Many entrepreneurs forget that their success is more about helping other people than about personally becoming famous, or overcoming the odds and getting rich. A successful business has to satisfy customers with a strong team, by helping them solve problems, save money, or experience more pleasure. That means more focus on helping others achieve their goals.

How and why this is true was brought home to me a while back in the book, “,” by Bob Burg and John David Mann. This is a fictional story about how an aggressive young M&A executive comes to realize that his aggressive style is actually making it harder to reach his goals.

He concludes that there are five leadership elements that include him, but are not always about him, that lead to success. These are lessons that every entrepreneur should take to heart:

1. Hold the vision. Many entrepreneurs are able to come up with a vision, but far fewer are able to hold on to it through thick and thin, and communicate it effectively and continuously to their team and their customers. Keep your eyes on where the company is going, especially when nobody else does. Watch your use of personal pronouns.

2. Build your people. Give people on your team the means, authority, and the motivation to do the job, you will be surprised at the value delivered. Make sure that the essence of your influence is pull, not push. See people for who they are, realize what they can be, and help to take them there.

3. Walk the talk and do the work. Most startups begin their life as “one-person shows” that over time evolve to teams of people, interacting with customers and vendors. By virtue of the growing workload and stress, too many entrepreneurs isolate themselves from the hands-on as the team builds. Don’t forget to be a mentor as well as a leader.

4. Stand for something. What you have to give, you offer least of all through what you say, and in greatest part through who you are. Competence and character are most important, and visible to everyone. I believe in the old saying: “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”

5. Share the mantle of leadership. The best way to increase your influence is to give it away. Don’t get stuck thinking that you are the deal. Let others lead in their own area of expertise, and your power will be expanded many-fold.

As early-stage entrepreneurs, it’s natural for you to focus on you – what you’re doing, what you want, and what you need. As the business evolves, you must expand your focus beyond yourself to motivating the team and delivering value to customers. At that stage, you are still important, but it’s not about you anymore.

One mistake many entrepreneurs make, especially with online businesses, is a fundamental misunderstanding of how interesting they need to appear to others. Yes, you are a fascinating person. You know how to bootstrap a business, build it from nothing, and burn sweat-equity for long hours to push your dreams to reality. Your business brand needs to quickly supersede you.

Online businesses have removed the convenience of geographic connections. Today, remote relationships are far more important. The best way to turn someone into your devoted fan is to go out of your way to make them feel important. Put yourself first by putting others first as well. It really isn’t about how great you are but how you make others great.

What have you done for your team and your customers lately? How did you make your product manager shine in the last meeting? Being an entrepreneurial success is not about grabbing information and power, it’s about helping others succeed.

Marty Zwilling

Startup Professionals Musings

Samsung’s next flagship phone, the Galaxy S5, will have a radically different home screen than before, according to a leaked image from . almost always gets gadget leaks correct, so there’s good reason to believe the following image is real.

It appears Samsung’s home screen will now be a tile-based menu that displays items you’ll likely care about: sports scores, flight information, incoming messages, etc. It’s sort of a hybrid between the auto-updating Live Tiles on Microsoft’s Windows Phones and the BlinkFeed home screen on HTC’s phones that pulls in updates from news feeds and social networks.

Samsung is expected to launch the Galaxy S5 by April along with a new Galaxy Gear smart watch.

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Radius is one of the more interesting big data startups.  Using web-crawling technology similar to Google's, they've amassed data on over 27 million U.S. small businesses.  They sell this data to companies looking for help with prospecting, lead generation and target marketing.

They just released a presentation on .  76 slides long, it covers a wide range of small business trends from a variety of sources, including us.  

All of the trend sections – technology, marketing, finance and business management, going local – are interesting.  But I really liked the Going Local section.  A trend quote from Two Minute Mobile in particular caught my eye:

"Consumers have grown fatigued by the shopping experience at big box retailers. Impersonal service, long lines and big data breaches are all working to drive business to smaller, main street retailers …"

I agree and so do a growing number of consumers.

They have an article summarizing the trends on their blog.   For anyone interested in small businesses and/or small business trends the article and trend presentation are well worth looking at.  

Index Ventures has led a $ 870,000 seed round into Resource Guru, a London-based startup that wants to disrupt companies’ use of spreadsheets to manage staff, equipment and other resources — and replace them with its cloud-based team scheduling software.

“Most managers still rely on complicated spreadsheets or cumbersome software to manage their teams and resources, neither of which makes allocating resources particularly easy and efficient,” said Robin Klein, partner at Index Ventures, in a statement. “We’ve been impressed how Resource Guru tackled this problem with its simple to use online tool that leads to huge time savings and increased productivity.”

Prior to this round Resource Guru, which was founded back in May 2011, had raised money from friends, family and angel investors. Other investors in the seed round included both existing and new names but these have not been disclosed. Its total funding to date stands at $ 1.14 million.

