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Don't Mess Up Tumblr: Five Lessons Learned from YouTube

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Mon, 20 May 2013 22:01:00 +0000

When Google purchased YouTube there was lots of skepticism and outright derision. Today analysts estimate its enterprise value is approaching $20 billion. So I guess it all worked out, eh? Being one of the first Googlers to join YouTube after the acquisition taught me a lot about what works, and doesn't work, when you bring a fast growing community property into a larger entity. There are clearly parallels between our situation in 2007 and what Tumblr will experience with Yahoo. Marissa is a friend from our time together at Google and I'm impressed, but not surprised, by her decisiveness and vision. I don't know David Karp but we share a number of mutual friends and at a 2012 group dinner he passed me the salt, so we've got that. But since neither of them replied to my tweet offering $10k/hr consulting services, here are five Lessons Learned for Not Messing Up Tumblr.

1. Protect Tumblr from "Helpful" Yahoos

YouTube saw a huge influx of meeting requests, collaboration ideas, inbound employee transfer offers, etc. We were the shiny new toy and everyone wanted to play. Much of it was self-interest - some good natured, some more political. But even the useful opportunities still had the risk of hugging us to death. Eric Schmidt, who was an amazing sponsor of YouTube, gave great advice - be very selective about who you bring into the team and just say he gave us permission to turn down the other offers of "help."

We complemented this by proactively educating key Google groups about YouTube. I, along with others, visited key stakeholders at Google and their team meetings. Especially legal, policy and pr - we wanted them to understand the magic of YouTube. Beyond cat videos and copyright questions, help them to see education, community, homegrown stars - everything that made this 18 month old company worth the $1.6b price tag.

2. Avoid Locality Bias in Product Development

You're part of Google, there's corporate pressure (and perceived quick wins) to work with other Google products. Blogger, Orkut, OpenSocial, Google Video, Picasa. Remember those? We were growing so quickly that if YouTube integrated or heavily promoted them, they could probably hit their quarterly growth target just from our marketing efforts. But guess what, in many cases that wasn't where our growth was coming from. It was coming from Facebook, Twitter, Buzzfeed, Tumblr and the curatorial blogosphere. So that's where we focused. Be where our users are and grow on the back of those ecosystems. Were some of them Google competitors? Heck, some of them were YOUTUBE competitors but overall the goal was to sew ourselves into the fabric of the web. Boy did I take arrows in the back (I still remember Jeff Huber saving me from a few of them) but at the time, it was the right choice. YouTube's partnership with Apple to be a default app on the original iPhone not only helped us make the jump to mobile but it ensured that every other carrier wanted YouTube on their phones too.

3. Stop Short Term Monetization That Won't Scale

YouTube was just starting to earn revenue via a host of banner ads and one-off branded campaigns. Neither of these were going to be important longterm and many of the programs put money in our pocket, but passed through little benefit to content creators because they sold YouTube inventory. It took a good 18 months but under the right goals and leadership the cross functional team started sunsetting this stuff for more scalable monetization products which put money in content creators' pockets.

4. Infrastructure (Tech, Process) on Tumblr Terms

The YouTube engineering and network team was superb - keeping the site live and minimizing operational costs during hypergrowth. Google engineering leadership helped out by connecting them with teams they wanted to speak with, not by ordering them to migrate systems. The goal was to help YouTube architect even more scalable infrastructure without slowing down feature development. I think search index moved over first, then a set of progressive projects around thumbnail serving, streaming, etc. Treat it as a science fair where Tumblr gets to see all of the cool tech available to them. Pair senior engineers from each side to help build trust and overcome the Not Invented Here pride of status quo.

Business processes were similar. We quickly started using Google OKRs but across release schedules, job ladders, bonus formulas, etc had license to experiment. Great cultures need to figure things out for themselves - it made no sense to immediately take everything Google was doing and force these best practices upon a company as young as YouTube. For example, there was a period where, working with Google HR, we changed our bonus multiplier to starve lower performers and give more of their bonus to higher performers. In addition to believing it was the right model, we also wanted to signal internally that YouTube wasn't a place you could transfer to and then just coast.

5. Separate Identity, Separate Space

Although YouTube worldwide increasingly colocated staff in Google offices we maintained worldwide headquarters as a standalone building in San Bruno. Coming to an office every day that said YouTube in big letters and was filled w just other folks working on the same goal - incredibly motivating. We would have gotten lost on Google's main campus. We needed separate space and identity. Not because we were better but because we were different. How could we have a community that believed in us if we didn't feel like a tribe ourselves. We had a building, we had a heartbeat.

