Last Thursday I had the pleasure of dropping in on the Designer Entrepreneur class over at CCA. My longtime friend and colleague Christina Wodtke invited me to talk a bit about startup investing and help critique some of their recent pitch work.
As I watched the pitches and listened to the students present, I thought back to other classes I had helped in and realized that it might be useful to put down some thoughts on how to do well in a class that supposedly teaches you how to be an entrepreneur. Here are some tips to ace your next entrepreneurism class and some of them may not be what you might think:
TIP #1: Find out how to get an A in the class.
When you start the class, ask the teacher, “How does one get an A?” Hopefully your instructor is organized and thoughtful enough to be able to give you a clear answer (be very WARY of those who cannot articulate what the grading criteria are – and yes you may meet some of them at your university!).
Write these down, and pin them on a wall where you can see them every day. These are your points of focus. NOTHING ELSE.
If you go off this focus, you risk not satisfying what your instructor told you they wanted and that you don’t satisfy the requirements of the class and therefore, won’t get a good grade.
That’s not to say that you couldn’t get a good grade by going off path. It just means you may need to work A LOT harder to do so.
TIP #2: You should pick a project that you can complete in the time period of the class.
Be very aware of the duration of the class, whether it’s a 3-4 month class or a year long project class. Figure out what it is you need to accomplish to get an A, and then find something to work on that enables you to complete the assignments by end of the class.
Creating a viable business requires that you find the right idea to work on in the first place. Discovery of the perfect or a viable idea can take a long time. You can spend some time in ideation of this idea but I would recommend doing that BEFORE you start the class rather than spending time in class coming up with something to work on.
Validation of the idea is also possible, but it could be time consuming and you could easily end up finding out that your idea was the wrong idea to work on.
In the CCA class, I gave them my Minimum Viable Product (MVP) vs. Minimum Viable Company (MVC) speech. It may be easy to crank out MVPs thinking that you can get somewhere, but entrepreneurism isn’t the search for MVPs, it’s the search for an MVP that can turn into MVC and hopefully one that is fundable.
Keep that also in mind as you pick the project you want to work on.
Don’t pick an idea that requires a lot of development time. Working on something that requires a ton of new research? Bad idea. Working on something that has a long manufacturing time (ie. building a new car from scratch)? Bad idea. Quick software app? YES- Great idea!
No matter what, you should try to pick something that allows you to satisfy the class requirements by the end of the semester or year.
TIP #3: You don’t actually have to build a real startup to get a good grade.
But wait, Dave, how can that be? Isn’t this a class in entrepreneurism?
A mistake I see many students make is thinking that they actually have to build a business by the end of class. I think this is actually false. In fact, trying to do that within the time period of a class can be a big mistake.
Why? It’s because building a business takes time. Figuring out what business to build takes time. You may not have time to build a traditional fundable startup by the end of the class period.
Remember to keep your eye on the ball – what is the main purpose of this class? It is for you to LEARN/EXPERIENCE THE PRINCIPLES OF ENTREPRENEURISM. I would not sign up for a class that required you to build a real startup at the end of it. Why? Because you never know how much time you need to validate your path. You may need more time than the class can give you. You may actually end up with nothing at the end. Many entrepreneurs spend their life looking for ideas to work on and not get anywhere; others happen on one instantly, if not magically or by luck or chance. You really don’t know which category you’ll fall into.
Therefore, it may be that if you show that you’ve learned the principles of entrepreneurism properly, it might be on a fictional business idea that may never survive the real world, but can show your instructors that you’ve mastered the material.
TIP #4: You may consider building a smaller business.
You don’t need to build the next Facebook to get a good grade. You just need to show that you learned the components of good entrepreneurism. It may be possible to do more complete-able projects in the areas of small business like building a new cafe or retail storefront. The principles are the same even if some of the dynamics are different than a typical internet/software based startup which are more popular today. But having more available data to work with makes things easier.
The more ambiguity/uncertainty/unknown there is, the more riskier it is to use this project in a class setting. The funny thing is, these traits are often those of a wildly successful startup outside of a class setting. The reality is that these projects often take a lot more preparation and thinking to bring to a fundable, pitch-able state.
TIP #5: Don’t fall into the product trap.
