The lies we tell ourselves. “I’ve learned more from my failures than my successes”

“In the world of entrepreneurship I think the most dangerous lie we tell ourselves is ‘I’ve learned more from my failures than my successes.’ It’s simply not true and I want to talk about why.

What I believe IS true is the statement ‘I’ve developed more CHARACTER from my failures than my successes.’ But, I firmly believe we LEARN more from our successes by far.

…

 The most important thing you can develop early in your career is a gut for what success feels like. The only way to do that is to be part of something successful.”

Source: briannegarcia

This and That: Capital Intensive Ideas

Source: santopoliti

Texas, Like a Local

As a lifelong New Yorker I’m a big believer that if possible when you travel to a place you should try your best to experience it like a local. Tourist experiences in most cities suck. It’s because the big avenues in each city are populated by corporate chains that don’t offer truly local experiences. New Yorkers stay away from Times Square like the black plague for that reason. Fortunately, Ashley shares my view. So, if you go to Texas take these tips with you:

1. Wherever you go, find a way to make it fun. Don’t bother with i-35 take the backroad they’re much more scenic.

2. Ft. Worth is more Magic Kingdom than Wild West. If you go though, eat at Lonesome Dove. Try the rattlesnake. Definitely eat the beef. If you’re an Old Fashion fan, get their specially made version. If you want cowboys though, find a ranch somewhere and skip Ft. Worth.

3. Shoot a gun. Go to Elm Fork Shooting Range in Dallas. They’re awesome.

4. Go see Will the Blacksmith in Grapevine, Texas. Buy one of his cooking tools made out of old horseshoes. Don’t let him show you any tricks though. This cowboy hustles like he’s from the 212.

5. Go to small towns, like Waxahachie.

6. Stay at Rose Hill Manor in Fredericksburg. It’s 100 acres of heaven owned by a couple that lives on the property. It was the best experience we had all trip. Their filet mignon is one of the the best things I’ve ever eaten.

7. Drive through Hill Country. Don’t miss this.

8. You’ll eat a lot of barbecue, but no one does barbecue like Smitty’s in Lockhart. I promise you this. Get the brisket and the sausage. Wash it down with some Sweet Tea. Mind your manners and be grateful for what’s happening in your mouth.

9. If you do San Antonio, go to the River Walk in the morning. It’s nothing but tourists during drinking hours.

10. Talk to people. We met some fantastic strangers who really made the experience. Their perspectives on life were different than ours, but reminded me of a great quote by Maya Angelou:

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

I’ve never found a compelling argument, report, or dataset set suggesting digital delivery of content cannibalizes traditional revenue models.
Joel Resnicow, Rexly CEO, formerly Product at Disney in his post on Disney Digital Revenues

Path and Derivative Network Value

— Originally wrote this in December and never published —

Path relaunched yesterday and everyone is loving it. Originally a photo-sharing site for you and your closest 50 friends; Path now allows content sharing of all types and has a litany of new features. They’re dubbing themselves as your personal journal and I think they’re right to do so.

The number of platforms to share at online has exceeded each of our personal capacity’s to share. Google +’s problem isn’t that it’s not eleqouently designed and ingeniously executed— it’s that the switching costs are too high. People fundamentally don’t have the time and Google’s value proposition isnt different enough from Facebook’s to warrant a new broadcasting stream. To their credit, Path rightfully acknowledged that there is no one purely in their competitive set and their lack of early adoption was more a function of execution and not ideation. While I love Path’s new features, it’s their positioning as your most discreet social graph that really excites me. Sharing happens from your most discreet social network to your least. More simply, your closest friends know everything about you and your weakest acquaintances know least. The strength of each of your friendships can be plotted along that social wavelength. Google + believes that you share information in communities of people. Each community gets a fundamentally different set of information.

And they’re right—offline.

The conversations I have with work friends are substantively different than those I have with my college friends, but that’s because I broadcast my message in different physical environments. There’s a link between physical environment and message substance. But online, that physical environment is removed and broadcasting a message becomes more about provisioning access to my personal information—and I do that by measure of the depth of friendship. Not by the material type of friendship. And this plays perfectly into Path’s business model. If what I share is about access to personal information then I’m willing to share everything with my 50 closest friends and a measure of degree less with all friends beyond that. Therefore, I share everything on Path and based on what the information is I’ll broadcast it to Facebook, Twitter or foursquare.