Best of luck to the Tumblr and Yahoo teams!

Tech Conferences Are Destroying the World. But I Have A Solution.

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Sun, 19 May 2013 04:11:00 +0000

Tech conferences aren't about the content, it's about the conversation. The conversations in the lobby, the hallways, over meals, across seats. The ability to connect with large numbers of people in an informal setting away from the office. In fact, the personal contact is so good that people travel long distances, mainly by airplane, to get a seat: San Francisco, New York, Austin, Paris, London, Hawaii and beyond. If you attend a few of these you're sure to grow your network and influence. And you know what else? YOU'RE DESTROYING THE WORLD VIA INCREASED CARBON EMISSIONS.

One roundtrip flight from NYC to SF or Europe creates warming effects of roughly 3 tons of carbon emissions per person. Oh, that's just the equivalent of 10,000 miles driven in a car. No biggie...

So all these folks tweeting about a greener planet and installing Nest thermostats, there's one thing you could do that might really make a difference: stop flying as much. Seriously, I know that every event is so important that in the moment it seems like a great idea to attend but you're creating a shittier world for my daughter. Since I go to some of these myself i guess I'm part of the problem. Besides trying to cut down on unnecessary plane travel, here's what I'd suggest:

Conference Organized Should Bake Carbon Offset Into the Ticket Price
Carbon offsets are a market-based solution where you can seek to reduce your carbon footprint not by changing your behavior, but by paying to reduce carbon emissions elsewhere. Most of the big tech conferences are pretty inelastic because many attendees are affluent or expensing their tickets. Toss another $100 in there. No one will care.

AllThingsD, TechCrunch, GigaOM, f.ounders, LeWeb, The Lobby, TED, and so on... you game?

Congrats! The Backslappy Nature of Social Media

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Thu, 16 May 2013 04:12:00 +0000

I'm a nice guy, right? I generally root for people to succeed, even in situations when I'm skeptical of their plans. And a pat on the back - of encouragement, or a job well done - I know that matters. But I'm sorry, I can't do it any more. The "congrats" tweets. They need to stop. Often, especially after a tech news event, my Twitter feed is filled with these meaningless kudos. Man, I sound like Gabe Rivera, but hear me out. This isn't about some cold, hard stoicism where we're all locked in some mortal confrontation and praise equals weakness. No, rather it's about three simple types of sin - THE FAUXGRATS

The SuckUp Congrats ("@dickc congrats man, you totally nailed the commencement speech")
Here someone tries to curry favor and attach themselves to a notable figure via public supplicancy. SuckUp pile ons often occur.

The Humblebrag Congrats ("Zuck congrats on 1B users. Man, I remember 07 when we hit 100m #GoodTimes)

The congrats which allows you to place yourself upstream of the event or suggest that you had some contribution to the success. Note one way VCs do this is via the "Congrats . Proud to be an investor! #blessed"

The Undeserved Congrats ("Congrats [company which essentially just went out of business] ! Excited for the next adventure!")
Hey guess what, I showered this morning. Congratulate me?

Let's embark together on a Congrats 12 Step Program. First, admit you have a problem. If you go back through my Twitter archives I'm probably guilty of all three. But not recently. You see, I now stop myself if the congrats is meant to aggrandize myself alongside the recipient. And then even if it's pure, I'll send an email or post to their Facebook wall. Keep it quiet. On the down low.

Congrats, you made it to the end of this post.

Don't Let a Minimum Viable Product Minimize Your Minimum Viable Vision

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Wed, 08 May 2013 05:21:00 +0000

Speaking today at a Wired conference in NYC, WarbyParker cofounder Neil Blumenthal prophesied that "you won't be able to hire talented people over the next 10 years unless you're a mission-driven company." I think he's right. Some entrepreneurs think "mission-driven" means taking an Uber to a bar at 19th & Valencia, but in actuality it's what binds teams together during both fruitful and challenging times.

Too many founders have sacrificed the WHY in the process of speeding up the WHAT and HOW. The Minimum Viable Product approach is not fundamentally at odds with thoughtfully articulating the longterm vision of the company. In many cases the founders bring this with them to the startup - it's why they selected this path. Other times though, founders are only coached on mission & vision in the context of selling the big picture to investors. If it's not in your heart, writing on a slide won't make it true.

