Just a quick post to announce the availability of my latest side-project: FoxyWire, which I built in about 15 hours of coding (PHP/mySQL) over the course of a week. FoxyWire is an out-of-the-box integration between two of the quickest ways to cobble together an e-commerce business that I’m aware of – FoxyCart for almost instant shopping cart functionality, and Shipwire for automated intelligent fulfillment and shipping.

Until today, if you wanted to use FoxyCart and Shipwire together to run your business, you needed to either transfer orders manually by uploading spreadsheets, or do some custom coding to connect the two APIs. I went ahead and did the hard work for you – now you can use a (free) FoxyWire account as a “universal connector” to funnel FoxyCart orders directly into Shipwire and build an end-to-end automated supply chain without leaving your desk.

Here’s a bit of background on how each service works, and how you can stich them together quickly with FoxyWire to build an enterprise class e-commerce supply chain.

FoxyCart

FoxyCart is different than any other online shopping cart software in that it’s designed to be lightweight, easy to setup, and not require the customer to jump through tons of hoops to check out. It’s the last point that drew me to FoxyCart – every additional “Next Step” click is a chance for cart abandonment. The checkout page is a single screen that can be completed in under a minute. Very slick, very easy. I’ve used FoxyCart to power several side projects, and have gotten explicit feedback from customers that “your checkout is the easiest I’ve ever used.” FoxyCart also doesn’t have any software at all you need to upload to your own server – orders are simply passed into their hosted cart via forms, links with parameters, or even a JSON API. Check out their 2-minute tour of FoxyCart for a deeper dive into their features.

Shipwire

Ah, how the world has changed. Advanced logistics and fulfillment used to be reserved for large, international companies with sophisticated supply chain managers. Not anymore. Shipwire brings professional-grade fulfillment within the price range and sophistication level of an individual entrepreneur. Shipwire has warehouses in LA, Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver, and London. To get started, you can ship your inventory to any or all of Shipwire’s warehouses. When a new order comes in, simply send the SKUs and address information to Shipwire (automatically via their API if you’re using FoxyWire), and they’ll use intelligent business rules to ship the order for the lowest cost possible, dynamically selecting the closest warehouse and cheapest shipping carrier. Check out this interview with their CEO to learn a bit more about how they are trying to help entrepreneurs build supply chains to rival Fortune 500 companies.

FoxyWire

FoxyWire acts as a connector and translator between FoxyCart and Shipwire. FoxyWire simply listens for new transactions from FoxyCart, performs some error checking and logic (to be sure we don’t try to ship e-books for example), translates the orders into a format Shipwire can understand, then pushes the address and line item information to Shipwire. I couldn’t have built FoxyWire without the great APIs provided by both FoxyCart (API docs link) and Shipwire (API docs link). The Shipwire API is extremely handy in that it takes only an XML file containing address information and the order’s line items – no specific shipping instructions are required. Shipwire intelligently selects shipping options based on the rules laid out in the user’s Shipwire account.

The kind folks at both FoxyCart and Shipwire have listed FoxyWire on both their websites (here and here) as the only currently available method for FoxyCart/Shipwire integration. Over the next few months, I hope FoxyWire is able to help a lot of people launch new businesses without jumping through manual spreadsheet hell or expensive upfront coding. If you’re a new entrepreneur looking to launch an e-commerce business selling physical goods, I don’t know of any quicker way to get started taking orders and sending them to your customers than by using FoxyCart, FoxyWire, and Shipwire.

Note: As of November 2012, FoxyWire is now part of Order Desk. Order Desk is an extremely robust FoxyCart order management product created by David Hollander, which adds an order dashboard, subscription management, order statistics, custom reporting, and integration with lots of additional systems in addition to the simple FoxyCart/Shipwire sync offered by FoxyWire.

As I’m reminded by my younger friends, it’s that time of year. The time when college students across the country start jockeying for the summer internship of their dreams. For many, that’s a summer analyst position in investment banking. The trouble is, most students have no idea how to prepare for investment banking interviews, and even less of an idea what the job would entail if they were hired. So in the spirit of “passing it on”, I’d like to offer some of the most valuable advice that was given to me when I was in college, and a few tips and commonalities that I picked up myself. The below is distilled from my time as an investment banking analyst and summer intern, as well as the over 40 interviews with at least 15 different banks that it took to land my full time job and summer internship. It’s specifically targeted at college juniors interviewing for internships, though much of the advice is equally applicable to those interviewing for full time analyst positions.

