Mick Liubinskas :: Des Walsh dot Com

At Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum the other week, one of the people I wanted to interview on video was Mick Liubinskas of Pollenizer. We started, but a camera glitch put a stop to that. Instead I was able to interview Mick later via Skype audio, as below.

Online or offline, Mick Liubinskas is one of those people you are always glad to see. He is both visionary and very practical.

And he is part of the team at Pollenizer.

I find Pollenizer a very interesting company. Very basically, it combines the capabilities of a management team with an offshore (India) development team. But there is more to them than that. These are very savvy folks.

You’ll get a better idea of what they do and how they do it by having a browse around their website.

For those who want the bullet points, their “service summary” is as follows:

CxO level SWAT team;
Strategy, technology and marketing;
Planning with a strong execution focus;
Web and mobile;
Consumer and enterprise;
Part-time, full-time or project-based;
Fee, equity, performance-based or combination;
Idea, prototype, growing, seed, VC, existing business.

Here’s the interview with Mick, where we talk about a few items, including:

what Pollenizer is and does
how even in the current, economically challenging times, some companies will grow and thrive
some shared reflections on what we heard at E2EF.

If you think Mick and his team at Pollenizer just might be able to help you, call him. He really is as approachable – and as on the ball – as he sounds.

Photo of Mick Liubinskas by Des Walsh: some rights reserved

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

: “The Sea Rises” via Wikipedia

Is right now, with the global economy a daily story of disaster and fear, a good time for a startup company?

My hunch is that, if I asked around, the more common response would be that it is a bad time. Even a very bad time.

Companies and individuals are tightening their belts, people are being laid off, credit is tight. Plenty of reasons to sit tight and not try to launch something new.

My friend and unquenchable entrepreneur Mick Liubinskas clearly thinks that, for the web industry specifically, this is not just an ok time to start a new business but actually “the right time”, as he explains in the current issue of Anthill magazine. For one thing, he says, it’s easier to hire the stars you want on your team. And the money? There is money around, he says, even now:

Yes, there’s less silly money, less private equity, less from family, friends and fools, but it’s there. Maybe it will take longer, maybe you’ll have to work harder, maybe you’ll get a bit less – but it’s there.

On the same topic, Zoli Erdos in So Is It a Good Time or a Bad Time to Found a Startup After All? links to posts arguing against and for this being a good time for a startup and gives his own perspective.

One aspect of all this that struck me on reading these posts was that they are set in the Australian context (Liubinskas) or the US one (Erdos and others quoted by him). It would be interesting to know how this issue would be looked at – or whether it would be looked at – in, say, China, where the economy has certainly slowed but is still growing.

If Western entrepreneurs take time out now, will they come back in several months (years?) time when the economy will hopefully have become more stable and back into growth mode and find someone from China, for instance, has eaten their lunch?