Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you've seen the emergence of Location Technology. It's all around us, from our cellular phones, portable GPS, car based GPS, Apps, Games, and so on. What you may not realize is, Location Technology has been around for a long time.  

Here's a fun look at the History of Location Technology

I love to read books but no matter how much I read, I'm always amazed at how much our ancestor's were able to accomplish.  

Smoke Signals

Back... back in time, everyone from the American Indians to the Ancient Chinese used Smoke Signals to locate home and communicate signals to remote groups or individuals.

Celestial Navigation

I'm not a mathematician but I'm confident that many reading this can run circles around me when it comes to math. For centuries our ancestors used the stars and mathematics to determine coordinates based on the position or location of the stars and sun. I know I would've been lost for sure! In the mid 18th Century, clockmaker John Harrison invented a chronometer which allowed sailors to determine longitude by accurately tracking the time change between home and their current location

Homing Pigeons 

Certain types of Rock Pigeons were bred to be able to find their homes from extremely long distances. These were used for courier services and navigation for thousands of years.

Magnetic Compass

By using a magnet to point to the earths poles, this invention allowed navigators to finally determine their heading, in addition to latitude and eventually longitude.

Radio Triangulation

By measuring the strengths of radio signals, ships, aircraft, and military ground troops began to be able to estimate their coordinates from very long distances.  

Satellite GPS

There's a group of around 30 satellites that orbits the earth and is used to triangulate the position of the receiver. Nearby satellites send timestamped messages, and the receiver calculates the distance of each satellite based on the speed of the incoming messages compared to the time they were sent. The size of these receivers have shrank considerably since the 1960's when this technology was first deployed.

Automotive GPS Navigation

While many GPS receivers were used for military purposes since the 1960's, the automotive GPS nave unit became the first dedicated GPS device to gain traction among consumers. Initially mapless and slow, these devices now include very detailed maps with turn-by-turn directions and connectivity to additional services like real time traffic.

GPS Enabled SmartPhones 

Every smartphone on the market, be it the Blackberry, Android, iPhone, Windows, etc. have changed the apps industry by allowing third party software applications to take advantage of user location.

Today we have the ever evolving world of Location Based Applications, Gaming, and Social Networks. These apps are everywhere and most developers now have some location functionality to their product. The past 2-3 years, consumers have shifted from candy bar, texting focused phones, to full featured smartphones. These phones have taken over and are in the hands of millions of consumers. We've only touched the tip of the iceberg. The next decade will be an exciting time in technology and mobile electronics.

Alex McGee-Gentile, Headhunter extraordinaire, and her husband Tony recently welcomed their first child. Congratulations on your new son!

Many wishes for a life time of happiness and a good night sleep,

The Perito Eleven Team

Spring is here and summer is around the corner! Spring is usually the time when we go through our homes and our closets and get rid of the old to make room for new gadgets. Or if you're like me, spring is just a good time to clean. Some of us have pets, kids, and we aren't exactly clean freaks. 

OK, so this blog isn't about your general cleanliness, rather, it's a reminder to not only clean your home but to also clean your computers!!! We rely so much on our trusty PC's and Mac's that many of us take them for granted until it's too late. You know, when you start noticing the fan on a lot louder and more often than ever before. Maybe your laptop seems to be running hotter than usual. Well, our trusted computers need to be cleaned too. There are many ways to do this but this video is a good start. Alright, next time your computer is acting up, ask yourself, is it full of dust gremlins?? 

Check it out!  Spring cleaning for your PC!

This subject was a recent headline on the WSJ.  We are just sharing this headline and do not take a particular opinion on the matter.  

According to a recent report, the Justice Department is stepping up its investigation into hiring practices at some of America's biggest companies, including Google Inc., Intel Corp., International Business Machines Corp., Apple Inc. and IAC/InterActiveCorp.

