Competing for Minutes

Gabriel Weinberg has an interesting post up called “I keep forgetting to use your app.” And yesterday, someone pitched me on a new project. And it reminded me how much competition there is for minutes. Day in and day out.

If you are building a consumer facing experience (i.e. game or app or site), you are implicitly assuming that your users will shift their minutes away from some previous activity and instead allocate those minutes to you. Your competition is not just the other sites which offer your value proposition. Your competition is Facebook, the TV, their girlfriend or boyfriend, the news, YouTube videos, etc. You are competing for minutes.

If you are building a B2B company, you usually need to compete for pitch minutes. Decision makers (and non-decision makers) at various levels of the enterprise get pitched to all the time. New suppliers. New software. New coffee machines. New this. New that. These inbound pitches come by way of different channels. Some pitches come in by way of cold calls or e-mails, while others come in via warm introductions, etc. You are competing across all of the channels for minutes.

Opportunity is not on the Sidelines

Almost two years ago, a mega successful entrepreneur shared with me some wisdom that I have grown to appreciate more with time. He told me:

“From the outside looking in, you never see opportunities. But jump into the ring and get into the fight. That’s when you find opportunities.”

Notice how he didn’t say “Find opportunities then jump into the ring.” In order to identify and understand the real possibilities/risks/challenges/rewards of any opportunity, you need information and actionable insights. Typically, this is not information you can find in a research report, outlined in a 10-K or 10-Q, discussed in a news article, or highlighted at an industry conference. Although you may find some of the information you are looking for there, you will also often find information which is misleading, inaccurate, false, lacking context, lacking sufficient detail, and or incomplete — useless for identifying real opportunities and executing against them.

Opportunities and real insights/information only come to those who put their money and or time on the line. This means constantly engaging in actions like pitching to potential clients, getting pricing from suppliers, making painful mistakes, shipping out products, losing money on some deals or projects, making money on some deals or projects, etc. The longer you stay in the market, the more information you will gather about the market and the more opportunities you will discover. You have to be in the market to know the market.

What is Value Creation?

Spend enough time in the business world and you will hear the words “value added” or “value creation” thrown around. Everyone tells you they can “add value” or that they want to “create value.” But what is value? How is value created?

At Penn, my derivatives professor taught us that any and all financial products, from the simplest bond or stock to the most complex CDO or CMBS you can imagine, could be broken down into simple blocks/units consisting of some combination of a long position, short position, put, or a call. Let us take this simplification approach and apply it across any business operating in any industry. Real estate. Technology. Manufacturing. Advertising. Medical practices. You name it. They all break down the same way:

1. Company A makes product X or provides service X.
2. Product X or service X has a total cost of Y.
3. Client B wishes to procure product X or service X from Company A.
4. Client B provides to Company A goods/capital/services of value Z in exchange for product X or service X.
5. If Z > Y, Company A earns a profit. If Z < Y, Company A loses money.
6. That’s it.

When is value created? When Z > Y. When is value destroyed? When Z < Y. A company that only loses money and destroys value will eventually run out of money.

But why then do some companies focus only on growth and not profits?

For a high growth company, profits are traded off for growth and market share. But this trade off still occurs with an eye towards the future when at some point value creation will kick in. As Mark Suster says, “This is the trade-off between profits & growth. You can drive profits up by not investing today’s dollars in tomorrow’s growth.”

And why then are there companies that get acquired for their teams or their technology or other “strategic” purposes and not for their profits? In these cases, the acquiring company expects to acquire resources which will add value to their own organization (some companies are better than others at acquiring other companies.)

Real value creation is not easy. The world is overall fairly efficient at pricing goods and services. Competition in most places/industries is high. In the end, you must take input resources (i.e. labor, capital, goods, services) and produce an output with a total cost that is lower than the price which you receive in exchange for providing the output to others. That said, there are always opportunities, inefficiencies, and ways to create value.

Nextpeer is AWESOME

One startup I recently met is Nextpeer. Nextpeer has a system that allows any developer to simply and quickly turn any single player mobile game into a live multi-player experience. The product is FANTASTIC. For game developers all over the world, this solves an enormous pain point. For small and medium sized companies, building scalable multi-player systems is not easy. Nextpeer does all of that for the developer in a well designed, slick experience. More importantly, multi-player enabled games keep players coming back for more, resulting in high engagement numbers. For game users, this is sweet as well — they can instantly play their favorite single player games against their friends and other users around the world. Nextpeer has the opportunity to become THE multi-player system that powers the mobile gaming world.