What will I really be doing as an intern at an investment bank?

A lot of people don’t have a good grasp of what investment bankers actually do. There are a ton of definitions out there, but a simple summary is that investment banks help companies to raise capital (through debt or equity offerings) or sell themselves (M&A). In both cases, bankers prepare all the marketing materials and help to broker the deal (similar to a real estate agent selling a house). As an intern, your job is to help out with things like industry research and PowerPoint slide creation, with occasional runs to pick up takeout or coffee for the team.

Are the hours really as long as I’ve heard?

That depends what you’ve heard – and it also depends where you work. Your hours will vary a lot based on the deals you are staffed on, and some groups at some banks are notorious sweatshops. However, most full time (post-college) investment banking analysts will spend between 70 and 90 hours each week in the office. That’s roughly equivalent to 9am-midnight on the weekdays (65 hours), and then variable hours during the weekend depending on your workload. When a deadline is looming, hours can get crazy – I once caught an hour of sleep sitting up in a bathroom stall at 4am before returning to my desk to finish cranking out a pitch book. As an intern your hours might be a little shorter, but never leave the office until you’re sure the analysts you’re working with don’t need any more help, and never complain – you’re there to work for the summer and get that return offer, not to see the city (sorry).

What questions are they going to ask me in the interview?

A lot of students freak out before interviews for an investment banking internship, expecting to be peppered with technical questions about bond math and fixed charge ratios. The reality is that your interviewer knows you’re still a junior in college and haven’t been exposed to a lot of this stuff – they’ll tailor their questions accordingly. The key things you want to demonstrate are an understanding of the job, a strong work ethic, and that you’re a generally normal and social person.

However, since I know you want more specific details, here are three questions you can be almost certain will come up:

Q: Why are you interested in investment banking?
A: If the best thing you can come up with is “I want to make a lot of money” you might as well cancel your interview now. The correct answer here is dependent on the group you’re interviewing for (M&A, industry coverage, etc) but the thesis is the same. The key is to convey an understanding of what the job entails – contrary to what you may see in the movies, it’s not all power ties and screaming pit traders. One of the most interesting things about investment banking is the opportunity to learn a ton about your clients – in an M&A group, you might spend 3 months selling a defense contractor, then the next 3 months diving into the quick oil change industry. If you’re interviewing for an industry coverage group, make sure you emphasize your interest in that specific sector.

Q: Why do you want to join our firm specifically?
A: Here’s another one where you need to have done your homework. Now’s a good time to parrot back some of the things you learned about the firm in the information session (you did attend their information session didn’t you?) You can also prep for this question by using your career services office to contact alumni that work at the bank – ask them what makes their firm unique.

Q: What are 3 ways to value a company?
A: Ah, finally a “technical question”. Despite what you may have heard, this is about as hard as it’s going to get for internship interviews. You covered the first valuation method in your introductory finance class – discounted cash flows. Use the time value of money to obtain a present value for the firm’s future cash flows. If you’re a little rusty on this, click here for a refresher.

The other two methods are comparative – we’ll compare the company you’re trying to value with others that are similar to it. There are two different types of yardsticks – public comparables and precedent transactions. “Comps”, as they’re called in the industry, are publicly traded companies that are similar to the one you’re trying to value. “Deals” are completed acquisitions of public or private companies. These externally validated valuations give you an idea of what your similar company is worth. The key concept to understand here is called the “multiple” – you don’t compare the values of the comps and deals directly, you compare their EBITDA multiples. Divide a company’s market capitalization (comps) or sale price (deals) by its EBITDA, then apply that multiple to your company’s EBITDA to get the expected valuation.

What part of the interview do students mess up most often?

Far and away, the most common reason prospective interns get dinged is for personality. Even if you nail all of the above questions, you’re not getting the spot unless you click with the interviewer. It sounds unfair, but it’s true. If I’m going to hire someone and then spend 90 hours a week with them, we need to click personality-wise. More students just need to relax and be themselves – connect with your interviewer and show them you’re a normal person who’d be fun to have a beer with. That’s the secret that career offices never tell you.

