Evan Williams posted his desire to find some good  times at the Sundance Film Festival.

When i lived in Manhattan I'd sometimes come out and run around seeing films. The locals avoid all things on Main Street during Sundance since it's something of a Zoo. The swarms from NY and LA are know locally as PIBs (People In Black). Guess why?

I lived in Manhattan for 10 years and my wife and I were mistaken for PIBs one Sundance while we were in a local store. I had to reply that we were the LIBs, Locals in Black. My color selection has widened since then.

I emailed Evan and extend this invitation to anyone who might be attending Sundance this year: I have access to a few of the $2500 Sundance passes. If you'd like one or two, let me know and I'll check on the availability.

Here's the deal:

Express Pass
Includes Closing Weekend
$2,500 each
If you want to choose your screenings once you get to the Film Festival, the Express Pass-B is for you. No ticket selection is required for Express Pass-B holders but you must be in your seat at least 15 minutes prior to screening times. Admission to all public screenings at all theatres and panel discussions within Pass dates is included. All Festival B-Passes also include admission to the Closing Night film on January 27 and Awards Night Party on January 27.

The term “entrepreneur” means a lot of different things to different people. To the average joe or jane in college it means wealth, being your own boss and prestige. To venture captialist the entrepeneur is the person who can tell the best lies when giving a pitch. To the accountant he or she is the spreadsheet wizzard that seems to be able to make any idea worth $50 million in revenue in 5 years. To the average worker the entrepreneur is the big risk taker that usually looses it all. To the disgruntled employee that hates their boss being an entrepreneur means you answer to no one.

Personally I think they are all wrong. To me an entrepreneur is someone who sees an opportunity no one else sees and makes it into a thriving business making investors lots of money. Even if the “investors” is only the entrepreneur and the employees. Of course my definition leaves few people qualified to be called entrepreneurs, including myself. Sure I have the abnormality of the unusual vision of seeing things others don’t see, but until my company is the thriving business making investors lots of money, I can’t call myself an entrepreneur.

My expanded difinition of an entrpreneur also includes being poor, working for and answering to multiple bosses from investors, to customers to employees, no prestige or honor, but people thinking you are the cooky person with the wierd ideas that everyone thinks should get a real job. If you want to raise money you have to tell the truth and expect that the story isn’t going to be good enough for 100’s of investors you pitch to who still don’t believe you and think you are the cooky person who should get a real job.

You have to prepare financials that you can live by if you raise money, because the second you stop hitting your numbers they look to replace you with an expert CEO that can get it done. He or she changes all the numbers and if they hit those numbers stays or gets replaced with the next savior CEO. You have to know so much about your industry, product or service and the mind set and buying behavrior of your customers that you have eliminated as much risk as possible. You have to mitigate risk and set yourself and your company up for success while all the time no knowing if the decisions you make will work.

If someone has a better definition or even more insight, I would be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Way back in 1999, Business week published an article that pitted A&E against each other. It's an interesting read and surprisingly accurate of the situation as it still exists. eBay vs. Amazon: Fixed prices or dynamic pricing? 

That's one thing Amazon and eBay agree on. There isn't much evidence that consumers want to ''one-stop shop for every single thing in their life at one company,'' says eBay CEO Margaret C. Whitman. And Bezos rejects the widely held notion that a handful of megastores will dominate. ''There's going to be tens of thousands of winners,'' he says...

...eBay has zoomed to prominence with an even more innovative E-commerce model--one that, in a rare feat, is actually profitable. Because eBay doesn't take possession of the goods--it acts as a broker for buyers and sellers and takes 6% off the top--it incurs none of Amazon's hefty distribution costs. It has only 198 employees to Amazon's 3,000. As a result, its gross profit margins are a Microsoft-like 85%--on gross merchandise that ballooned from $95 million in 1997 to $746 million in 1998. ''Dollar for dollar, eBay has a better revenue and bottom-line model,'' says analyst Mitchell Bartlett of Minneapolis investment bank Dain Rauscher Wessels.

And then there's this sentence that turned my head since this is exactly what we're aiming to do.

Moreover, eBay could even turn the nation's 18 million small businesses into a virtual selling force that could rival that of conventional retail. ''It could be the destination for all these businesses to sell online,'' says Steven R. Mitgang, a senior vice-president for Sitematic Corp., a San Diego software company that has helped several dozen small businesses list their inventory on eBay. Beyond auctions, says Mitgang, ''it has a huge opportunity to become the destination for consumers to buy stuff, period.''