The inquiry is focused on whether companies, particularly in the technology sector, have agreed not to recruit each others' employees in ways that violate antitrust law. Specifically, the probe is looking into whether the companies' hiring practices are costing skilled computer engineers and other workers opportunities to change jobs for higher pay or better benefits.

After a probe that began more than a year ago, Justice Department investigators have concluded that such agreements do raise significant competitive concerns.

But the leadership of the antitrust division hasn't yet decided whether—or how—to challenge the hiring practices. About a dozen companies are meeting with top antitrust officials at the Justice Department this week and next, some to defend their practices, others to provide information.

Antitrust experts say the Justice Department could argue that an agreement between competitors that holds down labor costs is as much a violation of antitrust laws as an agreement to fix prices.

Such agreements are "very close to the line," said Melissa Maxman, an antitrust lawyer at the law firm Cozen O'Connor. "They're not agreeing on price, but they're kind of agreeing on costs." Skilled computer scientists with some management responsibilities, for instance, often make base salaries of $180,000 to $210,000. Compensation for the most sought-after workers typically soars far above that and includes bundles of stock options and bonuses.

The Justice Department hasn't confirmed the existence of the investigation, and a spokeswoman declined to comment Friday. But several companies said they have received requests for information on the way they hire employees.

"IBM is one of many companies that have been contacted by government officials in a broad-ranging inquiry of technology and nontechnology companies regarding hiring practices," said company spokesman Edward Barbini. "We are collaborating with the government's inquiry."

Some companies are defending their recruiting practices. "Since investigations of this nature are confidential, we will not comment on what the Department of Justice may or may not be doing," said Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy. "However," he said, "we believe our hiring practices are lawful and don't harm competition."

Google declined to comment. Apple and IAC didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

Behind the scenes, technology companies are making the case that agreements among companies are not anticompetitive and don't affect employees' salaries or the availability of jobs. They say such agreements are commonplace, used by companies to maintain good relationships with business partners.

Some tech companies also say the agreements under investigation only stop them from cold calling each other's employees, not from hiring them.

The technology industry makes the case that it would be harder to enter into collaborative ventures with other companies if they fear losing valuable employees.

But Justice Department lawyers could respond that such agreements distort the labor market, theoretically harming the economy by cutting incentives for other people to enter such fields.

"In the long run, this is going to distort and depress the incentives for people to actually develop the talents and skills that are useful in this market," said Salil Mehra, a Temple University law professor who formerly worked in the Justice Department's antitrust division.

Policing the labor markets hasn't been a central focus of antitrust enforcers in recent years. But the Justice Department did act against what it saw as efforts to manipulate the labor market. It brought a civil case against a group of hospitals in Utah in 1994, alleging that they had illegally conspired to hold down nurses' wages by exchanging information about their pay.

A year later, it took action against the American Bar Association for allegedly using its accreditation process to force universities to raise law-school salaries. Both cases were settled.

The current investigation is the latest by antitrust enforcers to take aim at the often close-knit relations between tech companies, particularly in Silicon Valley.

The Federal Trade Commission's ongoing investigation into interlocking boards of tech companies forced Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, to resign from the board of Apple.

Another casualty of the FTC probe was Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson, who stepped down from Google's board. He had been doing double duty as a director for Apple and Google until the FTC started asking questions.

More recently, the decision by legendary venture-capital investor John Doerr to resign from Amazon.com's board was influenced by the FTC investigation, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Doerr—who recently declined to comment — is also on the board of Google.

I’ve read some reviews about a book by Dr. Kevin Leman, called The Birth Order Book. It’s very interesting and here’s some food for thought. Did you know that approximately 80% of Harvard students are first borns or only children. One can argue that first borns cost so much to send to Harvard that parents run out of money for the rest of the children (:

Why do angel investors exist?

Before answering this question, it’s useful to ask and answer a related question: why are there angels and why have they become more prominent in the last 10 years?  After all, doesn’t the definition of venture capital include all of the activities that angels perform? 

