Pike Place Market is empty during the coronavirus scare.

COVID-19 is already having a profound impact on our local businesses and non-tech workforce in Seattle.

Workplace closures have left Seattle devoid of people who normally would be eating at restaurants and buying from local stores. After seeing a 90% drop in his business over recent weeks, Tom Douglas announced he would temporarily close 12 of his 13 restaurants and lay off hundreds of workers.

This is just the beginning.

As many of us work from home, the local businesses that make Seattle Seattle are seeing a catastrophic decline in sales. Many local business owners cannot survive a prolonged coronavirus winter. I was surprised when I visited Fresh Chalk, a Seattle-based business recommendations site, to see the large number of businesses that have temporarily closed or modified their service. Restaurant servers, stadium employees, actors, baristas, retail workers and more are losing their jobs or already seeing a cutback in wages.

An empty downtown Seattle means those who live paycheck-to-paycheck may need to decide between groceries and rent.

The reality is that in doing the right thing by staying home, we may decimate the city we love.

What can we do?  What should we do?

1. Buy local if you can. A local entrepreneur/angel investor told me that he and his spouse are trying to eat at downtown and local restaurants when they can. If they choose to stay home, they request delivery from their favorite Seattle and neighborhood restaurants. Check out what Canlis is now doing, shutting down its dining room and going local to keep its employees working! [UPDATE March 16, 2020: With Washington state mandating the temporary shutdown of all in-person dining at restaurants and bars as of today, consider take-out and home delivery options from the same places you might have been visiting.]

2. Purchase gift certificates from your favorite restaurants. Another Seattleite said he is pre-buying gift certificates from his go-to restaurants to try to help out. One tech CEO is going even further, rallying his fellow employees to pre-purchase as a large group gift cards to lunch spots where they normally would be eating.

3. Consider donating your pre-purchased tickets. Instead of asking for a refund, one colleague said she is donating the purchase price of her tickets to the theater plays she was going to attend downtown.

4. Donate/volunteer at local food and blood banks. Our food banks are already experiencing shortages in food and volunteers.  As jobs disappear, these food banks will see a dramatic uptick in requests in the coming weeks. Northwest Harvest distributes supplies to many food banks statewide. I donate to the JFS food bank. Blood banks also need blood, donations, and volunteers during this vital time.

5. Let’s commit fully to stopping the spread of this virus and then get back to work. Preventing the exponential growth of this virus needs to be our first priority. Working from home, social distancing, and canceling large events are rational, thoughtful decisions for public health reasons. But I have heard many tech friends say that working from home is now going to become the New Normal. I hope not. The consequences to our city and society of that change would be devastating and depressing. Once health experts advise us that we have turned the corner and preventative testing becomes widely available, let’s head back downtown.

I am sure many of you have heard of or are considering even better ideas about small steps we can take to help our great city. Please share them with your friends and on social media. We will get through this difficult time, and Seattle will continue to be the best place in the world to live. In the coming weeks, local Seattle businesses may just need us to show a little extra love and support.

Like in past years, as part of my three sessions, I explained what a venture investor does, laid out the criteria we use to make investments (team, product, market, business model and timing) and asked each of the students to pitch a startup concept (their own “$1,000,000,000 idea”). Elementary school students like titles with lots of zeroes.

The students had no pre-warning that they were pitching, so the ideas were self-generated and inspired in the moment. Each group then voted anonymously to select their favorite concept of all of those ideas presented, and we talked about making that winning startup idea even better. Interestingly, just like in adult world, my sense is that roughly half of the students based their votes on the particular student pitching an idea (“I am secretly voting for my friend’s idea”) and the other half on the quality of the idea regardless of the presenter.

Here were the winners and some of my favorites.

First Group:

Company: TV Truck

This idea, presented by my youngest son Gabe, stemmed from his recent experience with a Game Truck, an RV that shows up at pre-teen birthday parties with four big-screen TVs and the latest in console gaming technology. Kids gorge on the multi-player games, sitting side-by-side on nice leather couches. Gabe’s idea was to offer the same experience for big sporting events like the Super Bowl: big-screen TVs, all the Doritos you can eat, and age-appropriate drinks for the entire group.

