Jay Elliot has a unique insight into what makes Apple so successful. He worked closely with Steve Jobs in the 1980s, setting up the company’s operational and managerial structure. Based on those years, he’s written a book: The Steve Jobs Way: iLeadership for a New Generation.

Elliot stopped by the VentureBeat studio this week to talk about his book, the irreplaceable nature of Jobs’ leadership, and how to structure a company that can continue to succeed through generation after generation of new technologies.

Hint: It’s all about the products.

Related articles

• Inside Steve Jobs’s brain: Author talks about the “crazy secretive” CEO (video) (venturebeat.com)
• Steve Jobs’s most ambitious product: Apple, Inc. (venturebeat.com)
• Why Apple employees avoid getting in the elevator with Steve Jobs (venturebeat.com)
• Steve Jobs and the age of great turbulence (venturebeat.com)
• Eric Schmidt: ‘Steve Jobs Gave The Best Performance By A CEO In 50 Years’ (techcrunch.com)
• Bono praises Steve Jobs as a generous (9to5mac.com)

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/swf/player-ec.swf

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Seesmic

The company helps users to manage their social networks both on the desktop and mobile devices, including Windows, Macs, iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Through a single dashboard, users can add their Facebook, Twitter and other social networks as streams and monitor or engage in real-time. Seesmic made a bunch of product updates in 2010, including adding support for multiple accounts on Android and acquiring social posting service Ping.fm.

The investment by Salesforce.com makes sense as the two companies have been working together recently to integrate Salesforce Chatter, a collaboration tool for enterprises, with Seesmic. Users will now be able to see Salesforce.com customer’s comments on Facebook and Twitter.

Seesmic has a host of competitors offering very similar services, including Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and Yoono. Though none have integrated with an enterprise collaboration tool like Salesforce Chatter.

The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2008, has secured a total funding of $16 million. Past investors Omidyar Network, the firm created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and Wellington Partners also participated in the round.

Users looking for an accountant, whether for taxes or other services, can visit the site and search by geographic area. Users can choose to contact one of the listed accountants by email or phone.

After both parties agree to work with each other, a payment is processed through the site. The user then has 2 weeks to upload all their needed documents to TeaSpiller for the accountant to access and begin the process.

With more than 1 million accountants in the U.S., the company has begun the process of using its search and indexing algorithms to find and add them automatically to the directory. Each accountant includes their own profile, similar to a resume, that includes an overall rating, comments/reviews and fees. Additional information like licenses, work experience and education are also included.

TeaSpiller plans to make money in two ways: giving accountants “pro” accounts for added features, like bumping their profiles higher in search results, and taking a cut of each transaction through the site.

The company has several competitors, including CPAFinder.com and AccountantsWorld.com, both of which act as directories for searching and finding accountants. While the search function works similarly, TeaSpiller offers more information on accountant profiles, including ratings and reviews, as well as the means for managing payments and documents online. TeaSpiller also doesn’t charge accountants to be listed, while the competitors charge rates of around $400 a year.

The New York City-based company was founded in 2009 by Amit Vemuri, a former vice president of product development strategy at online travel comparison site Travelocity. No funding has been secured to date.

I’ve been founding and helping run technology companies since 1999.  My latest company is Fabulis.com.  Here are 57 lessons I’ve learned along the way.  I could have listed 100+ but I didn’t want to bore you.

1. Build something you are personally passionate about.  You are your best focus group.

2. User experience matters a lot.  Most products that fail do so because users don’t understand how to get value from them.  Many product fail by being too complex.

3. Be technical.  You don’t have to write code but you do have to understand how it is built and how it works.

4. The CEO of a startup must, must, must be the product manager. He/she must own the functional user experience.

5. Stack rank your features.  No two features are ever created equal.  You can’t do everything all at once.  Force prioritization.

6. Use a bug tracking system and religiously manage development action items from it.

7. Ship it.  You’ll never know how good your product is until real people touch it and give you feedback.

8. Ship it fast and ship it often.  Don’t worry about adding that extra feature.  Ship the bare minimum feature set required in order to start gathering user feedback.  Get feedback, repeat the process, and ship the next version and the next version as quickly as possible.  If you’re taking more than 3 months to launch your first consumer-facing product, you’re taking too long.  If you’re taking more than 3 weeks to ship updates, you’re taking too long.  Ship small stuff weekly, if not several times per week.  Ship significant releases in 3 week intervals.

9. The only thing that matters is how good your product is.  All the rest is noise.

10. The only judge of how good your product is is how much your users use it.

11. Therefore (adding #’s 11 + 12):  In the early days the key determinant of your future success is traction.  Spend the majority of your time figuring out how to cultivate pockets of traction amongst your early adopters and optimize around that traction.  Traction begets more traction if you are able to jump on it.

12. You’re doing really well if 50% of what you originally planned on doing turns out to actually work.  Follow your users as much as possible.