As a student, you’re probably been entrenched in learning how to build stuff. Whether it’s coding or design, you’ve probably spent the last few years learning everything you need to learn how to build anything. Despite being awesome as a builder, you may not be anywhere near prepared to be an entrepreneur. Startups are NOT all about product as you might think.
Touching on the MVP vs. MVC comment above – I re-quote Steve Blank again:
A Startup Is a Temporary Organization Designed to Search
for A Repeatable and Scalable Business Model
[source: Nail the Customer Development Manifesto to the Wall – Steve Blank]
I think a lot of people have fallen into what I call the product trap. It is this mistaken belief that if you build something, somebody will buy it. While this may be true for some things, for the most part it is not true.
This is why Steve Blank likes to say that startups are on the search for a business model. They are NOT on the search for a product.
A few years back I helped out in a Stanford d.school entrepreneur class called LaunchPad. I loved their criteria for an instant A – you had to get one person to pay for your product. I always felt that accelerators should force their companies to do that by demo day. It was a forcing function that made sure that teams weren’t just building things but that people actually would give up money for their products – or they actually have the beginnings of a real business model.
So be careful as you go through your entrepreneurism class that you don’t get so enamored with building products that you forget that building a startup is about building a business, and not just a product.
TIP #6: If you are required to build an investor pitch, pitch the business and sell it. Toss anything that is extraneous out of the pitch.
In every pitch I heard, there was an emphasis on product process and what they discovered, and how they got to where they were.
It confused me, and I had to ask the context of their presentation – who was their intended audience? Was it an investor? Was it the instructor? Was it a thesis review board for your degree? Without knowing that I could not fairly judge whether they were presenting the right information or not.
But when they said they were pitching an investor, then I could respond with the appropriate comments. I told them that their pitches sounded like an end of year presentation to their instructors where they showcased what they learned. In fact none of the pitches had discussions about business models, and seemed to showcase their products only. Good for a project class maybe, bad for an investor pitch. Don’t mix the two!
TIP: #7: Establish your assumptions or points of view and execute on them.
In the context of a class, it is sometimes possible to establish what design schools like to call “your point of view.”
When I was at Stanford, they taught us to always establish our points of view whenever we do a design. This provided context and constraints in which our design was created, and allowed us to judge the final product within that context and constraints. If you were open ended or had a poorly defined point of view, then we could never know what you came up with satisfied design requirements or not. It usually ended up being yelled at by the teacher in front of your class, which you get used to pretty quickly in design school.
I believe you can do that with a startup project as well, and especially if you’re in a design school where this is familiar. Remember again, the goal is not necessarily to create a fundable startup by the end of class. It’s to show you learned the principles. And the more you bound your problem statement, the more able you are to complete a successful entrepreneur class project in the allotted class time.
As an example, one of the class projects at CCA I saw was related to doing a traditional business in a better and different way. That was a pretty strongly stated point of view – GOOD. However, when they finished their pitch, it was not clear they had executed on that point of view – BAD – it looked to me that their business strategy was pretty much the same as it always was.
If you follow the above tips, I am sure you will ace your entrepreneur class. Remember always that a class setting is a subset of the real world, a simulation at best. You play by its rules, and you’ll win. You’ll have learned some really important parts about being an entrepreneur and had the opportunity to experiment in a setting with guidance and mentorship. HOWEVER…
END NOTE # : Some of the most important parts of entrepreneurism can’t be taught in a class.
It is not easy being an entrepreneur, but yet in what we read and what we have people tell us, anyone can be an entrepreneur. But that is simply not true. Most people just don’t have the essential traits, or they are too risk averse, or their current lives just don’t enable them to let go of their steady lifestyles to pursue the dream of starting a company and its accompanying chaos.
I have often said that Entrepreneurs are to the rest of the workforce as Navy Seals are to the rest of the Navy. Can you see the difference I mean? They don’t put potential Navy Seals through their demanding training program for no reason – they are trying to weed out those who do not have the mental/emotional/physical traits that enable them to be real Navy Seals. It is the same with entrepreneurs.
This is something that can’t be taught in school. Somehow you just need to have had the right life experiences to become such a person.
Do some REAL DEEP soul searching when you leave your class. You have some good tools to try out in the real world, but don’t be that guy who quits when the going gets tough – you should have never started in the first place… and by the way, that’s OK.

