Font War: Inside the Design World's $20 Million Divorce (BusinessWeeK)

By Joshua Brustein                                      April 08, 2014

Typeface designers Hoefler (left) and Frere-Jones in their type foundry offices in 2007

Gotham is one hell of a typeface. Its Os are round, its capital letters sturdy and square, and it has the simplicity of a geometric sans without feeling clinical. The inspiration for Gotham is the lettering on signs at the Port Authority, manly works using “the type of letter that an engineer would make,” according to Tobias Frere-Jones, who is widely credited with designing the font for GQ magazine in 2000. Critics have praised Gotham as blue collar, nostalgic yet “exquisitely contemporary,” and “simply self evident.”

It’s also ubiquitous. Gotham has appeared on Netflix (NFLX)envelopes, Coca-Cola (KO) cans, and in the Saturday Night Live logo. It was on display at the Museum of Modern Art from 2011 to 2012 and continues to be part of the museum’s permanent collection. It also helped elect a president: In 2008, Barack Obama’s team chose Gotham as the official typeface of the campaign and used it to spell out the word HOPE on its iconic posters.

Among those who draw letters for a living, Gotham is most notable for being the crowning achievement of two of the leaders of their tribe, Frere-Jones and Jonathan Hoefler. The two men seemed to be on parallel paths since the summer of 1970, when they were both born in New York. Hoefler and Frere-Jones were already prominent designers when they began operating as Hoefler&Frere-Jones in 1999, having decided to join forces instead of continuing their race to be type design’s top boy wonder. Each would serve as an editor for the other, and they would combine their efforts to promote the work they did together.

Colleagues still struggle to explain what a big deal this was at the time. Debbie Millman, president emeritus of AIGA, the major trade organization for graphic designers, begins by comparing them to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, then stops. “They were famous before they got together, so that’s how they’re not like the Beatles. It’s more like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young,” she says, before pausing again. “You know what—I’ll tell you what they were like. They were like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.”

Gotham in the Wild

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  Photograph by Charlie Neibergall/AP

  In 2008, Barack Obama’s team chose Gotham as the official typeface of the campaign and used it to spell out the word HOPE on its iconic posters
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  Photograph by Ramin Talaie/Corbis

  The font was used on the 9/11 memorial at the Freedom Tower in New York
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  It also appears on Netflix envelopes
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  Courtesy GQ

  Tobias Frere-Jones designed the font for GQ magazine in 2000
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  Courtesy NBC

  It is also used in the logo of Saturday Night Live

For 15 years, Frere-Jones and Hoefler seemed charmed. They made typefaces that rendered the stock charts in the Wall Street Journal readable and helped Martha Stewart sell cookbooks. They created an alphabet for the New York Jets, based on the team’s logo. And they saw their lettering chiseled into stone as part of the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. Last year, the duo won the AIGA Medal, the profession’s highest award. It seemed to be one of those rare situations whereby two successful soloists had combined to make an even better supergroup. Hoefler was asked if there were any troubles in their working relationship for a video produced for the AIGA in 2013. “We do have a longstanding disagreement over the height of the lower case t,” he said. “That is the only point of contention.”

Not quite. In January, Frere-Jones filed a lawsuit against Hoefler, saying that their company was not actually a partnership, but a long con in which Hoefler had tricked him into signing over the rights to all of his work, cheating Frere-Jones out of his half of the business. “In the most profound treachery and sustained exploitation of friendship, trust and confidence, Hoefler accepted all the benefits provided by Frere-Jones while repeatedly promising Frere-Jones that he would give him the agreed equity, only to refuse to do so when finally demanded,” the complaint charges. Frere-Jones is asking a court to grant him $20 million. Hoefler won’t comment on the suit directly, but the day after it was filed a lawyer for the company issued a brief statement disputing the claims, which, it said, “are false and without legal merit.” (About Gotham’s creation, Hoefler writes in an email: “No one is disputing Tobias’s role in those projects, or my own, for that matter. [Our] typefaces have had a lot of other contributors, as well — everything we do here is a team effort.”) According to the company statement, Frere-Jones was not Hoefler’s partner but a “longtime employee.”

The conflict comes at a moment when the industry is soaring. Companies and institutions recognize that typeface matters, and they’re willing to pay for a good one. Customers have access to a wider range of fonts than ever before. Regular folks know what they like, even if they can’t tell their sans from their elbows. The increased appetite for lettering has created a distinct commercial opportunity in graphic design: the possibility of recurring revenue. Designers generally work from one commission to the next, but font licenses are akin to royalties for musicians. The software used to create a font can be licensed to multiple clients, temporarily or permanently. Fonts are often licensed to individuals for small amounts of money or given away for free, but corporations, magazines, and museums that want branded fonts sometimes pay up to tens of thousands of dollars for lettering used in publications or public spaces.

A market that was transformed by computers is now being transformed again by the increasing use of Web fonts, says James Montalbano, former director of the Type Designers Club, a trade group. This is a potentially significant commercial opportunity, but it is not a given that designers will figure out how best to take advantage of it. “The market is totally in flux,” says Montalbano. “Everyone is totally trying to figure it out.”

Hoefler&Frere-Jones seemed to have done just that. The firm, which had 16 employees as of this month, was known not only for design but also for business savvy. Within the industry, Hoefler is widely seen as the driver of that end of the company, with Frere-Jones credited for being the creative force. The company declined to discuss its revenue.

“I knew all the art directors in the city because I was the weird young kid with the Macintosh who knew the names of all the fonts.”