Keep an eye on this company. They are early and certainly have a long road ahead of them, but they have tremendous potential. If you’re an iOS developer, they are now out of beta and you can sign up at http://nextpeer.com/

Quote of the Day: The Edge

In response to my post, “Zynga, Pincus, And Embracing The Edge,” a friend sent me the following words from Kurt Vonnegut’s first published novel “Player Piano”:

I want to stay as close on the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.

Zynga, Pincus, And Embracing The Edge

VentureBeat just published a lengthy piece about the history of the soon-to-IPO Zynga, and Mark Pincus, the entrepreneur behind the company. The VentureBeat article reports a lot of information and history (of course it is impossible to truly know all the details.) And yes, Zynga has drawn a lot of attention and criticism from all different angles. I’m not going to discuss any of that.

The article brought back memories of my earliest days of building apps on the F8 Facebook platform. I remember Craig Ulliot posting about hitting 250k downloads on his app and not knowing how to handle all of the traffic. Keep in mind this was 2007 — Facebook with about 35-40 million users was the #2 social network behind the heavyweight MySpace.

It was glaringly obvious to Mark Pincus (and some other early players) that social games were an enormous opportunity — while it seemed glaringly obvious to many others that the silly games and applications on Facebook were just a fad filled with notification spam. I remember many people in 2007/2008 who told me there was no future in Facebook applications/games — no money to be made. Some older people told me that Facebook was just a fad for college kids. And people who were excited about the potential of the Facebook platform kept asking when we would see “real” apps instead of just games.  Fast forward to today — entire venture-backed companies try to enter the market by launching apps on the Facebook platform (and or on the iPhone platform.) According to the Wall Street Journal, venture capitalists invested $1.33 billion into gaming in the first three quarters of 2011, after investing $589 million in all of 2010. Things change quickly.

The VentureBeat article reminded me how Zynga consistently raised big money ahead of everyone else time and time again. Zynga also focused heavily on the #2 Facebook rather than the spam-cluttered/creepy MySpace (seems so obvious in hind sight right?). Zynga did so while the media/pundits preached doubt about the viability of the social gaming business, while competitors failed to grasp the size of the market opportunity, and way before gaming incumbents even knew what was going on. Zynga raised a war-chest to go after what they could see was/is an enormous opportunity, while incumbent gaming companies did not view Zynga as a real threat or competitor. By the time the rest of the world fully realized the opportunity, Zynga was already miles ahead.

The takeaway is about being at the edge — by no means an easy place to be. This applies across areas like technology, entrepreneurship, and investing. The edge is the land of uncertainty — where everyone tells you what you are doing makes no sense, will not work, is too small, is not interesting, will not make money, etc. And often they are right. Many ideas, products, investments, and companies on the edge fall off into nothingness. Yet the edge is where you have to be to spot the obvious-in-hindsight big time changes before everyone else does. The edge is where you catch the big wave. [Or the edge is where you step out of the way for an impending storm.] The edge is where you can react to what is coming before everyone else. If you wait for the time when things are clear and obvious and everyone around you nods in agreement that there is a tremendous opportunity approaching, you are no longer on the edge. You are too late.

Steve Jobs and Business Dogma

The other day I had the opportunity to go see Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview. The interview is from 1995 and contains never-before-seen unused footage from a PBS series called Triumph of the Nerds. This is Steve Jobs ten years after getting kicked out of Apple and one year before selling his company NeXT to Apple. He would later go on to lead the resurrection of Apple from near bankruptcy to, at one recent point, the most valuable publicly traded company in the world.

I found this part of the interview memorable:

Cringley: So you were 21 years old. You were a big success. You had done all this by the seat of your pants. You didn’t have any particular training in management. How did you learn how to run a company?

Jobs: You know, throughout my years in business I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: “Oh, that’s just the way things are done around here.” Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business. That’s what I found.