The Ineffectiveness of Email

Fred Wilson just blogged about how backed up he is on email. Glad to see more people are paying attention to this now. My friends and I have long complained about how ineffective email has become.

I think this is happening for a number of reasons:

  1. We now use social platforms for activity that we used to use email for. Communication like event invitations and casual updates is more easily done on Facebook. Stream-of-conciousness broadcasts are now done on Twitter (GChat statuses, AIM statuses, etc.)
  2. We are always connected to the internet and are less reliant on walled gardens to do so. When Aol was at the height of its popularity nearly 34 million people used it. As a walled garden, before browsing online I was told how much email was in my inbox. We moved to broadband and wireless connections, but accessing the internet was still an activity done when I sat down at my computer. However, with a computer always in your hand now, we live on the internet, quite literally. Connecting to the internet is no longer an event, and therefore increasing numbers of people feel less of a need to see who is trying to connect with them.
  3. Email used to be a place where people went to feel connected. Now we’re always connected, so we don’t feel like we’re missing key communication if not on email.
  4. There are more efficient, less intrusive communication channels now. Here’s how I think about this:

Digital communication allows for immediate message delivery (phone, email, SMS), with increasingly less intrusive ways of demanding attention. As we’ve moved from sound to text methods of signaling communication (phone to SMS text) we’re seeing higher efficiencies. And now products are differentiating forms of delivery for a single communication method. A SMS text uses the same communication method as a push alert, however iOS signals importance through the color of the screen window. 

I’m excited about the next communication platform. Great companies have been built atop of communication technologies: from AT&T, MCI and Verizon to Excite, Yahoo and Google to Facebook and Twitter there’s always a ton available with this new technology.

We thought about this a bit as we considered building a new product for vente-privee usa. We knew that as our inventory scaled, our ability to sell was dependent on identifying a new channel to making our users aware of the day’s sales beyond email. We went in a different direction with the product that didn’t immediately require us answering that question, but it still is an interesting one.  

Part of the solution may also be about personal management. Given an onslaught on information and communication, its increasingly important to say no, to be more discriminating in who and what gets our attention. Attention in some ways is as valuable as currency. We also need to think more about the modes in which we give our attention. For instance, a lot of friends and companies set aside specific time for email so that during other times they can be more fully engaged and therefore more effective. 

I’m excited to see what comes next. How do you think this problem will be solved?

Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter.
Harold Kushner

How to Be More Interesting

Great post by Jessica Hagy at Forbes on How to Be More Interesting. Jessica runs a blog focused on telling stories, jokes, and truths through handrawn images. It is pretty awesome.

 

Community Building On Browser Software

Checkout Firefox’s new HTML Inspector—it is really cool. Earlier this year when we were working on launching vente-privee USA we had to deconstruct the European site to understand their hierarchy, user actioning decisions, etc. This would’ve been super-helpful then.

Increasingly as the OS moves to the browser, users will make more conscious choices about what browsers they use. That is going to require greater feature enhancement for each technology provider. It also will require that browser providers really incentivise developers to develop great add-ons. Part of the reason I’m loyal to Chrome is because of rapportive and Polaris Insights. I can imagine that more of my lightweight browsing behavior (e.g. reading news and entertainment) will continue to be augmented by great add-ons.

An interesting question is what communities are forming around shared software. For example, I just tweeted a question to Action Method asking if they have GMail plug-ins. I imagine I’d get a ton of value from exchanging thoughts and ideas with other Action Method/GMail users. 

Originally from Tumblr Staff blog. Really great stuff there. 

The Weeknd’s Brand Strength

A year ago I was building a company. Our product was going to be distributed online, through email and through mobile applications. We also suspected that in the not so distant future our product would have to be distributed within third-party apps and HTML5 mobile sites. Thus, the implications on the brand of our product were vast. The head of our brand team began using the term atomize and distribute when referring to how we’d brand our product. The basic concept is that the atom (smallest unit) of the brand would have to be the most recognizable, since we were going to have less and less space to communicate our brand (online to own app to others’ app). 