As important as fonts have become for companies, politicians, and anyone with a drop-down typeface menu on their word processing program, the faces behind the typefaces have largely remained unknown to the public. Though Hoefler and Frere-Jones were renowned among font enthusiasts, their popular name recognition was limited. Their abrupt, confusing split has drawn a surge of attention that has surprised their peers. “Our business is interesting to us, but we would never think it would be interesting to normal people,” says Michael Bierut of Pentagram, a prominent graphic design firm. “Part of it is that it doesn’t have a whole lot of dramatic conflict and there’s not a lot of money involved. What makes this so riveting is that it has both.”

Tobias Frere-Jones seems like someone who could hold something in for 15 years. He’s a thin, neatly dressed man, with posture reminiscent of the capital letter I. Talking about Hoefler appears to bring him pain; in describing recent events, he stares at the wall and lapses into silence. He regularly compares his relationship with Hoefler to a marriage—one in which he was betrayed.

Frere-Jones came to typography as a compromise. His great-grandfather and father were both writers, and his brother is the pop music critic for the New Yorker. Frere-Jones wrote fiction in high school and also dabbled in Russian Suprematism, a form of abstract painting where squares figure prominently. Typeface design included aspects of both crafts, and Frere-Jones took to it easily. “Back in high school, I got kicked out of French class because I should have been reading Molière, but instead I was doodling a lower-case K and L and M and N,” he says.

When Frere-Jones enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1988, there was no course of study for type designers. He took what lettering classes they had and was partway through an independent study when his professor admitted that he had nothing more to teach his student, advising Frere-Jones to go to Cambridge, Mass., and show his half-finished font to Matthew Carter, perhaps the world’s most prominent type designer. Carter recommended Frere-Jones for a job at the Font Bureau, a Boston-based font foundry. Frere-Jones began doing freelance work there, and he joined full-time when he graduated in 1992.

Hoefler (center) and Frere-Jones (far right) at the ATypI conference in 1996

A few hours south, a second young man from Manhattan was making a name in the world of letters. Jonathan Hoefler was also a kid caught between two passions: in his case, computers and graphic design. Hoefler didn’t go straight to college after high school, instead finding freelance work designing lettering and logos. He also began teaching himself computer programming, enabling him to automate portions of the process.

It was a fortuitous time for a type designer to come of age. By the late 1980s the personal computer had begun to loosen the hold that big European font houses such as Linotype and Monotype had on the market. It was increasingly possible to sell directly to publications and designers, skipping layers of middlemen that typified the existing system. “I cut all that out and went straight to the end users, and that is because I knew all of them,” says Hoefler, who had set up an office in a 320-square-foot cubbyhole in downtown Manhattan. “I knew all the art directors in the city because I was the weird young kid with the Macintosh who knew the names of all the fonts.”

“If you go back and look at the old logo, you can see the deal that we made… There are two names there, the same size, side by side, not one over the other.”

Hoefler cultivated a rolodex of graphic designers who became his clients, but he really rose to prominence in the late 1980s and early ’90s by designing typefaces for magazines, includingHarper’s Bazaar, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times Magazine. At the same time, Hoefler began selling fonts to individuals through his website, on which customers could print out an order form, fax in a request, and receive a disc of their desired fonts in the mail.

In the 1990s, changing industry economics was affecting its aesthetics, too. The democratization of the tools of the trade had given rise to so-called grunge typography, which trafficked in angst and messiness. Neither Frere-Jones nor Hoefler took to that trend, preferring a cleaner style based on historic typefaces. Both men were also scouring the Internet for books of samples of source materials. These were not the most well-traveled of EBay (EBAY) auctions, and Frere-Jones and Hoefler found themselves competing for titles. Given the relatively small number of skilled type designers, they were also facing off for commissions. The two began bouncing ideas off one another.

Citing the lawsuit, Hoefler declines to discuss any aspect of his relationship with Frere-Jones, including how they started working together or how things went sour; nor will he address any substantive issues in the complaint. Frere-Jones says that Hoefler began floating the idea of working together in the mid ’90s, jokingly proposing that they start a company called “Tobias and Jonathan’s Excellent Adventure (LLC).” One evening in 1999, Frere-Jones says Hoefler took him to the Gotham Bar and Grill and made a formal proposal that they become partners. Frere-Jones says the pitch centered largely on the idea that he wasn’t reaping the full benefit of his work at Font Bureau. He says he thought he was entering a full partnership in which the two would jointly control intellectual property, share business decisions, and have their names on the door.

Photograph by Kathy Willens/APUsing a microscopic enlargement of an old document, typeface designer Hoefler explains, in 2007, the inspiration behind a variation on the firm's Requiem typeface

His view was widely shared within the industry. When the two were awarded the AIGA medal last year, the company was described as a partnership. As part of the suit, Frere-Jones provided a series of e-mails in which Hoefler refers to Frere-Jones as a partner in communications with potential clients, the press, and Frere-Jones himself. “Never did it cross my mind that they weren’t equal partners,” says Bonnie Siegler of Eight and a Half, a designer who is friends with both men.

“If you go back and look at the old logo, you can see the deal that we made,” says Frere-Jones. “There are two names there—the same size, side by side, not one over the other.” While this is a compelling argument from a design perspective, it may not persuade a court. One place where Hoefler has never referred to Frere-Jones as his partner is on any kind of contract. In legal documents, the firm was described as the Hoefler Type Foundry, doing business as Hoefler&Frere-Jones. Frere-Jones says he never drafted paperwork to formalize the partnership he thought he was entering, nor did he hire a lawyer to examine the contract in which he signed over the rights to the fonts he had created at the Font Bureau for $10. In 2004 Frere-Jones also signed an employment agreement describing him as an employee of the firm. Both men agree that Frere-Jones signed this document, and the case is likely to turn in part on what the contract means—was he the firm’s employee? Or Hoefler’s?