Even though it didn’t win the vote, I really liked a student named Kylie’s idea to create gloves that mimic the sticky feet of lizards (or geckos) to allow humans to climb vertical walls.  It turns out so does a bunch of Stanford engineers and the U.S. military.

Second Group:

Company: In-home Drones

A student named Julia presented the following problem to her fellow students: Don’t you hate it when you are sitting at the TV and want a bowl of Cheetos that’s in the kitchen? Her solution: Hover crafts around the house that could bring you what you want, when you want it.

It’s not so crazy. Outdoor drones are the latest rage.  Why not indoor drones, if not for Cheetos delivery, then how about for transporting medicine to an aging population who may at times find it hard to get out of bed?

I also really liked one student’s idea to sell a clothing line that actively monitors your health.

Third Group:

Company: Nano-shoes

Looking for a new pair of shoes? A student named Xander wants to help and pitched the concept of shoes that can morph for every occasion, using nanotechnology to give you exactly the pair of shoes you want and a perfect fit. I would buy those.

Thank you West Mercer for another incredible Career Day.

Click here and here for a look at the winning ideas from last two years.

1. Nothing ever goes as planned.

For the first three-and-a-half quarters, nothing worked for the Seahawks. Quarterback Russell Wilson had thrown four interceptions and couldn’t run the ball. Penalties killed every promising drive. The Seahawks were down 16-0 at half and 19-7 late in the fourth quarter, and it wasn’t that close.

Every startup leader knows the feeling. Your product breaks in unexpected ways at unexpected times. You lose customers for reasons outside your control. Your well-thought-out business plan reads like fiction.

Even though nothing seems to be going your way, you’re still there, responsible for plunging ahead and convincing yourself and others there is light at the end of the tunnel. You embrace the uncertainty and stay positive, realizing (inexplicably) that part of the allure of starting a business is that every day brings unexpected challenges.

2. Believe in yourself, even if no one else does.

Trailing 19-7 with five minutes to play, the Seahawks were 30-1 underdogs to come back and win the game. Vegas didn’t believe. Not many did. “Y’all didn’t want to believe in us,” wide receiver Doug Baldwin told reporters after the game. “It’s okay. We don’t need you to believe. We’re going to believe in ourselves.”

Most successful entrepreneurs see something in a market few others see. If the ideas were obvious, larger companies would have already executed on them. Uber is a great example. Weren’t taxis good enough? The best startups are full of contrarians and Don Quixotes.

Great entrepreneurs listen very closely to their customers, but not to the naysayers. They believe in their vision even when most others don’t.

3. You play injured and in sub-optimal conditions.

Safety Earl Thomas dislocated his shoulder in the first half.  Cornerback Richard Sherman strained his elbow in the second.  Both men played through the injuries.

“I know who I am, I’m a warrior, bro,” Thomas said. “If I can play I don’t care if I can’t function really well. I know if I can help the team I’m going to be in there.”

Startups have very limited resources. A founder builds the product, sells the product and cleans the floors. Startups can’t afford fancy marketing materials or expensive marketing people. Entrepreneurs kill themselves on behalf of their product and team.

“They kept telling me it could get worse, but you know, it is what it is,” Sherman said after the game. “You play for your teammates.”

In Sunday’s fourth quarter, when they went onto the field with one collective arm, Sherman and Thomas taught a master class in hard-nosed entrepreneurial leadership.

4. Take advantage when luck falls your way.

Many of the pundits blame the Packers for botching the recovery of the onside kick. But the Packers didn’t just lose the game; the Seahawks won it.

After recovering the onside kick, the Seahawks needed to score a touchdown with just two minutes and a few ticks on the clock. Wilson engineered a perfect drive, capped off by Marshawn Lynch’s 24-yard touchdown run and a two-point conversion reminiscent of a World B. Free floater.