Resource Guru said it will use the new funding to “accelerate hiring, product development and customer acquisition”. The startup launched its scheduling app in May 2012 but is not currently breaking out customer numbers (although it name-drops Saatchi & Saatchi, Vodafone, Intel, Roche, ASOS and National Geographic Channel as among the unknown number).

It also says users of its platform have created more than 296,000 bookings on over 31,000 projects, so make of that what you will.

One thing to note is it’s not gone down the freemium route, but rather charges a subscription fee for all users of its software. This starts at $ 19 per month for a “mini” offering (for up to 10 people), rising to $ 99+ for a “premium plus” offering that covers 80+ users.

When you’re trying to convince companies to ditch spreadsheets and switch to a dedicated scheduling tool, your biggest differentiator is undoubtedly the relative slickness of the user experience. So that’s where Resource Guru says it has focused its energies.

“When we designed Resource Guru, there was no reference point — apart from the spreadsheets people were using. We started from scratch and re-thought the whole process,” says co-founder Andrew Rogoff.

The software includes a booking section for visualising how resources are being used at given points, a “clash management engine” to prevent over-booking, and a waiting list feature so in-demand resources don’t get hogged by the same early bird from accounts. The availability of people and resources can be filtered — based on factors such as skill-set — so users can locate the right person for a given job within the required time-frame.

The software also generates “utilization rates” — so you can identify under- and over-used resources (or staffers), as well as tracking how much time is being spent on which projects/clients, and who’s been working on what. In other words: keep tabs on your staff.

It’s a feature-set that overlaps somewhat with time-management software offerings — such as Harvest – although Rogoff rejects the comparison, saying Harvest is focused on “timesheets and the past” whereas Resource Guru targets “forecasting for the future”, adding that that “has been a severely under-served area until now”.

In terms of direct competitors, aside from spreadsheets, he names the likes of  Synergist and Deltek‘s Resource Planning offering as having “scheduling as part of their overall solution”. But again he rejects any direct comparison.

“We don’t really consider them to be direct competitors because they are expensive, clunky and bloated with unnecessary features,” he adds.

A few days ago, Google unveiled its latest moon shot: a contact lens with a built-in glucose sensor. As far as Google[x] projects go, the lens is right up there with flying wind turbines and (though maybe not quite on the same level as self-driving cars). There is an interesting twist to this whole story, though: the researchers who are working on this project at Google previously collaborated with Microsoft Research.

In 2011,  and Brian Otis were still at the University of Washington and published a case study (PDF) with Microsoft Research on how they built a prototype lens that can monitor blood glucose levels. In the paper, Microsoft describes the collaboration as being ‘close’ and going back several years.

“At the time I met Babak, he was starting to work on the functional contact lens, putting displays, or LEDs, into the contact itself, to create displays that sat on the surface of the eye,” Desney Tan, who was then a senior researchers at Microsoft Research, wrote at the time. “He was having a slightly hard time selling the idea, both in terms of feasibility, but also in terms of vision. What we added to the equation was basically a set of needs in all computing environments or in our projections of future computing environments that gelled very well with a particular technology.”

Tan, it turns out, is still at Microsoft Research, and in a somewhat unusual move, he took to Microsoft’s official blog the day after Google’s announcement to talk about Microsoft’s role in all of this. Clearly, Microsoft wasn’t going to let Google get all the praise for a project that was incubated with its support.

Like a good researcher, Tan is quite restrained in his words. He profusely praises the work of Parviz and Otis, but he also notes that Parviz, Otis and the team at Microsoft Research “tackled numerous hard problems around miniaturization, wireless power, wireless communications and biocompatibility.” The really hard questions around this project, he seems to imply, were answered with the help of Microsoft and not at Google[x].

Between the lines, he also sets up the difference between Microsoft’s and Google’s approaches to research in the context of what Google is doing with [x]: ”Our open research and deeply collaborative model allows us to work with the best academic and industrial researchers around the world,” Tan writes, “and we will continue to do so as we certainly believe in the philosophy that ‘we’ is smarter than ‘me.’” While Google[x] works in private and doesn’t openly cooperate with others, Tan seems to imply, Microsoft Research helps to push basic research forward by working with researchers around the world.

He goes on to list some of the projects Microsoft is involved in (HIV vaccines, brain tumor diagnostics, tuberculosis treatments etc.), but the overall message here seems clear: Microsoft does a lot of basic research and doesn’t often get the credit it deserves.

While most of the projects at Google[x] happen in private, though, it’s also worth noting that Google does quite a bit of work . Most of this is focused on its own core competencies and focuses on search-related technologies like natural language processing, machine learning and data mining, as well as basic computer science research.

Google’s Moon Shot approach may yield some breakthrough products in the long run and the smart lens project could improve the lives of millions of people. There is something to be said for participating in the larger research community, though, and Microsoft definitely does this more effectively than Google[x]. At the end of the day, though, Parviz and Otis decided that the best place for their research was at Google. If nothing else, that speaks to Google’s ability to convince researchers that they can have more impact at [x] than at their research universities and more easily bring their ideas from the lab to the real world (and Google[x] probably pays pretty well, too…).