Frere-Jones says that he agreed to this because Hoefler was always promising to formalize the partnership soon. In 2003 the two drew up a press release saying they had become full partners, according to Frere-Jones’s suit. It apparently never went out. There was always a project to be finished first, a commission on deadline, an aspect of the business that needed Hoefler’s urgent attention. Why would Frere-Jones allow 14 years to pass without formalizing such an important aspect of the business? He is at a loss to explain. “It would seem bizarre for this to not follow through, that we would just put all this work and patience into building this new company, and I put all this work into designing all of these typefaces,” he says. “It would, you know, it didn’t even occur to me that there would be some—you know. That I would get stonewalled.”

By Frere-Jones’s account, the situation reached a head last fall. He began pushing Hoefler to make his co-ownership of the business official earlier in 2013. On Oct. 21, he says Hoefler told him that a partnership was “not going to happen.” Frere-Jones began planning to leave and eventually departed in January.

While Hoefler declined to discuss when the fracture started, there is evidence that he also saw October as a turning point. Over two days, first on Oct. 21 and then again in early November, a handful of Web domains related to Hoefler and Frere-Jones’s names were purchased. Some of these, such as HoeflerCo.com, seem to hint at a company without Frere-Jones. Others are derived from Frere-Jones’ name, like TFJType.com, TFJFonts.com, and FJType.com. Anyone who types these URLs into a Web browser is now redirected to typography.com, the homepage of Hoefler&Co. When asked about the domain names, Hoefler writes in an e-mail: “The company maintains dozens of domains that are variations of its registered trademarks, in keeping with best practices.”

Jonathan Hoefler still works at the same building in which he set up shop 22 years ago, although he has more space. Hoefler&Co, as the firm is now called, operates out of a tidy office above a Crate & Barrel (a store that laid out its logo in Helvetica—except for the first letter, setting off a minor typographical controversy). Hoefler does not seem like a man going through a divorce. During a recent visit, he was all smiles as he pointed out attributes of various ampersands with help from books he pulled down from shelves. He recounted the untold genius of Henrik van de Keere, a 16th century Flemish punchcutter whose work is the basis for a font the company is working on; expounded on the difficulties of designing typefaces in non-Western scripts; and asked an employee to demonstrate code that automatically adds shadowing to letters, taking a repetitious task out of human hands.

Photograph by Kathy Willens/APFrere-Jones holds a promotional book in 2007 containing examples of the Gotham typeface

At this point, only about a quarter of Hoefler&Co’s workforce is dedicated to creating fonts. Hoefler brightens as he discusses the website, which he sees as a sort of Bloomingdale’s (M) window for typefaces, an aspirational display that gets graphic designers fantasizing about dressing up their own work in new ways. The office also has a legal team dedicated to policing its intellectual property—like many forms of creativity, fonts are susceptible to piracy—and a sales staff.

While Hoefler is widely respected for his design work, he has also gained a reputation for having a keen business mind in an industry where such skills are rare. Former clients and colleagues say that he can be aggressive when he thinks he has been wronged. In 2005, the firm sued Joshua Darden, a former employee, for incorporating its fonts into his own work. “For many years I personally felt like I wouldn’t want to say anything public that would get back to him, because I feared his wrath,” says Chester Jenkins, a type designer who knows both men. “I don’t think there’s anyone I’ve talked to who hasn’t had a run-in with Jonathan.”

Several designers I spoke with said they were under the impression that Hoefler was almost exclusively focused on managing the business in recent years, leaving design to Frere-Jones. This makes it easy to cast Hoefler in the role of the villain exploiting the work of a naïve genius. But Hoefler and Frere-Jones’s relationship was more complicated than that, says Mike Essl, who teaches design at Cooper Union. Hoefler had all of Frere-Jones’s design chops, but also had the ability to propel Frere-Jones to prominence in a way he couldn’t have done on his own. Business partnerships rarely last forever, says Essl, and when they end, it’s often ugly. “Van Halen isn’t going to be Van Halen forever,” he says. “Someone is going to leave.”

Hoefler’s nonchalance about the break-up seems to stem from the feeling that he no longer needs Frere-Jones, whom he says he doesn’t plan to replace. When asked whether the company would miss Frere-Jones, Hoefler demurs. “Honestly, what we’re looking for next are people who can do new things that we’ve never done before. Typeface design is something we do very well,” he says. “To think about type design in the narrow confines of drawing alphabets doesn’t seem to me like a recipe for success.”

“Anybody who knows that design knows I drew it, but my name is nowhere on the stuff. I was just erased.”

If Gotham is the typeface signifying the union of Hoefler&Frere-Jones, Surveyor may symbolize their falling-out. Like Gotham, Surveyor was created in 2000 when a magazine—this timeMartha Stewart Living—approached Hoefler and Frere-Jones. The result was a “warm and inviting voice, with the charm of the handmade but the credibility of a textbook,” according to the font’s website.

Both Hoefler and Frere-Jones claim artistic ownership of Surveyor. Hoefler says the typeface came from a sketch he drew in 1997, while Frere-Jones says he was the lead designer. In late March, Hoefler&Co made Surveyor available for licensing to the general public for the first time.