Every startup needs a little help from technological or societal winds. Good timing is a key, exogenous factor — tackling an opportunity too early or too late usually spells disaster. But even a healthy dose of good fortune cannot substitute for execution. Startups face internal challenges and typically a host of competitors. Even if you’re lucky, you still have to out-execute everyone else.

5.  It’s not over until it’s over.

The Seahawks were 3-3 and 6-4 this season. With five minutes left to play on Sunday, oddsmakers gave them a 3 percent chance to make it to the Super Bowl.  Luckily, the oddsmakers were not on the field.

Great entrepreneurs know about 3 percent odds. They take risks others avoid, believing their uncommon tenacity and insights will lead them to the end of the rainbow. They fight and claw their way to success, even when that end point seems elusive.

The Seahawks gave us all a treat and some important lessons about entrepreneurship on Sunday. That being said, now that we’ve learned these lessons, how about a blowout on February 1?

This post was also published in Geekwire at http://www.geekwire.com/2015/5-lessons-entrepreneurship-seattle-seahawks-style/.

Most experts who wax about the ongoing mobile revolution focus on the growing power and functionality of our smartphones. I have always believed the more important change has less to do with our increasing access to these new brains and more to do with ones we already have.

Human beings have so many talents and insights that in a feature phone world were difficult to expose. Today, anyone with a smartphone can produce high-quality, specialized work 24 hours per day. As an example, I am writing this post on an iPhone sitting in a car waiting for my youngest to finish basketball practice.

Leveraging smartphones to access our collective brainpower is the thesis behind Spare5, the first spinout of Madrona Venture Labs, an in-house startup studio I help lead at Madrona. Spare5 is a mobile on-demand work platform that enables anyone to complete paid tasks like image tagging and data cleanup.

The Spare5 team, led by CEO Matt Bencke, the former SVP of product at Getty Images, is world-class. In addition to Matt, the team boasts Daryn Nakhuda and Patrick O’Donnell, two supremely talented startup technology leaders, and Matt Shobe, a product and user experience executive I have been trying to recruit for more years than I can count.  New Enterprise Associates, Foundry Group and Madrona recently invested $3.25 million in the seed round.  Here is a link to the Spare5 press release.

In addition to recognizing the incredible work of the Labs’ team who launched Spare5 and the Spare5 team who has taken the product to the next level over the last three months, I want to give a special shout-out to my exceptional assistant of more than 10 years, Cindy Petek.  A conversation with Cindy helped sparked the idea. Joe Heitzeberg, the serial entrepreneur who started Labs with me, and I had been debating for months various concepts to make money with your smartphone. I decided to ask Cindy what she thought about an app where she could make a little money completing tailor-made tasks on her 45-minute bus rides to and from work.  Her enthusiasm for the idea was palpable and started us down the right path.

I can’t wait to see what Spare5 becomes over the next several years. Mobile on-demand work has the ability to change people’s lives in a meaningful way. We already have heard stories about single mothers who are using the Spare5 app to make some extra money while their kids are napping. Others have talked about Spare5 enabling them to earn enough money for gas or a date night.

Joe talks about Spare5 providing freedom—real freedom—to everyone with a smartphone. That’s a concept worth backing and a company worth building.

“Um, excuse me, I … I think you forgot my bread.”
“Bread, two dollars extra.”
“Two dollars? But everyone in front of me got free bread.”
“You want bread?”
“Yes, please.”
“Three dollars!”
“What?”
“No soup for you!”
— George and the Soup Nazi, in “The Soup Nazi,” 

I spend far too much time trying to convince people to say “yes,” especially people who are looking for reasons to say “no.” I think of myself as a pretty good salesperson, but I don’t think I have ever convinced someone to change his or her mind once it was made up.

Let me give some examples just from the past two weeks.