On the 500startups forums, someone asked about how to name their startup. I thought it would be worthwhile to repost my response there, which was to detail my favorite process for brainstorming a new name for a company, product, or service. Here it is, with some embellishments:
Before you begin, some good tools to have: thesaurus and dictionary. Creative people, advertising copywriters are the best. An open mind to the nutty and weird.
1. Brainstorm related words, or perhaps unrelated words if you want something interesting and fun that may not be directly descriptive of your business.
2. Check synonyms of those words, and reference dictionaries for words that you might use, or might not have thought of.
I also just found this great list on Wikipedia for product naming language techniques. Use these to generate more words besides just the above.
3. Employ these words as prefixes and suffixes, and use both standard and non-standard. For example for suffixes, a standard suffix would be something like “-ly”. A non-standard would be to just use a word in place as the second half of the name.
4. Mix and match the above multiple times. Create lists of possible names and even those that are a bit crazy. Don’t reject anything at this stage – you are bstorming! Put them up on a wall so you can see them all at once. Continue putting words together and creating new combinations.
5. Pick favorites, then throw into a domain name search to see if available. <-- this is usually very depressing - not many domain names are left out there. NOTE: be careful - I'm sure that some people are tracking what domain names people are searching on although i can't prove it. but I'm a paranoid guy ;-). So only check names that you are absolutely sure of because if someone believes you are interested in a name, they may buy it before you and try to sell it back to you. 6. Do informal or formal testing of name against customers, friends, family, etc. Check for unintended or alternate meanings. Check foreign language dictionaries to make sure your name doesn't mean something you don't want it to mean in another language, ie. Chevy Nova, where nova means "doesn't go" in Spanish. 7. Repeat above until you find a name that you like. 8. After you pick a name, then search your state's database of company names. BUT I would highly recommend that you pick a company name that is completely different than your product/website name. To me, staying stealth in today’s world for most startups is critical since things get copied all the time and easily.
9. As for trademarking, you can do your own trademark search at the USPTO website.
You can also file your own trademark application there so i think you can probably get away with not paying a lawyer to do it.
More on general information on trademarks can be found at the USPTO website.
Some online guides to naming:
How to Name Your Business – Entrepreneur.com
How to Name a Business – SBA.gov
The 8 Principles Of Product Naming – FastCompany.com

Last week I got my Lytro from pre-order in the mail and was excited to try it out in the field. I went to the California Academy of Sciences in SF to see what it could do.

About the Industrial Design
It fit well in the hand, although I was very scared of it slipping out and me dropping it. Since it is in a horizontal configuration, I wish it had a palm strap like camcorders do. The wrist strap was OK, but there was no way to tighten it on my wrist and I felt like it was swinging precariously as I walked around. Most of the time I just stuck it in my bag.
The magnetic cap in front was slick, but it kept falling off when I removed my camera from my bag. Couldn’t they have figured out some way of doing a built-in iris protector or attached cap? I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose it at some time in the future. At least a screw on cap won’t fall off, even if it is a pain to get off. Snap-ons might work but they aren’t perfect either.
The on/off switch is a small depression the bottom of the unit. It was hard to find, but eventually I got the hang of just pressing generally where it was.
There was a zoom but I totally didn’t know about it until I got home and read the instructions – who reads instructions right? This is a small row of dashes on the top of the unit. I suppose that could be better and more clearly labeled.
The button to take a picture was a small depression on top. I think I got the hang of where that was to take pictures.
The screen was too small in my opinion. You can press on it to refocus into some area, but the image was so small that you couldn’t tell if the focus changed or not.
The UI in the camera was pretty simple. At least there are no fancy menus to confuse you. The point is to just shoot a lot and not worry about things, right?
Images
Reviewing images on the tiny screen sucked. So I downloaded them to take a look at home. Most of them were pretty good. Image quality is up there although it doesn’t match up to my favorite camera, the Canon G12.
It even seemed to deal with low light fairly well. The lens seemed set at f/2, supposedly to minimize field of view and get you the nice blurred surroundings effect. Noise seemed very limited.
However, I did not really enjoy what I perceive to be the main cool feature of this camera, which was to be able to focus in on different parts of the image while other elements blurred out. After just shooting around, I only had one image out of the whole set which I could do this with, an image of some funky blue jellyfish:

Try clicking on some of the jellyfish, especially the ones in back. Very cool indeed!