A license to use the full range of Surveyor fonts on a single computer and online costs $299. In Frere-Jones’s lawsuit, he values the rights to the fonts he signed over to the company at more than $3 million, and he says his overall share of the company is worth $20 million. Citing the lawsuit, Frere-Jones would not discuss how these numbers were derived. Hoefler disputes them. “We have no idea how he arrived at these speculative numbers,” he said in an e-mail. “They are certainly not the product of a formal valuation of the company or the fonts.”

While this is in some ways the center of the conflict between the two men, Hoefler may be holding something even more valuable to Frere-Jones: veto power over his ability to work. As part of the contract that Frere-Jones signed in 2004, he agreed to a clause prohibiting him from working for any competing companies for two years without the firm’s agreement. This is potentially a big problem for Frere-Jones, although it’s unclear if or how it could be enforced.

The legal fight is likely to drag out for months or years. Hoefler’s attorney filed a motion to dismiss the case, citing the 2004 employment agreement and saying Frere-Jones waited too long to raise grievances. In response, Frere-Jones provided the e-mails showing that Hoefler had described their business relationship as a partnership. A judge has not yet been assigned to the case.

As the lawsuit winds through the courts, Hoefler will continue to draw income from the firm’s past work, while Frere-Jones will not. Hoefler says that releasing Surveyor for license is a normal course of business. “We would never identify any of these typefaces as having an author,” he says. “If nothing else, it’s offensive to the team.”

Frere-Jones is slowly getting back to work. He started his own website this week. He is also planning on launching his own firm. “I think it depends on how long it takes to get this situation worked out,” he says. Frere-Jones sees Hoefler’s decision to release Surveyor in the meantime as a slap in the face. “Anybody who knows that design knows I drew it, but my name is nowhere on the stuff,” he says. “I was just erased.”

Brustein is a writer for Businessweek.com in New York.

FutureAdvisor Brings Mint-Style Advice to Investments (PC Magazine)

FutureAdvisor, a site offering automated long-term financial and investment advice for free, launched on Tuesday with support from top executives at Square and Yelp.

FutureAdvisor, a site offering automated long-term financial and investment advice for free, launched on Tuesday with support from top executives at Square and Yelp.

In a sense, FutureAdvisor is like a version of Mint for financial advice; it asks for read-only access to a user's bank accounts, IRA, and other investment accounts, even using the same third-party authentication scheme that Mint uses, according to Bo Lu, the co-founder of the company.

So far, FutureAdvisor is just a free Web app, with no mobile app on the horizon, Lu said, although it works "great" on the iPad browser. "We believe that users are going to want to manage their 401K sitting down, rather than on the bus," Lu said.

When a user signs up, he or she is asked some basic questions about their financial goals, such as their age, as well as their risk profile and time that they would like to retire. Users then have the option of linking to their IRA accounts, or manually entering the stocks and funds they've invested in. FutureAdvisor then creates a personalized recommendation.

"We are absolutely on the side of the consumer," Lu said. "We have a free analysis, that is accessible to everyone, and we don't take money from money managers."

FutureAdvisor does make money from two tiers of paid subscriptions: a $49 "gold" tier, and a $195 "platinum" tier, both of which provide the customer with different levels of personalized advice via video calls and portfolio monitoring. FutureAdvisor's free, basic service is based on "algorithms with human oversight," Lu said.

The personalized recommendations don't include specific stock recommendations. Instead, the emphasis is on mutual funds, especially index funds with low annual fees. FutureAdvisor may recommend a user diversify into an international fund or invest overseas, or give advice on how or when to open a Roth IRA fund. The company employs four economists on staff, Lu said, who endorse a large body of research that shows that index funds consistently perform better than personally managed funds, about 80 percent of the time. Instead, the company's software is founded upon sound financial practices that have been traditionally used for the service of wealthy clients, Lu said.

"We're just taking that financial advice and providing it to everyone else through the magic of software," Lu said.

The site will send emails to clients on a monthly basis, to help them reassess how their investments are performing, and how they are meeting their own goals.

"We're very much a strategic investment shop, and we very much look toward the long term," Lu said.

From a security standpoint, the site uses 256-bit encryption, but never actually stores a username or password on the site. Instead, that information is passed to a trusted third party, which then returns to FutureAdvisor the security token that allows the site to examine, but not modify, the user's investment information. If a user changes his password at his or her investment site, he or she will need to change it on FutureAdvisor as well.

The site is backed by Sequoia Capital and angel investors that include Keith Rabois, the chief operating officer at Square, and Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman.

For more from Mark, follow him on Twitter @MarkHachman.

El Complejo "Juana de Arco" ... (TechRepublic)

Silicon Valley's Joan of Arc complex: Why startup founders are working themselves to death

By Conner Forrest                                    April 7, 2014

Startup founders are prone to work themselves to the bone. Are 'startup martyrs' something we should celebrate, or caution against? 

Americans are no stranger to working too much. Some would go as far as to argue that Americans work more than any other country in the industrialized world. That's the American dream, though, if you want something, you work as hard as you possibly can to attain it.

We celebrate the people who put in the long hours, as it is often a measurable, physical representation of their dedication to their profession. This devotion can be found in every industry in the US, but the pinnacle of reverence to the overworked is found in Silicon Valley.

"There is something inspirational about someone working hard and sacrificing to achieve their own vision. It's a demonstration of faith that juxtaposes refreshingly against the cynical symbol of corporate toil," said Adam Rich, co-founder of Thrillist Media Group.

