Sinu

I was recently rereading a very interesting article by Paul Graham on 'What Startups are Really Like'.  Among the many great points he makes,  he summarizes how VCs disproportionally reward startup founders that present confidently over the objective measures of the value of the idea or company.    He hypothesizes that this is because they themselves had to show lots of confidence and make a strong impression that they knew exactly what they were talking about in order to raise their own money from their Limited Partners or Asset Managers.

"The reason VCs seem formidable is that it's their profession to. You get to be a VC by convincing asset managers to trust you with hundreds of millions of dollars. How do you do that? You have to seem confident, and you have to seem like you understand technology.

VCs themselves have no idea of the extent to which the startups they like are the ones that are best at selling themselves to VCs.  It's exactly the same phenomenon we saw a step earlier. VCs get money by seeming confident to LPs, and founders get money by seeming confident to VCs."

More recently I watched another TED talk (I am addicted to them) by Noreena Hertz where she questions people's sometimes complete trust of experts.   She thinks there are some real dangers to shutting off our own internal decision making mechanism and highlights the recent economic crash and other areas where experts have dramatically failed - such as amputating the wrong leg.

"But experts do get things wrong. Did you know that studies show that doctors misdiagnose four times out of 10? Did you know that if you file your tax returns yourself, you're statistically more likely to be filing them correctly than if you get a tax adviser to do it for you? And then there's, of course, the example that we're all too aware of: financial experts getting it so wrong that we're living through the worst recession since the 1930s."

This got me thinking about our role as an IT advisor to our customers.   Our customers look to us as experts in many areas of IT.  While we are too humble to say we know everything there is to know,  since we onboard a new customer almost weekly we definitely have seen our share of IT problems and found ways to make things better for all involved.

We encourage our customers to include us in an open dialogue about their IT and Business challenges and welcome the opportunity to help them with as many as we can.

But what happens when you don't understand your expert?  

"You see, being ready to take experts on is about also being willing to dig behind their graphs, their equations, their forecasts, their prophecies, and being armed with the questions to do that -- questions like: What are the assumptions that underpin this? What is the evidence upon which this is based? What has your investigation focused on? And what has it ignored?"

We think it is important to be able to talk in your own terms with your trusted partners,  especially in an acronym filled field like Information Technology.

So if you are a small business who knows they need advice with their technology needs,  don't be shy to ask your technology advisor to explain why they are making the recommendations they are.  If they keep falling back on charts, "industry standard" and acronyms - you have to wonder how deeply they understand your needs and the solutions they are recommending.

Here at Sinu we welcome trying to explain the Business goal behind our decision and how it will help improve your overall business - not just the challenge at hand.

We think as the world becomes more complex and everyone has more of the world's information at their fingertips,  they will need experts to help guide them through the wealth of available knowledge.  But most importantly they will need experts they can understand and trust because the thinking of their advisor makes sense to them in their own terms.    We think these new types of relationships between business and other companies in various areas are going to create great companies and hopefully balance our economy with the increased importance of small businesses run by people who really know their business and not so much the mega-corporations that by their size have to rely on experts - who are sometimes wrong.

CES – the largest  consumer electronics show in the world – just ended. So many gadgets. So many choices.

From the Atrix, a smartphone so powerful it can run a laptop; to 3D TVs that don’t flicker (not to be confused with Flickr); to the Bloggie – Sony’s affordable 3D camcorder; to a Polaroid camera that can print…designed by none other than Lady Gaga!

More choices…

iPhone is now on Verizon. It’s the democratization of the iPhone and people love it!

This is a strange and interesting paradox. While people love the iPhone because of its inherent simplicity and ease of use, as opposed to cell phones with many other options (remember, the iPhone did not even offer MMS until last year), when they have too few choices (having to use AT&T), they rebel!

In Barry Schwartz’s 2004 book “The Paradox of Choice,” he argues, quite convincingly,  how and why the abundance of choice in modern society is actually making us miserable, feeling more like restraints than freedom.

We see this everyday... Our customers want more options but want to expend less time and money. They want simplicity in their technology department to free their minds to work on other aspects of their businesses.           

All of us here at Sinu spend a lot of time thinking about the right balance between a plethora of technology choices and simplicity, finding ways to strike the right balance in each piece of IT. 

Whether there will be a stampede of people to Verizon stores to trade their BlackBerries for iPhones come February, or whether the next great technology comes from somewhere unforeseen, we are working hard to explore all the complex choices, recommend the best solutions, and strive to make IT decisions simpler for our customers. 

Google put together a great little book that covered 20 areas of web browsers and the internet of today.

It is well put together and I think a lot of people don't know these things but never bother to ask,  or might not be very interested.

We are increasingly moving towards a world where the web and browsers is unavoidable.  It is possible that the generation growing up has an inherent understanding of these things, but I doubt it.  After all most adults today don't really have any idea how the phone system works - and they use it constantly.

In any case, check out this great little book - you might learn a couple of things.

http://20thingsilearned.com/