If your Minimum Viable Product is the simplest implementation that will add value for your users, your Minimum Viable Vision is the most succinct version of why your company matters and what you hope to become. A MVV isn't just for your employees or press or VCs. It's your product true north too. If you don't know the destination, then it's hard to ensure your product isn't just a collection of parts.

Can You Really Trust A Cookie?

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Tue, 07 May 2013 15:15:00 +0000

Is there a market in reverse engineering cookies in order to present a false identity to a website? Ecommerce sites routinely provide various discounts, and potentially even variable pricing, to individuals based on behavioral analysis. For example, if a site sees you visited six times, browsed, but did not purchase, perhaps they'll pop up a "$10 off today" coupon.

Got me thinking - could you write a piece of software which for a given site, presents a large number of manufactured cookies, in rapid succession, to try and find which will trigger advantageous pricing?

Are there other scenarios where manufactured cookies would be helpful? 10 Free Articles Before Hitting Paywall - today you clear your cookies in order to restart, but what about constantly re-presenting that site with a cookie suggesting you've only read one article?

Today cookies are generally trusted for machine-to-machine communication. Should they?

Update via Mark Ayzenshtat:
This kind of technique would not get very far. Sites that stored, e.g., numArticlesRead=1 inside the cookie could easily ensure that it wasn't tampered with by adding a message authentication code (HMAC) to the cookie state. Or (more work for the site) they could avoid storing anything in the cookie beyond a randomly generated user ID and track the interesting parts (like how many articles you've viewed) entirely on the server.

Could Your Username Be Used For Fraud Detection?

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Mon, 06 May 2013 02:28:00 +0000

If you go to just about any social website and search for user "hunter walk," there's a reasonable chance you'll find me. It just always seemed easiest to employ my real name and its uniqueness meant it was often available. Any site I register with would also see it's the name in my email address and that my identity corresponded to a number of other sites where there exists proxy data suggesting I'm a good egg (eg in good standing on LinkedIn). So basically I should be trusted on any new site since it's a very low probability that I'm a fraudster, at least if past behavior is indicative of future. So why does each site start off not knowing a thing about me?

I'm not talking about a Facebook-style federated identify but wondering if there's a "Username Analysis as a Service" component to fraud prevention, or at least asshole detection. Can a username be valuable in predictive analysis about behavior? For example, do users who purposefully misspell words in their screen name behave better or worse? Are nonsense usernames more likely to be spammers? Can someone who seemingly uses a real name ("Hunter Walk," "Larry Goodstein," etc) be trusted because they're using their name, even though the system doesn't require it?

Cursory Google search didn't turn up any academic research on this. Can anyone point me to relevant studies?

Funding Kabuki (aka Creativity in Round Naming)

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 05:12:00 +0000

In the last 48 hours I've seen funding solicitations for the following "Pre-A" financings: Advisory Round, Friends & Family, Seed Alpha, Seed Plus, Seed, Accelerator Round, Traction Round. And I'm probably forgetting a few. Boy we're getting creative in our fundraising narratives...

On one hand it doesn't really matter, who cares what it's called - any smart investor is going to look at real metrics of traction and cap table. You can't fake the numbers. If your startup is raising its third financing to explore yet another pivot, I know it smells, no matter what fancy name you invent.

But at the same time it bothers me a bit - it's funding kabuki - and I can't help but see it as a negative signal for where energy is being focused. Making decks, naming rounds.

What if we standardized on funding like the convention of software releases? Round 1.0, Round 2.0, etc. Each advance in version number represents a change in financing terms. A point release (eg R1.1) suggests more money raised at the same - or substantially similar - terms.

Nah, will never happen. Pardon me, I need to review a deck for someone's Superhero Beta Round.

These Three $50B+ Companies Should Be Fighting Over Foursquare

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 15:50:00 +0000

I've identified three companies each worth north of $50B who should be fighting over ownership of Foursquare. Apple, Facebook and Google? Nope. Visa ($110B), Mastercard ($66B) and American Express ($75B).