For many startup founders, the bags under their eyes are a biological mask of success -- self-aggrandizement of their commitment every time they look in the mirror. "This is what it takes," they tell themselves. "It's all going to be worth it." And, it can be worth it if you hit it big with amulti-million (or billion) dollar acquisition or IPO. So, it's understandable to chase that success

Nearly every personal endeavor that has potentially life-changing consequences will require some sacrifice. The point at which sacrifice becomes martyrdom is subjective, but it's often lionized as the point at which a person becomes truly recognized as an entrepreneur.

Celebrating martyrdom

We celebrate startup martyrs because we want to believe that hard work will ultimately become success, but that just simply isn't true. The equation for success requires much more than just hard work. Founders who are especially well-versed in humility will often point to luck as one of the deciding factors. But, while hard work doesn't directly translate into success, it is still a major part of the process.

"Chosen at random, the chances of an individual startup succeeding are extremely low. Subsequently, our community understandably celebrates those individuals that put literally everything they've got into improving their chances at success," said Fueled founder Rameet Chawla.

As much as failure is lauded as a rite of passage for founders, the truth of the matter is that we don't stand behind failures as readily as we stand behind those who have experienced success. Failure is death, and Americans are not fatalistic enough to truly embrace failure as a valuable experience. According to Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, 75% of all startups fail. He went on to say in an interview for that article with the Wall Street Journal that VCs, "bury their dead very quietly," adding that, "They emphasize the successes but they don't talk about the failures at all."

Startup ecosystems are generally insulated, meaning that they have a lot of people and ideas to protect from outside forces. While that protection can be valuable, the insulated nature of a startup scene can also breed imitation and mimicry; seeing a founder follow the crowd instead of carving his or her own path. Anthemos Georgiades, CEO of Zumper, said that celebration of startup martyrdom can stem from entrepreneurs wanting to convince themselves that they are doing the right thing.

"Much of it is self-preservation - creating an internal dialogue for your own sanity that those 16 hour days you pull as an entrepreneur or an early joiner are ultimately going to be worth it," Georgiades said.

Consider the complications

For some entrepreneurs, living the life of a startup martyr is not an exercise in martyrdom at all. In fact, it is quite the opposite. For those with a stereotypical Type A personality, long work days and missed lunches are a matter of efficiency, not a matter of sacrifice.

"Many conform to the classic 'insecure overachiever' stereotype. These are people who command very high IQs and who are often consequently insanely restless and always trying to improve, no matter how successful they have already been. They're often trying to prove as much to themselves as to anyone else, if not more," Georgiades.

For these founders, the martyr lifestyle is not one they subscribe to solely on the road to success, it is something that defines their lives. Entrepreneurs that fall into this camp will continue with the 16-hour days even after they have achieved conventional success. A prime example of this is Elon Musk, who works 80-100 hours a week even after coming close to a nervous breakdown. His advice to entrepreneurs: "Work like hell." I would argue that Musk is not, in fact, a startup martyr; but people like Musk can turn other people into startup martyrs.

When asked what he thinks startup martyrs are trying to prove, Adam Rich responds, "Hopefully nothing. Martyrdom for its own sake is deeply self-indulgent, while hard work and laser focus are about getting things done. Successful startups are about results not posturing."

This is where a clarification needs to be made on what, exactly, constitutes a startup martyr. A startup martyr is a founder who makes sacrifices that he or she deems painful, in order to appear better positioned for success in the future. For folks like Musk, it's a matter of feeding a constant necessity to produce, for others it can be much more dire.

Self-examination is key in determining whether your individual working style and how life as a martyr would affect you. But, according to Chawla, martyrdom is often unavoidable, especially in early-stage startups.

"By nature, some startup martyrs find it difficult to just 'call it a day' when there are still tasks left to be done, when a time-investment is the only thing preventing an opportunity for improvement or advancement from being capitalized on," Chawla said. "Startups are oftentimes limited in terms of bandwidth and manpower - consequently, some startup martyrs choose to take it upon themselves to see that particular progress is made."

Gaining traction in the early days of your startup will require elbow grease, but it is up to you to determine just how much. As you make that choice, you must also consider the effect it will have on your business and the people who are close to you. It's all about setting expectations so that your co-founders and your family know what they are getting into.

If it's going to take one year of 16-hour days, seven days a week, your employees need to understand that. Clarity of the reward is also key, as misappropriated shares can breed resentment among early team members if they believe they put in more work for less compensation.

If you can follow the regime while remaining healthy and maintaining your relationships, you have nothing to lose by martyring yourself for your startup. But, if you have more to invest in outside of the company, you might want to stick to 10-hour days. Consider what you are putting in and what you are, or are planning to, get out of this, and ask yourself how they stack up.

The main struggle for an entrepreneur trying to maintain a work/life balance is coming to grips with the fact that startups are a game of short sprints, not long marathons. Martyr or not, make sure your startup is something you believe in.

"One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying." - Joan of Arc

Conner Forrest is a Staff Writer for TechRepublic. He covers Google and startups and is passionate about the convergence of technology and culture.

How Small Businesses Can Get Products Into Campus Stores

By Karen E. Klein                                                                   March 21, 2014


Dartmouth College students in front of a College Supplies store in Hanover, New Hampshire

Since he founded it in 2008, Jim McFarland’s sports bottle company, FLEXR, struggled to get shelf space in athletic stores and online retail sites catering to runners and cyclists. McFarland, who patented the bottle’s disposable liner design, kept his day job at an aeronautic engineering company while struggling to break even on his five-employee Chino (Calif.) business.