We made an offer to an amazing candidate to join a portfolio company. He laid out a series of issues that we needed to address before he would say “yes.” We attended to each issue and improved our offer significantly. He agreed that we had knocked down each one of his objections and that he was very happy with the revised offer. But he just couldn’t get there for reasons he couldn’t or wasn’t willing to explain. We should have recognized earlier he was never going to get there.

I also recently upgraded to the new Comcast X1 service. Now the TV in our bedroom won’t play back recordings. A Comcast technician came to our house and said he knows how to fix the problem by replacing the new box with a different type of box (at no extra cost to Comcast). But he can’t do it. Comcast won’t let technicians make that device change in our particular region — it boxes its employees into saying “no.”

One of my companies had a third meeting with a venture capitalist. The investor asked for a new set of numbers and another detailed financial analysis to prove that the market size was sufficiently large. It was the same market size question that the investor had expressed issues with during the first and second meetings. The investor ultimately passed, citing market size as the issue. We were never going to convince him. He was looking for reasons to say “no.”

Why do we spend so much time trying to get people off of “no” when there are so many people looking for reasons to say “yes”?

I went on a sales call last week to present a new software product that is yet to be built. Five minutes into the presentation, the decision maker on the other side of the table stopped us and said he wanted to try to make a sale happen. We were excited but pushed back to set expectations, explaining that we didn’t have a shippable product yet. That didn’t matter. He had already bought in. He asked us how quickly we could install something to test. He was looking for reasons to say “yes.”

When you are negotiating for something you want, ask yourself whether you are starting on your own 10-yard line or on the 40. Is the other party looking for a reason to say “yes” or “no”? You rarely score if you are starting on your own 10.

After failing to hire that first candidate, we started recruiting another equally accomplished individual. After several interviews and reference checking, we presented an offer. The negotiation was short. We made some slight modifications, and he accepted the terms, both of us trusting each other’s good intentions. We both were looking for reasons to say “yes.” He started today.

Don’t waste your time with people looking for reasons to say “no.” You can feel it viscerally in a negotiation. No matter how hard you try or how many concessions you make, you’re unlikely to get there. The good news is, if you refocus your efforts, you will likely find someone else is waiting to say yes.

My latest Dirty Diaper

Not just tech products, either. Game of Thrones is a great product, which is why I feel the need to blab on and on about it until I nauseate those who haven’t gotten hooked yet.

With summer approaching, I feel the need to share with you another truly great product: the Dirty Diaper.  The Dirty Diaper is the result of roasting a marshmallow with chocolate shoved into it.  Done correctly, you are treated to a toasted marshmallow with hot melted chocolate inside.  Think new-and-improved cousin to the s’more, sans graham cracker.

I can’t take credit for this revolutionary dessert. My youngest son told me about the concept (he learned  about it from some worthy soul at a campout), and I am now happier and slightly more rotund because of it.

If you are lucky enough to have changed a few soiled diapers, Dirty Diaper is the perfect name. This combination of marshmallow and chocolate look very similar to the dirty diapers I have experienced, but thankfully taste and smell differently.

Many of you are now thinking, “Greg, you could have just tweeted this pic and saved me from reading 223 words.” When you try a Dirty Diaper at your next outdoor fire, I think you will agree 140 characters would not have sufficed.

So, I thought we should come up with 10 other important limits that we as a city can and should place on new technology-based business models. Here they are:

1. To protect the legitimate interests of the U.S. Postal Service and keep the price of stamps reasonable for our citizens, the City should cap the number of emails we send to no more than five per day.
2. To protect the legitimate interests of U.S. petroleum companies, local gasoline stations, and our strategic interests in the Middle East, the City should cap the number of Teslas in Seattle at 1,000 and eliminate Priuses altogether.
3. To protect the legitimate interests of local employer Microsoft and the new-and-much-improved Windows Phone, the City Council should cap the number of iPhones to 5,000 and Android mobile devices to 10,000.  While we are at it, shouldn’t we cap the number of Google searches to five per day to protect the important tax revenue that comes from the relevant high-paid, Seattle-based Microsoft employees that work in search?
4. To protect the legitimate interests of local hotels and their employees, the City should cap the number of Seattle listings on airbnb to 10.
5. To protect the legitimate interests of PC manufacturers and the important operating systems that run on PCs, the City Council should cap the number of mobile tablets in the city at 1,000.
6. To protect the legitimate interests and margins of our local hospitals, the City Council should limit the number of Fitbits to no more than 1,000 within the city limits. Moreover, the City should cap the use of arthroscopic surgery to one body part per individual as this new surgical procedure may limit the amount of time people spend in the hospital.
7. To protect the legitimate interests of our school teachers, the City should cap the amount of time students can spend on Khan Academy and other free learning sites to no more than one hour per week.
8. To protect the legitimate interests of cellular companies and their employees in our region, the City should cap the amount of free Wi-Fi we can use for data transfer to no more than three hours per day.
9. To protect the legitimate interests of local merchants and retailers without hurting the growth of Seattle-based Amazon, the City Council should cap the amount of non-Amazon e-commerce purchases to no more than three per year.
10. To protect the legitimate interests of our local movie theaters and retail DVD/VHS video stores, the City should cap the number of on-demand movies to one per week.

The City needs to act quickly because once these technologies and new business models take hold, it is very difficult to go back.

My session was entitled “Your Billion-Dollar Idea.” Like last year, I explained what a venture capitalist does, laid out the criteria we use to make investments (team, product, market, business model and timing) and gave each student the opportunity to pitch a new business concept. Each of the three groups I led picked a winning idea. I promised the students I would publish the winners here.

First Group

Company: Weather Changer

A student named Christina told us that her mother is always complaining about the weather. Her pitch was to use massive airborne fans to push bad weather like rain or snow to places that need it, like farms or ski mountains. One of the students mentioned that we might want to push bad weather over the Super Bowl to throw off Peyton Manning.  Love it.

Second Group 

Company: 3D Phone

Borrowing a page from George Lucas, a student named Evan pitched a small phone that could project holograms so you could talk to your mom in all her 3D glory or play games that are much more immersive. I know some intrepid folks are already working on making these types of interfaces. They have some future buyers in group 2.

Another idea from this group that didn’t win (but I would buy instantly): gloves that auto-massage your hands.

Third Group

Company: Clean Hands

In each group, at least one student pushed the idea of using fingerprints or facial recognition to unlock doors, lockers and/or mailboxes. But it took the marketing genius of a student named Cade to get sensor technology into the winner’s circle. Cade said he thought we needed some kind of sensing devices in bathrooms to make sure people wash their hands after taking care of their business. The group decided this idea might be especially important for employees who handle food at restaurants.

Based on my day at West Mercer, I am more convinced than ever that we don’t give young people enough credit. They are so creative and have few preconceptions about what’s possible.  Somewhere amidst hearing “no” for the thousandth time, most of us lose that ability to think outside the box. Thankfully, some of the great entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk never did. I bet they would have enjoyed hearing the student pitches today as much as I did.

Click here for a look at the winning ideas from last year.

I just binge-watched all six seasons of Breaking Bad. If you haven’t downloaded the AMC show (but plan to soon), prepare yourself for experiencing someone else’s mid-life crisis, with healthy doses of terminal illness, murder, infidelity and drug-dealing thrown in to keep it interesting. Spending time with chemistry-teacher-turned-meth-kingpin Walter White, his family and the surrounding characters is exhausting and engrossing at the same time. The characters (and Walt especially) are more complex than any you have spent time with on the TV screen.

Instead of reviewing the show, as others have done far better than I could, I thought it would be fun to review what lessons the show teaches us about entrepreneurship. Walt is, in the end, an entrepreneur. He makes some good and not-so-good choices. Below are six lessons from Walt’s experiences as an entrepreneur.

