Dean Michael Berris

It's out! I'm writing to debut a web service in "alpha" we've just put live named boughtstuff.com -- social spending in style!

Posted via email from Dean Berris' Brain Dump

Last night while having a great Japanese dinner with a few of my co-founders of the company we talked a little about maturity and having balls to take on roles that we have not been in. Basically I mentioned that I thought I wasn't mature enough yet to take on management roles and that I wasn't comfortable leaving my niche (high performance computing) yet. I thought about listing a few of my criteria to determine whether I (or someone else) is mature enough or just has the balls (there's a difference) to take on responsibility:

• Composure -- you need to be able to function whether you're in a high pressure situation or whether you're on the daily grind. Some people call it poise and you can only have this if you're comfortable in what you're doing and have internalized what your role is. If you can really say your personal mission is to be the best 'insert-your-role-here' and that you have the balls to take that on your shoulders and still deliver only then can you start having composure.
• Humility and Modesty -- if you're not willing to take on criticism from other people or at least take constructive criticism, you lack maturity. As character traits these are essential not only for being a good person but also if you intend to be an executive or a leader. Being in a position of authority usually corrupts your vision -- staying humble and modest are the tools you use to prevent that corruption from happening.
• Initiative -- some people (and I am one of them) see great opportunity to contribute but taking responsibility is one of the things that scare them (including me). It's not the fear of failure that's scaring me, but that thought of maybe others might want to take on that role too. So instead of taking it on with initiative, I pass it off to others who might want to be in that position too. That's pretty much the pattern for me since I was a child growing in the shadow of other leaders. Without that initiative to take on the responsibility of being in a certain role and a recognition of your own strengths and weaknesses, you are not mature yet.
• Vision -- I think I have this, but I think it's not enough. Vision is the capacity to see clearly what the destination is and be able to decide with conviction and without compromise what the steps to take are. Vision also requires that you be able to recognize that you're not on the right track and given that you have composure, humility, and initiative be able to say that things should change. What I lack is that decisiveness -- I still have some tunnel vision when it comes to things that I want to accomplish; being able to objectively say "wrong way" is something I still have to develop. Without this, you are not mature.

Posted via email from Dean Berris' Brain Dump

One of the hardest things to do arguably when running a business like
a software development/consulting company is finding more work to do.
Although we are working on products that we ourselves would want to
release real soon, you hear the proverbial "we've got to pay the
bills" reason. For the remainder of the week the team will be ramping
up our lead generation activities. Exciting times ahead!

Posted via email from Dean Berris' Brain Dump

So today is the last day of my mini vacation where I spent the whole week trying to not do any work. I'd say I'm now refreshed somewhat and in a better frame of mind. There's much to be done in my startup projects -- there's the matter of launching them, after being delayed for one week to add in additional polish to both products. One of them is ready and hopefully going to be launched within the next few days, while the other one will just need a host to be put on.

One of the interesting things I've learned while on vacation is that ever since I switched my brain into entrepreneur mode, I keep finding lots of opportunities around waiting for a business to get started. Even while in the province, just talking with my wife (who's also as enterprising as I am, if not more enterprising) about the possible business opportunities ranging from things like food, retail, and things like investing in small scale businesses to get it to a scale where it would be profitable even lucrative. My wife and I both come from families where business is the mode of thinking and it's good that we have things like the business mindset as a common thing. The only issue we have right now is that we're just two people with limited time and resources.

This brings me to one of the points I want to make in this post: where are the investors in the Philippines? I know there are a lot of entrepreneurs: the fishball vendor, the carinderia owner, the tricycle operator, and the fish vendor. However, where are the people who have the means and capital to enable the growth of these small businesses?

I've been mulling around with the thought of doing angel investing for small enterprises at some point in time, and this is one of the reasons why I wanted to start a company with people that I share a common interest with. I'm just not ready yet to give out the name of our company because for web people, we don't have a decent website up yet. I know, that's a little embarrassing but that's beside the point. There will be a time and circumstance when we do launch our website, especially after we have our products out in the wild and gaining traction.

About angel investing, I really want to be able to give people who have great business ideas and are already executing some money in exchange for a small stake in their company. Not all companies will want to take outside investment (I know ours wouldn't for a lot of reasons) but here's a list of things I think should be the "terms" of my investments if ever I get to a point where I can do this sort of thing:

1. I will take only a maximum of 10% of your company, and at most a seat in the board. The board set is not necessary -- but if it is a web/software company, I'd like to be in on the business side of things.
2. I will invest only in companies I would start myself but couldn't otherwise -- this means it would be in the science and technology (not necessarily IT) field.
3. Companies I will invest in will only be ones that have an immediate revenue stream. The revenue trajectory should be positive, meaning the investment I will make would most definitely just be for ensuring growth and for jump-starting further development.
4. I will only sell shares when the founders sell shares or when the founders buy out my shares. In the case of the company getting acquired or if they intend to raise funding from venture capitalists, I'll have the option to share my shares to other co-investors at the valuation that the new investors are coming in at.

Posted via email from Dean Berris' Brain Dump