13. But don’t rely on focus groups to tell you what to build.  Focus groups can tell you what to fix and help you identify potentially interesting kernels for you to hone in on, but you still need to figure out how to synthesize such input and where to take your users.

14. Most people really only heavily use about 5 to 7 services.  If you want to be an important product and a big business, you will need to figure out how to fit into one of those 5 to 7 services, which means capturing your user’s fascination, enthusiasm, and trust.  You need to give your users a real reason to add you into their time.

15. Try to ride an existing wave vs. creating your own market.  If you can, catch onto an emerging macro trend and ride it.

16. Find yourself a “sherpa.”  This is someone who has done it before — raised money, done deals, worked with startups.  Give this person 1 to 2% of your company in exchange for their time.  Rely on them to open doors to future investors.  Use them as a sounding board for corporate development issues.  Don’t do this by committee.  Advisory boards never amount to much.  Find one person, make them your sherpa, and lean on them.

17. Work with the best possible people for your project, regardless of where they are located.

18. Co-locate as best possible but be willing to travel to remote offices to make multiple offices work.  Online collaboration maxes out at 3 to 4 weeks apart, which means you need to commit to traveling almost monthly to make remote offices work.

19. Work with people you like to be around.  There’s no sense in going to war with people you don’t like.

20. Work with people you trust like family.

21. Work from home as long as you can.

22. Position your desk in a way in which you are staring at your co-founders and they are staring at you.  If you aren’t enjoying looking at each other each day, you’re working with the wrong people.

23. Use a tool like Yammer to share internally what you’re working on.  It’s easier for many people (especially developers) to post a status update than to write an email.

24. Use a file sharing service like basecamp for your team.  It’s impossible for everyone to keep track of every file sent to their email in-box.  Use basecamp so there’s a history and central repository.

25. Figure out quickly what you are personally really good at and focus your personal time around those activities.  Let other people do the other stuff.

26. Surround yourself with people who fill your gaps.  Let them do the stuff they are better at.  Don’t do their jobs.

27. Work with people who are smarter than you at certain things.

28. Work with people who argue with you and tell you no.

29. Be willing to fight like hell during the day but still love each other when you go home.

30. Work with people who are passionate about solving the specific problem you are trying to solve.  Passion for building a business is not enough; there needs to be passion for your customer and solving your customer’s problem.

31. Push the people around you to care as much as you do.

32. Be loyal.  Cultivate and coach people vs. churning through them.

33. You’re never as right as you think you are.

34. Go to the gym and/or run at least 4 times per week.  Keep your body in shape if you want to keep your mind in shape.

35. Don’t drink on airplanes unless you are on a flight of longer than 8 hours. It ruins you and wastes your time.

36. Choose your investors based on who you want to work with, be friends with, and get advice from.

37. Don’t choose your investors based on valuation.  A couple of dilution points here or there wont matter in the long run but working with the right people will.

38. Raise as little money as possible when you first start.  Force yourself to be budget constrained as it will cause you to carefully spend each dollar like it is your last.

39. Once you have some traction, raise more money than you need but not more than you know what to do with.  This is tricky.  Don’t skimp on fundraising because of dilution fears.

40. Spend every dollar like it is your last.

41. Know what kind of company you are trying to build.  There are very few Googles and Facebooks.  A good outcome for your business might be a $10M exit or a $20M exit or a $100M exit or no exit at all.  Plan for the business you want to build.  Don’t just shoot for the moon.  From a money-in-your-pocket and return on time spent standpoint, owning 20% of a $20M exit in 2 years is much better than owning 3% of a $100M business in 5 years.

42. Related to #41, understand whether your business is a VC business or not. A VC business is expected to deliver 10x returns to investors.  That means if you’re taking money with a $5M post-money valuation, the expectation is that you are building for a minimum $50M exit.  $10M post-money valuation = $100M target.  That’s not to say that you might not sell the company for less and everyone involved might be happy with that outcome, but that’s not what you are signing up for when you take VC money with such a valuation.  Know what the implications of taking VC money are and what it means for expectations on you.

43. Make sure your personal business goals are aligned with the goals of your investors.  The business will only succeed if you are motivated.  Investors can’t force the business to succeed.  And they certainly can’t force a CEO to care.

44. Conferences are generally a waste of time.

45. Smile.  Laugh.  Wear funny socks. I wear funny socks to remind myself to not settle for boring and to be creative.

46. Do something, anything that shows you’re not just a robot.  Let people get to know the real you.

47. Hang a lantern on your hangups.

48. Wear your company’s t-shirts everywhere.

49. Do your own customer service.

50. Tell a good story.

51. But don’t lie.  Ever.

52. Find inspiration in the people around you.

53. Have fun every single day.  If it’s not fun, stop doing it.  No one is making you.

54. It’s true what they say in sales, you’re only as good as your last sale.

55. Make mistakes, but learn from them.  I’ve made hundreds.

56. Mature, but don’t grow up.

57. Never give up.

Do you see a pattern? The time-waster changes names, but the pattern of online idleness never goes away. Maybe it’s time for managers to think about harnessing this phenomenon rather than fighting it.

