James Siminoff

My 10 rules of travel

For the last 10 years I have traveled over 100,000 miles per year, click here to see where I have been.  Based on trial and error I have come up with a set of 10 rules (in no particular order) to keep up this schedule with killing myself or ruining my family life in the process:

1.  Food- Do not eat on the plane.  Even if the flight is 15 hours, I do not eat.  You digestive system does not work as well in the air.  Also your taste buds get dull at altitude so airplane food is packed with salt and spices to compensate.  The combination makes you feel crappy so just wait till you land.

2.  Beverages- Having a few drinks of booze is a ritual for many when they get on the plane.  However between the altitude and the dry air, alcohol is just a bad idea.  Dehydration is one of your worst enemies on the plane, drink a ton of water.

3. Exercise- Overall being in shape is a good thing for flying.  Travel is pretty brutal on the body so the better condition you are in the better off you will be.  If I am going on a long flight (over 6 hours) I try to work out before and after my flight.  Working out when you land really gets your mind ready for the day.

4.  Time Zones- I have found that concentrating on time is a bad thing when you travel.  I try to live by the sun when I am abroad.  This seems to be the best way to have my body adjust quickly.  The down side of this is that you have to plan your meetings around daylight hours, so early dinners.  This does not mean that I do not sometimes stay out late with clients, etc., but I pay the price when I do.

5.  Airline- Pick one and fly it always.  The difference in price of tickets over the coarse of a year by sticking with one carrier will probably be $500-$2,000.  It is worth the extra money if you are going to travel a lot.  With miles comes status which allows you to do things like go in a special security line, better customer service levels, board early and get free upgrades.  If you have not already chosen your airline then I highly suggest American Airlines.  Out of all of the airlines I truly believe that they are the best company and team of employees by far.

6. Attitude- This is probably the biggest factor in having a good trip.  I take the redeye at least twice a month.  When I am getting on it I always hear people saying “oh this is going to be rough”, “I never sleep on these things”, etc.  Overall people seem to pre-hate their trips, creating a self fulfilling prophecy.  While no one is perfect, overall I stay very positive regardless of the brutality of the trip.  Never underestimate the power of the brain.

7. Platinum Amex- I am sure that there are other credit cards that offer great travel benefits but the platinum amex is what I carry.  For a few hundred $ per year you get a ton of travel benefits like, lost luggage insurance, business lounge access, lost/damage product insurance, hotel room upgrades, car rental insurance (used this when I totaled a Lincoln), great emergency travel concierge. 

8. Caffeine- This is to be used only as a last resort.  When you are tired from travel a cup of coffee will only keep you up for another 1-2 hours.  After that you will crash harder then you would have otherwise.  Depending on your caffeine tolerance you might be able to do a few cups of coffee or similar caffeine rich drink to extend this but I have found that at some point, 6-8 hours max, it does not matter how much caffeine you put in your body, you just crash and sleep is the only thing to recover from that.

9. Get it done- It seems that the further people travel the longer they make the trip, regardless of the business requirements.  Most of that time is for recovery of the travel.  Even before I had the family I did day trips to place like India, where I would arrive in the morning, have a full day of meetings and leave that night.  At first this sounds like more of a preference then a tip, however your body clock adjusts to a new timezone so the faster you are in and out the less jet lag you will actually have.

10.  RedEyes- I am a huge fan of overnight flights.  First and foremost you do not waste any part of your day traveling.  Also the cheap bastard in me enjoys the fact that I do not have to pay for a hotel, it is a 2 for 1, the flight is your accommodation.  Typically redeye’s go to major airports which is great because you can then use the showers at the airline club to get ready for that day.  Sometimes the club will not have showers, in that case you can do a decent wash job at the sink, yes I am not above that:)

Updated (thanks everyone for the feedback and comments)-

11.  Dress Code- Michael Galpert had a good point on wearing comfortable clothes on flights.  Sweat pants and t-shirts are great for flights, anything loose fitting.  Also take your shoes off while you are in the air.  Your body swells when you fly so anything that you have on that is tight will constrict blood flow.  As he pointed out you can always bring clothes with you and change quickly in the bathroom, very good advice.