Wrapping It Up

So there it is prospective junior masters of the universe – get the above concepts down cold, and you’ll be more prepared than 99% of your classmates (assuming they haven’t also read this post). Make sure you grasp basic financial concepts, and relax. The most important things are to show a genuine intellectual curiosity for the job and to connect with your interviewer on a personal level.

Hopefully this helps a few people out – I’m more than happy to answer additional questions in the comments.

If you read the Economist, you’ll remember their February cover story on “The Data Deluge”, which throws out some mind boggling numbers about the exponential growth of information in our society. In 2005, mankind created 250 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data. In 2010, that number grew to 1,200 exabytes. Google CEO Eric Schmidt put it another way at the Techonomy conference in August – every two days we now create as much new information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. That’s what I call explosive growth.

But how much information can we even consume? Just look at all the new things we are measuring today about our world, our systems (markets, economies, servers, transactions) and our bodies that we never have before. I think as a society we have recognized that there is value in measurement (manage what you measure), but now we’re confronted with the difficultly of actually deriving meaning from all the data we are collecting. There is simply no way to understand and absorb all of that information using traditional methods.

The phrase “traditional methods” is important, because it gets to the unique way that human brains process information. To a computer, a byte is a byte, whether it’s text, image, or video. But humans process data differently. Consider – How long does it take you to absorb a picture of your parents? How long to read and understand “War and Peace”? It’s about the same number of bytes, but the visual information is much more rapidly consumed and categorized by our brains. The number of bytes we are able to consume varies greatly with modality. A megabyte of text (about 500 pages) is harder to consume than a megabyte of HD video (less than a second).

I believe that the key to understanding and deriving meaning from the exponentially growing amount of information in our world is to exploit efficiencies in the way our brains process data. With the help of computers, we are able to translate vast amounts of raw data into visualizations that allow us to consume it more efficiently. I think that’s why we’ve seen an explosion recently of investments in so-called “big data” companies like Palantir Technologies, Recorded Future, and more (you can see the IA Ventures portfolio for even more examples). We’re going to need new ways to summarize and interpret data in the future if we want to gain value from all the things we are now recording and measuring.

So in essence, we are experiencing a race between the volume of data that is being generated and the systems that allow us to consume it all in manageable modalities (summary charts, images, video, etc). The systems we devise must evolve rapidly to aggregate and present increasing amounts of data, allowing human users to arrive at the holy grail – “answers”.

Special thanks to Dave Peck for inspiring this post after our conversation on Namesake.

This Christmas, I’ve been thinking a lot about ways to give back and help others. There are a staggering number of charitable options out there, so choosing between them can be a somewhat daunting task. This year, I want to focus on one of my favorites: Kiva.org. Kiva organizes microfinance loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world to help them start simple businesses in their local communities. I believe it’s one of the best ways you can give back this holiday season – by loaning money to those who are less fortunate as they try to change their own lives. It’s important to know that a contribution through Kiva is a loan, not a donation. It’s a way to help people get on their feet while also encouraging independence, accountability, and entrepreneurship. Kiva borrowers are required to pay their loans back over time (Kiva’s repayment rate is 98.92%). Once loans are paid back, you can re-lend the money again to help another aspiring entrepreneur – a single capital commitment can be reused again and again to help people all over the world.

Kiva borrowers are people that live in impoverished and war-torn areas, and instead of looking to the government or the Red Cross for a hand out, they’ve decided to pick themselves up by the bootstraps and start a business. Their ventures are nothing complicated – I’ve funded cafes, agriculture, electronics repair, tailor shops, grocery stores, and construction businesses. They aren’t world changing projects, but they are life changing enterprises for these people and their local communities. Your loan could be the difference between a person literally breaking rocks for a living or working in a skilled profession – both for the entrepreneur you back as well as the local employees they hire.

The picture attached to this post is of Elva Pineda, a 43 year old entrepreneur living in Choluteca, Honduras. Elva runs a general store out of her home, selling consumable items to many of her neighbors that work at nearby okra plantations. Elva’s Kiva loan of $650 will be used to buy inventory that will allow her to serve more customers and eventually move the store out of her home and into a dedicated building.

Kiva can put you in touch with entrepreneurs across the globe like Elva who simply need a little startup capital to get on their feet. When you loan to a Kiva entrepreneur, you can see their picture and have a chance to read their background and their business plan. You’ll get updates as they build their business and gradually repay their loan. I’ll be able to follow Elva and several other entrepreneurs I’ve funded as they put my loan to work.

