Meet Dr. Glenn, CEO of a radically different venture-capital-funded real estate start-up. He’s charming, witty, self-deprecating, baldly transparent about his means, ends and motives. The people who saw him speak at Inman Connect were amazed at how engaging he could be.

Why amazed? Because his reputation has suffered from the verbal savageries of his alter-ego, the coarse and flippant Mr. Kelman, a vulgarian who cannot come within shouting distance of a mainstream media maven without shoving one or more of his plentiful feet into his vast, cavernous mouth.

It was Dr. Glenn who showed up at Guy Kawasaki’s weblog, posting the winning entry, Financial Models for Underachievers: Two Years of the Real Numbers of a Startup, in this week’s Odysseus Medal competition:

Startups face one primary challenge: To never run out of cash. So when projecting costs, we heeded Guy’s advice that “the three most powerful words you can utter at a board meeting are, ‘We beat projections.’” This convinced us to develop the worst possible financial model that could still be used to raise money.

We’re glad we did. True underachievers, we’ve performed at or just a bit better than this worst-possible plan almost every month, raising revenue projections only when forced to in December 2006. We’ve been able to stick to our plan mostly because absurd assumptions in opposite directions cancelled one another out. As the real estate market tanks, we may not be so lucky in the future.

When first putting together our financial model, we looked online to calibrate spending assumptions. So many people have blown venture capital, we thought, there must be a manual somewhere on how to do it, at what rate, avoiding which follies. We couldn’t find anything. So we took some wild guesses and figured we’d see how they turned out. And now two years later to the day that we built our first model, here are the projections and actual results. Hopefully, you can learn from our experiences.

Say what you want about the cretinous Mr. Kelman — I know I do — this article is a fascinating glimpse into a side of real estate few of us are familiar with.

I confess I’m going to go local — if not completely loco — on you for The Black Pearl Award. This week’s winner: Michael Wurzer with Big News:

We have some big news we’d like to share and as I’m not much for press releases, I’m going to make this an FBS Blog exclusive and see how far and fast the news spreads:

“Arizona Regional MLS has entered into a three-year contract with FBS for our flexmls® Web MLS system to replace the current system.”

(Let’s pause for a moment here so Greg Swann, Russell Shaw, Jay Thompson, Jonathon Dalton and the many other Phoenix area bloggers who may be reading this can wipe the coffee from their screens.)

Yep, that’s right, come July 1 of next year, ARMLS members will be logging in to a new MLS system.  Why not sooner, you might ask?  Well, that brings me to some more news I think is exciting. I believe FBS will be breaking new ground here as an MLS vendor, because our intent is to blog about the conversion process step by step, and many steps there are.

Where’s the Black Pearl? We’re working on it in the form of The Phoenix Real Estate Technology Exchange. Working together with the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service and FBS Systems, the wired Realtors of Phoenix could have a lasting impact on MLS systems nationwide. We’re just a tiny irritant right now, but this could be the greatest Black Pearl of all.

The People’s Choice Award this week is a testament to the diversity of entries we see in this competition — and a testament, too, to the braininess of our readers. The winner is Michael Seguin with Central vs Distributed – a familiar cycle:

During my ‘digital life’ as I have worked and grown with technology I have seen a number of interesting things happen, ‘quantum leaps’ in thought and implementation. Yet certain puzzles within technology, certain ‘debates’ still rage and always will. My personal favorite is local vs central, or thick vs thin client, or centralized or distributed processing.

Ok, I know that sounds like a jumble of catchphrases, and it is. But let me spend a moment unpacking those terms, and then I will explain why I think this has something very practical to do with the real estate industry.

The question began sort of like this… if you had to crunch some massive number problems, stressing the pure computational power of a computing system, is it better to have one very powerful ‘brain’ (think CRAY computer) or many smaller ‘workers’ tied to one or several brains in a farm or cluster (think of the SETI and similar projects harnessing the horsepower of millions of client pcs spread across the global network).

Now understand that as computing applications have grown and diversified, this same local/central push and pull has been identified… is it best to process that web request on the server side for an optimal but costly to produce and maintain experience, or ship that processing off to each of potentially many more users?

If you’re looking for pictures, subheads and bullet points, look elsewhere. If you want to improve your mind, you’re in the right place.

If you didn’t look at this week’s nominees for The Odysseus Medal, you should. As always, if you catch sight of the sublime, nominate it.

Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon PDT/MST. You can nominate your own work or any post you admire here.

Congratulations to the winners — and to everyone who participated.

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