The answer lies in the history of technology companies and the differences between how they were built 30 years ago and how they are built now.  In the early days of technology venture capital, great firms like Arthur Rock and Kleiner Perkins funded companies like Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Tandem.  In those days, building the initial product required a great deal more than a high quality software team. Companies like Tandem had to manufacture their own products.  As a result, getting into market with the first idea, meant, among other things, building a factory.  Beyond that, almost all technology products required a direct sales force, field engineers, and professional services.  A startup might easily employ 50-100 people prior to signing their first customer. 

Based on these challenges, startups developed specific requirements for venture capital partners:

• Access to large amounts of money to fund the many complex activities
• Access to very senior executives such as an experienced head of manufacturing
• Access to early adopter customers
• Intense, hands-on expert help from the very beginning of the company to avoid serious mistakes

In order to both meet these requirements and build profitable businesses themselves, venture capitalists developed an operating model which is still broadly used today:

• Raise a large amount of capital from institutional investors
• Assemble a set of experienced partners who can provide hands-on expertise in building the product and then the company
• Evaluate each deal very carefully with extensive due diligence and broad partner consensus
• Employ strong governance to protect the large amount of capital deployed in each deal.
• This includes requisite board seats and complex deal terms including the ability to control subsequent financings
• Manage own resources effectively by calculating the amount of capital/number of partners/maximum number of board seats per partner to derive the minimum amount of capital that must be invested in each deal 

It turns out that building a company has changed quite a bit since the early days of venture-backed technology companies.  Building a company like Twitter or Facebook is quite different from building Tandem.  Specifically, the risk and cost of building the initial product is dramatically lower.  I emphasize product to distinguish it from building the company.  Building modern companies is not low risk or low cost: Facebook, for example, faced plenty of competitive and market risks and has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to build their business.  But building the initial Facebook product cost well under $1M and did not entail hiring a head of manufacturing or building a factory. 

As a result, for a modern startup, funding the initial product can be incompatible with the traditional venture capital model in the following ways:

• Lengthy diligence process. Venture capitalists take too long to decide whether or not they want to invest because they are set up to take large risks and have complex processes to evaluate those risks. 
• Too much capital. Venture capitalists need to put too much capital to work – often a VC will want to invest a minimum of $3M. If you only need 4 people to build the product and get it into market, this likely won’t make sense for your business.
• Board seat. Venture capitalists often require a board seat and, for that matter, a board of directors be formed. If 100% of the company is building the product and the team knows how to do that, then a board of directors may be overkill. In addition, it may be too early to decide who you want to be on the board. 

As a result of the above, a venture capitalist usually requires a serious commitment from the entrepreneur to pursue an idea that is highly experimental. If the product doesn’t stick, it might make sense for the entrepreneur to pursue a totally different idea or drop the business altogether.  This is much easier to do if you’ve raised $300,000 than if you’ve raised $3,000,000. 

As entrepreneurs needed someone to bridge the gap between building the initial product and building the company, angel investors stepped up. 

Angel investors are typically well-connected, wealthy individuals. They generally use their own money and come with none of the above VC constraints describe above: they don’t go on boards, they don’t need to put in lots of capital (in fact, they usually don’t want to), they prefer dead simple terms (as they often don’t have legal support), they understand the experimental nature of the idea, and they can sometimes decide in a single meeting whether or not to invest. 

On the other hand, angels do not manage huge pools of capital, so entrepreneurs need to find someone else to fund the building of the company (as opposed to the product) and most angels do not plan to spend a great deal of time helping entrepreneurs build the company. 

When should you raise an angel round and when should you raise a VC round?

This question really comes down to the company’s development. If you are a small team building a product with the hope of “seeing if it takes” (with the implication being that you’ll try something else if it doesn’t), then you don’t need a board or a lot of money and an angel round is likely the best option. On the other hand, if you’ve developed a strong belief in your product or your product idea and you are in a race against time to take the market, then a venture round is more appropriate. You will benefit from both the extra capital and extra support that comes with a serious and large commitment from your investors. 