FLEXR’s prospects brightened in 2012, after an apologetic retailer turned McFarland down but suggested the bottles might sell better branded with college logos. At a trade show last year, the company’s U.S.-made, BPA-free bottles got noticed by a collegiate licensing agency interested in selling branded editions on campus bookstores and on school websites.

Now, McFarland has contracts with several major universities, including the University of Texas at Austin and the University of North Carolina—both schools competing in the NCAA basketball tournament—as well as numerous private and community colleges around the country. And he has signed a major distribution deal for his products that could get them into 4,000 campus bookstores by the end of 2014.

BLOG: Who Needs Banks? PayPal and Lending Club Want to Make Small Business Loans

“This is going to be a major jump-start for us. We made about $120,000 in 2013, but we could triple or quadruple that this year,” McFarland says. “I’m expecting to hire 15 or more new employees.”

In 2013 the sale of licensed products such as sports team logos and celebrity images amounted to $110 billion in the U.S. and Canada, according to the International Licensing Industry Merchandisers’ Association (LIMA), a trade group. The practice can be a lucrative avenue for small businesses, allowing them to boost sales and increase customer awareness of their products. But how does an entrepreneur tackle the often-confusing world of licensing deals and navigate legal contracts, royalty payments, and distribution?

Here are some tips for getting started from Marty Brochstein, senior vice president of LIMA, based in New York City. The organization represents more than 1,000 companies in the licensing industry.

STORY: Five Ways That Small Businesses Risk Customer Data

Understand the value of licensing: “It’s very expensive to build a brand on your own, develop a logo and brand identity, and do all the marketing yourself,” Brochstein says. “Licensing is a shortcut to market, where you take the equity of another brand and use that as your path to the store shelf.” Established brands generate emotion in people who have a built-in affinity for their college, their favorite cartoon character, or their hometown football team.

How a licensing deal works: Licensing lets a small business effectively rent the brand equity that the owner of that intellectual property has built up over the years. In return, the business pays the brand a royalty—usually a percentage of the wholesale cost of the item. “There is a financial commitment upfront in the form of a guaranteed minimum payment, so even if you don’t sell as much as expected, the IP owner still gets paid,” Brochstein says.

You will also be required to sign a licensing agreement that guarantees product performance standards and grants the license holder approval over how the final product looks and works. “You’ll have to show that you have a quality product that the IP owner can trust with their brand,” he says.

BLOG: The Limits of What We Know About the Small Business Economy

Financial considerations: Licensing adds extra expenses on the production side in the form of royalties, but it can reduce the cost of manufacturing as volume goes up. “If you’re spending 5 cents a bottle to make 10,000 bottles, your cost might go down to 2 cents a bottle due to volume discounts if you’re making 100,000 bottles,” Brochstein notes. Small business owners considering licensing should estimate the cost of royalty fees and see if they are offset by manufacturing discounts, increased sales, and the higher price tag branded products can command.

What brand to license: Just about any brand can be licensed, from fictional characters and corporate logos—both current and classic—to artwork and celebrity likenesses. You can even license a new brand—a local artist with a distinctive style, for instance—that seems promising. “Working out a deal with a new artist might be a way for her to test her appeal and you to pay a much lower royalty,” Brochstein says. Of course, you won’t have the same guarantee of a built-in market, but sometimes popular concepts come in under the radar.

How to get started: Brochstein recommends that you shop your product category exhaustively. “I can’t stress enough how important it is to see what’s out there and what isn’t. Know your customer base and try to think of a license that would appeal to them but is not already out there,” he says. “Retailers often look at this as a zero-sum game. You almost have to knock somebody else off the shelf in order to get stocked.”

BLOG: How States Are Cracking Down on Small Business Tax Cheats

Klein is a Los Angeles-based writer who covers entrepreneurship and small-business issues.

10 entrepreneurs under 18 who jumped on the startup fast track (TechRepublic)

I quit! 10 things that drove me out of IT (TechRepublic)

By Jack Wallen in 10 Things,                                              March 16, 2014

After six years of working as a remote support tech for a managed service provider, Jack Wallen threw in the towel. If you've ever been tempted to quit IT, his reasons may sound familiar. 

Image: iStockphoto.com/IvanBastien

Some people assume that the world of PC support is a glamorous, Sheila E sort of life. After all, it's technology, geeking out all day long. What's not to love?

Famous last words.

For what seemed like an eternity, I served as a support tech for a managed service provider (MSP). Starting the job, I had no idea what I was getting into. As the saying goes, "If I knew then what I know now…." Would I have stepped foot into the world of remote support? It's hard to say. What is not so hard to say is why I eventually gave up being a support technician. In fact, I can give you 10 reasons why.

1: Stress

This is the number one reason why I left. If you've never experienced the levels of stress associated with managed service providers, you're in for a real treat. You have (possibly) hundreds of clients calling in all day to report their computers "aren't working." The queue lines up with people who can't get their work done because "you haven't fixed their problems." It's disaster management and triage all day and it never lets up.

2: Pay

The pay for an MSP engineer is not what you'd think it would be. I nearly exploded with laughter every time I heard a client say, "That's why you get paid the big bucks." I wanted to say, "You probably get paid more than I." But I refrained. Every time. The truth is, the pay just wasn't enough to offset the high levels of stress and frustration. It made more sense to move on.

3: Printers

Nearly half of what I did all day was fix printers. That's how I came to the conclusion that the very foundation of printing is broken. I never signed up to be a printer technician and would feel my blood boil every time I saw a support request come through that said, "My printers stopped printing!"

