Trump needs a prolonged diversion from his growing roster of scandals, some of which are actually starting to stick. What better, then, than the invasion of an unsuspecting banana republic? (I mean, other than his own, which he is also doing, spawning yet more scandals). Americans love a good war, or the chatter about one, even after having their noses fruitlessly bloodied for 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There is not a more fertile target for some good ol’-fashioned sabre-rattling than a largely defenceless tin-pot communist petro-state. Spinning the globe, our finger inevitably lands upon Venezuela. It has all the great hallmarks: a whiff of communism, a fantastically weird dictatorship, lots of money sloshing around thanks to petroleum exports, an international pariah subject to crippling sanctions and even more crippling national debt.

Its military has some modern hardware, with ships sourced from Europe and Su-30 fighters supplied by Russia, and a mechanized infantry that includes ~100 armoured vehicles from China. Despite those fighters and modern fighting ships in limited quantities, air and naval assets are likely to be in some state of disrepair. And with a military hampered by extremely limited funding for maintenance and training, Venezuela could probably be dominated in the air and sea by a single US carrier group (and, given its proximity to Florida, the CG would not need to operate without USAF support).

Trump has been playing chicken with Maduro and Venezuela since his first term. It’s an easy game to win. Mostly this has just amounted to a bunch of feathers flying and name-calling. But since Trump’s domestic problems have been mounting, so has the chicken game begun to escalate. US Marines have begun to mass, afloat near the coast of Venezuela.

This task force (including two LPDs and an LHD) is capable of landing a bit more than 2 battalions worth of US Marines, and roughly 50-60 fighting vehicles (including Humvees). The presence of a Ticonderoga-class Cruiser would imply the offensive use of land-attack missiles, and the three Arleigh Burkes would quite adequately defend the fleet against air and sea threats. Conspicuous by their absence, though, is a US carrier battle group.

The US carrier fleet right now is stretched thin (by US standards) and it’s no surprise there isn’t a carrier battle group yet tasked to the region. I’m not privy to any more information than you, so it’s possible there’s a group coming on/off rotation from the Atlantic Fleet that could be tasked to contribute to the theatrics of this with a sail-past. But I would suggest if a carrier group does arrive and actually lingers in the region, which is doubtful, then this will have become more than just another of Trump’s melodramas.

In the unlikely event that some sort of Marine landing is to be attempted, the task force detailed above (which could potentially deploy as many as 2,800 Marines) is really not enough to do more than capture the beaches near Caracas, and attempt to depose Maduro before making a hasty retreat. Venezuela can muster some 220,000 to 300,000 troops of varied levels of training in its defence. And a longer ground war targeting substantial regime change would need a very high commitment of US forces over a protracted period. While this likely sounds like music to Trump’s ears (think: distraction), I’d like to think that cooler heads would prevail to prevent such an ill-conceived excursion.

If the Marines were indeed dispatched to remove Maduro from Caracas, even that limited mission would prove difficult. While Caracas is near the coast, it’s fortified by a 7,200ft high mountain range. Beaching their gear would be very doable, but moving 3,000 Marines and their armour to the capital would expose them to huge risk of ambush and counterattack by a mechanized infantry of comparable size.

So. until I see 30,000 or more Marines massing, and a Nimitz-class carrier group stalking the Venezuelan Coastline, I’m going to call this what it is: more Trump bluster.

Meanwhile, I’m going to re-watch Wag The Dog.

Also, some funny stories from Silicon Valley bubble 1.0

I’ve uploaded the slide deck here.  Of course, delivery is always better when given by the deck’s creator.  For the students, I promised to post some of my favourite startup pitch deck breakdowns: here, here, here, and here.

Famed UCLA Basketball Coach John Wooden once said, “Sports do not build character. They reveal it.” A considerable body of social science research has explored the positive impacts of athletics, in particular team sports, from youth into adulthood. Playing sports can be a tremendously positive influencer on us physically, emotionally, socially and ethically.

I’ve certainly bought into this idea: I play hockey on several teams three or four times a week. I’ve also invested years of time and money into building RosterBot, a service designed to increase the accessibility and enjoyment of team sports for youth and adult athletes of every skill level.