So who is qualified to invest in each?

Obviously angels can invest in angel rounds, but what about VCs? Is it safe to have them participate? The answer turns out to be “if and only if they behave like angels.” What does it mean for a VC to behave like an angel? Well, they must:

• Be able to make an investment decision quickly, e.g. in one or two meetings
• Be able to invest without taking a board seat
• Not require control of subsequent funding rounds
• Not impose complex terms

If the VC wants to be in the angel round, but refuses to behave like an angel, then entrepreneur beware.  Having a VC who behaves like a VC in the angel round can jeopardize subsequent financings.  Angels can be great participants in venture rounds, but it’s generally better to have a VC lead those deals as they have more financial and other resources required to build the company. 

To friend or not to friend, that is the question

As more people embrace Facebook and other social media websites for business purposes, the already fine line between what's professional and what's personal continues to blur.  It can be difficult to determine which work-related contacts to connect with and what content to share.  Here is some friendly advice:

 

Let your boss make the first move

According to a recent survey, nearly half of executives polled said they are uncomfortable getting Facebook friend requests from people they manage (well that makes sense).  Regardless of how much rapport you have in the office, your supervisor simply might not want to connect with employees on personal networking sites. Avoid awkwardness by waiting for your boss to reach out to you first.  If you choose to accept the friend request, make sure you don't post anything you wouldn't want him or her to see!

 

Protect your privacy and your professional image

Familiarize yourself with Facebook's privacy settings.  Facebook seems to change the parameters of your privacy with minimal notice.  At one point, I swore I was invisible to everyone but my friends, then out of the blue, I'm getting friend requests from practical strangers.  Remember: Unless you use this feature, every word or image you post can be seen by all of your Facebook friends. Do you really want coworkers and clients to view your vacation photos?  Adopt a better-safe-than-sorry approach by creating a separate "work" list and limiting the content you make accessible to those contacts.  You can even go a step further and customize your settings to block specific individuals from viewing certain sections of your profile, such as photos of you and your friends. 

 

Exercise good judgment

This common sense message bears repeating: Don't be your own worst enemy.  If you have a bad day, cool off before clicking.  Badmouthing your boss, a colleague, or a hiring manager through Facebook is a highly risky move that's come back to haunt many professionals. Similarly, if you're currently employed (and you want to remain so), think twice before writing status updates about your search for a newq job.  In addition, avoid becoming a fan of potentially controversial people or products, or taking online quizzes (for which there are no privacy controls) that could be deemed unprofessional. 

 

Consistently monitor your online reputation

Managing your so-called "digital footprint" requires more than merely monitoring what you post.  Check your Facebook account regularly to keep tabs on the information others are broadcasting about you. You'll want to act quickly if someone makes an inappropriate comment on your Facebook wall ("Steve, are you still working for that boneheaded boss?") or identifies you in an embarrassing photo.  You can easily delete comments posted on your wall and untag yourself from pictures by clicking "Remove Tag" under the image.  You also might contact the person to express your displeasure and politely request that he or she keep your professional reputation in mind in the future.  While Facebook enables savvy professionals and job seekers to build key connections, there are also many pitfalls to sidestep.  By taking the tips highlighted above, you can be sure that Facebook helps, not hinders, your career.

Where does the money come from that private equity (venture capital, growth equity and buyout) firms invest?  It might indirectly come from you.  Key constituents include the likes of government employees, employees of large corporations, trade organizations (e.g. teachers) and wealthy families.

Wealthy Families / Foundations

The original investors in venture capital firms were wealthy families.  The Phipps family was behind Bessemer.  The Rockefeller family was behind Venrock.  These wealthy families often invest out of vehicles like family offices or foundations.  From those roots, many wealthy families have played impactful roles in backing some of the best names in private equity.  As the asset class has became more known and attractive, the sources of capital grew to include more institutional sources.  But, behind every institution are regular people.