VentureBeat has written increasingly about the phenomenon of gamification — the application of game-design principles to products and services far afield from the conventional gaming sector. It’s being applied to everything from building websites to serious efforts like improving healthcare. Why not put gamification to work at the office?

Popular social networks like Twitter and Facebook have game-like elements: the constant flow of updates can feel like a stream of cascading Tetris bricks, each one demanding a response: Quick! Like that comment! Retweet that post! Foursquare, the fast-growing location-announcement service, has long incorporated elements of gaming, like badges and points, even though they carry nothing more than bragging rights — much like having the high score in a game.

Indeed, the biggest complaint about Foursquare and FarmVille is that they are games that aren’t fun — networked rituals of obligation, performative acts of online status-seeking, abstract clicks in a circular, self-involved world that ultimately lack purpose.

And yet the millions of people drawn into these pseudo-games find them addicting. Zynga, the maker of FarmVille, employs behavioral psychologists to make sure its games hook people in just the right way. FarmVille may feel like work — all that harvesting and planting and gift-giving — and yet people keep doing it.

It’s a boss’s dream, in short: Getting people to perform repetitive tasks out of a feeling of obligation in a way that somehow feels rewarding.

The visual design of productivity software, too, could draw inspiration from the world of games. Web-based dashboards could present messages, alerts, and tasks in a serendipitous, time-driven way that feels like clicking through a first-person shooter — and maybe pull in teammates the way online multiplayer games do. Imagine organizing your department into a raid through that quarterly earnings spreadsheet!

There are many practical lessons managers could gather from studying social games and services. But there are a few obvious ones that jump out:

• Small but frequent rewards
• Mutual obligations to teammates
• Data that comes in short bursts rather than long documents

The more that work feels like a game, the less we’ll hear about the time workers waste on online diversions. Indeed, social-game makers may have to commission studies by network-monitoring software vendors on the cost to the American economy of the distractions of work.

How else could we design work to make it as attractive as social games? Leave your ideas in the comments.

OpenPages’ software highlights any inconsistencies in risk and performance goals — such as overly aggressive revenue goals for an emerging market like Latin America — and gives management a comprehensive view of the business opportunities and risks associated with the expansion.

OpenPages had previously partnered with IBM for the Operational Riskdata eXchange, a consortium of banks formed to collect loss-event data and meet operational risk guidelines outlined by standards set by an international banking committee.

The Waltham, Mass.-based company had previously raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Goldman Sachs, Matrix Partners and Sigma Partners among others. Allianz, Barclays, Carnival Corporation, Duke Energy and SunTrust are among OpenPages’ clients, according to the company’s website.

IBM has invested about $11 billion in analytics research and interpretation, which included hiring about 6,000 consultants and seven full-time analytics centers.

[Photo: epSos.de]

Sprout Social

Sprout Social gives customers a single Web-based dashboard to manage and grow all their social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, LinkedIn, and Foursquare. The tool monitors the web for social brand mentions and then alerts the user of potential customers. A contact center and promotional tool then allows users to engage those potential customers. Engagement features include being able to cross-post across all networks and schedule messages. An analysis tool allows users to track the progress of their outreach.

The company joins a whole host of social media management and monitoring tools, including Radian6, Visible Technology and Scout Labs, which was recently purchased by Lithium Technologies. Though Sprout Social appears to have a leg up on the competition as it pairs social monitoring with promotional tools to turn potential customers into actual customers.

The Chicago-based company, founded in 2009, previously raised an undisclosed amount from Lightbank, which also invested in Facebook application Where I’ve Been and Poggled, a social aggregation site.

A problem large companies face is how to have honest lines of communication between employees and the highest rungs of management. With several hundred or maybe thousands of employees for every key senior leader, it can extremely difficult to find out what’s happening on the ground with a product launch.

“People are often over-optimistic about how a project will progress,” said Mat Fogarty, chief executive of Crowdcast.

Fogarty’s company Crowdcast is a pretty novel solution to gathering intelligence in big companies with crowdsourced bets. It’s launching a dashboard today that lets managers pose questions to employees, and learn from their anonymous answers whether a project will meet its target.

If a manager, for example, asks a question like, “How many users will we have in 30 days?”, employees can anonymously make bets on what will happen. If they’re right, they’re rewarded with virtual currency that can be translated in benefits like reward carts.

The company uses financial incentives and gaming mechanics like leaderboards to get employees to participate. Employees can adjust their bets up until a deadline, giving a managers a constantly changing barometer of where projects are. They can also turn around and ask more detailed questions if they want reasons why a project ifs behind.

Crowdcast is funded by Alsop Louie Partners and has clients including GM, Electronic Arts and Hallmark.