So here is where my issues begin.
In order to see the coolness of the camera, I now have to think about the what is in the scene to make this feature come alive. I have to take pictures with things very close to me in the foreground, and then have things in multiple distances all the way into infinity. In that way, the blurriness is accentuated and I can pick around the image to see this happen. Most of the images I shot did not have this quality, and were good images but you can’t really see any blurriness come out when you pick around the image.
This is what happened when I bought a 3D camera, the Fujifilm Finepix Real 3D camera. I had to also think about what I could shoot that would really highlight the 3D-ness of the resulting image. If I just shot some random shot, the 3D effect may not really be noticeable because the elements are too far away and everything still seems flat, which is arguably what you would see in reality.
This makes me think too much. I want the camera to do magic, not make me think about how to make magic. If I wanted to think (and I do with my Canon 60D) then I would just use my old cameras.
But I think we’re in an era where we want cameras to take magical pictures, almost pictures of what we perceive, not what we actually see, or what physics says is out there in the scene.
Take high contrast scenes where there is brightly lit areas inserted in darkness for example. Most cameras fight to figure out how to expose such scenes. Bright light areas often are too bright if you try to expose more of dark areas. Or if you try to expose the bright light areas to get more detail there, then all of the darker areas go black.
However, we do not remember such scenes like that – our eyes are darting around and readjusting what we focus on, and our memories are of what is in the bright areas as well in the dark areas. Certainly there is artistry that results from high contrast images, taking the dark areas and making the mysterious silhouettes in the brighter areas. But sometimes, we want magic to happen. We want to see what is in the bright areas and more detail in the darker areas without having the bright areas wash out.
So I want magic and I want reality when I want them and don’t want to think. I just want to shoot and see awesome results.
This is where I think smartphone cameras like on the iPhone are really the next wave of photography. I would meld Lytro with a image computer that can take both reality and imagined reality and then produce the result I want later with ease and not making me think about the technology. I just want to shoot and have magic come out the other end.
Lytro has some really cool things going for it. As a first iteration, it’s pretty cool but I think I’m demanding more from cameras these days.

For the last two weeks or so, I was having a ton of Mac problems. It seemed that my OS had gotten corrupted, so I thought that upgrading to OSX Lion would clean up the OS and upgrade me since I was going to do it eventually.
The nightmare that threw me into is probably best told over a beer – somehow I was one of the unlucky few where OSX Lion upgrade over an existing OSX Snow Leopard was just not possible and became unstable over a few days, leading to not being able to boot the Mac at all! I managed to roll back to OSX Snow Leopard (no little trick there!) and think I’m back in action.
But this post is not about my upgrade problems. It’s about email. During that small window of time when OSX Lion was working, I opened up the new Mac Mail and saw….a visual makeover and the additions of grouping by conversation. In fact, it defaulted to conversation grouping. What a disappointment. Here was an opportunity to revolutionize email and the most innovative force in technology decided to just do a visual makeover and add what Gmail has had for a few years now?
Like I said, disappointing.
Email has not been innovated in decades. It’s still the same old thing. Oh, people have tried, but then most fail miserably as startups. Some of the things people have tried or are doing:
1. Grouping and viewing messages by sender.
2. Turn email into a social network and view messages that way.
3. Adding windows to email to make it into a professional or personal CRM.
4. Graphical views of email that are beyond the rows of messages we see today.
5. Group email by conversation.
Perhaps item 5 is the most dominant innovation in email, and most notably through Google’s Gmail. In fact, it is dominant because Google refuses to give you another interface. If you sign up for Gmail (or Google powered business email) and you use their web interfaceYou also see this in Facebook messaging, but I believe Facebook’s implementation is subtly better because they always show the conversation that has the latest message in on top. If you use offline Mac mail and pop into Gmail occasionally, Gmail always shows the conversation that came in first on top that you have not read. It takes a few days of working in the Gmail interface before their sorting becomes somewhat effective. This is why I find the web interface to Gmail so annoying; since I go back and forth between Mac Mail and Gmail, Gmail never gets the chance to stay current to what I’m doing and when I do use Gmail in the browser, it’s always sorted in the wrong way. And I always lose key messages because the little flags and bolding are the only signals that something new has come in. And it makes me read those messages in the conversation first before I get to the very last, most recent message. Contrast that to Facebook’s conversational grouping and they are OK because they sort the recency of messages differently.