Endowments

One of the most aggressive investors in venture capital has historically been school endowments.  When you make that annual class gift to your college, if you designate it for the endowment, some of your gift just might be put into various venture capital and buyout firms.  Typically, universities are charged to protect your endowment gift, so they invest it, and use the returns generated from the investment to fund various school initiatives.  Major universities like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, etc. have been big proponents of investing some of that endowment principal into private equity firms.

Pension Funds

Another prominent investor in venture capital has been corporate and public pension plans.  Pension plans (of the defined contribution variety) are just another type of retirement plan used by state governments, labor/trade unions, and large corporations.  As you work at a company or state government and thereby accrue pension benefits, the company or organization funds a pension account based on actuarial models tied to its potential pension payout obligations.  A portion of these funds are often allocated to the private equity asset class.  Major states investing in this asset class include New York, New Jersey, California, Oregon, etc.  Major corporations like AT&T, General Motors, etc. have also been active investors.

Fund of Funds

Many foundations, endowments, and pension funds lack the capacity or resources to evaluate and monitor different private equity firms.  Hence, the fund of funds industry has sprung up to pool capital from these sources into funds and then invest on their behalf.  Unlike the other sources of capital, fund of funds have to raise their capital from third party sources, just like the firms that they invest in.

So, if you follow the money through, your child’s college financial aid package or your pension plan – might be tied to a couple engineers working on some project in Silicon Valley or tied to the big buyout you read about in the Wall Street Journal.

 

 

This is a different perspective on household finances.  We always look at how much we make per hour, year, project, etc.  But do you know how much profit you're making per hour?

Hourly Wage

From the day anyone starts working, we're quickly educated on the concept of an hourly wage. Whether we start at minimum wage or otherwise, we're conditioned to the idea of compensation being denominated in the time interval of hours.  Even as many folks transition to being paid on a salaried basis, it's not hard to calculate what you effectively make per hour. For example, if Bob's after-tax bi-weekly paycheck is $1,500 and Bob works 50 hours per week, then he makes $15.00 per hour.  This example presumes Bob has no other sources of income other than his paycheck.

Spending per Hour

The household metric that is often missing from the equation is the flipside: spending per hour. The most simple way to calculate this number is to take all of your expenses for a given period (say a month), mortgage/rent, credit card charges, car payments, ATM withdrawals, utilities, insurance, interest payments, tuition, healthcare, charitable giving, etc. and do the basic math to denominate that spending on an hourly basis presuming the same spending hours as working hours.  To use the same example, if Bob spends $3,000 per month and has the same 50 spending hours per week, then a little basic math says Bob spends $13.85 per hour.

Profit per Hour

That takes us to the most important metric: profit per hour.  Bob makes $15.00 per hour and spends $13.85 per hour which means he makes $1.15 per hour in profit.  The reason I prefer the hourly denomination of profit more than a month or year is that it's more practical for all of those little spending decisions we make every day.  Congratulations to Bob for being profitable!  Just knowing your hourly profit metric is an achievement in and of itself.  But, let's go on to a couple second order ideas for those interested.

First, you can say that spending hours and working hours are not the same in reality.  If Bob spent $13.85 every hour of every day (24 x 7), he would end up spending $10,000 per month instead of $3,000.  So, the key to making the math work is to limit your spending hours per week to the same as your working hours per week.  If you work 50 hours per week, pick the 50 hours per week where spending is allowed and fix them.  It might be 5 specific hours on each weekday and 12.5 hours on Saturday and Sunday.  Once that is selected, the question is how much can you spend per hour in those spending hours.

