1. Start-up companies are hard work, rarely succeed, and are almost always a labor of love (or of intense greed). Fortunately ours fell on the side of the former.
2. Though it’s not the mere purpose of a start-up, on of the by-products of participating in one is that you’ll learn way more about operating a business then you could ever learn in business school or by working for someone else. The start-up environment demands that you familiarize yourself with pretty much every aspect of the business, and as a result you will know way more then you want to about how to start, fund, and run a business.
3. Conscious business practices, and values motivated from worldcentric and above stages of human development are absolutely critical in the business world. They may not always be successful, but we have an obligation as conscious entrepreneurs to make them so, if we can.
4. The companies values should be aligned at the highest levels of the organization. Without that shared understanding from investors, the decision makers, and ideally throughout the organization it will be nearly impossible to cohere and act quickly enough to respond to market conditions.

In any case, I learned a great deal with helping start Falling Fruit, and was extremely disappointed that we didn’t succeed. It will probably take a long time to integrate all of the different learnings, and deal with the pain of something failing that I cared so deeply about, but in the end I have a feeling that will have been well worth it.

On another note, Buddhist Geeks will continue on, but in a new form. Ryan and I owned BGeeks, outside of Falling Fruit, and so when FF went down, BGeeks did not go with it! It’s new home is on the Personal Life Media network. The same great dialogues we’ve been having on BGeeks for the past year and a half will continue over there, and we are so thrilled to be able to keep doing it.

As for myself, I’m heading on a much-needed meditation retreat next week. I’m spending 9-days at the Insight Meditation Society w/ my partner Emily, sitting with Jack Kornfield & Co. and then walking through the woods over to the long-term retreat facility, The Forest Refuge, to spend another 2 weeks deepening in the practice.

And if you have any questions/comments about Falling Fruit or Buddhist Geeks, shoot me an e-mail at: vince [at] buddhistgeeks [dot] com

MLM’s are the tapeworm of America, the ringworm of Capitalism, the computer virus of the social matrix. They are the opposite of Conscious Business–no matter how conscious the product sold, no matter how conscious the people selling it. The individual still remains unconscious of how economics and business structures actually work, and the MLM’s are structured to encourage this ignorance by distracting from it with an emphasis on personal attitude and effort.

You want to serve while helping your financial condition. Wonderful! Your intentions are pure, but pure intentions can still be manipulated by a pathological structure. No amount of upper-left pure intentions or even upper-right pure actions can completely overcome a situation in which the dominant problem is in the structure of an organization.

Duff and I have discussed this issue several times, as we’ve both had friends and family who have run amok with MLMs, liquidating their “social capital”, and justifying their desire greed to make money by saying how wonderful the product is. This is such a common (and rampant) issue, that I’m happy that Duff has unleashed a little intelligence into the fray.

The interview is actually quite good, and it provides a lot of clarity into Falling Fruit’s mission and vision, and why we are trying to be part of the “conscious business” movement. A question and answer from the interview on the relationship between Buddhism and Business:

You mentioned another show at Falling Fruit called Buddhist Geeks, and I know you practice Vipassana meditation. Please tell us more about Buddhism and business. Do you think that it’s possible to reconcile a Buddhist philosophy with a mentality of career success and wealth-building?

I do practice Vipassana, and the teacher in my tradition, S.N. Goenka, was a businessman before becoming a Vipassana teacher. He too wrestled with the greed and corruption in the business world, and anyone who takes Buddhist teachings seriously will have to come to their own integration.

Personally, I don’t see any inherent contradiction between career success and insight into the fundamental nature of life, if you understand the purpose of business, which I believe is to serve human needs. Now keeping that in mind, we all have a need for food, and if you habitually overeat, then you are not truly meeting your needs for nourishment and health. A certain amount of wealth will feed your own needs — happiness studies in the US have shown that after about $36,000 in income, a person is no more happy if they make more money. However, it’s hard to fund a new venture without a stockpile of extra cash! Falling Fruit was started in large part because two of our friends had access to trust funds, which helped kick off the project. The purpose of large amounts of accumulated wealth is not to overstuff yourself with luxury, but to feed new things — new businesses, new projects, and yes, to feed people too, via philanthropy and the creation of new jobs!

Plus the definition of career success seems to be changing. A lot of young people are being raised by parents who have accumulated all they ever wanted and yet are obviously unfulfilled. We don’t want to go through their suffering, so we are looking to have our cake and eat it too, to make a good living AND to live out our passions AND have 2 months off a year to meditate and do personal development AND to serve the world in the highest ways we can possibly imagine. Nothing else feels like “success” anymore.

