The hardest yoga position to master is corpse pose. Savasana, the fancy name for corpse pose, is just lying on your back, not moving – completely relaxing, so your focus lies only in your breathing is really difficult. It only seems easy. The same could be said for all aspects of building and growing a business. Your real job is sharpening your focus to do simple things well, and where possible, better than anyone else. At Vigilent, our software intelligently monitors a data centre to keep temperatures at a level where the computer equipment runs safely without the need to blast arctic air constantly and expensively. It does not matter that solving that problem is compli- cated and counterintuitive. Our goal as a company is to stay focused and deliver a product that makes it simple for our customers. We also try to make smart, simple choices when it comes to building our business. Our corporate investors, telecommunications companies NTT and Telus, both started as customers, so they are not purely financial investors. Their primary interest is getting a great product. It is a huge act of faith for large customers to pick a smaller company for a component of their critical infrastructure. We are selling stuff that severely impacts their business if it fails. Companies like NTT and Telus have a history of championing innovative technology. When they find a company they think has a great team, a great product, and a great track record, they realise how relatively rare that is and move to support it. We need customers who are tough on us, and help us build a competitive product by being honest about what they really need. Most of the features in our next two or three releases are because of conversations we have had with partners like NTT and Telus. We showed them some developments we thought were the bee’s knees, and they said: “Yeah, that is great, but we are not interested.” So because we listen to and trust our corporate inves- tors, we are doing things we might not have done other- wise. We are also not doing things we originally thought might be good, but when tested against the needs of key customers, were not. For us, this leads to much better cap- ital efficiency. We do not waste time building things that our customers do not want. Having companies like NTT and Telus as both partners and investors also produces insightful dialogue. Our…
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Corpse pose: looks easy
Aug 6, 2013 • Mark Housley
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