my interview by DePaul University's Raman Chadha.

The Fulfillment of a Business Owner – Coleman Entrepreneurship Center – DePaul University.

To summarize the video, my proudest accomplishments as a business founder to date are the culture of Obtiva that celebrates software developers and gives them a fantastic group of peers to work with. And, the exceptional—in many cases life-changing—value that we have brought to our clients over the years.

Video: Managing a Management Team

Here is the second of several video segments from the interview Raman Chadha conducted with me at DePaul University. 

Managing a Management Team – Coleman Entrepreneurship Center – DePaul University.

In summary, at some point in a growing business, typically when entering the second stage, the founder needs to transition from being a day-to-day operator to being the leader of a management team. Leading, managing, and coaching an executive team requires a wholly different work-flow and set of skills than that of a startup entrepreneur. As the founder, if you are not interested in, or capable of, growing into this new role, it is time to bring in someone with the right skills.

Video: Cutting Costs During the Recession

Raman Chadha of DePaul University's Coleman Entrepreneur Center recently invited me down to the campus to record a video interview. They broke the interview into several short segments, which I'll post links to here on the blog, as they become available.

The first segment is about my experiences helming Obtiva through the depths of the 2009 Great Recession.

Cutting Costs During the Recession – Coleman Entrepreneurship Center – DePaul University.

In summary, anyone can look like a great business manager when times are good and profit margins are covering up sub-optimal decision-making. But, when times are tough even minor mistakes are amplified and can put your company at risk.  

Agile 2010 Presentation: Programmer Self-Education

At the Agile 2010 Conference in Florida, I'm happy to be presenting a 30 minute experience report entitled, Programmer Self-Education: My Year Studying Programming Language Fundamentals on Tuesday at 11:30.

Official Session Description

After attending Michael Feathers's talk at SCNA 2009 titled "Self-Education and the Craftsman," Kevin Taylor made a commitment to himself to read the revered, and despised, MIT textbook, "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (SICP). Over the next year, he spent hours each week working through challenging programming exercises in Lisp. In this talk, Kevin shares some of the programming fundamentals he discovered, or rediscovered. Kevin also shares his insights on the importance of self-education (knowledge + practice) for software craftsmen and their journey toward mastery.

Additional Insights

This session is about programmer self-education first and the material contained within SICP, second. Unfortunately, after considering how much SICP material I should present, it became painfully obvious that I wouldn't be able to do justice to any topics from the book within 30 minutes.

Since many of us aspire to become masters of our craft, I am using this brief session to discuss:

1. How/why I chose to spend my time with SICP, a seemingly impractical book.
2. Brief highlights of material I discovered/rediscovered in the book.
3. My general approach to self-education, which is applicable to any topic worth aspiring to master.

Frankly, this experience report could be expanded into a whole day or semester of material, so be prepared for a whirlwind, if you attend.

EDIT 1/10/2012: Here is a link to the presentation (this one given a few weeks after the agile conference):

http://vimeo.com/14611112

Command Line Scripts in Scheme

I write a fair number of command line scripts. Usually I use sh, bash, sed, awk, etc. Or, Ruby for heavy lifting. But, having spent the past nine months studying Scheme, why not try scripting in it? Now that I have, I can report that it is simple and leads to concise and elegant little scripts, with nice command line parsing and procedures to get to the system. And, the REPL, makes in convenient to experiment and hack.

Here is a basic script in Scheme. In it, I parse the command line for the passed argument and then echo it back out to the terminal. This should be enough to get you started.

#! /usr/bin/env mzscheme
#lang scheme
; parse arg out of command line
; and assign to arg
; automatically supports -h or --help flag
; supports custom flags also
(define arg
(command-line
#:args
(str) str))
; print out the arg
(printf "~a\n" arg)

Sailing from Antigua to the Azores

I'm happily back at the office, after 20 days, and 2400 miles, spent sailing from Antigua to the Azores as crew aboard one of Sail Ionian's Bavaria 46 sloops.

Departing Antigua

 After flying from Chicago to Antigua (via Charlotte and San Juan) on May 3rd, I hung out at Jolly Harbor Marina with the newly assembled crew, getting to know each other and (attempting to) help ready S/V Tranquilizer for the coming trip. We were expecting 16-17 days of travel, assuming a 5.5 knot average speed. So, we played it safe and stocked enough freshwater, food, and fuel for more than 60 days. With a crew of five men, that equated to loading on board quite a few cans and bottles.

We left Antigua on May 5th, around 12:30 P.M. on a sunny, 90 degree day. With prevailing northeast winds expected, the plan was to sail north-northeast for a week and then hope that the winds shifted to the north, or better, northwest. Then, we would be able to turn right and let the wind push us to the Azores for the final 10 days.

The plan mostly worked. After six days of beating into steep, 10-15 foot swells coming out of the north, the winds shifted favorably to the north and then to the northwest. This was fortunate timing because, by this point, the crew was battered and bruised.

Mid-Atlantic

For the next nine days we were able to make fantastic progress sailing and motor-sailing to the east and northeast. First, we needed to get through the Horse Latitudes, which are well known for stranding sailing vessels with little or no wind for days or weeks at a time. Fortunately, we had a working diesel engine, so we were able to motor-sail through the 150 by 300 mile, egg-shaped area in two days. 

We did take the opportunity, while becalmed in the Horse Latitudes, to throw some lines over the side and take a dip in 12,000 feet of water. With shampoo and soap in hand, we took a refreshing plunge, while also enjoying nice saltwater baths. I imagine there are spas somewhere selling similar natural, saltwater baths for a lot of money. Since reading about Sir Robin Knox-Johnston taking similar deep water swims while solo-circumnavigating back in the 1960's, I've dreamed of doing the same.

Landfall, the Azores

On May 20th, day 15 of the trip, we celebrated my birthday in fine fashion. The skipper cooked a special dinner of rice, tomato sauce, and canned meat. Better than that, he also used the last box of custard to whip up a nice birthday custard and canned fruit dessert. (And, he gave me extra fruit.)

Unfortunately, the birthday celebration came to a screeching halt the following day when we discovered that the engine was burning fresh cooling water. Over the next 24 hours we realized that the water was getting sucked into one of the cylinders, causing engine overheating, and eventually, rendering it unable to start at all. So, with no engine, we revised our ETA from Saturday, May 22nd to Monday, May 24th. At this point, we still had about 300 miles to go and light, shifty winds from the west.

Being on a sailboat, we knew we would eventually make it to port. And, we had plenty of food and water. The only constraint was the electrical capacity of the batteries. The engine's generator was the main source for charging the batteries, and without that we would be forced to function on the 6-8 amps that the solar panel and wind generator gave us. So, the skipper ordered all electrical devices shut down except for the navigation lights. We used the autopilot only at night and pulled out the battery powered handheld GPS unit. 

With that electrical configuration, we were able to get through the next four days and 300 miles sans engine, albeit with dozens of hours of manual helmsmanship. The cherry on top  was that the last six hours of sailing into Horta, Azores was the best sailing of the trip. We had a few hours of rain, 20-28 knot winds, dozens of dolphins, land in our sights, and plenty of channel fever to energize our sail handling. We ended the trip by refusing a tow into harbor and sailing up to the dock. We'd arrived! 

Visit my Flickr page for more images of the trip.