Rock on Duff!

Agile Develoopment

From the world of agile software development, through the training in Project Management that Brian Robertson and Tom Thominson of Holacracy One gave our company, I’ve also found these practices useful:

• Project Iteration Cycles - In GTD a project can take any amount of time to complete, although if it takes too long then it’s probably a goal and not a project, but a principle I’ve found useful is to define the project in terms of the shortest possible iteration cycle that one can complete it in (in my case it’s 1 week). In defining projects this way, one can quickly complete a project and can steer their focus in a more dynamic way from iteration cycle to iteration cycle.
• The Cork Board - At work we have large cork boards. The one for our production team is 8 foot tall x 4 feet wide. On the board we have weekly projects and then the next actions beneath them along with a colored tack that identifies who that action belongs too (my buddy Nate somehow ended up with the pink tack. Sorry bro.). This method has been extremely useful with team projects, where multiple people are working on things together and where a project manager needs to have a visual reference for all of the work happening at any given time. This method is way more useful then those ridiculous gannt chart programs, as it’s more dynamic, visible, and connected to the work being done.
• The Backlog - The backlog is an idea similar to David Allen’s “someday / maybe” list, where one can accumulate projects that one might want to work on in the future, but aren’t being worked on right now. This is especially helpful for those people who have tons of ideas, but find that it hard to get traction with them because they are overwhelmed with all of the great ideas they have.

Other Additions

Many of my other additions have to do with the specific tools that I use to carry out all of these things. They aren’t techniques per say, but rather useful tools that integrate well with these techniques:

• Mac Attack - The Mac, especially the notebooks, are some of the best productivity devices. From the ease of use, to the super-efficient hot corners, to Leopard’s new “spaces” features, the Mac is one of the best machines I know to do work on. And it’s sexy to boot.
• iPhone Integration - Being a Mac-Geek, I ended up getting an iPhone (check out this talk a co-worker and I recorded about the iPhone and Productivity). Fortunately it’s integrated well with everything else in my system. GooToDo works with e-mail so by having my iPhone on me at all times, I can send myself todo items, as well as check my e-mail, or reference my todo list on the go. It also integrates with my Google Calendar, so that I can have everything I need to remember where I’m supposed to be and what I’m supposed to be doing. It’s almost like it’s my master… hmmm.
• Mindmapping Software - My friend Lion turned me on to mindmapping, which is a great visual way of using David Allen’s natural planning model, or just for brainstorming in general. I use Mindjet’s Mindmanager software for the Mac.
• Google Apps - I use Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs for all of my personal and company-wide knowledge management. Google is great at creating highly collaborative software, and it’s free. Granted they’ll be taking over the world soon, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.

Balancing it Out with Being

With all this focus on doing, on being productive, I often find it useful to remind myself that it’s great to also spend time being. Being is a state of non-doing, of non-striving, one where we can be with this body and mind and focus only on present-tense experience. I have used the practice of vipassana meditation to be extremely helpful in this regard, and find that developing a calm, clear mind allows me to balance out all of the action I end up taking.

The other piece is that a productivity system, if properly implemented, should actually help create a clearer mind, not a busier one. Mark Hurst talks about productivity in terms of attaining emptiness of bits, and David Allen speaks of a “mind like water”. Both of them are referring to the fact that the more organized and clear one is about what one is doing and how, the easier it is to let things go when they arise in the mind. In that way productivity can actually be a great support for relaxing into the simple feeling of being. In the end, I think productivity is not just about doing more, but also about living a life of fullness.

In my own case I’ve been consciously practicing the art of productivity for the past several months, and it became particularly prescient when I helped start my second business. In this post I wanted to share with you the specific components of the productivity system I’ve been using, and point you to the resources I’ve found most useful, and perhaps even inspire others to begin experimenting with these types of systems. If you do, I think you’ll find that you can actually do much more then you’d ever thought, and do so in a much more clear and purposeful way.

Bit Literacy

My first book on productivity was Mark Hurst’s Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload. The main premise of the book is that we live in a world of bits, and that we are constantly being bombarded (and in some cases overloaded) with these bits. The only answer then is to work with these bits in a more skillful way, and to “let the bits go.” It was an easy, quick read and had tons of extremely practical suggestions and tools. Here are the one’s I adopted and have continued to use:

