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UNIVITELLIN
I am not a witch
How To Tell You’re A Douchebag
Jinn

In the spirit of International women’s day, here are a few things learned so far on leadership and running a tech business. I hope it helps anyone that feels out of place with the knowledge there are others like you quietly plugging away.

1. The broader tech startup industry is fuelled on smoke, mirrors and BS that makes Nathan Barley sketches seem tame. Having a slick pitch and a vision will impress your startup friends and family only. Keep your AI, Blockchain, IoT buzzword bingo and fantasies of how you will disrupt the giants to yourself. Humbly work out why anyone should even spend 30 seconds using your thing.

2. Top skills underrated in leaders are empathy and the ability to keep their mouth shut and observe. Be present to problems people are facing, it will help you build amazing products as well as be a better manager.

3. It’s ok to refuse to play i.e. to gas about how you are crushing it or run towards every conference stage and startup competition. Instead work out how to be straightforward to do business with and easy to buy from.

4. Don’t compare yourself to others who seem to be doing it for less time than you or have raised more money. Shout out to the Benjamin Button startups that were registered 10 yrs ago but claim a founding date 5–8 years later, I see you but am not mad. It really does take a lot of time.

5. It’s hard to run a business. You think about it 24hrs a day and the grind phase is at least 10–15 years. There will be at least once a week where you wonder why you are even doing this. Do you know more than you did a month ago? Do you have more revenue? Acknowledge it.

6. It’s completely doable without sitting at a desk 14 hrs per day. It is totally doable if you have children. It’s your party; you can set up remote teams if you want, finish early to do the school run without worrying about what a boss will say. There are a lot of women in the world with children working much much much harder than me and without a small % of the autonomy I enjoy.

7. Lead by example. Don’t expect your team to pay attention to the details if you don’t, don’t expect your team to be transparent if you aren’t.

8. Raise or don’t raise money there is no right way. Do stop reading the VC pro /con blog posts. The whole thing is so steeped in privilege and survivor bias to be utterly useless. Side eye people that have really strong opinions on how others finance their companies.

Yes, it is likely that a Stanford dropout white dude will walk in/out with millions of funding with less merit than you, the numbers tell us this is reality in 2018. I personally prefer to spend my mental energy on things I have control over and accept the chips will fall where they may.

9. Understand the stats and be mindful of the probabilities, allocate your time and energy accordingly. I calculate that each customer meeting I take will have a 10–20% of success but a VC meeting will have a 0.1% or less. I allocate my time mostly to the things with a higher likelihood of success. The wonderful VCs I know get why this is necessary and the ones that get petulant get the side eye.

10. Addition to 9 to maximise your chances of success, work harder to win over firms that have a track record of funding other people like you or (even better) those that have senior partners that look like you. Life is much easier when you aren’t the first.

11. Just because something has a low chance of success, it doesn’t mean you don’t do the prep work and bring excellence. Bring everything or don’t do it at all.

12. Study companies that have got far with very little money and intimately understand what they got right. It will give you discipline when (never an if) times are tough.

13. Have a plan if you raise, don’t raise, under raise. Stress test the shit out of the worse case scenarios. Know exactly on what dates contingency measures will get triggered and update probabilities weekly based on facts. Chop off happy ears and cultivate scepticism. People are polite but hardly anyone will tell you that your baby is ugly or that they just don’t get it. With planned contingencies, you will sleep soundly and can concentrate on being present at on the day to day work.

14. Find customers as quickly as humanly possible, from day 1. Then pour blood, sweat and tears into keeping them happy.

15. Have fun :) I still have to pinch myself every day that people pay for a thing I built.

• * Am still learning and reserve the right to change.
• ** ymmv
• *** yyy I know not all X

Tl;Dr For those too busy to read a 2 minute medium post. Of course you can, please carry on. We like and want to collaborate with our fellow Makers.

Longer answer: Our view is that there will not be 1 platform that will ‘win’ the whole market (seems ridiculous stating this but needs to be said). Over time many companies will be building products and services most suitable to the various verticals i.e. home automation, wearables.. It would suck if we didn't have sensible integration.

We have real time and historical apis you are welcome to use. We are busy making making ‘search’ much more usable as we (and a lot of you sorry folks bear with me) are not happy with it. If you have particular data needs please get in touch with the team on hello@opensensors.io and let’s have a chat.

The point of Open Data is reuse, plain English licensing terms here. Please give credit to the data providers and us, it’s the right thing to do when using a free service. If the data you use brings you success, please give us a shout as it gives everyone at OpenSensors HQ a warm and fuzzy feeling.

The Internet of Things hype cycle is in overdrive, as someone working in the area at OpenSensors, this is theoretically great but it getting harder and harder to filter out the marketing hype.

What is the Internet of Things? Some describe it as the ability to connect billions devices to the internet, auto-magically creating Trillions of dollars in revenues. Just connect any normal devices and let the good times roll right?

If only…

The internet of Things is much more than a licence to print money. It should give us the ability to understand the world around us in unprecedented detail. If the web is a human curated knowledge base, IoT is the machine generated illustration of our world. There will be many IoT applications that will significantly change the way we live and work over the coming 5–10 years.

IoT descriptions can seem quite futurist but what does this actually mean for most of us today?

Within commercial buildings, IoT is taking existing infrastructure and improving and simplifying it. Whilst previously landlords had to buy expensive building management systems tied to 1 or 2 vendors, more and more building companies are starting to shift the management of their data to the cloud. Node Red open source community members contribute integration points to traditional buildings protocols like modbus letting companies view and analyse their data independently. Friction free access to data enables better analytics through the stitching together of multiple data sets. As a result, galleries can better quantify the energy impact of visitor footfall, architects use beacons and footfall monitors to create better designed and user friendly buildings.

Why Open Data?

The more data a service has access to the ‘smarter’ it can become, silo’ed data stores inhibit this. Unfortunately, the 1st iteration of IoT architecture is a ‘thing’ or a set of things with their own app and/or dashboard. Data is not available to be integrated into the multitude of other services we use.

Parking companies and municipalities deploy parking sensors but you have to download their particular branded app to find information. This approach means downloading several ‘parking’ apps from several companies in 1 city. I would argue most people would rather see parking information in services they already use daily, such as citymapper and google maps. Being too focused on the 1 app for 1 thing architecture gives the mistaken belief that competitive moats are built with the ability to control people’s experiences. In truth, hardware firms that will win are those that create a thriving ecosystem around their products, the more your ‘thing’ seamlessly integrates into my life the more I will use it.

IoT service providers are also starting to understand that their products cannot be truly ‘smart’ until they build on existing data sets.

In the simplest case, air quality within a building is influenced by air quality outside. To understand air quality we have to utilise information from our own sensors as well as data from others. Having access to weather, traffic, local flooding dangers and footfall datapoints enables us to configure better building automation systems.

The real IoT revolution is actually happening quietly, away from the spotlight and marketing dollars of big companies, with communities gathering and publishing millions of data points daily from sensors with Open Data Licensing. Communities such as Herelab in Martha’s vineyard, Massachusetts implemented a smart island project sensing water quality and many other factors. Schools across the world are starting to teach electronics by enabling students to configure and deploy air quality sensors. This has the direct result of giving the world it’s first view of granular information that never previously existed.

Hardware manufacturers such as air quality egg, the flood network and others are creating innovative products which are being deployed at scale all over the world. More successful products like these are the acorns of the real IoT revolution.