12. Work/Keeping busy- Paul Stamatiou made a great comment about planning to have something to do on the plane.  For the take off and landing I always have a magazine or the newspaper.  As soon as we are at electronics altitude I fire up my laptop.  I subscribe to a lot of TV shows on iTunes so I will start playing one in the top corner of the screen.  I will then open up my email, I find that while I am flying I am able to really clean up my email.  I like watching the shows while I work as it makes it a little less monotonous. Make sure that you have all of the proper power accessories and try and get a seat with a outlet.  Working on the flight makes it go bye a lot quicker and it is nice to land feeling productive.

If anyone has any more suggestions would love to hear them and add them to the list.

(Also check out Albert’s list)

Can profitability suck?

Startup entrepreneur Ben Horowitz recently wrote a post The Case for the Fat Startup. He summarizes the article with:

As you listen to the virtues of the lean start-up–lightweight sales, light engineering, and so on–keep the following in mind:

• If you are a high-tech start-up, your value is in your intellectual property. Don’t stare at your spreadsheets so long that you get confused about that.
• You cannot save your way to winning the market.
• The best companies can raise money even in this market. If you are one of those, you should consider raising enough to wipe out your competition.

The whole post has some interesting points but one of them I highly disagree with :

“Start-up purgatory occurs when you don’t go bankrupt, but you fail to build the No. 1 product in the space. You have enough money with your conservative burn rate to last for many years. You may even be cash-flow positive. However, you have zero chance of becoming a high-growth company. You have zero chance of being anything but a very small technology business”

If you are able to build a startup to cash-flow positive or you have runway but have been unable to really crack you market you are not stuck, in fact you are in a great position.  As a entrepreneur you will look at all of the infrastructure, talents, technologies, etc., that you have in your company and leverage those into a adjacent sector or maybe something entirely new.

Additionally if your startup has taken money from investors then you do not have the right to give up if you do not make it in your first shot at a market.  Your duty is to keep trying, iterating and changing things until you are beyond dead (and even then you should probably still try to make it work).  

While there are many successful companies that took a ton of money and spent it hard and fast to achieve market dominance, there are just as many stories of great succes of the lean and scrappy start-up that continues to iterate and modify its plans.

inspiration via, Chris, Bijan, Albert and Mark 

Tumblr + Bug Labs + Twilio = Ideal Phone System

Fred Wilson wrote a post a few days ago , “My Ideal Phone System” about his desire for a hosted VOIP system for his new apartment.  As a person who has been in and around VOIP and telephony my entire business life it shook me a bit.

What rattled me is that Fred was looking for something that just does not exist today.  He wants the simplicity of Skype with the functionality of a more traditional phone system.  The list of people who think they supply this is very long but really understanding what Fred wants, there is just no one out there doing that.

So I started thinking about what this would look like as a company and a product.  There are three key components to building his ideal phone system, and amazingly his firm USV has invested in what I would consider to be a stand out in each category:

Design and UI- Today’s hosted vendors have a lot of functionality and features but they do not deliver the experience Fred wants. Tumblr would be the perfect team to do this.  They came into a established market, blogging and kicked its ass by having incredible UI and design.  Marco and David (and the rest of the Tumblr team) are really geniuses here, put their talents into this very established and competitive market, VOIP/Phone Systems, and let them do their magic.

Equipment- Overall the VOIP devices are just old phones with new guts in them.  There are a few really cool ones coming out with video like the Tandberg E20 but there is still a long way to go.  Bug Labs has created some way out of the box developer sandbox hardware.  Channel that same energy into building devices from scratch that leverage a better UI then stand back and enjoy the ride.

Telecom/Infrastructure- There are a lot of people that are designing and building some really cool cloud based telephony.  One of those companies is Twilio which continues to roll out the pieces via a simple API to power the back end of such a system.  A few other candidates here would be Voxeo/Tropo, Cloudvox or more traditional providers like bandwidth.com and Level3.

I believe strongly that VOIP and telecom are about to enter a next wave of explosive growth and innovation as was seen in the 90’s with deregulation.  It is not going to be one company doing it all or even one technology it will be the wave of cloud based providers like Twilio increasing the attention of the developers who build the cool things like Tumblr to focus on voice.  When that happens the hardware should follow to take advantage of what is changing in the cloud.  Put all three together and you have the ingridients for incredible change.

As for the people that say the “phone system” is dead, I strongly disagree.  If you feel that way, get a HD video enabled desk phone like the Tandberg and start playing with it.  I think you will very quickly see why a separate device makes sense to have in the office or at home regardless of how fast and cool our computers and cell phones get.