• E-mail Inbox to Zero - Everyday I make sure that I bring my e-mail inbox to a 0 count. Basically, that means that I don’t leave anything in the inbox. Everything gets filed away, moved to in todo list, or deleted as needed.
• Hibernated, Web-based ToDos - I use a web-based todo system called GooToDo that allows me to move my actions to a central place online. Hibernated refers to the fact that I can have an action set to happen on any day that I choose, so that I can do something next wednesday, and on that day it will show up on my daily todo list. In essence I don’t have to think about it until it needs to get done.
• 2-minute rule - The two-minute rule, which you also see in Getting Things Done, basically means that if you have an action that will take you 2 minutes or less you just go ahead and do it right there on the spot. This helps one avoid procrastination, and keeps your system free from clutter.
• The Media Diet - This suggestion basically has to do with ruthlessly trimming and cutting the amount of media that you intake. It’s easy to spend hours reading stuff on the web, when %90 of the material turns out to be irrelevant. Mark’s suggestion is to keep the amount of media you injest down to a manageable amount, of only the highest quality and relevant material. This becomes a little harder to do when you actually help run a media company, and it’s part of your job in partake in media, but even so I keep my Blog reader down to under 15 blogs at a time, and very rarely spend my free time taking in pointless material.
• File Naming & Storing - I adopted some suggested protocols from Bit Literacy on how to name and store my digital files. The protocols themselves aren’t as important, I think, as simply having some that make sense. Digital files become easier to find, and share when they are named and stored in a way that is easy to related to.

Getting Things Done

Getting Things Done (GTD), by David Allen, is one of the most well-known productivity books around today (and for good reason). The complexity of his system of the usefulness of his ideas make this a rich (and sometimes overwhelming) productivity system. Here are some of the brilliant ideas that I’ve ended up adopting from GTD:

• Multiple Inboxes - Where Bit Literacy deals primarily with one’s e-mail inbox, GTD recognizes that there can be multiple ways that we collect information that then needs to be processed. Besides my e-mail inbox, I also have a paper inbox (one at work and one at home), a desktop inbox (a folder that sits on my computer’s desktop that collects all the files I download), and my cellphone voicemail. I try and empty out all of these inboxes at least once a week (and sometimes multiple times each week).
• Next Actions - David Allen makes a powerful distinction between a project (which takes multiple next physical actions to complete) and a next action, which is the next visible, physical action that can be taken (ex. “Call Ronya about holiday trip”). The next action serves to breakdown a project into the very next thing that can happen, and by doing so it simplifies things and reduces the amount of time we spend paralyzed not knowing what we should do next.
• Waiting For - By reminder ourselves that there is something we are waiting for, and by setting that at the proper date (I use GooToDo for this) it becomes easier to follow-up with people in a way that ensures that do everything we can to move things along in projects where we may depend on other people.
• Multiple Altitudes - David’s system deals mostly with the day-to-day management of projects and actions, but he also pays attention to the fact that we operate at multiple altitudes in our lives. Actions and projects happen at the lower altitudes, but goals (which happen on a 12-18 month cycle), our vision (which happens at a much longer interval, some 3-5 years out), and finally our purpose (which rarely changes) all serve to connect the things we do on a daily level to the bigger reasons that we do these things at all. I keep a mindmap where I’ve done my best to define each of these altitudes and it’s also where I check in with my current projects each week while I’m doing my weekly review.
• Weekly Review - In David’s system one takes time to actually clean out their system, and make sure everything is running smoothly. One takes this time to do routine things, like clearing out all one’s inboxes, as well as checking back in to one’s projects and identify the current status of projects, removing projects that are completed, and initiating new projects. The weekly review serves to keep the system running smoothly, much like a tune-up.
• The Natural Planning Method - The natural planning method is a simple way to break down the planning/brainstorming process into it’s naturally flowing steps. One identifies the purpose, then the intended outcome, goes through a process of brainstorming any and all ideas related to the topic, organizes that material, and then identifies any next actions. I use that method for many of my projects (including planning this post) and we often use it at work as a meeting format for things that we are collaborating on together. This method alone makes GTD worth reading.

In Part 2, coming soon, I share some more of the tools and techniques that I’ve found useful, as well as discuss that important of simply being.

Falling Fruit is one among several of the first netcasting media companies. Revision3, based out of San Francisco, is another such company who are paving the way and doing it quite well. They focus primarily on technology and offer all of their content in a video format. What’s so interesting about Revision3, and why I wanted to dedicate a post to them is that their project is similar to ours in many ways, but also diverges in some unique ways.

Age: While I’m not sure the average age at Revision3, it seems like most of their employees are in their 20s and 30s (with the exception perhaps of their new CEO Jim Louderback who is probably in his 40s … Sorry Jim if I’m mistaken). The median age here at Falling Fruit is 25, and so while I suspect we have a bit younger crew, we are both definitely younger than the ol’ TWiT crew. Sorry Leo.