I’ll give you an example. When we were building our Apple computers in a garage, we knew exactly what they cost. When we got into a factory in the Apple II days, the accountants had this notion of a standard cost, where you kind of set a standard cost and at the end of the quarter, you would adjust it with a variance. I kept asking: why do we do this? The answer was, “That’s just the way it’s done.”

After about six months of digging into this, I realized that the reason they did this is that they didn’t have good enough controls to know how much it’s going to cost. So you guess. And then you fix your guess at the end of the quarter. And the reason you don’t know how much it costs is because your information systems aren’t good enough. But nobody said it that way.

So later on, when we designed this automated factory for the Macintosh, we were able to get rid of a lot of these antiquated concepts and know exactly what something cost.

So in business a lot of things are folklore. They are done because they were done yesterday. And the day before. What it means is, if you are willing to ask a lot of questions and think about things and work really hard, you can learn business pretty fast. It’s not the hardest thing in the world. It’s not rocket science.

This reminded me of a course I took at Penn where the professor would often push back on our responses to dig down to the underlying assumptions or bases for our answer. In business, many processes and decisions get made with the basis that they are “standard” or because “everyone else does it this way.” Steve Jobs reminds us to discover the underlying reasoning behind a process or decision — to stop and critically examine what we are doing, how we are doing it, and why we are doing it. For an entrepreneur this extends to everything from hiring to product decisions to raising money vs. not raising money to marketing. Clearly time is a scarce resource for any entrepreneur, so there is a trade-off between thinking and doing. Navigating that trade-off is part of the equation.

Stanford University: Transforming Global Education With Technology

In 2008, I posted about the then-new iPhone Application Development Course at Stanford University and how awesome it was for Stanford to open-source the course materials. I continue to be amazed and extremely impressed with Stanford University. They are leading the world forward and transforming education through technology. This summer, Stanford announced that it would make available for free to the entire world, three intro undergraduate courses (Machine Learning, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Introduction to Databases) for October through December 2011. This is not the first time an institution of higher education has offered to open its doors to the world –institutions like MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and others have previously offered materials like lecture videos, course materials, etc before. Places like Khan Academy and Udemy are also creating platforms that share knowledge.

Stanford has now turned what were previously collections of course materials into actual courses with not just lectures, videos, and materials, but also professor interactions, quizzes, peers/community interactions, homework, exams. This is made possible through a combination of automated grading, crowd sourcing questions, open office hours, crowd sourced translations, video lectures, and online discussion forums. These courses are being taught by world class faculty — people who are at bleeding edge of their respective fields. The courses are designed to resemble the difficulty and work required for the actual in person courses.

According to the course announcements, the Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course alone signed up over 145,000 people from all over the world. This is typically a course taught to 200 undergraduates on campus each paying about $57,198 per year to attend Stanford (Stanford estimate of the typical student budget.) Now this knowledge is being disseminated across the globe to thousands upon thousands of knowledge-hungry people for free. Simply amazing.

Stanford is expanding from three courses to eleven (update: thirteen) free courses for the term starting in January 2012. Here is a link to the Cryptography course. You can find the other courses at the bottom of that page.

Technology allows professors to transcend physical space and time constraints to leverage their expertise into an online learning platform for large numbers of people all around the world. Education and knowledge dissemination are powerful forces of change and growth. They allow people to build, create, develop, and improve both themselves and their surroundings. They make our world a better place for more people.

Among institutions of higher learning, Stanford is leading the way. For that they deserve our applause.

Post-College Travel Part Three: Singapore and Malaysia

This post comes long overdue, but I wanted to jot down at least some notes on the last part of my travels through Asia. After the conclusion of my trip post-college trip in August, I have traveled to four countries in Asia. I plan to increase this number over time. I see the emergence of Asia as one of the central global themes for the foreseeable future and the only way to truly learn about something is to see it with your own eyes. I would particularly like to make trips to Mongolia, India, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia.

Post-College Travel Part Two: Japan

For the second part of my trip, I spent four days in Tokyo and one day in Yokohama (2nd largest city in Japan.) It started with a fourteen hour flight over the Pacific to Tokyo, Japan. I landed in Narita Airport and made my way down to the JR East (one of the large metro/train operators in Japan and one of the largest in the world) to grab the N’EX to take me to Tokyo. Side note: Public transportation in Japan is incredibly clean, efficient, and easy to use. All of the signage is in both Japanese and English. Taxi cabs can be incredibly expensive.