But when I set out to hire a team to help me carry the company up the hill to future success, and I decided that each of our staff should be a team athlete, my intent was rather more direct. The thinking was that as athletes—and particularly team athletes—each of the crew would be bringing a useful set of perspectives from their own daily experiences with their teams and apply those to building the product. In short, by hiring team athletes, we would be assured they’d be eating their own dog food.

This is largely true. But I actually ignored the rather more significant set of benefits to hiring and working with a crew that is truly inured in team athletics. And since then, I’ve learned a valuable lesson, one I will carry with me as we continue building our team in this company and on to the next venture.

Here’s an interesting study result: the multi-decade U.S. National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 found that men at age 31 who played high school sports were paid 12% more at their jobs than those who did not. That’s compellingly outside the margin of error for such a large sample size.

But hey, money isn’t everything. Multiple studies have shown that sports participation can help build character, encourage emotional growth, and teach players the value of honesty, respect, teamwork, dedication and commitment. Call me crazy, but these are attributes I value in a co-worker.

One of the more frustrating aspects of my time spent working in Silicon Valley during the 1990s technology bubble was working with people who were in it purely for themselves. They were mercenaries and were on board with the plan for as long as it seemed clear that things were moving forward unobstructed. Whenever their startup encountered choppy waters, employees would simply hop over to the next venture-backed vehicle, rather than sticking with it and doggedly facing the opposition.

This job-hopping happens quite often in the current froth in Silicon Valley, too. A friend recently shared with me an unconfirmed but totally believable rumour that the most senior software developer working at Twitter these days has been there only two years. There isn’t even any shame in having a string of 10-month-long employment engagements spanning half-a-dozen companies in Silicon Valley anymore; it’s just par for the course.

I think this is a really big problem. As an employer, and as the captain of an ambitious startup plying the choppy waters of a volatile sea, I’m not interested in mercenaries. I’m interested in people who wake up each morning thinking about how they can build better tools for people just like themselves. I’m interested in co-workers who understand accountability to their teammates, to their coaches, and to their investors and customers. I’m interested in people who will inspire the people around them as well as empower (and enrich) themselves. I’m interested in grinders, playmakers and snipers who work to fill whatever role(s) they can in helping advance the team.

In short, I am now resolved to exclusively hire people who have the emotional makeup to join us for the long haul because they grew up playing, and with luck still play, team sports–whether it’s a business dedicated to sports, or any other.

Startups are hard. You need to be working with a team you’d gladly go to war with. I want to look at everyone around me and know that if we’re under fire, they’ll have me covered. I expect them to hold me to the same account.

For more than a year, this approach has been paying daily dividends in my day-to-day dealings. I suspect that it could lead to long-term success for all of us. In the interim, it’s also helped us to field a pretty good company hockey team.

The key lesson you learn in your first improv workshop is to never say “No.” In improvisational comedy “No” is death of the scene, and negates everything your scene-mate is trying to build within that narrative. “Yes” is always the appropriate response to any question posed to you, and it is from this building block that entertaining (and we hope also hilarious) narratives grow and flourish.

Little did I know that this simple lesson learned in the tenth grade would do me a world of good later on, when it came to running a small team building the world’s coolest startup. When we assembled the RosterBot team for the first time, I gave an introductory presentation on our mission, direction, ways of doing things, and my own personal philosophies of leadership and what it means to work at a technology startup. While I didn’t use the acting allegory (I didn’t want anyone digging up any old VHS tapes), I did find a way to express the same sentiment as it applies to innovation.

I don’t think this is particular to the world of technology startups, but over 25 years of working and socializing with technologists I have come to seperate them along this vector. Four words on a single slide of that (and every future) introductory presentation said it all about the types of people we tend to work with: “Yes if…” and “No because…” I made it pretty clear to my team which one I preferred to surround myself with.

“No because” people tend to be self-appointed experts. If you’ve ever been in a planning or design meeting, you’ve met these people. They crave authority, and their means of asserting that authority is to find a roadblock in something the team is exploring or planning to do. By saying “No because” they instantly come off as the knowledgeable, wise, responsible ones. All attention in the room is diverted away from problem solving to contemplation of your pearls of experience when you use this phrase.