Is Push still relevant?

My first blackberry was a cosmic shift in my mobile experience.  Going from wireless email that polled vs. one that pushed was life changing.  The difference is that polling is set for a increment, say 15 minutes, while push sends email in real time as it is received.

When I switched to the iPhone I set it up for push email using the Microsoft Exchange back end.  The problem was that setting up the iPhone for push killed the battery.

So while looking for a new solution I started using the Gmail mobile website to access my mail.  I have now been accessing my mail on the mobile that way for over 6 months and I love it.

A few things have changed that have made both push and polling unnecessary.  It used to be nice to know when a email came in so that you could deal with it.  Now I get enough email, or too much, that it is more when I can look at it not if I have any.

The other big change is the interruption of constant email.  When I am in a meeting or doing something I do not want to be buzzed by a email every minute.  It is distracting.  By controlling when I look at email I am able to be more attentive when I need to be. 

While email is a really efficient way of communicating it is just no longer time sensitive for me.  

Karma

I recently had someone contact me for advice based on a post I did on buying domain names on Tim Ferriss‘ Four Hour Work Week blog.

Their question involved a .com domain name that they had purchased a few years ago.  It turns out that before they got the domain someone had filed for a trademark for the same name and has since been issued the mark,  they have the .net.

The person with the mark offered to buy out the .com person for a decent number.  The name is very long and in my opinion worth much less then the amount offered.  So my advice was to just take it and live happily ever after.

Well the owner of the name wanted more, feeling that because the .com was a better extension for the business that they deserved more.  Oh and by the way both people do the same exact thing which means that the .com person is stomping all over the trademark.

I first tried to give some broad advice around trademarks, if someone has the mark and you are doing the same business you are basically cooked unless there are millions at stake and then it might be worth a fight.  But that advice did not seem to matter and they kept asking me how do they get more.

So I told them how I make many of my decisions in situations where you could go both ways, Karma.  If you feel that the decision is good Karma then things always seem to work out correctly, when you go against Karma, at least for me, you always get screwed.

I get asked for advice based on my experiences frequently.  Since I myself do not have all of the answers I try and steer people to the right answer by giving them examples of similar things that have happened to me.  Usually I find working with people for things like this to be very fulfilling.

This was probably the first time that I have felt my time was really wasted.  Today I received an email that the .com person was going to ask for more money, very bad karma.  My bet is that now instead of getting a few dollars, they are going to lose their domain by force and have nothing.  And if that happens Karma will win again.

iSearch

I was thinking today about the competition going on between Apple/Google/Microsoft.  The fight is taking place on the mobile phone, PC, cloud and elsewhere.

With Apple’s incredible market share of devices that people access the internet from I think it is only a matter of time before Apple launches their own search.  While search is a difficult problem to solve I do believe that with where technology has come since Google built its first algorithms it would not be out of the question for Apple with over $30 billion cash in the bank to make a big bet in search.

Regardless of if they do search or not the fight between these 3 titans is going to be interesting to watch over the next few years.

Entrepreneurs to the rescue

One of my favorite blogs, AZSpot, had a post about how Arizona has voted to lease state parks to private businesses.  Government budgets are under extreme pressures and as a result a lot of public parks are being closed down to save money.

The picture above is of a long abandoned motel just outside of Los Angeles across the street from the ocean.  The site is incredible but on national park property.  People have tried to re-open it over the years but without any success, because it is just too hard to get the parks department to agree to anything.

Done properly allowing the private sector to take things like the above Motel and build something great, revenue producing and respectful of the park property is a win for everyone.

Must be Morse Code

I am really bad at looking at the details on bills but for some reason I looked through the details of the bill for my Verizon Mifi.  What struck me as odd on the bill was that I had received 3 text messages on the devices and was charged $0.60 for it.

When I called customer support, the very nice (really she was nice) agent explained to me that if I wanted she could turn off text messaging.  I asked her how a device that has only one button and no screen could possibly be used for text messaging and without skipping a beat she told me that the device is enabled for text but would not answer how you could see them or how you could possibly send them.  I asked her if I had to tap the button to send a text like morse code, but I do not think she got the joke.

If you have a Mifi I suggest you call in and have them block text messaging as I did today.

Also I talked to a carrier exec who swears that they are not doing this for the extra revenue, the problem is in provisioning things like this they end up not doing the work for custom provisioning which causes issues like this.