Post-College Travel Part One: California

Readers of my blog have probably noticed that I have not posted anything in a long time. I started this blog on July 7th, 2007 (three years go by quick) and I have blogged at least once nearly every single month since then. After graduating in May, I decided to spend some time travelling. This resulted in a break from writing blog posts. In my New Years post, I wrote:

I’m excited for what the future brings. I’m graduating college this year. I can’t wait to travel to new places, meet new people, learn about new technologies and businesses, and jump into the world.

I’m happy to say that I was able to get a start on all of the above during the past 5 weeks. I plan to write three blog posts covering the separate parts of my travels. This first post covers my time in California.

Quote of the Day

I wanted to share a great quote that has stuck with me from an entrepreneur I recently met:

“From the outside looking in, you never see opportunities. But jump into the ring and get into the fight. That’s when you find opportunities.”

It’s easy to sit on the sidelines while the world passes you by. It’s easy to be a critic, a pundit. Jump into the ring and get into the fight.

China: Everything is Hard, Anything is Possible

“In China, everything is hard and anything is possible.” This quote comes from a partner at one of the companies I met with in Shanghai during Spring Break. His words really stuck with me and I saw the truth in this statement through out the entire trip. Shanghai is the largest city in China and one of the largest cities in the world. I learned in one of my real estate classes that China urbanizes a population the size of New York every year. I had to see this with my own eyes. I’m still jet lagged, but I had an amazing experience in China and my only regret is that I didn’t have more time to spend there because I really wanted to see the rural areas of China. I kept a journal throughout the trip and I’m going to use this blog post as a way of summarizing the main themes that I observed on my trip. I also figured out a workaround to China’s Twitter block, so I got to record some thoughts on Twitter as well. Keep in mind that my thoughts and observations can be easily skewed/wrong based on the short time frame of my trip. I would love to hear feedback from people with more experience in China who can supplement and or correct my conclusions.

Off to Shanghai

Tomorrow morning, I’ll be leaving to go visit Shanghai as part of a Wharton trip to China. I’ll be meeting with leaders of various multinational and Chinese companies. Hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to travel outside of the city into rural areas. This will be my first time in Asia and I am incredibly excited. As I mentioned in my New Year’s Eve post, “I can’t wait to travel to new places, meet new people, learn about new technologies and businesses, and jump into the world.” This trip will allow me to do just that. If you’re in the area and want to connect, please shoot me an e-mail. Twitter is blocked in China, so don’t expect any updates from me on there, but I will be sure to have a blog post about my experiences as soon as I get back!

Our Foursquare Rap Went Viral

The Foursquare Rap went viral! I realize by now this is old news (especially if you follow me on Twitter), but I wanted to follow up with a blog post and I have had absolutely no time this week for anything outside of sleep, school, and eating. We made it on the front page of some of the biggest blogs in the world: The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, GigaOM, Mashable, and many others. I saw our video posted on Arabic, French, Spanish, Italian, and German sites. I watched all of Saturday morning as tweets poured in from all around the world talking about our video. The team at Foursquare loved it and gave us love on their blog and in their Twitter feed, which was awesome:My collaborator on this, Matt Newberg , did a great writeup where he analyzed the results of our video. He’s got some cool graphs that illustrate his main point: the shelf life of ideas/products/anything on the Internet is very short. You’re lucky if you can even get one moment to capture people’s attention. Attention spans are just too short online and there are too many competing stimuli. Our video exploded overnight and it died out the next night with the same speed with which it had risen.

I’m thrilled with the results of this video and I had a blast. The whole process behind creating and launching this video felt the same as when I was launching new applications on Facebook. There’s very few experiences that can compare to the amazing feeling of launching something new and watching LIVE as people enjoy what you’ve done.