“No because” people snuff the creativity of teams, starving the room of oxygen, whether they mean to or not. More often than not, when you begin to creatively probe a “No because” person, it becomes obvious that they are considering a single or very few reasons for objection to a given idea or direction, and they’re stuck there. In introducing their blocker in this way, they drag the rest of us into their quagmire. Good ideas can become marooned on the rocks of this form of objection. Instead, there’s a better way.

“Yes if” people are oftentimes no closer to a final solution than the naysayers. The way in which they voice the perceived roadblocks identifies that just the same, but does so in a way that encourages contribution. Teams working from a “Yes if” statement can continue to problem-solve as peers, and no self-delegated authority is perceived to be standing in their way. “Yes if” people solve problems in creative ways, invent new things, and find innovative approaches to business opportunities.

“Yes if” people are valuable contributors to problem solving. They extend the plausibility of a solution to any problem, regardless of how ludicrous their “if” condition might actually be. The odds are good, in my experience, that someone will jump in with a slightly less ludicrous means to combat their ludicrous condition. And so, we iterate to solve the problem, jumping from “Yes if” to “Yes if” like lily pads, until the problem is solved.

Every nerd loves the movie Apollo 13 and this one is no exception. In this scene we see the beginnings of the triumph of “Yes if” over “No because”:

The results, as the actual history books show, speak for themselves.  The impossible became possible.

If you truly want to break new ground, chase something innovative or simply tackle the hard problems, you’ll need to banish “No because” from any discussions. And reward every “Yes if” regardless of how ridiculous it may seem. The Yeses have it, every time.

Ian Bell has been bending bits into business since 1993 and is creator of ‪Tingle, ‪RosterBot and other things celebrated and ignominious. Follow him @ianb on Twitter.

Nowadays that’s really no longer possible. I still snicker when sitting in meetings where we talk about moving a few pixels around on a screen or changing the shading of a button (the kind of thing I’d do myself between sips of Jolt Cola in the 1990s), but it takes a substantial team to create a credible web service that offers a meaningful experience to end customers. There is some respite from this, though: If you’re just looking to sell stuff there are hosted services like Shopify, and if you’re just looking to publish stuff, there are open-source software web frameworks like WordPress that can make this pretty easy to customize on the cheap.

But for making apps? Not so much. People assume, without really thinking through the problem at hand, that apps are easier to create than a full-blown website. In reality, they are ever so much harder. First of all, you have the problem that there are multiple platforms (iOS, Android being the primary ones) for creating an app. Want to serve everyone? You’ll need to support more than one platform. Want to choose just one? Remember that there are a lot fewer iOS (iPhone, iPad) users than there are Android (Samsung, LG, HTC, and more) users. However, in a strange quirk of fate more iOS users actively seek out and use apps.

And sure, more sophisticated developers will tell you that there are open-source and commercial frameworks that promise to allow you to write a single codebase and support multiple mobile phone platforms. Depending on the complexity of what you’re looking to do, that may or may not solve or exacerbate your problem. But the more important, dynamic people often fail to understand is that apps are just a beachhead. The overwhelming majority of apps you see in the App and Play stores communicate with a server somewhere on the Internet in order to store, retrieve, and compare information—particularly apps that have social features or which operate some sort of service. So really, the app is just the tip of the iceberg. You’ll have to think about what sort of functions the server element of your solution needs to perform. Data stored on one app cannot be shared on another user’s app without transiting your server, remember. So, broadly speaking, most apps are really just a user interface slapped on to a series of tasks performed by an internet server floating out there somewhere in the cloud.

Most developers tend to specialize. If you’re creating an app for iOS, generally that coder will have specialized skills for that development environment (xCode or Swift). If you’re building the Android version of your app, there are coders who work in Java or other frameworks created for that platform. Neither of these developers will probably want to tackle the server-side element of your service… which requires yet another set of skills and programming tools.

Furthermore, apps are not typically fire-and-forget. Once your team finishes coding and testing, and you release your app, you are now obligated to maintain it. Shifts in the frameworks, operating systems and the screen resolutions of the devices themselves means you now have to keep on top of these changes and adjust your app to accommodate these. So building and running an app is a protracted ground war which is powered exclusively by your money.

