a quick trip to golden colorado

Cheap Beer and Interesting Food
















Ok, so a few things to know about Golden:

1. You can see Denver from there but it feels about a million miles away.

2. There are really excellent river sports there.

3. The food is a bit like one giant pub. I really wanted to avoid anything fried when i got back to SF, unfortunately the first thing i did when i had free time was head to Royal Exchange with the kids and eat....pub food.

4. Golden is like an extremely old, small, college town. Kids running around until 1 am on a sunday, etc. The benefit is that you can serve a table of 5 a round of drinks for $7.50 at most of the night spots. Not a bad way to spend $7.50 on a Sunday night.

5. Lastly, and maybe most interesting, everywhere we went we were given bottled water. Ummm, aren't we always told that Coors tastes so good because of the water in Golden? What happened?

The Coors Brewing Company












Well it was interesting if nothing else. Who knew that the Coors brewing company pushed out 1.8 million gallons of beer a day. That's enough to get the entire bay area drunk for a few hours every day.

The interesting thing about the actual plant is that it looks like something out of Soviet era Russia. It was extremely drab, huge, and cement. It was interesting to see something produced on such an industrial scale. I wonder how long that will continue. Long live Banquet Beer. Oh yeah, that Blue Moon we all like so much...Coors.

I bought a hat.


The Kong Company


The actual purpose of my trip was to meet a new client: the KONG Company. They are truly a great group of people. They have a wonderful product, and dispite not selling out to the man they have had sustained 25-50% growth over the last 7 years. They are currently not returning a call from WalMart. They think it might actually change the business in an unhealthy way. They want to think about it a lot before selling anything there. I think that says a lot. In a lot of ways I aspire to be like them in business. Let's take a few minutes to look at what they have going on there:

They have been in business for 30 years. The basic "KONG" was really nothing more than a bump stop off of the rear end of a Volkswagen from the mid 1960's. The founder owned an auto repair shop in Colorado. People kept breaking into the place, and it was suggested that he get a dog. Simple enough. He added Fritz (an ex-police dog) to the operation and the place was more safe less theft etc. Problem was that Fritz has a problem with chewing things around the place. Some things that were useful to the business, and some things that were bad for the dog (rocks, sticks, etc.).

One day Joe decided to throw Fritz a part from the Volkswagen. It was a bumpstop attached to it's mount. The rubber was natural and it wouldn't harm Fritz, and the interesting thing was it was pretty durable. Fritz was unable to chew through it, and this kept him entertained.

Thus an idea was born.

They had their ups and downs and the company did some business with vets and trainers. Their early success was with people who really knew their animals. An itnteresting situation started to unfold, everyone loved the product, the company made a great product, and the employees loved the work...these people are true animal people...no one was really a business person in the sense of process, marketing, accounting, growth plan etc. At this point the KONG company had a real threat of extinction. Think bank with locks and chains for the door.

The founder Joe, decided to get together with a friend of his John. John was a successful business person who had taken other companies and turned them around. This did provide some level of discomfort for the old timers around the company. As it would with any business that is run like a family. John began making changes, and the changes to the company really worked. As the people around the company began to see that not only was the company stabilizing, but it was also growing, they began to give over some trust to John, Joe, KD and the other leaders that were running the place.

I think the one thing that intrigued me was that they managed to keep their culture in tact while becoming a moderately large company.

The other thing that really impressed me was that there was some amount of controlled chaos. There was no secret formula to their success and they knew it. They didn't claim to have all of the answers, and they didn't act like they were indestructable.

They acted like they were human. I had not seen that in a while in a business setting. There was clearly some tension around having the outsiders from San Francisco there, talking about information architecture, and better product stacking. Our questions made some people really bristle. The interesting thing was they were pretty forth coming about that.

To get them to work with us, we will have to get them to trust us. A concept that i am not only comfortable with, i actually really love. It is a challenge, but it is also an invitation to something bigger. It is the opportunity to form a relationship. We were there for two days and i found by the end that the exchange of ideas was more interesting and developed than the day before. One of the designers from the group that is probably most skeptical about us actually said thanks for taking the time to meet with them, and for the thinking around their problems.

That meant a lot to me. Not in an egotistical way, i feel like a lot of what we do is common sense. These guys were certainly very smart, intuitive, and extremely motivated, they just need a different perspective from people who are just a little bit more removed.

A ray of light in an otherwise gray 3 months in my business world. Skeptics who might actually be able to trust. Hmmm...what an interesting thought.

I look forward to working with this company to solve some interesting problems. I think they are giving us as great of an opportunity as we might be giving them.

Let me close this little trip diary with a word about...


United Airlines

I am so amazingly disappointed with United. Yawn, so what else is new right, or join the club.

They did not assign seats until we got to the gate. Umm, hello if I wanted to fly Southwest I would have flown Southwest. Or if I am flying UnSouthwest, atleast charge me a Southwest size fair. I think i have enough United miles to fly to europe at this point, and I think i might actually be willing to pay another airline to assign me a seat, or let me pick my seat...and maybe feed me.

In my particular case on Tuesday they just refused to give me a seat assignment until 5 minutes before the plane took off. I was the second to last person on the flight. I was not standby, but they sure made me feel that way.

The people at the gate were rude, and the maintenance guy was on the jet way talking to some other boarding passenger about how awful it is working for United, and how he would be working there until the day he died. Great. makes me feel really comfortable that this guy who sounds like he works for the whale is the dude securing the luggage, checking the tire pressure, and making sure the engine stays tacked to the wing. Excellent feeling.

Not to mention, damn, what does that leave me feeling about their company.

The flight was miserable, and there was about a 30 minute span that I was convinced we were going to die. Not their fault, but the entire thing left me stressed out and unhappy with them as a company.

It was an interesting way to spend a couple of days away from home. I felt like i learned a lot.