Of course I think that Amazon, eBay, Google, and Yahoo are built bass ackwards for accomplishing this as top down search and retail. But what do I know... Shmula has all the charts.

I received a note today from Jeremy Nielson of the Utah Fund of Funds pointing out that in prior years, Utah ranked number one among U.S. states for the number of Inc. 500 companies on a per capita basis.  Utahns have a long history and deeply ingrained sense of self reliance and entrepreneurship.  It is part of our pioneer heritage.

That said, in recent years, Utah has dropped from the number one per capita spot.  Jeremy argues that this is not because Utah now has fewer entrepreneurs or successful companies than in the past, but believes that it is because fewer have been applying.

The MountainWest Capital Network each year recognizes the 100 fastest growing companies in Utah.  Many of these companies are eligible for the Inc. 500, but we don't see them on the Inc. 500 list.

This is the beginning of my effort, at Jeremy's behest, to encourage fast-growing Utah companies to apply for recognition in Inc. magazine.  To apply, click here.

I’ve had a great week in San Francisco (one of my favorite towns) and Mac World. I’ll be posting some cool pictures of the show over the weekend on my Flickr account, which can be accessed by clicking the Flickr badge to your right.

Microsoft’s “blogger lounge” had a little more traffic yesterday. It looks like the burly blog Nazi dude patrolling the booth is gone as well.

Speaking of MS, I spent sometime yesterday checking out Parallels. This is the software that allows you to switch back and forth between OSX and Windows on a Mac. It was very impressive. However, something didn’t feel right looking at Windows run on a Mac. It was like two universes collided. It was kind of like the twilight zone. Anyway, I like the option because I would much rather run spreadsheets and other office applications on a PC. However, I am very interested in using a Mac for digital photography and digital video, which I am really into. This may be a great option. Looks like I might drink the cool aid!

Speaking of digital photography, HP and Canon had some amazing products here at the show. I am constantly taken back by the advances in digital photography. HP was also sponsoring a photo gallery featuring photography by Joel Meyerowitz. Great stuff!

I’ll be in the podcasters lounge most of today but I am looking forward to getting home tonight. Podango has some huge announcements coming up. We’re close to the tipping point and its exciting to have a front row seat. Stay tuned.  

2007: it's time to clean out your feed reader. I understand this article goes without saying but feel the majority of heavy RSS users don't understand the importance or reasoning behind usubscribing from feeds. Why should you? Because RSS overload eats into productivity and phases out quality reading time, that's why. Even if you click "mark all as read" you're still wasting time.

Last year I let my total feed count creep into 400+ territory. I read maybe 20-30 daily with about another 30-40 periodically. Since then, I've reduced my total "active" feeds to 67 while constantly cycling in new ones and ditching old ones that no longer yield useful content for me. With that, here are some general guidelines I like to follow to keep my feeds clean and usable and my productivity at a healthy level:

• Determine which feeds you no longer use. You know the routine. You read an article you like and subscribe to the publisher's feed. That's what you should do. But maybe that was and is the only article that appeals to you. What if you're no longer reading the feed, or better yet, pulling inspiration from it? You may be thinking: "But I don't want to lose it." Well guess what. You can resubscribe at anytime.
• Remove feed. Hit delete. Just do it. You'll be better for it. If you must, save the feed in a backup OPML file in the unlikely event you decide to re-add it to your reader later on.
• Create high-, medium-, and low-priority feeds. Another helpful method in organizing your feeds is to use priority folders. "High" being stuff you enjoy reading daily and that yields solid inspiration, "medium" being the above average feeds you sometimes read, and "low-priority" being feeds you don't use often but like to keep tabs on and/or read when you have some extra time. I've also seen some feeder users organize feeds by "updated often" or "rarely updated."
  
• Add new feeds. If you aren't cycling in new feeds at least once a month, you're missing out. There is simply no way you have already subscribed to the web's best content. Seek it, add it to your reader in a "pending" status to gauge its viability, then add it permanently if its producing consistent results.
  

Life, not to mention the work day, is too short to waste on stale feeds. And just think, while you're mindlessly thumbing through "fast food" feeds, you could be treating yourself to a real literary entree; The Chosen or one of these business-related books quickly come to mind.

Tonight I received the following email from my buddy Robin Peng who designed this sweet little solution for handling your iPod cord.