The core message, then, is that this app thing usually isn’t so simple as it might seem. There are many forks in the road and pitfalls that can either cost or save you a mountain of money initially, or down the road. If you bump into me on a street corner and share your big idea, I’m not going to be able to quote you a price and a timeline on the spot. It is just not that easy. Anyone who convinces you that you can simply knock out an app for your business from their basement, in their spare time, is most likely focused on parting you from your money.

Ian Bell has been bending bits into business since 1993 and is creator of ‪Tingle, ‪RosterBot and other things celebrated and ignominious. Follow him @ianb on Twitter. This article originally appeared in 2016 for Profit Magazine.

1) Don’t be Chicken Little

Awesome. You found something wrong. Your impulse will be to tell the team (this is a good impulse) and help the members understand why this is important to you. The matter of importance is usually where the non-techies get into trouble, because one has to remember that when you find a bug, it’s probably the result of someone’s mistake—and they’re likely to feel bad about it. But the sky probably isn’t falling. If you layer too much hyperbole on the affair then you’re likely to take them from feeling guilty to feeling offended. Then they will begin to debate the importance, versus fixing the bug, and time gets lost. Also bear in mind that any given day for a software developer is spent slaying a vast array of similar bugs; they might have a different understanding of your bug’s importance than you do. Providing context for why a malfunction is affecting things is good. Freaking out and demanding immediate action is bad.

2) Use the tools they do

These days most software teams use workflow management and issue tracking tools (like Pivotal Tracker).  These are usually web-based tools that are easy to learn. Take the time to learn them.  When you have an idea for a feature or discover a bug, rather than barking out an email and CCing the world it is generally appreciated by all when you submit these via the issue tracker. The team members will also appreciate your interest in learning how they manage their tasks, so when you ask for a little training on the tracker they will probably be pretty jazzed to help you out. This has an added bonus: once submitted to the tracker, your idea is kept in a safe place, not buried in months of email and convoluted threads. So nobody can claim they forgot about it and lost your suggestion.

3) Take things as far as you can

Say you’re at a cocktail party and Dmitri tells you there’s a problem with your website on his computer. You’re obviously going to want to tell the team. However, this information alone is not particularly useful. Who’s Dmitri? Where can he be reached? What kind of computer was he using? What web browser? Is he a user? Or trying to sign up? Or trying to buy something? Chase down as much context as you can so that when someone rolls in to tackle this heinousness, they have already grabbed some of the information from you to save them time. You’re also showing respect for the team in not sending them on a wild goose chase. Many such reports can be dismissed with even the most cursory information: “Oh, he’s running Windows ME and Internet Explorer 6 on an ACER Palmtop? That’s hisproblem.”

4) Be interested in the process

Prioritizing tasks within a software team is black art. Mapping these to the business objectives of your company is where you come in. But you don’t necessarily get to put one thing in front of the other without understanding that even writing software effectively requires strategic thinking. Sometimes you need to make three left turns in order to head right. Sometimes the best way to do something takes longer, and other times, you just want to bash something out. There are many many schools of thought on this like “lean” and “agile,” but in 21 years of creating software within teams I can assure you that we’ve never done it the same way twice. There is no cookie-cutter methodology, and anyone who tells you there is is trying to sell you their book. Work collaboratively within the team, and allow every voice to contribute. This is also a good way to learn who your smarter players are.

5) Encourage yes men

This is worthy of an entire piece, which we’ll get to some other day. The easiest way to sound smart in a group is to be a blocker. When an idea is floated, the expert will scoff “no, because…” and provide some poorly strung together but authoritative diatribe on why something can’t be done. The temptation is for the crew to lean back in awe of the dissident’s expertise. But in the context of a startup it’s wrong. Don’t be that person. Don’t allow that person in the room. The correct response to pushing the envelope of the possible is “Yes, If…” and explore what conditions need to change for something to be possible. Maybe those conditions are impractical, or maybe someone else in the group knows how to meet that “if” requirement to cross the chasm. If the whole discussions stops at a “No” and a self-professed expert digs their heels in, then you’ll never really know, will you?