Which gets me to what I did next after I rolled back to OSX Snow Leopard. Fearing that my rollback was also corrupted, I ran it for about a week now but storing all changed files on Dropbox and only using the browser for email to minimize changes on the hard drive in case I had to start over again. It was also a rare opportunity for me to really see if I could adapt to the Gmail interface because I was now not switching back and forth between Mac Mail and Gmail.
After 7 days, Gmail (and Yahoo! Mail!) still annoyed the heck out of me. But after 7 days, my Snow Leopard Mac seemed stable, and I got my old Mac Mail back minus their conversation grouping which was the annoying part of Gmail to me anyways and I didn’t miss it.
Here, Apple had an opportunity to leap email several levels and didn’t take it. They just made the app look a little different and added what Gmail was doing, which I annoys me when I use it. Really disappointing.
Now follows my wish list for what I want or need in email, but hasn’t been done yet or needs to be redone:
1. A better search.
Searching on Yahoo Mail is miserable. Searching on Gmail is pretty good which is to be expected from Google BUT is a poor solution for the original reason why I lost the email in the first place due to other UI problems. Searching on Mac Mail is pretty darn good but could use some tweaks.
What’s missing in search is the time element. Often I know that an email came yesterday but somehow I can’t find it. Can’t I filter by only showing results from yesterday? No – I gotta wade through all the other crap that gets returned from the search just to get the one I want.
I believe people naturally use time as a memory aid. Where did I put my keys? I go back in time, retracing my steps through the house, and find that left it on the table by the door and not in my usual place. Or I know he sent me an email right after our meeting….last Tuesday. So I go back to last Tuesday and find the email.
Some searches have advanced filtering but they are all inconsistent. If I search on my boss Elon in Mac Mail, I can only pick 2 choices of where to search (All Mailboxes and my current mailbox) and From, To, Subject, and Entire Message. What if I only want to see messages from Elon that are about one of my companies and not any others? Can’t do that. I start typing in the search box all that text and then select Entire Message and then I’ve got all sorts of random stuff showing up.
2. Taking huge blocks of email headers and using visual techniques to highlight or even remove them completely from view.
If we say that we like the email header view that’s been around since the dawn of internet time, then I think this could be optimized further. One of the big problems here is that there is huge information overload. Trying to find something in the clutter is super hard. Spam filters have tried to help somewhat, creative filters which dump certain emails to relevant folders is another.
But one thing I have not seen tried is using some visual technique to highlight or remove completely from view. Well, not completely true. When I search, I remove all the non-relevant results from view. OK one case. Read/unread is now a blue dot in Mac Mail although some mail readers using greying out. So maybe two. I think, though, we need more cases where filtering causes email to either drop back in visual hierarchy or completely disappear from view.
Take my time example. Why can’t I select only show me email from Tuesday? Then all other email would disappear and only Tuesday email would be shown? Or show me only email from my boss Elon. I can sort the column, but then I see everyone elses email also cluttering up my view. I can search, but I get every mention of Elon in every field of the email.
Even if this was to visually set back every email that was an advertising email, and bring to the foreground emails from real people – that would be valuable. Now why wouldn’t I want to remove them? Because I’m a shopper and I still want to see some deal emails and not just see them completely. This is why I always go through my junk folder. Who knows what my computer decided to mark as spam? It makes a ton of mistakes.
3. Despite my lack of love for conversations, their OSX Lion Mac Mail visual implementation of conversations is pretty good.
I like how you can just scroll and then you can see conversations, each in its own block. This part I love. On Gmail, they are hidden behind each other once you’ve read them – now I can’t scan them! I have to manually open them all up to refresh my memory on the thread.
I also hate sorting by header to see if the subject can generate conversations. That doesn’t work. I’d love to see this combined with visual techniques to drop back other emails or remove them entirely from view, so you ONLY see emails from this thread and conversation.
4. Search by attachment media type.
Why can’t I view all emails with pictures attached? Or PDFs? Or Excel docs, Word docs, etc.? If it’s all pictures, then why not show them in a UX conducive to that media type, like in a slideshow or grid metaphor, or for docs I have a swipe-able (or equivalent) way of going through them quickly, and then also being able to easily return back to the email that it was attached to.
