Values

An unusual, but beautiful, method of forming your company's values

I've got the Conscious Capitalism Summit on my mind as I write this.  Specifically, the main Summit (in Dallas this year), which my daughter, Rachel, and I are leaving for tonight.  Rachel is one of the keynotes and I couldn't be more proud of her.  She will be speaking about the process of writing her first book, Guardians of the Forest, which has been her dream since she was eight-years old and just happened this past January, after a year of work and years of saving up to pay for it (she paid 100% of her savings to the illustrator, Ryan Durney).  My good friend, John Mackey, will be introducing her on stage.  He has been a mentor to me for years and most recently her, for her book.  There are many good lessons for living a fulfilled life in her book and she is certainly an emerging conscious capitalist.  You can see all of the speakers here, and in the spirit of the post I wrote at the beginning of this year on continuous learning, I highly recommend you attend this Summit in the future (or the CEO Summit if you qualify).

But I've got the Conscious Capitalism Summit on my mind for another reason, and it is because of what it has taught me as an entrepreneur.  Last year, at the CEO Summit version of their events, I heard a CEO say on stage, "If you want to learn something amazing, just ask each of your employees to share with you the core values that they bring to work each and every day."  This immediately resonated with me as I had been thinking about how beautiful our culture was becoming at data.world but yet we hadn't written our core values down yet.  This isn't that unusual, BTW.  We didn't write down our core values at my previous startups, Coremetrics and Bazaarvoice, until we were around this age.  You want to get some operating history and some significant team build-out going before you do this exercise or it is just aspirational with no real resonance for how you've actually been living your day-to-day business life as a collective.

What I learned from my top three Lucky7 posts in 2013 … and my biggest busts

December 5th marked my first year of blogging personally (I had previously been a corporate blogger for 7 years at Bazaarvoice). I began blogging primarily as a service to entrepreneurs - a form of giving back to the community that I believe is the greatest force for change. I named my blog Lucky7 as a tribute to my amazing mother, who passed away last year. My first Lucky7 post on December 5, 2012 was a revisit of my manifesto to Bootstrap Austin on March 15, 2005. Looking back, it was clear I deeply cared about the development of our entrepreneurial community in Austin. That caring - and passion - drove a year of many highs in 2013. I've been actively investing in startups since December of last year with my wife, Debra, and I formally chose this as a career a few months ago, forming Hurt Family Investments. We've made 14 startup investments so far, 9 of them Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies. I've also joined the Advisory Board of 6 additional companies, all of them SaaS. Out of the 20 startups we are involved in, 16 are headquartered in Austin.

A rant on derogatory language in business

As I continue to help more startups in Austin, I want to go on a bit of a rant. In my opinion, there is simply too much derogatory language in business - and there is no place for it. Most leadership training comes from the roots of the military, where people can die if they don't follow orders. As I always told our incredible people at Bazaarvoice, especially during the very difficult Great Recession years, we are working under an air-conditioned roof, receiving free snacks, and seeing our families at night much of the time. If we take too many of our leadership cues from the military, we don't honor the unique culture of modern-day business.