6) Don’t be a feature creep

When teams get good at working together, they get better at understanding how long it will take to do something. Agreeing on a timeline for a specific set of objectives is good and, though these’ll be soft, the one thing that tends to lead to massive expansion in the length of a project is a continuous stream of “Oh, another thing…” suggestions which we call “feature creep.” New ideas will pop up as you proceed, sure, but try to understand what’s substantial and what’s negligible in terms of impact to the development timeline. To minimize delays, before you start it’s important to sit down and sketch out both the objectives of the project and its detailed requirements. Writing them down into a document doesn’t hurt. But poking your head into the development team’s work area and saying “you know what would be great?…” will lead to rolling eyeballs and stretched timelines. The more you know at the outset, the better off you are.

Creating good software is collaborative and iterative and successful projects are rarely managed in a truly top-down fashion. Be understanding that developers’ time, like yours, is pretty valuable. By doing the things that you can do to ease their job, working within the set of tools they use to guide their work weeks, and by actually communicating with the team as a peer, you can both learn a whole lot about the process and ensure that everyone is aligned on the goals and timelines of the project. It’ll also enhance the team’s respect for your contribution as the business/marketing/sales/support/warehouse/etc. person, a role they likely only vaguely understand.

The basis of making everybody smarter is good communication. These techniques are a key part of being successful in any software endeavour, and though I don’t have a book to sell you they are an excellent starting point in diving into the process of creating new technology. And if this all seems like a lot of work to you? Time to hire a product manager.

Ian Bell has been bending bits into business since 1993 and is creator of ‪Tingle, ‪RosterBot and other things celebrated and ignominious.  Follow him @ianb on Twitter.  This article originally appeared in Profit Guide magazine.

As a rule of thumb, advertising experts believe that it takes an average of five “impressions” of your brand in order for an individual to form enough of a bond to become your customer. They might, in fact, click your ads or experience your brand several times before they become a purchaser.

This real-world behaviour, of course, wreaks havoc on the budgets and plans of online marketers, because we have been building and measuring our online campaigns like we just finished watching Glengarry Glen Ross.

The sales funnel is dead. Or, at least, the traditional sales funnel is dead. We’re now starting to design and to measure campaigns as they guide a consumer along a “decision journey” and to build the relationship with the consumer progressively and with increasing effectiveness.

The decision journey (or at least this moniker) was brought to the fore by researchers from McKinsey& Co. in 2009. In their paper, the authors described the consumer’s experience with a new brand or idea as a “circular journey, with four primary phases representing potential battlegrounds where marketers can win or lose.”

When we began actively marketing RosterBot in 2014, we realized the effects of this behaviour as we started to use social marketing methodologies (engaging users in scale via Facebook, Twitter, our company blog, etc.). We were very good at driving traffic in the tens of thousands by writing great blog posts, posting hilarious video content and so on, and encouraging people to share them. This was happening at pennies per visitor, and fractions of a penny per impression. These were not, however, leading to a compelling number of customer signups.

So we turned to retargeting. If you’ve ever abandoned a purchase at an online store, and then were suddenly beset by ads for the items from your deserted cart at that online merchant, you’ve been the object of a retargeted ad. Retargeting networks like AdRoll buy online advertising inventory in bulk on traditional ad networks (Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, etc.) and then resell these at a higher value. Here’s the retargeting cycle:

You should be willing to pay more for retargeted ads (still on a pay-per-click basis, by the way) than for generic ads because the retargeter is actually taking contextual information from your website and the user’s browser to target them directly based on their prior visit to your site. But here’s the good news: the retargeted ads generally cost roughly the same as any other online advertisement.

The challenge for our team is that we’re only interested in people who play sports, not simply those who ‘like’ sports. So, on Facebook, we market the content to people who “like” certain sports, but our content is really only designed to appeal to actual players. In this way the content acts as both a separator to filter the athletes out from the fans and as an amplifier that encourages them to share RosterBot with their friends.

The reality is that in this “social” session, at least, the site visitor is less likely to sign up–they’re just meeting us for the first time, after all. The best we can hope for in that first visit is that they share our funny video or post. This is where retargeting takes over.

Now that we’ve got their cookie (or rather they’ve got ours), we can retarget these visitors with a progressive campaign of ads to nurture their interest in signing up. This might take days, weeks or months. A healthy percentage of those do eventually return, and regardless of how high or low that number is, we only pay when they do. In the interim, we’re extending their understanding of our brand completely for free.