Your credit card company has a tremendous amount of data on where you, and the world, shops. Not purchases at the SKU level - they largely don't know what you bought at West Elm or Cheesecake Factory - but they do know that you spend $350 at a furniture store and $75 at a casual food chain. Now extrapolate this over millions of customers. Using covisitation data they could recommend to me other establishments visited by folks with similar spending patterns. "Hunter, because you enjoy West Elm you might also like SF Modern Design located at 1000 State St." This would be especially helpful when traveling.

But none of these credit card companies are (a) skilled at building consumer facing applications, (b) upstream of purchase decisions and (c) have place level data for retail establishments. Oh but wait, Foursquare has all of those. By combining with Foursquare, the credit card companies could finally justify and preserve their transaction fees (in the face of competition from other payment options) but working to drive demand to the local retailers. Today they do this in very non-scalable ways such as one-off marketing programs such as AmEx Small Business week.

To take it a step further, this would also give a credit card company the ability power loyalty programs at the retailer level using Foursquare check-ins combined with verified purchases to close the discovery<>transaction loop.

Is that a Foursquare-powered credit card in your pocket or is your app just happy to see me?

[When buzzing about this on Twitter, Rakesh Agrawal pointed me to a 2012 article where he feels similarly]

Promoted Apps: Could Native Advertising Come to iOS App Store?

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 06:02:00 +0000

The iOS app store will pass $20b annual runrate this year and yet app discovery is still terribly suboptimal. At first I thought it was merely product limitations that Apple would aggressively move to solve - better search, social discovery, improved ratings system. Then I claimed conspiracy theory - that Apple likes having editorial control and thus the ability to play kingmaker via the featured section. Now I'm thinking something else - something that Jobs might have rejected but could provide billions in high margin ad revenues to Apple: native advertising in the form of promoted apps.

Think about it - there's a fast-growing market in Cost Per Install app promotion around the iOS ecosystem. Apple doesn't like when it succeeds - partly because of grey-area techniques, but maybe also because they don't want anyone to meaningfully create alternative promotional mechanisms before they roll out Promoted Apps. AppGratis wasn't too bad but too good?

What could it look like? Some promotional slots within the leaderboards, on search, on browse. A cost per install auction system. Makes a lot more sense to me than iAd.

Anyone have good reasons why Apple shouldn't pursue this opportunity?

I Just Delivered Cookies to Watertown, MA Police Department from 2,500 Miles Away

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:31:00 +0000

I'm biased. I see technology as an amazing force in empowering people and creating connections. TaskRabbit helped me deliver a 'thank you' gift to the Watertown, Massachusetts police department from 2,500 miles away here in San Francisco. We've used TaskRabbit before for furniture assembly, help at a kid's birthday party and other local tasks, but never considered how I could use the platform for distributed labor in other cities. Hmmm.... :)

Note, if you want to do same, here's my task page for you to copy.

VC Firms Don't Back You, VC Partners Do

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 01:26:00 +0000

Have you ever tried to hug a company? It's kinda tough. They don't have arms. And total Ken doll down below. That is to say, COMPANIES ARE NOT PEOPLE. So it always surprises me when founders say "I raised money from [VC firm name]" and not "I raised money from [person] at [VC firm name]."

"Semantics" you might say and "bullshit" I'd definitely reply. By genericizing the relationship between you and your investors, you're losing the opportunity to build a sense of personal responsibility and obligation between your sponsor and yourself. This is especially relevant within large partnerships and when a traditional venture capitalist is investing in your seed round.

In fact I'd go so far as to say at the seed round you're definitely NOT taking money from a firm but a person, because you need that one person to make an important set of implied commitments: to work with you hands-on despite the relative small size of their investment compared to overall fund; to help you build a narrative towards your A Round so that their firm will participate, perhaps even lead. The opposite is true - if there's not a named investment professional on your deal who you can trust will be your advocate, don't take that money.

So founders, when recounting your investors - on your website, in conversation and especially with the investors themselves - don't say you took money from a firm, you took it from a person.

How I Became An Overnight Success (Spoiler: Took 10,000+ Overnights)

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 05:09:00 +0000

A little over two months since I left my gig at YouTube. Head down working on my new thing, details soon, but noticed something rewarding as I've been pitching it to people. Often they ask "how long have you been working on this?" and I get to say "oh, about 39 years." Wha????

What I mean is that my next project really comes from trying to go 'all in' - what can I do that's the sum total of everything I've done up to this point. The experiences I've had, the people I've met, the successes, the failures, the fears. All of it.