The Foursquare Rap – “Badges Like Us”

My friend Matt Newberg (aka @thenewb on twitter) and I made a song/video about Foursquare, a mobile startup service that we use frequently. Basically, Foursquare lets you “checkin” to venues/restaurants/locations and notifies you when your friends “checkin” to places as well. The service has had incredible usage growth in the past year and most of my friends use it daily. It’s fun, entertaining, and really useful to finding new places in any city to eat at, go out to, or just explore. It’s also highly social because you are constantly notified of where the popular locations are around your city or what is going on in your friend groups. Back in 2008, I wrote a marketing analysis paper for one of my classes where I predicted that Twitter would be huge. I wasn’t the only one saying that at the time, but this Foursquare video is my way of saying that Foursquare is THE NEXT BIG THING (I’m not the first person to say this either, but Foursquare is still fairly early stage and I’m extremely bullish).

Here’s the first song I’ve ever recorded/published. Enjoy:

BlackBerry Sucks and Death to the Cell Phone Business Model

I want to first start out by venting my frustration with my BlackBerry Tour that I purchased less than 6 months ago. Every single person that I know who has a BlackBerry has had problems with it. Either the trackball breaks, the keys stop working properly, the phone randomly crashes, the phone gets wiped out during upgrades, and or some combination of these problems (and others).

My trackball first showed signs of not working properly within 2 months of getting my phone. As the weeks wore on, it got harder and harder to use. Eventually I got fed up with it and called Verizon. They shipped out a new BlackBerry Tour for me. I restored my backup onto my new device, and when I went to upgrade the phone, everything got deleted. And the BlackBerry software on my computer stopped working. Long story short: after spending a good chunk of my day doing multiple uninstalls-installs, restoring data, and updating everything, I finally got my replacement phone working again. Even with my insane amount of optimism, I am confident that my new device will break down or cause me a headache shortly.

Now on to the business model of cell phones. Right now, in the USA, cell phones are mainly sold through a razor blade model. The carrier gives away the phone (or heavily subsidizes it) and in return, you sign a long term contract with heavy termination fees. And many devices are only available on certain carriers — the perfect example being the iPhone on AT&T. I expect and hope that this model will be disrupted shortly. What we need is more competition between carriers and device manufacturers — no more exclusive contracts on devices or forcing people to sign long term contracts. Competition breeds innovation and lowers prices. I want to be able to buy any phone and use it on any carrier with no contracts required. Some important highlights:

• On January 5, 2010, Google released the Nexus One phone. This phone can be purchased unlocked and can be used on any carrier.
• Rumors are that this Wednesday, AT&T will lose exclusivity over the iPhone

I am hopeful that such developments are the start of a longer term trend where consumers are given more options in devices and carriers become commoditized.

Time and the End of a Decade

Just a few days away and we are in 2010. It’s crazy to think that this past decade will be my first memorable decade; I’m old enough to remember the later 1990s, but those years do not have the same distinction as the 2000s. I look back on so many significant or memorable events/changes: everything from the September 11 terrorist attacks to the mass scale adoption of smart phones to the long awaited emergence of Brazil-Russia-India-China to the recent global financial crisis of 2007-2009.

I’ve been thinking about time a lot lately. Time has an incredibly unique set of characteristics: everyone has it, you can’t buy it back, everyone spends it differently, it is infinite on a generalized level, it is limited on a personal level, no one knows how much of it they have left, and you can’t stop spending/using it. Given these characteristics, I simply want to maximize the time I have available to me.

I’m excited for what the future brings. I’m graduating college this year. I can’t wait to travel to new places, meet new people, learn about new technologies and businesses, and jump into the world. I can’t wait to see what the coming years have in store for me. I have no predictions other than the fact that human nature will repeat itself in the future as it always has over history: people will make/lose money, people will make irrational decisions, new artists (musicians, actors, etc.) will emerge with new work and performances that captivate us, barriers to entry will drop across various industries, old incumbents will fall at the hands of new emerging startups, political/high profile scandals will unwind, technology will evolve to make our lives easier and better, the world will continue becoming more global/connected, and the clock will keep ticking. Am I an optimist? Hell yes.

Here’s a really cool mashup that my friend Spencer sent to me. It’s a very well done mix of the top 25 Billboard hits of 2009 by DJ Earworm. I think it’s a great way to end my last post of the year:

Pushing Beyond Your Comfort Zone

I recently had the opportunity to attend a talk in one of my classes from real estate billionaire Tom Barrack who runs Colony Capital. His “path” through life has been absolutely non-linear — he started out as a lawyer at a traditional law firm, went broke in Saudi Arabia, found himself in Haiti doing energy deals, before bouncing around in various roles around the US, and somehow ending up as a real estate investor. Now he runs one of the largest private equity real estate firms in the world.