Unlike visits generated by our social content, visits generated by retargeted ads convert with very favourable economics. As a bonus, retargeting also plugs into our other campaigns such as press, radio ads, and search advertising, to radically increase their overall effectiveness. In essence all we need to do is generate that first impression, drive the user to visit our site, and then we are able to bring them back and develop that relationship further via off-board ads.

Customer acquisition, whether online or not, is really a conversation between a brand and the consumer. The key to success is to take a more considered, nuanced approach to developing your relationship with the consumer, and to understand that the funnel simply ain’t what it used to be.

Ian Bell has been bending bits into business since 1993 and is creator of ‪Tingle, ‪RosterBot and other things celebrated and ignominious.  Follow him @ianb on Twitter.  This article originally appeared in Profit Magazine.

Recently, I caught myself reading a New York Post article, as I very infrequently do, about the rise and fall of Lady Gaga, who received a tepid welcome to her most recent album. The lack of “hits” produced from this endeavour has led to fears of layoffs and cuts at Interscope, her record label. I was struck by the similarities between her decline and the frustrations of several entrepreneurs I’ve known who have experienced similar challenges in rebounding from radical success.

Radical success, you say? What’s to rebound from?

Often, plenty.

A music executive quoted in the article states: “Artists have a lot of help on their first albums, and they’re open to a lot of help, and they are very smart collaborators and make great work.”  In other words: early in her arc, Gaga was collaborative as she learned the ropes, largely trusting the judgment of others as she solicited their input.

The Post article discusses how the Lady Gaga that many of us know is really the product of a collaboration between visual artists, producers, engineers, fashion designers and stylists, managers, marketing strategists and a host of others—a crew that includes and is largely led by Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, the woman we plebes refer to as Lady Gaga. Packaged in the veneer of the meat dress, the 11-inch heels and the costumes crafted from Post-It-Notes, that Lady Gaga product is no different from a company. Germanotta is the CEO of Startup Gaga.

As entrepreneurs, we too are often Germanottas portrayed as the focal point of what is otherwise a collaborative effort among inspired and hard-working peers. When we’re successful, as often transpires, some leaders forget whose efforts propelled them there. And to some extent, this makes sense—we’ve learned a lot, watched specialists do their thing exceptionally well and taken lessons from the challenges encountered. In every empirical sense, we are better entrepreneurs and leaders than we were when we began.

Artists and entrepreneurs who can’t repeat successes are generally those who become convinced of their own greatness, losing sight of the team that helped them along. In the case of Lady Gaga, she recently tried to go it alone—losing her designer, ignoring her producers and generally trying to prove to others (and perhaps herself) that had she called the shots all along, and that her early success could have been even bigger.

Sound familiar? Entrepreneurs that fail the second time (and even again) after a big success often have become drunk on the accolades.

Top performers need to be heard. This includes top performers who aren’t necessarily the boss. Making a substantive contribution to success, regardless of where the accolades are ultimately directed, is a substantial part of what motivates such people to work hard and think critically. Being told they’re wrong at every turn? Not so much. When egos begin to run the decision process in an organization, those more comfortable with reasoned collaboration depart for loftier climes.

Invariably, they are replaced by sycophants and other yes-men who follow success rather than manifesting it. These second units usually fail to challenge leaders, bring more limited domain expertise and are reticent to offer the critical thinking that helped to make that first collaboration so successful.

“Time and again, they feel like they could have done it themselves, and if they had done it their way, it would have been even bigger,” says the producer quoted in the New York Post. “So, they jettison the people who helped them get where they are and hire people who are less powerful [and] who let them do what they want. I think that may be where Lady Gaga is.”

Lady Gaga’s new album, public persona and performances currently are being routinely panned as “tone deaf” and self-congratulatory. As she struggles to pull her new album through the doldrums of popular obscurity, she finds herself in a precarious position—heeding advice from no one and surrounded by people too afraid to offer constructive dissent, with her army of brilliant collaborators long since departed.

She’ll survive, I am sure.. but I can think of no worse position for a company’s chief executive.

Ian Andrew Bell is an entrepreneur and writer based in Vancouver. He does not listen to Lady Gaga. Or even Radio Gaga. This article appeared originally in Profit Magazine in 2014.