Talking with a young founder the other day and he said, "you're Internet famous but I don't really know why." I took this to mean that there's no single accomplishment I'm tied to - I didn't found a billion dollar company - so why the heck would people know my name. My hope would be because I've tried to contribute in lots of small ways to lots of people or communities. Some totally silly. Some meaningful. But it's probably also because I've been fortunate enough to be part of amazing teams at Second Life, Google and YouTube. When I get mentioned in the tech press it's usually for that stuff. No one ever covered my struggles - the 2006 promotion cycle where I got denied or fall 2008 when the YouTube monetization product team was moved out of my org because Google management didn't think I could handle the additional responsibility. But these are all part of me - and part of what I'm doing next.

Anyway, the point isn't to talk about myself but rather to say, life is a cumulative game, where one experience leads to the next. Keep pushing yourself. Don't settle for a 'meh' job. Be willing to jump up on the table and say "we can do better." Because the only thing I know for sure is that the best way to become an overnight success is realize it takes thousands of overnights.

Why Video Discovery Startups All Fail

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:32:00 +0000

Sad to see Cory Booker's startup Waywire pivoting to "Pinterest for video" after starting with much bigger ambitions. Prediction: they'll struggle because video discovery just isn't a venture scale business.

My previous role leading product at YouTube put me in position to see a lot of video startups. Additionally, most large developers hit our radar at some point via their API usage. Many of the video curation/discovery startups were based on two hypotheses:

1. There's an explosion in web video content (and it's not all on YouTube)
2. It's difficult on YouTube to find and manage the content you want to watch

These are both absolutely true yet it doesn't matter - video discovery startups are flawed products and even worse businesses. Why? Because they don't fit into a consumer's mental model. They're fine products - several are very well-designed - and I'm sure many user studies provide answers like "oh yes, I totally need this," but in reality there's no habit being formed. Here's why:

Verticalized content needs context not just collections. Many of these startup founders would provide the example of a particular interest and describe how an enthusiast would want to come to their site to see [fishing, cooking, fitness, travel, etc] videos. But just a collection of embedded thematic videos isn't enough - the real fan wants content, community, editorial. They already get their videos as part of the sites they visit today - along with text and images. A bunch of three minute videos with varying quality, metadata and sources isn't enough value, not when some blogger is already picking the best of these and adding content around them.

Horizontal content needs to solve search not just browse or curation. At YouTube we thought of a user's video discovery needs as occurring across a spectrum of intent. On one side you have "high intent" which means someone searching for a very particular individual video. On the other side you had low intent - this is why millions of searches a day start with something very generic such as "funny videos." In between the two would be more thematic queries such as "Lady Gaga" or "Louis CK standup." Today even though YouTube isn't an A+ in fulfilling needs across this entire spectrum it's largely good enough to be the only dedicated video site consumers turn to for short form content. By and large they don't want to sort their video destinations by intent (I go here to search for news video, here to browse for recipe videos, etc) because that's unecessary mental load. Furthermore, and anyone who has ever gone down the YouTube rabbit hole can attest, a single user session is likely to include multiple points on the discovery spectrum. You start perhaps by searching for a video on how to fix a flat tire but before you know it, watching clips from High School Musical.

Social video is not a standalone product, just a signal. For a while many companies were simply pulling the video shared by your Facebook friends and people you follow on Twitter to create social collections of content. These failed as standalone products because (a) social graph != interest graph and (b) removing the context and conversation took social videos and made them non-social. Fail.

It's hard to make money on other people's video when you can't monetize it directly. Finally, even those people who've been able to get a bit of traffic find it hard to create a business. Video sites have a great business model - the ad follows the content so when you watch a YouTube video offsite, you're still allowing the content owner to get paid. When you're simply embedding content your monetization is really limited. You can't put another ad in the player. From a YouTube terms of service standpoint they're perfectly happy to let you ad support your site so long as the ads don't target the video content AND if you removed the video, the page would still have enough content to be interesting to the consumer (that's the reasonable man test).

Some believe that native ad models are the solution - that content owners and advertisers will pay to promote their content. YouTube does this via sponsored videos and indeed it does work but requires a scale of both users and operations that these startups can likely not reach.

So what would I do? Probably create a great mobile app and a .99 per month subscription service to deliver a handful of curated YouTube videos to you each day. Highly thematic and where context is less important - hockey fights, vegan recipes, kid-friendly videos. It would be a niche business but one I think you could scale by getting folks to subscribe to multiple channels. But don't take venture capital. Just build it.