4: Ignorance

I hate to be one of "those people," even momentarily. Still, the levels of ignorance I dealt with on a daily basis were staggering. I was always professional, and I tried to be patient and kind. But fielding the same questions over and over — things as basic as, "What's a web browser?" — eventually wore me down.

5: Micromanaging

As a contract company, MSPs need their engineers working at 150 percent all day, every day, and each second must be accounted for and billed. So it's not surprising that they tend to micromanage the staff. Some people can handle this management technique. But it drove me mad to have someone breathing down my neck all day. There was also an avalanche of paperwork we had to do to ensure that we'd be covered in case of a disaster.

6: The pace

The world of PC support (especially of the remote flavor) can be boiled down to this: You have way too much to do, not enough time to do it, and not enough help to get it done. And as that workload piles up, you have angry clients who can't get their own work done. To accommodate this, you have to work at a pace you can't maintain for any length of time (which leads us back to #1: stress).

7: Windows

I've always been upfront about my opinion that Microsoft Windows is the reason tech support is so busy. I mentioned that half of my job was fixing printers. The other half seemed to be malware and viruses. Every day I fought the urge to blurt out, "If you used Linux or Mac, you wouldn't have these problems and you'd save a ton of money!" But I refrained. Every time. If you've experienced the stability and reliability of "the other platforms," you get this. You don't want to spend your day supporting Windows. You'd rather spend a portion of your day training users on another platform and watching them work happily ever after.

8: Multitasking madness

I am a multitasker. I often have two to three major tasks running at once. I'll be writing a tech piece, a work of fiction, and getting intense on social media. But the problem with working directly in IT is that you get your head buried in something you've been told is critical... only to be yanked from that task to do something like fix a printer for a CEO. You come back to the original task(s) and find your flow completely ruined and you're back to square one. This happens more often than not, and you lose a lot of work as a result.

9: The love of technology 

It can be tricky when your work intersects with something you're passionate about. For me, technology is one such passion. But having to deal with tech issues (often caused by user-error or platform inadequacies) day in and day out was starting to ruin it. I even began to hate it. That caused serious problems for me, as I had to go home and toil away in front of a computer to create works of fiction, which is something that usually brings me great joy. It wasn't until I left the support industry that I regained my love for technology.

10: Burnout

There is no avoiding this. You will burn out. The pace and stress tend to remain neck and neck in the race to subvert your sanity. Working support will eventually take you down. And (at least for me), you'll find yourself carrying that stress home with you. You'll go through periods where that stress doesn't seem to want to wash down the drain and it turns you inside out. For me, that was too big a price to pay.

The last straw

Not every company and not every person is cut from the same cloth. There are those out there who will gladly tolerate what, in the end, sent me packing. I am also not pointing any fingers at any one company. Ultimately, the killing blow was my own lack of resilience and my inability to keep up with the choking pace of the managed service provider industry.

Jack Wallen is an award-winning writer for TechRepublic and Linux.com. He’s an avid promoter of open source and the voice of The Android Expert. For more news about Jack Wallen, visit his website getjackd.net.

The dark side of venture capital: Five things startups need to know

By Conner Forrest                                                              March 10, 2014, 5:34 AM PST

Venture capital funding is a great tool for entrepreneurs, but its implications are often not fully understood. Here's what VC-seekers need to know. 

Image: iStockphoto/darak77

Nearly $27 billion dollars was invested by venture capitalists in 2012. That $27 billion was invested across 3,723 deals, making the average deal hover at a little over $7 million.

While that number may seem staggering to many people, it's about average for VC investments made since the dot com bubble burst between 2000 and 2001, according to the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). Yes, the economic impact of the dot com bubble was horrendous, but it did spawn a renewed sense of innovation in startup development.

Companies are running leaner than ever, and because of that VCs are more willing to invest in companies who don't pride themselves on their burn rate. Still, raising venture capital funding can be a risky business if you aren't realistic about what to expect.

Here are some things to think about if you are considering raising your first round.

1. Statistically, you will fail

The venture capital investment process is a complicated one and potential companies are vetted thoroughly before they are committed to. With that being said, just because your company is backed by a major VC you aren't guaranteed success.

Think about those 3,723 deals that happened in 2012. In that same year there were only 49 IPOs and 449 mergers and acquisitions (M&A) deals. Granted, those exits came from companies that were invested in probably a decade ago, it is still an interesting ratio to consider.

Micah Rosenbloom, a venture partner at Founders Collective, said that historically, only one out of every 10 companies that a firm invests in with a given fund will be successful. That's not to say that all of the remaining companies will fail, though. According to Tomasz Tunguz, a partner at Redpoint Ventures, "Typical portfolio company failure rates across the industry defined as either shutdowns or returning capital are roughly 40%-50%."

This isn't to discourage hopeful founders that are seeking capital, but to ground your expectations in reality. Besides, entrepreneurship is about having the courage to fail, right? The fact that you are more likely to fail is a fact of life for venture-backed companies, it is not an expectation for the VCs making the investment.

"You never invest in a company thinking that it will fail," Tunguz said.

A VC investment in your company does not guarantee success, but it does mean you have someone in your corner who believes you have what it takes to make this thing work. Once you have a VC in your corner, you have to make sure you are in sync on what it will take to make this a worthy investment. More importantly, you have to know how long it will take for this investment to pay off.

2. There is a timeframe for ROI

"Typical venture funds are structured as 10 year commitments for the limited partners who invest in the fund," Tunguz said.

