Previously: Princess Pricklepants, Entrepreneur

Dear reader, for our preamble we’d like to say a number of fascinating, witty, clever, and delightful things, but we can’t think of any. Sorry.

A reader contacted us indirectly with a really brilliant idea that we can’t tell you about. Also, sorry.

Quentin emailed in to say something, but we haven’t read that email yet. We’ll do that really soon, though.

Our awesome and brilliant reader Mike sent in this superb graphic, which you should all admire, and which we plan to develop into a theme once Princess runs for President, which now must happen.

On a separate note, we found someone reached our blog via a search for “when adventure trip on a ship. how can we do good manner.” Cool!

And so, we begin our story with a picture with some words under it.

Princess Pricklepants gathered the council of cows et al. to pitch her latest idea in the living room. Startups were supposed to be in garages, but she didn’t have a garage, so the living room would have to do. “Princess Pricklepants-pedia – an online encyclopedia of all things related to me.” Jane, the cow accountant and general downer, explained that this sounded like a really fun idea, but had the problem that there was no way to possibly ever make money.

“Well, what about a blog?”

“You’ve got a blog, and so far you’ve lost money. Your blog is free so you don’t even get anything from the ads other people see. It’s just a vanity project.”

“Mugs and Tee-shirts?”

“No”

Princess turned to google “polite web startup ideas,” but the first result was an article titled, “Polite, Purposeful People Create Startups That Fail.” Clearly google was confused.

Christine, the cow safety officer, had a warning, “Since we’re starting a business we should use Robert’s Rules of Order and keep minutes so that we have accountability.”

Boris made a motion, “I propose that we never ever use Robert’s Rules of Order. All those in favor?”

The ayes had it.

Boris stepped forth with a daring plan, “We start a comparative mythology as a service company. We create a platform for employees on their mythic and heroic quests.”

This was not well accepted.

Princess pitched another idea, “MaPaaS, Manners and Politeness as a Service, we architect a dynamic cloud platform for delivering the infrastructure of manners, refinement, sophistication, and politeness to the enterprise. We’ll target mobile advice. Also, synergy.”

Nobody could think of an objection, or if they had one they couldn’t find a polite way to say it (since the software didn’t exist yet), so they started their plan.

Their plan had three parts.

1) Develop dynamic MaPaaS cloud platform.

2) …

3) Profit.

Boris said, “Oh, we also need to name the business, this is an important part of the heroic journey.”

Jane suggested, “Politetronic Logistics”

“No”

“Manner Cloud”

“No”

“Telstar Etiquettronics”

“Yes!”

They googled it to make sure nobody had already taken the name. Clear. They still needed to register telstaretiquettronics.com, but would get to that soon.

Boris said, “Princess, there’s an important point I think I need to make. If we look at this situation in terms of a literary structure, there’s no antagonist, nor are we following a traditional comic form of three separate minor conflicts that intertwine until they are resolved in a denouement.”

Princess explained, “Boris, we aren’t in some fictional universe, we’re real hedgehogs and cows and bears doing work things. Real life isn’t like fiction, there aren’t usually antagonists or neat little situations that get wrapped up nicely. It’s just you and your friends and family and coworkers doing your things as best you can, and trying to not waste all your time watching amazing hedgehog videos on YouTube or reading wikipedia articles when you should be getting important things done.”

She then checked wikipedia to make sure this was correct and wound up reading about grizzly bears for a while, then salmon, then the Yukon river. Then she watched an amazing hedgehog video. Then she visited boingboing.net.

Eventually they got to working on part 1 of their plan.

Part 1 was the fun and annoying part, since it meant they’d need to make a program. They turned to Bessie, the generic cow, who was also a robotics programmer. “Bessie, can you write the software tonight?”

“Um, well, you see, I, uh, write C for embedded systems, and for web things it’s all completely different. We need to hire someone or learn these things.”

Princess hit the books. It was so boring, though. All those letters and words that didn’t quite mean the right thing, and the jargon, that odd almost, but not quite English jargon. Even with a montage this would be unbearable. So they decided to find a programmer.

While Mufiki, King of the Planet of the Baboons, might not have seemed like an immediately obvious choice, he had previous experience as a software engineer for a web company in the dot com days. He was interested and would take low pay in exchange for equity. Soon he had something running. We’ll spare you the boring details of a code monkey. He also wrote a module to measure how polite or impolite something was that was named polite-o-tron2000 that applied machine learning with vectorized Bayesean analysis on natural language processing, text analysis, and computational linguistics on the works of Emily Post on a Hadoop cluster (this obviously was a Big Data problem) to assign a score from 1 to 10, where 1 is something we couldn’t possibly say, and 10 is something really, really polite and appropriate. Sorry, had to throw in boring details.

The software would send text messages to Princess’s iPhone where she would respond with helpful advice. They ran their first test, sending an etiquette request:

“when adventure trip on a ship. how can we do good manner.”

Princess texted her reply, “When taking an adventure trip on a ship, always be sure to share treasure maps with any cows that want to go on the adventure with you.” It went through the internet tubes and showed up in their software thing where it was supposed to. polite-o-tron2000 ranked it a 10. They were cooking with gas!

Many other things happened, but they were dull business things that nobody in their right mind would ever want to read about, let alone suffer through in real life, so we’ll skip to the interesting part – getting funding from venture capitalists.

They showed up at Yoyodynamic Capital to pitch their business. They did a great presentation on how Telstar Ettiquettronics was the premiere MaPaaS business in the industry, with exponential potential for growth, and presented their highly relevant buzzword catch-phrase – immersive big data and well-mannered disruption of advice columns through the mobile cloud, and also social media. Negotiations were tense, but they were ultimately funded with a lot of money to start a business in ways that were complicated to explain, but which Jane, the cow chief financial officer thought were workable.

Yoyodynamic Capital even forgave Princess for climbing on the table.

Thus they were probable tech millionaires. Maybe. All they had to do was make an actual company with customers, a long term manageable strategy, and a way to make a profit – easy.

Next episode: Will they buy a foosball table, fancy espresso machines, and nerf guns with their startup capital? Will the Yoyodynamic dinosaurs betray the company? Will the platform do the right platform-related things? Will Princess become a tech millionaire? Will this whole episode be explained away a few sentences in the next preamble? Will they ever get a decent lighting setup so the color temperature and shadows aren’t all over the map? These questions and others may or may not be answered in our next installment:

Princess Pricklepants and the Dinosaur Denouement