Choose the right co-founder

Walt understood early on that he needed a co-founder that rounded out his skill set. Jesse Pinkman, Walt’s co-founder in crime, handled distribution, and Walt headed up product. Until the final season, they did more than that for each other. They had each other’s back and balanced each other out emotionally. Most investors prefer Walt’s multi-founder approach to starting a company. (In technology startups, that means a strong business co-founder with an equally strong technical co-founder.) As important as picking a co-founder who minimizes your functional weaknesses, seek out someone who balances you, personality-wise. Every startup goes through major ups and downs. Maybe you won’t be running from drug cartels, neo-Nazis and the DEA like Walt and Jesse, but starting a company will likely be an emotional roller coaster. Find someone you want next to you in a foxhole.

Pursue your passion

You should only start something as crazy as a startup if you are fanatical about it. You can’t sleep at night because you are thinking about it. You find yourself taking longer showers because you are daydreaming about your would-be company. Walt didn’t cook meth just to make money for his family. My favorite Walt quote comes in the last episode, when he is admitting to his wife the real reasons why he built his drug business: “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really … I was alive.”

In a crowded market, you need clear differentiation

Walt made great product. It was based on better chemistry and was more pure. One of the key ingredients to his distribution success, however, had little to do with the quality of his product. His approach to cooking meth yielded a product that was blue in color. That blue color became his product’s signature. If you are competing in a competitive environment, having a feature that is truly your own can be an important advantage.

Pick partners you trust

The most important quality when picking partners for your business is trust. Even though the drug business is not a bastion for saints, Walt was fortunate to have chosen several partners who were loyal to him. Saul Goodman, Walt’s lawyer, invented new ways to be slimy, but he consistently gave Walt candid advice, and helped to steer him in the right direction numerous times. Walt’s big mistakes (other than dealing drugs and murder) were in selecting some partners that ultimately turned on him: Gus, the neo-Nazis and Lydia. No matter what you’re selling — meth or widgets — finding trusted advisers and partners is critical.

Think before you talk publicly

One of the most interesting scenes in the series involved Walt’s reaction to listening to two former colleagues undermine him publicly on TV. When you talk on TV, get quoted in a newspaper, a blog, a tweet, a Facebook post, or make comments to people you don’t know well, assume that your employees, competitors and partners are listening. Because they are.

Life is short: Avoid jail

One way to avoid jail is to stay away from businesses that are illegal (like selling drugs), or that might be illegal if governmental winds blow that way. I have tended to shy away from gambling plays for that reason, even though they are often very interesting. If you want to sleep better at night, stay away from the black (and the gray).

This post was published in AllThingsD.com (http://allthingsd.com/20131203/a-breaking-bad-guide-to-entrepreneurship/?mod=atd_homepage_carousel).

I was snooping through my son’s middle school yearbook recently when I came across a disturbing inscription from a fellow classmate.  This preteen had taken up an entire page to draw a schematic of a strip club, replete with a stick figure woman doing a pole dance and another stick figure woman giving a lap dance to a stick figure man.  How do I know that he intended it to be a lap dance?  Mercifully, he handwrote “lap dance” with an arrow pointing to the stick figures in question, just in case there was any doubt.

Why do I share this with you (other than so that you could revel in the chutzpah of a preteen being so wildly inappropriate in an inscription that would clearly be read by parents)?

As someone who often speaks before he thinks and can be emotional at times, I have developed these rules of self-censorship.  Please feel free to suggest some rules of your own.

1. Reread. Before you hit send, reread what you have written. If something feels off, delete it. That goes for tweets and Facebook/Instagram posts as well. 

2. Sleep on it. If you are writing an angry email response or post, sleep on it. See if the language feels right in the morning.

3. Hop on the phone. Don’t write about other people in a medium in which your words can easily be resent. For example, reference checks are better done over the phone unless they are perfunctory or glowing.

4. Does it pass The Wall Street Journal test? The test asks the following question: Would you feel comfortable if what you are doing, writing or saying shows up on the front page of The Wall Street Journal? If the answer is no, stop and rethink.

Oh, and if you are in middle school or high school and have some crazy friends, hide your yearbook from your parents.