What’d I take away from his talk? The importance of pushing through comfort zones. He emphasized throughout his talk to us how important it is to constantly push yourself beyond what you are comfortable doing. That’s how he ended up pursuing opportunities all around the world. And, as he explained, that’s what he uses as his test for making business decisions where he is in unexplored territory. As always, that’s easier said than done.

Most high achievers grow up with constant external positive reinforcement of their success. When you got an “A” your math test and your teacher gave you a sticker or your parents put the test on the fridge — such actions condition high achievers from a young age to value extrinsic motivation. Furthermore, high achievers develop an avoidance of failure. It’s too easy to stay in a comfort zone and continue achieving without much risk.

What Tom Barrack emphasized is something I have tried to incorporate more into my life in the past few years, although his talk really underlined to me just how important it is. Last year, I signed up for an extremely quantitative class filled with engineers, statistics, and math majors. My initial reaction was one of fear of failure. I wanted to drop the class within 2 weeks because I felt that the material was way above my head and that I could not keep up with other students in the class. But my father convinced me to stick to the class. He put everything in perspective for me: I would just have to work harder than everyone and that I have never in my life backed down from a challenge. Why should I back down now? It made me realize how easy it is to avoid challenges — it’s so much easier to stick to the formula that works. But I faced that class head on and ended up with one of the highest grades in the class. All because I pushed through my comfort zone.

Another recent example came to me in squash, which I only started playing about 2 months ago. I’ve been playing a lot lately, and usually with players who are undoubtedly more experienced than I. I have forced myself to constantly play with people who are better. I get destroyed match after match after match. But I push through it and my game has improved dramatically in the past few weeks. I recently tweeted my approach to squash, which I believe applies to a lot of other things:

If you want to be the best, play with the best…embrace the competition

My serve and court game is decent, but my return game is awful. So what do I do? I always let my opponent serve so that I am constantly under fire and forced to practice my awful return. And it has definitely strengthened my return game.

Basically, I think comfort levels serve as an amazing gut check. Anytime you feel uncomfortable trying something new or difficult — it means that you have to push through it and force yourself to embrace whatever comes your way.

Putting Capital to Work

There exist, on a simplified level, two main types of operators in the business world: 1) entities or people who have capital and want to put it to work and 2) entities or people who put that capital to work. Basically, Type 1 has money and Type 2 needs money to run a business, which should generate returns for Type 1. Again, I am grossly generalizing here, but it illustrates a few points.

Until recently, I had only thought of myself as interested in a Type 2 role (running a business), but the current state of the world has opened my eyes to the importance of Type 1.

In a boom, money is loose and easy to find. Capital in essence, becomes a commodity. If you are running a business as a Type 2 at a successful level, everyone is competing over you; everyone wants to invest in your business and put their money to work. Also, in a boom, business is generally good and it’s easier to find customers, charge customers, and ultimately make money. So during boom times, it puts you in a power position to be an entrepreneur putting Type 1 money to work.

In a bust, money is tight and hard to find. Capital is now a rarity. If you have capital (Type 1), everyone is competing over you. Business operators want you to invest in their company. They are willing to take lower valuations and worse terms just for some cash. It’s also harder to run a business when the economy is struggling; customers are harder to find, customers demand better pricing, and everyone tightens up. In such a state of the world, Type 1 sits in the power position.

I constantly hear how right now is the best time to start a business. Conventional wisdom today, at times, feels like it is purposefully contrarian. While right now is a good time to start businesses, especially in areas where incumbents are struggling or out of business, I think it’s a mistake to ignore the importance of having capital.

Right now, to me, seems like a better time to be investing in undervalued assets, investing in startups at low valuations, and putting money to work on much better terms than seen in a long time.

The conclusion is then fairly self-explanatory: I’d rather invest in many businesses at the bottom for cheap than start one business at the bottom. I’d rather operate a business in a boom than invest in businesses at boom prices. In a boom, entrepreneurs are in power. In a bust, capital holders are in power. Be in the power position.