If you think about some of the best brands over time, they’ve all accomplished this. You need only see the first C in Coca-Cola, IBM’s three letters or McDonald’s golden arches to recognize their branded products.

I mention this because I’ve been listening to The Weeknd’s new mixtape Echoes of Silence (download now, thank me later) and realizedAbel’s (The Weeknd’s real name) branding is a great example of non-Tech companies following the atomize and distribute principle. 

Consistent font and layout across three mixtapes. 

All of Abel’s music has been released free, distributed through cloud hosting sites like Hulkshare. Much like Drake, Abel is working on building his brand for free through digital tools, forming a strong community of followers and then presumably negotiating a favorable record deal with a major label or releasing his first studio album through self-funding. Either way, he is going to be reliant on communicating a consistent brand message through an online medium, with limited space. His music is killing it and his branding isn’t far behind.

P2P Services as the Future of Social Online

Some time ago, I wrote a post about how the social software companies that have been created over the last 10 years haven’t created fundamentally new human behaviors. They’ve only augmented existing behaviors, creating new normals in frequency and method of behavior. The best example of this is Facebook. Sharing your plans for Friday night, uploading photos of your children and sending out event invitations is not a fundamentally new human behavior. Broadcasting those plans, a weekly upload of your kids’ photos and inviting hundreds of people to a limited capacity event are certainly more extreme forms of those behaviors. That said, they aren’t new behaviors unto themselves.

Therefore, adopting their new forms through internet software (though often complained about) is not a difficult conceptual step for new adopters to take. 

Thus far, networks have been the focus of the social layer on the internet. Services like P2P marketplaces have been largely neglected. Those services are heavily reliant on deliberate social actions (selling something on eBay requires multiple active states of socialization—deciding to sell, posting the item, posting social proof for trust and security, bidding on the item, purchasing the item, shipping the item) unlike services like Dropbox that are dependent on the internet, but have few deliberate social actions as features.

I thought about this because I was listening to 1970s soul records with my family and thought—someone would pay to be a part of this. My parents were giving me a musical lesson of 60s and 70s soul, one that I’m only fortunate to receive because of my good fortune in being born to them. That experience is worth something and the democratization of all information (including experiences) is at the heart of what the internet is. Paying for those services through an online platform is just the commercial manifestation of that. And so I realized that this revelation itself isn’t new. Its one I had months ago about Facebook, but just didn’t apply to P2P services. Read these pieces from Christina and Fred at USV that speak a lot to the investment strategy concerning P2P marketplaces.

Generating Sustainable Value as a Derivative Company

From Vinay’s Thoughts

API Value Chains — Why Are They Unique?

The emergence of the API economy has transformed the way internet companies organize. Companies’ ability to build a derivative product on an existing database creates opportunities for innovation and growth previously too expensive or overwhelming to build. In some ways, an API assembles relationships among companies similarly to a traditional value chain. In a traditional value chain, at each actor in the chain contributes additional value, fundamentally altering the product, before transporting it to the next stage

Traditional Value Chain — Oil to Gasoline

In the world of APIs, the inputs at each stage are data and the outputs are the synthesis of previously unconnected data sets to form a new data point. While this analogy effectively describes part of the dynamic, economies reliant on APIs also contain unique attributes. Like in traditional value chains, at each stage in an API economy, actors transform the data inputs from the previous stage into a new more refined data point. Unlike traditional value chains, however, even after the transformation into new data the later stages often remain reliant on the APIs of earlier players, because of the network dynamics of Web 2.0 industries. 

In an API dependent industry, each level of the value chain continues to rely on the previous layer for access to the data ‘spigot.’ The notion of a data spigot is one we normally associate with wireless data providers, but the concept also applies to accessing data from 3rd-party APIs. One example was Twitter’s decision to compete with third party developers last year. Twitter has complete discretion over how it wishes to interact with other players via its API, something we will discuss in even greater detail later. In a traditional value chain, earlier players cannot alter the nature of an output once it has left their domain. In data-centric world of API economies, however, there exists an ongoing risk of such alterations.

Despite Risks, API’s Offer Significant Benefits

Despite the risk, the benefits of using an existing API versus recreating such a database is self-evident.

Read More

Great Technology Loves You Back

This post is from my close friend Vinay Ganti’s blog. We’ve decided to cross-post. So, you’ll see his posts listed here as well.