[For a smart response to this post, please read this post from ShowYou CEO Mark Hall]
[Update: Some additional thoughts from the CEO of Telly, a social video site]

Google Fiber: Just One More Search Per Session

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 04:00:00 +0000

Just got back from spending a day IN THE FUTURE! Ok, Kansas City where we met with local startups, big companies, Kauffman Foundation leaders and other folks thinking deeply about Google Fiber. As you can see from our speed test screenshot it's for real.

Since Google Fiber is just rolling out, it's not like there's a whole bunch of specialized web products built around having 1GB speed. But when you play with it, the gap between you and Internet totally disappears. The computer is responsive in a manner that I've never experienced before. You can play multiple 4k YouTube videos without buffering. You download 1GB files during a tv commercial break. You just get more done.

And that's the point. People ask me what's Google's metagame with Fiber. My guess is the following: Use Fiber to reset consumer expectations of what a connected home should feel like. Continue to drive down the cost of deployment and sign up customers for a very sticky (high LTV) service by being first to market. If existing ISPs follow - or even beat Google in ~~some~~ many markets - Google still wins. Why? Because as I found out personally, when the Internet is this fast you do one more search per session, watch one more video per session, send one more email per session. A connected population benefits Google. Period.

[Big thanks to Jeff & Regan of Silicon Prairie News for curating the trip. Their Big Omaha event is coming up May 8-10 and looks great.]

Optimizely Raises $28 Million via "Try Before You Buy"

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 23:05:00 +0000

A while back I wrote about the "Try Before You Buy" trend in hiring - finding ways to work with people more deeply than an interview process would allow. My friends at Optimizely recently raised $28m and one selection criteria they used for investors caught my eye:

they auditioned VCs in an unusual way, by holding “mock board meetings” with potential investors

Perfect. Congrats Pete & Dan (and Stanford classmates Peter Fenton & Doug Pepper who are among their funders).

Be More Generous? There's An App For That Too.

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 04:06:00 +0000

I just delivered a dozen cannoli and pound of cookies to my local firehouse, Station 15 here in San Francisco. And I didn't even have to get up out of my comfy chair.

On Friday I was sitting at Peet's in SOMA when a few policemen in uniform stopped by on break. Seeing them made me wonder how I could digitally gift coffee to police, fire and other first responders who serve on behalf of the city. Folks on Twitter suggested a few different ideas including my friend Ashley Brown who is VP of Operations at Get It Now - Postmates, a just-in-time delivery service. Ash recommended that I just use their service to send coffee to someone I wanted to thank. Their CEO/founder Bastian Lehmann even agreed to waive the delivery fee for this charitable endeavor. Operation Thank You was on!

This afternoon a Postmater named Jorge followed my instructions to pick, purchase and deliver the goodies to Station 15. He even snapped a picture

So many of the use cases we think about are based on satisfying ourselves - bring me this right now! It's equally fun though to start conceiving about how Postmates, Taskrabbit, and other of these new mobile apps can be used to brighten someone else's day instead of just our own. Seems like an opportunity for one (or all) of these products to build these use cases. Like a day of service, where taskrabbit helps coordinate rabbits to clean up local parks. Or Postmates does a Day of Thanks where all deliveries to firestations are free of charge. Apps that can be used to get can also be used to give.

Early Employees: Joel Jewitt & Palm

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 04:43:00 +0000

I was a huge Palm Pilot/Treo fan. In my latest LinkedIn post, early Palm employee Joel Jewitt shares stories of their success and failure to become Apple.

Q: Palm had the first mainstream smartphone, the first mobile app platform and even was developing a mainstream tablet/netbook before other PC companies. Why didn't you guys turn into Apple?

A: The ipod/itunes service phenomenon was the seed for every other mobile product Apple has developed. Or put another way: we should've been the ones who built a great music player and service

“Well, that’s the future”

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 22:55:00 +0000

Jurassic Park oral history in Entertainment Weekly. When you see the future, you know it.

KATHLEEN KENNEDY Producer I remember getting the phone call where Dennis said, “I think I have something you and Steven should take a look at.” We saw this wire-frame model of a dinosaur running across the screen, and it caused five  or six of us to literally leap to our feet because it was so extraordinary and significantly beyond anything we had seen in motion control up to that point.