To determine how much you can spend in those spending hours, you have to determine how much you have already spent just by existing.  Take all of your fixed costs.  All those costs that you bear whether you ever take your cash or credit card out of your wallet.  This could be things like car payments, rent/mortgage, insurance, tuition, etc.  Let's say for a moment that of Bob's $13.85 per hour of spending, $10.00 per hour is fixed.  That means in those 50 spending hours per week, Bob can spend $3.85 per hour and still maintain his profit margin of $1.15 per hour.  Now all of Bob's discretionary spending decisions can be benchmarked against that $3.85 in hourly discretionary spend that he knows he is allowed.  That's a useful metric whether Bob is looking to get that bagel sandwich for breakfast or that fancy steak for dinner.

After a recent blog about resume tips, I realized there's so much more I could have included and this addendum will cover more areas but there's always more!

More things to Avoid

Before we get to writing content, let's start with more things to avoid when writing your resume.

• Microsoft templates, skip them.  Make your resume pop.  Lose the built-in template everyone else has and come up with something unique.
• Stretching the truth.  You can be called on your bluff. Write what you know instead.
• Attempting One Size Fits All.  Whenever you try to develop a one-size-fits-all resume to send to all employers and recruiters, you almost always end up with something that will end up in the recycle bin.  Recruiters and Employers want you to write a resume specifically for us. We expect you to clearly show how and why you fit the position in a specific organization.
• Going on Too Long or Cutting Things Too Short.  Despite what you may read or hear, there are no rules governing the length of your resume. The one page or two page rule does not exist.  Understand my frame of reference, I deal mainly with Technical Professionals and Executives.  We need details.  The point here is, don't cut your resume short just to keep it under two pages.  Give us all the details necessary while balancing length versus readability.  You don't want to write a novel either.  This also goes back to the point above with writing customized resumes for every job you apply for. 

Quantify Achievements

I can spot bull excrement at 100 yards, just like the rest of the intelligent world.  Statements with quantifiable achievements aren't just easier to read, they make for stronger points.  

For example: Instead of this:I am a talented and popular writer dedicated to writing good documents fast.

Try this:Wrote upwards of eight articles per day and can attract an audience of over 30,000 unique visitors.

Which of these sounds like the better deal to you? Showcase what you can bring to your prospective company.

Keep It Simple

Expect your resume to be skimmed.  Make it as easy as possible for us to see why you are so special.  We tend to read lists and skip over paragraphs. So, when it comes down to a choice between the two, keep the most important information in a bulleted list.  You can scan a list much quicker than a paragraph, this way we will take away more raw information from your neatly listed resume, helping you stand out. 

Keep this in perspective.  Too often I find resumes that are basically a bulleted resume.  Everything is in bullets.  Including boring details that read like job responsibilities.  I don't care about that!  I want to know what make you different, list your accomplishments, not your responsibilities. 

Something else to keep in mind and this goes back to writing a customized resume for every job... you must have pertinent information on the first page of your resume.  You must catch the readers eye with the first page if you have multiple pages.  Otherwise, all the great details will not be read if your initial page is full of fluff.

It's like watching the news and they say red wine is good for your heart and suddenly you switch to a red wine diet.  Common sense rules apply here too!

Include key terms

Increasingly, resumes are entered into systems that scan them for key terms applicable to the job. This is especially true of resumes submitted in soft copy, whether to a recruiting site or directly to a prospective employer. These systems weed out any that don't contain the right trigger words. Employers don't mind if this costs them a few good candidates, since they still have more than they can talk to, but it doesn't have to affect you. Make sure the key terms are in your resume somewhere - and that they're spelled right, especially if they're technojargon or product names that a spell-checker can't check

When you send Perito Eleven your resume, it's read by recruiters, not machines.  It's more important for us to able to see key terms on a skim.  Believe it or not, I actually prefer to work with candidates that will pick up the phone and call!  Let me know you exist so we can get down to business!

Edit Ruthlessly

Keep everything important both on the first page and up high. Don't give us a chance to skip your most important selling points.  Take a very hard line on clutter.  If there's anything that detracts from exactly why you'd be perfect for the job, remove it.