——

Vinay:

I hurried my pace to cross the the street, and turned left. Glancing down on my phone, I flicked my right thumb upwards on the screen and was met with the next step in the directions to the restaurant. The phone had even taken the time to let me know that if I reached 7th Avenue then I had gone too far. That made me smile a bit on the inside, and in some weird way I felt as though the phone did the same thing when I actually reached my destination.


When we look back on the impact of Steve Jobs, most of us will focus on the idea that he created products that people loved. He created a product family and company that made people feel safe, triggered real emotion in the user and for many actually for once feel cool. Along the way he managed to create one of the most valuable (and at one point the most valuable) companies in the world. 

So it is unsurprising then that most people describe Apple as a company that focused on making the experience for the user as pleasurable as possible. But I believe this description only gets us part of the way. The magic of Jobs came not from creating technology that peopled love, but rather creating technology that loved people. 

What I mean by this is that Apple’s products feel like they enjoy being used. Every time you interact with the device it seems to be happier than the time before — similar to a loving dog. In fact the introduction of touch as a means of interaction only bring this metaphor closer to home. It makes sense that this evolution of technology appears so acute with mobile devices, because these are the most personal of all technologies. Like a loyal companion following close behind in the park or woods, your mobile phone is likely by your side 24 hours a day patiently waiting to be used. Sometimes the device “barks” letting you know that something demands your attention; other times it lays by your feet ready to react the moment you need it. 

This ongoing pursuit to develop technology that loved people back culminated this month with the release of Siri for the iPhone. Now the implicit has become explicit as you can converse with your technology. In what may be a harbinger for successfully overcoming the Turing test for artificial intelligence, Siri has broken the final barrier of interaction with one’s personal device — voice. No doubt voice recognition software predates Siri (in fact Apple acquired Siri), but the way in which you are able to naturally communicate with Siri and the breadth of tasks that Siri can do fundamentally has moved the needle. 

Even more so, Siri enjoys chatting with you. Ask Siri, “What are you wearing?” and she has an answer (SFW, I promise!). Ask her to remind you to call your mom, and she gladly obliges. Like any good pet she wants to be wanted, a feeling that is rare in most devices (that’s right I implied that a phone has feelings). In fact there is a tumblr blog that tracks all the crazy things she is capable of saying.

Surprisingly, the people that appear to understand this loop the most is the team who designed Windows Phone 7. That’s right the company that created Windows 95 understands better than anyone else today how a technology must love its owner back to be successful. In fact the vignette at the post’s beginning is from the other day with my own Samsung Focus — the best phone I have ever used in my life. Developing products that love being used requires incredible attention to detail and the ability to predict what small nugget of humanity a user will appreciate when provided by their device.

Why does this matter then? Because at the heart of building great products, we will never be able to fully predict how a user behaves, no matter how hard we try. What we can do is predict how the product should behave when engaged. Focusing on making a product that is happy to be used is a liberating but challenging endeavor, as it often means discarding many features that you may want because it is simply too difficult to humanize them well.

But look around you, and you will begin to notice that those products that people love are the ones that seem to love their owners back. This maxim applies when we move beyond technology, like a BMW, or even a well-prepared meal. The food almost seems to want to be eaten. 

Yahoo/ABC News Partnership

Fresh off the Kindle Fire news and a day before the iPhone 5 launch, Yahoo has announced a deep integration with ABC News in their latest fight for big tech relevancy. Yahoo—which produces original content, but really has value as a news aggregator—will now give ABC News content premium positioning on its platform. This deal makes sense for both companies, for a few reasons:

  1. Audience alignment: ABC News and Yahoo! both capture the very general audience segments. Neither seems to skew younger, to a specific gender or of a specific political affiliation relative to their competitors)
  2. Category leaders in News media are of three types: 24 hour news networks (CNN), Platforms that aggregate news (formerly Yahoo, Google News, AOL), Niche plays (HuffPo, Drudge, Fox News, MSNBC)). ABC News (similar to CBS News and MSNBC for a long time) is a classic, general news provider that doesn’t own eyeballs through a platform and has no niche play. So for them, this makes perfect sense.
  3. Yahoo! doesn’t need the overhead of heavy content creation: There are already numerous companies that invest significantly in creating content, primarily for a live broadcast, appointment programming world. In that world, because distribution was limited (only 4 -5 news channels) there was less of a need to differentiate on content. News orgs focused on being high quality and premium. In an on-demand world these companies no longer have any competitive strength in distribution and so have to win solely on perceived content value. And the value of producing high-quality, middle-of-the-road content is not as high as producing niche content. Yahoo distribution plays back to ABC’s original strength of distribution channel ownership.
  4. ABC will now be able to place an identity to a lot of their news consumers, since they’ll be actively logged-in Yahoo users. This is critical to serving more relevant advertisements and other forms of relevant revenue-generating content. News sites have long struggled in creating true user value in being registered and logged-in. Yahoo will help solve some of that for ABC.

I think we’ll look back on this partnership as a significant step in the realignment of news media. AOL has really made a strong push as being the leading general media platform online and this positions Yahoo to really do much of the same. You’ll always have your niche plays because of the nature of on-demand consumption, but there is still room for platform owners to get most people the general news and information they’d otherwise miss.

And yes, I used to work for ABC, but trust me that I have no biases. I get my news from The Onion: America’s Finest News Source. Now, that’s journalism.

Kindle Fire: Amazon as a B2B Service Provider

Jeff Bezos debuted the Kindle Fire today, a $199 7-inch tablet that some media outlets are suggesting will be an iPad killer.

The pricing and product design of the tablet, however, suggest that it isn’t Apple that Amazon is worried about. At $199 Amazon has had to go light on hardware features on the device, as highlighted by Techcrunch,

There are no physical buttons on the black slate, along with little Amazon branding. The Fire doesn’t have a camera, microphone or 3G connectivity although it does pack WiFi. It’s all about the experience here.

Yes, it is all about the experience—but we’ll get back to that.

Amazon’s new tablet will take share from the iPad, but that’s because the mobile computing market is continuing to grow significantly and as markets expand it is the cheaper-priced devices that new customers buy. Google knew this and that’s why they’ve focused on dominating the under $300 smartphone market, which is primed to grow the most and has true international viability. In Q2, Apple sold every iPad2 they could manufacture in the U.S. and that won’t change anytime soon. Only if they planned on releasing a less expensive device, is this Fire news relevant to them. And that’s not only because of the price point, but because Amazon has a real ecosystem that can compete with Apple’s iOS ecosystem. That’s a real barrier to competition. 

And that ecosystem is built on being a data-driven product company with strong retailer relationships. Amazon knows this and it shows in the product design. Their display of media content is being described as a “complete storefront for the retailer” (see left), which they are betting is the kind of experience necessary to get formerly reluctant publishers to make their full content library available online. Bezos seems to get, that though the absolute rule for internet product design is to focus on the consumer, when disrupting industries there is a position for companies who focus on the supplier as well. Amazon is positioning itself as a B2B service provider, as much as they are a B2C retailer and the Fire wasn’t their first product release to acknowledge that. Earlier this year they launched MyHabit, a private sales site to challenge Gilt, HauteLook, RueLaLa and end-of-life fashion retailers.

The private sales business model is selling end-of-life, high-fashion inventory behind a wall that protects the premium position of the designer’s brand. More simply, Marc Jacobs is OK with selling last season’s pants on Gilt, because Gilt can guarantee the quality of the customers and merchandise presentation. Marshall’s can’t do that. What you see however, is that Gilt is increasingly positioning itself as a general eCommerce player and less a PS retailer.

My Habit, however, was a product designed with the brand’s interest at heart. From what I can tell, they never couple multiple brands within the same sale and have invested significantly in the presentation of the merchandise. For instance, when you click on a piece of clothing there is a brief video that shows the model walking in place. This is ideal for designers and Amazon knew that. 

So as much as the Bezos’ announcement is being positioned as being most relevant to Apple, it isn’t really. This announcement is just another signifier that mobile computing will soon be the only type of relevant computing and as more industries are disrupted, there is market opportunity in being a B2B2C company. And that’s something a lot of startups should take note of. The only caveat I’d add is that I think B2B2C products can only exist, once a B2C product has commanded consumer demand. Just think, if the Kindle Fire was released in 2010 instead of the iPad, would we even be having this conversation today? Not a chance.