Since Kiva is a non-profit, the entire sum of the loan is delivered directly to the entrepreneurs – over 470,000 of them so far in 57 countries have received over $180 million in microloans. You can start lending with as little as $25. So I hope you’ll take some time this Christmas to reflect on ways you can give back to those around the world who are trying to lift themselves up and break their own cycle of poverty. You can get started in 5 minutes at Kiva.org.

How is entrepreneurship like skydiving? As they say, the hardest part of skydiving is jumping out of the airplane. I think entrepreneurship is the same way.

I believe that the key to success in life is overcoming your fears and eliminating the excuses that keep you in your comfort zone. Action almost always brings more fulfillment than the status quo. “Ready Fire Aim” (the title of this blog) is an expression of that ethos. I also believe it’s very applicable to entrepreneurs thinking of starting a company – the starting is often the hardest part.

Think of all the “armchair entrepreneurs” in the world – everyone has an idea. And yet nobody executes. There always seems to be a reason to delay actually starting an entrepreneurial venture. I don’t have enough startup capital. I need to refine my idea a little more. I should save some more money first. I need to finish college first. I don’t know if anyone will use it. There are one thousand and one excuses for putting off starting until tomorrow.

So why do we do this to ourselves? What is it about human nature that makes us manufacture endless justifications for inaction? I want to mention two authors who’ve written about it specifically, one classic and one contemporary.

Sigmund Freud called these nagging doubts the Death Drive, or Thanatos – the destructive force inside human nature that rises whenever we consider a tough, long-term course of action that might do good for ourselves or others. The opposite of Eros (the drive for life), Thanatos is the natural drive in all of us to give in to the status quo and seek a state of calm, non-action, and death.

Stephen Pressfield (author of “Legend of Bagger Vance” and “Gates of Fire”) has a wonderful contemporary description of Thanatos. Pressfield calls it “Resistance” in his new book “The War of Art” and defines it this way:

Have you ever bought a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? Have you ever wanted to be a mother, a doctor, an advocate for the weak and helpless; to run for office, crusade for the planet, campaign for world peace, or to preserve the environment? Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is. Look in your own heart. Right now a small voice is piping up, telling you as it has ten thousand times, the calling that is yours and yours alone. You know it. No one has to tell you. And you’re no closer to taking action on it than you were yesterday or will be tomorrow. You think Resistance isn’t real? Resistance will bury you.

So how do we overcome Resistance and accomplish our dreams? To put it simply, “JFDI” (think Nike).

People and ideas have inertia. That which is at rest tends to remain at rest, that which is in motion tends to remain in motion. I think the key to starting anything is to actually start. Take the tiniest first step. Get off the couch. Put out an ad for a web designer on Elance. Draw out a mockup in pencil. Make that first phone call. After you’ve started, I think you’ll find the second step comes much more easily. Make that inertia work for you.

The truth is that the only way someday turns into today is by getting off your butt and starting. Starting makes things real. Starting builds momentum. Starting gets you excited. Starting eliminates all your excuses and all the reasons you’ve invented in your head to rationalize your inability to overcome your inertia. Starting makes you an entrepreneur.

I also want to point out that in order to succeed with a “JFDI” philosophy, you must also excel at correcting course along the way – what some call pivoting. It is the final and most important term in the phrase “Ready Fire Aim”. Too often we all forget to aim. Most successful business are not perfect incarnations of the founder’s first business plan, they require a lot of adaptation along the way. Very rarely is it purely a brilliant concept that makes a startup successful. Success is a sustained, long term drive, and that’s far rarer than a good idea.

Twitter is a perfect example – it started as a side project inside a company called Odeo (also founded by the Twitter guys). They soon noticed that Twitter was far more popular than Odeo’s main product offering, a podcasting web app. They scrapped the Odeo idea entirely and focused all their time on Twitter, which now has over 150 million users. Good aim.

In summary, success is action plus agility. Get the ball rolling, put inertia to work for you, and correct course along the way. Jump out of the airplane. I’d like to leave you with a quote from Machiavelli that I have printed out and hanging above my desk. Hopefully it helps remind you to go out there and JFDI.

“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.”
— Niccolò Machiavelli