Venture capital firms are ten-year vehicles for investors, but that doesn't mean that all companies will be ten years old when they return on the investment. Rosenbloom mentioned that initial investments are made in the first three years. After the portfolio has been establish, a firm will typically make follow-on investments over the remainder of the fund's lifecycle.

Ten years may sounds like a long time, but you have to consider how long companies like Coca-Cola have been around (since 1892) and some companies that were started in the 2000s have a comparable valuation to Coke. Founders Collective is usually the first institutional round in a company, and Rosenbloom said that they aren't looking for the next cool invention.

"As a venture capital firm, we are not in the business of funding inventors or inventions, we are in the business of funding fast-growing companies," Rosenbloom said.

Considering the first three years as initial investments, a company could only have seven years to "make it." Some VCs, like Rosenbloom, consider seven years the average age for ROI, and the data from NVCA supports that claim.

The NVCA reported in their 2013 Yearbook that, of the 49 IPOs that happened in 2012, the median age for IPO was 7 years old and the mean age for a company to IPO was 8 years old. While some have argued that it is taking longer for startups to mature, Tunguz argues, "The gestation period will likely fall some because of the tremendous exit activity in M&A and IPOs in the last 24 months."

To help you make it through the whirlwind of growth that can happen after an investment, you have to know how much capital you need and when you need it.

3. You can take too much funding

"All too often, entrepreneurs will think of raising a Series A round from a reputable VC as the end goal and don't think they can be successful unless they do so. So they reprioritize raising capital over building a valuable product or service and usually end up asking for too much money too soon which ends up in a failed fundraising attempt or a raise on bad terms for the entrepreneur," said Hrach Simonian, a principal at Canaan Partners.

As I mentioned in a previous article, knowing how much money you need can make all the difference in your venture capital experience. It starts by understanding how much money you need and only raising that much money. Raising too much money can force entrepreneurs to make decisions they aren't ready to make.

"If you raise too much money, you have to swing for the fences," Rosenbloom said.

You want the amount of money you raise to coincide with the benchmark you are trying to hit. If you don't have a specific benchmark in mind (which you really should), a good rule of thumb is to consider the amount of capital it takes to sustain your operations for 18 months, then add 25-50 percent for added flexibility and seek to raise that amount of money.

Tunguz said that raising too much capital is far from the gravest sin to be committed by an entrepreneur, "But having a huge sum of money in the bank can entice founders to dramatically increasing burn rate or diffuse the company's energy among many projects. It can be challenging to maintain the same execution discipline created by the scarcity of capital when the bank account is overflowing."

Another risk of raising too much capital is setting the bar too high for your exit. By doing so you will run the risk of not being able to grow into the expectation that was set by raising a large amount of money.

Remember to raise enough to get yourself to the next stage where you can assess whether or not you need to raise more money. Keep in mind that once you choose a firm and raise those funds, that VC will probably get a permanent seat on your board of advisors. Choose carefully, because you are usually stuck with that investor for good.

4. You can't fire your VC

Too many founders abdicate their due diligence when it comes to the firms they end up pitching. Each venture capital firm has its own general focus on specific sectors or verticals. Taking that to a more granular scale, each partner within each specific firm maintains investments in a focused area of expertise.

Founders typically don't appreciate the incentive structure on the side of the fund, which is based on the size and the dynamics of that fund. Understand how the fund makes money to determine if it is a good fit for you. The size of the fund will be a good determinant for whether or not your company will present a quality investment opportunity for the partners.

You have to think of your VC firm as another partner in your business.  This leads to one of the single most important aspects of your startup/VC relationship: Make sure your goals for your company line up with your VC's goals for his or her investment. By aligning your goals with those of your VC, you can help potentially avoid a disaster scenario.  

"The disaster scenario is that the founding team wants to do something different than the board," Tunguz said.  

The risk/reward curves are different for entrepreneurs than they are for VCs, and board members (including your VC) have a legal responsibility to take into account the goals of the investors. So, if your company is losing steam and an acquisition opportunity comes along that is in the best interest of your investors, they might push you to take it, even if it means you don't get paid.

But, of course, you can avoid all that potential heartache by not taking funding to begin with.

5. Failure isn't death

Micah Rosenbloom describes venture capital as jet fuel. If you want to drive somewhere 100 miles away, you'll probably drive there. If you want to get from New York to Los Angeles, you're going to have to fly, and you will need fuel to power that jet.

Venture capital gives you potential—the potential for major success and the potential to fail spectacularly. The good news here—the gospel of venture capital if you will—is that failure is not the end of the story if you play your cards right. Despite stereotypes, most VCs are actually looking to build relationships with entrepreneurs, not just make money off of them.

"The Valley is small, and life is long," Tunguz said.

According to Tunguz, when it comes to his work at Redpoint Venture, great relationships are the motivation, because even if you fail it's not the end of the world. What is much more important is how you fail and how transparent you are throughout the process. If you keep people informed when you hit a snag and ask for help with a problem, you can build trust with your investors.  

Venture capital investors want to know that you will be a good steward of the funds they placed under your control. If you can prove yourself a highly competent entrepreneur and someone who will push as hard as they can to make an idea work, failure will not mean the end of your career as an entrepreneur. At that point, even if you fail, past investors and people involved with your company will be far more likely to fund your next project if they trust the way you work.

As an entrepreneur, burning bridges is unwise. Treat people with respect to build social capital, but don't see them as just a resource either. Other than that, always remember that if you're going to fail, fail big and go down swinging.  

Conner Forrest is a Staff Writer for TechRepublic. He covers Google and startups and is passionate about the convergence of technology and culture.