Work Culture: Perhaps related to their youth, I’ve been intrigued to see what the culture is like over at Revision3. Most of the information I’ve received is from watching their video show on the inner-workings of the company, The Revision3 Gazette (see video above). They seem like they have a very humorous, enjoyable, and flexible work-environment. That isn’t to say that work isn’t happening, cause it’s obvious they are getting plenty done, but just that it is far more laid back than your average corporate environment. This is something that has naturally arisen here at Falling Fruit as well, and may even have something to do with start-ups that are founded by millennials.

Geekiness: Another commonality, and this may have a lot to do with the medium of both our businesses, is that we are both extremely geeky (in the good sense). I’d actually go so far as to say that Revision3 is just a bit more geeky than us with regards to Technology. But where we lack in technology we make up for in…

Self-Actualization: Part of the reason that we founded Falling Fruit was to provide media that helped to empower, connect, and inform people who have inclusive understandings of the world around them and want to make a bigger difference in their lives. Our mission was born out of a deep motivation to serve the world, to grow in the process, and build a healthy and profitable business. That being said, I haven’t seen much evidence (so far) that Revision3 has a similar mission. While I’m sure that some of their employees are conscious in this way, the major thrust of the company doesn’t seem to be that. Granted, I’m sure they have some vision about changing the face of media that is only one small part of what we are trying to do here at Falling Fruit.

Part of the way this manifests in our company culture, is with regards to different practices that we do. We are a group of health-nuts, who live off of organic foods, use biofeedback devices, lift weights, and will eat just about anything (well, some of us). Many of us are also committed meditators. We hold a monthly meditation retreat, which half of our staff usually attend. We are also into self-development, enlightened communication techniques, and hacky sack. How does hacky sack relate to self-actualization? If you have to ask, you obviously have no clue!

I’m very grateful to be helping pioneer the business of netcasting with such companies as Revision3 & TWiT. In many ways they are our role models and are compatriots. In other ways, I think they are missing an important dimension to what might revolutionize the business world, and that is having a business that explicitly aims to wake up, and in the process help the rest of the world wake up.

Conscious Business represents the leading edge of business innovation. This podcast looks at the emerging world of conscious business and examines the strategies, leaders, cultural conditions and new markets that are driving its evolution. Listen to dialogues on revolutionary topics with influential thought leaders in all walks of business and professional development.

We will soon be launching several new shows on a number of different topics, with our aim being to create a community of listeners who can appreciate a wide-variety of programming with the intent of using insights in any one area to apply directly to their areas of interest. If you haven’t already, check it out and then let me know what you think…

• Computer Bookbag
• Macbook & Powercord
• Inbox Folder
• Home & Work Folders
• iPhone - mobility squared
• iPhone Computer Adapter
• Earbud headphones
• Rode Podcaster Mic - Just in case I have to do some interviews on the road
• Pad of Paper
• Post-it Notes
• Pens

It would also be nice to bring along a camera, but my Nikon is HUGE, and I can’t seem to find the battery charger. Ah well, I guess I’ll just have the use the iPhone’s camera. My dad said he might be flying me out to NYC in the next month or so, so maybe I’ll have the chance to test out my mobile workstation.

TimeOut, originally uploaded by vincenthorn.

My good buddy and co-worker Duff turned me on to a simple program called Time Out. They recently released a new version (1.5), and it’s very slick. It allows you to take micro breaks, where you stop and turn your attention away from the computer. I like to take that time to do a little meditative rest, simply allowing whatever contraction is happening in awareness to subside, and then after the break is over I get back into whatever work I was doing. There are also longer breaks you can set, so that you make sure and take time in your day (especially if you are on your computer all day) to get away from the box.

Falling Fruit is a Mac House, originally uploaded by vincenthorn.

I haven’t been blogging lately. Hell, I haven’t really been doing much lately beside help Falling Fruit TV get off the ground. We now have around 10 people working in our offices, including the recent addition of my fellow co-worker from I-I, Casey Capshaw. It’s good to have you on board dawg!

We are about 6-8 weeks out from our public launch, and things are coming together beautifully (and super-quickly). Having never started a company (well, at least not one of this magnitude), it has been a phenomenal learning experience. Business lingo, project management, and communication have been some of the keystones of what I’ve been taking in recently. Surprisingly the principles of business were easy to grasp, it is just connecting that with a particular and specific language that has been challenging.

As you can see from the picture above we are a nearly %100 mac-house. When we get together for meetings we’ll often have black Macbooks on one side of the table and white on the other side. Good vs. Evil all over again… And of course I’m on the Evil side.