SPIELBERG The last time my jaw dropped like that was when George Lucas showed me the shot of the Imperial cruiser [in Star Wars]. I showed it to [stop-motion effects legend] Ray Harryhausen. He was absolutely enthralled and very positive about the paradigm changing. He looked at the test and said, “Well, that’s the future.”

Quantified Self or Better to Quantify Someone Else: Can We Improve Ourselves By Mimicking Others?

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 15:27:00 +0000

The quantified self movement has produced any number of digital wearables allowing us to track our runs, our steps, our calories, and even our sleep. Then using our own motivation or target goals, we're supposed to change our behavior towards improvement. Easy, right?

However, I wonder if we're focusing on the wrong idea. Instead of tracking us as individuals, what if we used this technology to mimic someone who is already doing it right? Train like an athlete, eat like a nutritionist.

Imagine "following" someone and be made aware of their actions. Drink water when they drink water. Snack when they snack. Or follow the work pattern of the most productive person you know - how often do they check email? How often are they on Twitter? Should I follow the technology usage patters of MG or would my head explode?

Instead of measuring yourself and improving against some depersonalized target, would it be interesting to pattern our behaviors to someone else - in realtime, not just a training model - and as a community, live like someone else. Would that increase chances of improvement because we're part of a real collective?

The next gains in quantified self might not be hardware and sensors but sociology and community....

Lean Startup, Lean City: Visiting Tony Hsieh's Vegas Downtown Project

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 03:20:00 +0000

Growing up around New York City taught me to be most comfortable in dense settings. I came out to California for grad school but as soon as that finished, hightailed myself from Palo Alto to San Francisco looking for concrete in my life. An urban space renaissance lead by tech, design and other creative industries has grown over the last 10 years. This wave transformed Brooklyn, is transforming Oakland and if Zappos founder Tony Hsieh has his way, will restore downtown Las Vegas to a glory last seen a half-century ago. His Downtown Project is investing $350 million into real estate, tech, education and arts development in a part of the city that most tourists don't even know exists.

Count me among those who had no idea what downtown Vegas held, other than the Pawn Stars store. Until visiting this past week my visuals had been limited to the wonderful photos by Geoff Ellis who spent the past year chronicling the Downtown Project and bootstraping the photography scene. Geoff's images were bold and colorful but I realized upon landing that they were only some of the pixels on an otherwise complex screen. Yes the Downtown Project is about murals, neon, and sun-stained white walls, but at its most basic, it's about getting to a density of 100 people per square acre, the target at which they believe urban vitality blooms. Today it's at 15.

After two days of hanging with the Downtown Project crew - meeting startup founders, speaking with team members, drinking and eating at new local restaurants and giving a talk about YouTube to ~125 locals - I emerged both energized and a little stressed out. Energized because it's truly amazing how unified and committed everyone was to the Downtown Project goals. Stressed because, wow, what a challenge. One where they need more help, more hands on the boulder, especially from the hospitality industry and local government. There's no supermarket downtown. No college campus. No geographic border which allows you to take a portion of the land and clearly set it apart from the rest of the desert scrub. It's just there.

The startup founders I spoke with all were thrilled to be in Vegas. Some were locals but most relocated from the Bay Area, New York and all points in-between. They prized the chance to be around a small committed group of other CEOs and focus on their work without too much distraction. A new coworking space provided home to many and others worked out of apartments in The Ogden, Downtown's fancy apartment (originally built as condos but when market crashed in 2008, the building was sold and converted to rentals). But at the same time people are still processing how to grow in Vegas. Will the Vegas Tech Fund, with a goal of blended Return on Investment and Return on Community, be better off creating a bunch of small companies or should they be focused on finding and nurturing a few big hits to put Vegas on the map? They need critical mass of talent and investment beyond what exists today.

Tony is really committed to making this work. He lives in one of the apartments and is moving Zappos from nearby Henderson to a building downtown. I'm sure he's got the drive to stick this out and here's hoping the rest of the city has similar stamina. The cab driver taking me to the airport probably said it best: "Impressive when someone takes their money and tries to do so much with it."

Flickr's Early Days

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:27:00 +0000

Latest "Early Employee" series, Heather Champ remembers the dawn of Flickr.

