I'm no expert in economics, I'm not an academic, I'm not a great speller (or good at grammar), and I'm the last person that should be pointing others mistake in using popular expressions. But still, if I can teach you something useful, why not?
The biggest mistake that people make when referring to the 80/20 rule is that they think it sums up to be 100% and that is incorrect. What if I tell you about a 90/20 rule, would you think I'm incorrect? Mostly people would, but it is not.
Basically, the official 80/20 rule comes from a guy that did a study (a while ago) and realized that 80% of resources X were being consumed by 20% of the "consumers", so the opposite also is easy to understand: 20% of the resources were being used by 80% of the "consumers".
In other words, you are talking about 80% of A by 20% of B, where A and B are distinct entities.
Last Thursday I went to the Amazon Start-up Project, and Matt McIlwain, a Venture Capitalist from Madrona was talking that 99% of companies don't need (or should not) use VC money. He is correct. Most service companies (lawyers, consultants, cleaners, restaurants) and most mom-and-pop shop cannot return the multiples that VCs expect, and they are the majority of the US companies.
The mistake that McIlwain made was referring to it as the "99/1 rule" when he meant to say the "100/1" rule.
See, there are only two ways to interpret 99/1 and neither work:
99% of the companies consume 1% of the VC money;
99% of VC money is consumed by 1% of the companies;
What he should have said is that 100% of VC money is consumed by 1% of the companies, hence the "100/1 rule".
Sampa moved to position #26 (from 29) by gaining 5,398 positions on Alexa Traffic Ranking.
There are also 30 new companies on the list this month (!), including Groundspeak, Remote Control Mail (formerly known as Document Command), LexBlog, Down2night, Popshops, Instacalc, Mercent, Bus Monster and more.
Today the Sampa team went to a meeting with another startup in the Seattle area. The meeting went from 1:30 pm until 5:00 pm. Not bad for a first meeting.
I won't tell which company is so we don't spoil the surprise if something comes out of that.
Basically, they don't do what we do, but their users would like to have what Sampa offers. On the other hand Sampa does a little bit of what they do, not all, and what we do isn't great. It is actually one of our weakest points, yet, our users need it.
Why don't we do that by ourselves? Why we don't fix this problem if it is so important to our users? The short answer is because it is hard. It is hard to implement, manage and do it right.
There is a lot of business, marketing and technical discussion that should follow, but we are startups, so in a month or so you should either see some integration between the two companies or the deal didn't go through. Keep watching reading.
During one of our many pitches to investors we heard the phrase: "Microsoft has no startup DNA". The basic interpretation is that if you are an entrepreneur coming out of Microsoft you'll have a hard time convincing investors that you can think and execute in a startup environment.
Recently, I've met with another ex-Microsoft senior exec, that told me he was surprised at how much of a liability having spent so much time at Microsoft has become.
What do I have to say about this?
Yes, it is true. Microsoft has no startup DNA. Not only the company as a whole is uncapable of fostering a startup mentality, but also 99% of the people working at Microsoft have no startup DNA. They would not be able to be entrepreneurs and to create a business from scratch.
Now, there are 1% of those (which is a lot on a 70,000-employee company) that do have it. Most of them are still fighting the system from the inside. Stressing themselves out at why they can't get anything done. But a small amount of them don't put up with that and quit and create their own companies, or join very early stage startups.
So, dear investor, don't tell me I have no startup DNA. Odds are that I have more than you do, because most investors on this region got their fortune from Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon or Real Networks, and they really never founded any company.
Today I reached a whole new level on Technorati's Blog Rank: 93,749. This is the first time I'm below the 100,000 mark. With about 71 million blogs being ranked by Technorati, that puts me on the top 0.13%. In other words, before I was a "C" blogger, now I'm a proud "C+" blogger.
I guess the next milestone is the 50,000 mark, which would put me into the "B-" blogger category.
I might be a year late on this one, but I just saw An Inconvenient Truth and I thought it was a pretty good documentary. I think the data presented is compelling and the way Al Gore explain concepts in layman terms is pretty good.
There is a no brainer way to know when somebody is about to take a big career move and leave their current employer: The number of connections that they added recently to LinkedIn.
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, a Venture Capitalist from 
October, 2007