As you are probably aware early this week at Macworld, Steve Jobs unveiled the long awaited iPhone in San Francisco. Later at the show, he walked through the convention floor and came around with his bodyguard to Handstands - our licensee distributor here in the US. They handed him the AppleCore and as he looked at the sample, they heard him exclaim “that’s genius!” as he continued walking off. Suffice to say, we thought that was pretty cool.

I have one of the first prototypes of the AppleCore and I'll have to agree with Steve Jobs on this one, it's genius. The best part is just being able to play with the little thing. It just makes you smile. Robin's told me that if he ever gets a cease and desist letter from Steve Jobs and Apple he's going to frame it. It sounds like that's not going to happen now. Perhaps there's still hope. Robins got a whole pipeline of products. 

The MountainWest Capital Network publishes an annual Utah deal flow report each year in March.  The data is also hosted on-line.  The report covers venture capital, private equity and other investment transactions, along with mergers and acquisitions and public offerings, including IPOs.

The data comes directly from those involved in transactions.   If you have any information about deals that you've done, visit the MWCN web site to report your transaction.

If you are interested in deals in Utah, you can also view the data on the web site. 

Utah is a great state to do business in.  I am excited to be a part of ConnectBlogs and Connect Magazine and especially excited to be a part of the business community here in Utah.  I look forward to your thoughts, questions, and experiences in the coming years.
 

I am not sure that empathy would be something that the general population would associate with the sales profession.  Poll your colleagues and ask them to name the top ten most empathetic professions and my guess is sales wouldn’t even come to their mind.  Pose the question to yourself … don’t you think sales should be right up there with doctors, nurses, and soda-jerks?  Wouldn’t one of the top characteristics of a great sales person be their ability to understand the customer’s situation so they can more fully work to solve it?
 

At eLampros our pipeline review meetings are filled with employees banging their fists on the table, “my customer released this product six months ago and no one is successfully selling it - it’s not fair, all the research shows that the market wants it but they are not buying.  We NEED to fix this.  We NEED to help their call center learn how to move this in the market.”  Before they begin selling we insist a salesperson describe their accounts with the same passion and pain the customer is feeling.  Having empathy for the customer’s situation helps us to work to solve it rather than to cram our product down their throats.  (Which fewer and fewer businesses will let you do anyway)
 

THE WRONG KIND OF EMPATHY:  Often sales people use empathy but in the worst way possible.  Each of the following introductory statements is empathetic and each is completely inaccurate:  ‘we can save you money’, ‘we can make you more productive’, ‘we can free up your day’.  I have a colleague who get’s very excited when they receive a call telling them how much money they can save.  He says, “Really, that’s WONDEFUL!  Thank you!  How much am I spending now?”  Silence on the other side of the phone.  Point being empathy is a positive facet - scratch that - a critical facet of a sales professional … but only when it’s the right kind of empathy.  Get to know your prospects, understand their pain and be almost more passionate about it than they are and you’ll get the sell every time.
 

EMPATHY IN LEAD GENERATION:  The most important thing every lead generation professional needs to know is this - you are interrupting something very important when you call a prospect.  By definition what they are working on is important because they are working on it.  By definition the least important thing in the world to them is you - or they would have called you.  By definition you are interrupting because they were not expecting your call.  When you understand this you have very important knowledge.  When you put this to work you will change your world. 
 

What would you say to someone you are calling if you knew for a fact that you were interrupting something important?  What are you currently saying?  Do they conflict?  If you put yourself in the prospect’s shoes {visualize being extremely busy with an important task} and then think about what you say to them when you call how would you feel?  Do some of the responses you’ve gotten make more sense to you?  Do some of the hang-ups and false excuses and ’send me an email’ lines seem more realistic?  They should.
 

In our firm we absolutely refuse to meet with someone unless they were expecting our call.  We’re too empathetic of their situation.  If they are expecting my call and I’m on their calendar I’ll meet with them.  If someone calls them during our call THEY are interrupting and I’m the important thing they are working on.   Suddenly calling 100 people a day to set a time to talk seems significantly less daunting then calling 100 people a day to see if I can find someone willing to listen to my pitch.
 

Try it out - empathy in sales and lead generation may be one of the most important yet subtle things you can do to assure your growth.

I just read a great post by Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) about what they look for in a Management Team or Founder.  I figured that I would pass it along.