5. View by calendar.
OK back to my comments on time. Time can also be expressed as a calendar, as a grid with days of the week for any month or similar. If it’s a monthly grid, then I can just pick on it and see only emails that came for that day. It could even have a cool graphical representation that abstracts the number of emails that came in on that day, or some other summary information like 3000 emails, 30 attachments, 12 pictures, etc. If it’s zoomed in to a weekly via with 7 days, maybe the graphical view abstracts in more detail, like showing me a bar graph of emails that came in at each block of time. I could click on one of those blocks, and then it would show me all the emails that came in within, say, that hour. There would also be easy nav to jump to the next hour.
6. Better personal information tool integration.
My Mac Mail is always open. I have often written notes, keep key information like lists of designers I’ve worked with, and even written whole blog posts in draft emails. On the Mac, I don’t really have a good place to take notes. I’d have to start using Evernote to really get some power but that is a separate thing. And Word just blows for that. Every time MSFT releases a new Word version, it takes that much longer to launch. Sucks!
Maybe notes can be treated like Mail that you never send – you just can file them away, you can search on them, attach them to calendar events, or associate them with emails.
Scheduling often comes with an attached invite.ics which, upon clicking, opens up my calendar and presents the opportunity to reply to the invite. At least on the iPhone, Mail has some nice features where you can auto-create calendar events and the iPhone is smart enough to link some text that seem like dates. But I want more than that. When I create a calendar event, I want it linked back to the email that created it, and I want that email accessible so that when the day of the meeting comes, I can quickly go back and review the purpose of the meeting before the meeting starts.
And I want to only see that as a self contained context; don’t show me all the other crap around it. Just show me the emails associated with that calendar event and that’s it.
7. Better view by person, and info about that person.
Again, email UIs fail here. You sort in the sender column and then try to find the send there. Man that sucks. Try doing that in Yahoo Mail when your inbox is huge. Their paging eventually stopped working for me.
I should have a way of searching by person, and then having all the time and visual filtering that I have, only I’m acting only on one person’s emails with me.
It would be nice to be able to pull up additional info about someone, especially those I don’t know. I think this is potentially a more advanced business CRM function than for personal use.
8. Better integration with address book.
Mac Mail’s integration with Address Book is pretty good. But it could be better. When I find a contact, I want to be able to easily get to all meetings and emails with this person, perhaps even getting back to the first email or email introduction I had with this person. Right now, when I meet someone new, I always type it in the notes. This is because later, I often forget the person, but I remember I met that person through another person. I search on my friend’s name and pull him up because I put that in the notes field.
9. Search the SPAM folder.
This is so simple but ignored. Why can’t I search my Spam folder too? At least once a week I always open up my Spam folder because I don’t trust the filter to grab and hide stuff I wanted to see. I have to remind myself to do it regularly because there are always emails that get stuffed in there that I want. And it seems that even if I say this is not spam, eventually they get caught again. What’s up with that? Woe be to the guy who has a new domain; he’ll get tossed in there for sure. Or woe to me for starting a new business with a new name; I have to prove to the spam filters out there that I’m not spam.
10. Better Spam filtering.
No matter what we do, Spam manages to always get through. And non-Spam seems to get caught also. Somebody needs to do this better.
11. Local and location integration.
Everyone else is doing location based services, so why not email? If I knew where an email was sent, that would enhance searching a great deal. Sometimes I remember where I sent an email, as a way to find an old email. Perhaps I was on a business trip in NYC, or at a conference. Speaking of conferences, if I was emailed from someone I didn’t recognize and I looked up from where and saw it was at a conference that I was at, it could help jog my memory of who this person was and why he was contacting me.
What other innovations on email are out there? Here are two I recently encountered:
LookAcross – magically, they are able to determine when someone is most likely to respond to various communication modes, like email!
Tout App – templated emails, email management and analytics, plus connection with CRMs.
There is a plethora of email clients on Wikipedia but seems like the dominant ones are the ones we all know and love according to this report from Campaign Monitor.
Anything else interesting out there?
In any case, history has shown that email is hard to create to a successful separate business out of. This is why my disappointment with Apple was so acute; they had the chance to release something really innovative with Mail and didn’t do it, AND didn’t need to worry about survival as a startup.
In the meantime, I will have my decades old, time sorted, header interface that I’ve come to know, love, and hate….