"As the community grew, we wanted to find a way to document what Flickr was in a tangible way and the guidelines grew out of a conversation during our daily commute back and forth from San Francisco to Sunnyvale. We weren't sure that "Don’t be creepy. You know the guy. Don't be that guy." would pass muster with the lawyers, but it did. I continue to see fingerprints of Flickr's Community Guidelines throughout the web and it makes me happy."

These engineers quit their jobs to start LeChat

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 15:40:00 +0000

Since leaving Google I've had the chance to meet many entrepreneurs to share stories about their projects and passions. Many have very compelling and personal founding tales. Andrei Soroker, cofounder of group communication tool LeChat, is first up. By the way, LeChat has just started raising an angel round if you're interested [LeChat AngelList Profile].

1. What led you guys to start LeChat and how did you decide to make it a company vs a side project?

For years we’ve worked in small, distributed engineering teams and we’ve always struggled to find the right tool for communication. We primarily use chat because software engineering is very text-oriented. We tried many different products: free, paid, basic, complex. None worked well for us. We needed fast, integrated, as-you-type search across all history, the ability to see multiple conversations at the same time, good support for copy and paste of source code, and great integration with development tools.

We decided to try to write our own, so we built LeChat. It happened pretty quickly, over a few weeks in our spare time. We wrote the search function and multiple layouts first. We quickly saw that our chat made us more productive as developers and realized that we have an opportunity to build a great business.

2. What qualities are you looking for in your angel investors?

We found that it’s easiest for us to talk to people who really get the value in a user base that consists of software developers. Early on, a lot of people didn’t realize how incredibly important GitHub could become. We’re looking for investors who understand, even in hindsight, why GitHub became what it is today.

3. Advice for engineers who are thinking of founding companies?

Every company has people who are rarely in the office — they are going to conferences, meeting with clients, always on the phone, always moving. Get to know these people — they are your tunnel to the other world, where people make money by selling the stuff you make. If you start a company, you will have to quickly adopt that world as your own.

Keep in touch with former colleagues. This world is about people, not companies.

The DNA of Google AdSense

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 03:46:00 +0000

Early employees interview series continues with Eva Ho, one of the original execs at Applied Semantics - the company Google acquired to help power AdSense.

"We were courted by a few folks, but once Google was in play, all went very quickly and smoothly. I remember coming in to work one day and Sergey was in our kitchen, hanging out by himself. I walked over and we struck up a conversation. I remembered how nice and humble he was -- and thinking to myself how cool it would be to work for/with him. It all went so quickly that I didn't have much time to process any of it."

Series A "Crunch" Explained

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:53:00 +0000

Danielle Morrill just published thoughtful post about Zombie Startups, namely her own, Referly, falling into that zone. Via one of her investors:

“The biggest problem we see with early stage companies coming out of YC, or really any program, is that they’ll approach a year or two after they’ve graduated to raise a seed round. It’s exciting to see they’re still alive and pursuing their vision, but then we ask about the growth of the team and the ways they’ve been capturing the opportunity of the business in the time they’ve had… and discover everything is the same. The same 2 or 3 people, the exact same idea, very little growth around key metrics like engagement or revenue. So why should try raise a series A? What have they proved?”

Next Hot Dating App: The New York Times

noreply@blogger.com (Hunter Walk) — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 01:26:00 +0000

The New York Times says it's a "leading global, multimedia news and information company," one which is making the transformation from dead trees to digital. The woes of the Times - and every other traditional newspaper - are well documented. Having grown up in the New York City suburbs there's something about printed page which provokes a deep emotional reaction, flipping through the Sunday paper with bagels and coffee. Pure nostalgic anachronistic bliss.

The news companies can digitize, debate paywall philosophies, even produce amazing digital experiences, but so long as they think of themselves as producing content and not as a community, they fall victim to the declining valuation of the individual article.

So what's the next great opportunity for the New York Times? Dating! What? Yes, you heard me, dating. Matching partners based on the overlap in the articles they read (ie Times URLs they visited). Today I read about SimCity, the JCPenny vs Macy's Martha Stewart Battle, the US weather and a movie review of Oz. Now I'm happily married but IF I WASN'T, I'd likely be interested in finding out what women read those articles as well. I mean, at least we'd have something to talk about over a drink. Content starts conversations.

Many media properties have strong brands and even stronger communities but aren't fully taking advantage of these relationships. While they shouldn't just try to build products which aren't their competency, there exist unexplored data and distribution opportunities. When you're looking for revenue, you should be willing to turn over a lot of stones.