Facebook just launched Instant Articles today. In short, it allows articles that used to be web links to load as part of the native code inside their native iOS application. I spent a good four + years working on a similar problem with Onswipe – how do we make the web feel as fast, fluid, and beautiful as a native app? As much as we tried to replicate the performance of a native app on the web- it isn’t possible with modern web browsers or even any future web browsers. We tried everything from our own javascript libraries for touch interactions, rendering the content server side so it loaded super fast, and building our own ad server for full page ads. These were great leaps forward, but none of them were on par with native app performance. The two main reasons are – ad servers usually load dozens of nested iFrames inside of each other, blocking Javascript causing long load times and mobile web browsers are not meant to have complex javascript for performant touch interactions. To be honest, we took a bunch of steps back in performance and achieved the opposite of our goal from a user experience standpoint due to issues like ad performance – the product became a UX and performance train wreck over the past 2 years that was not a pleasant experience for users. Instant Articles are what I always wanted the product to feel like for the user experience and it makes me happy to see it live.

Facebook is one of the few companies on earth with the ability to control performance and what happens after you tap on a link, people look for the best Facebook Ads Agency almost every day. In my mind, Facebook and other social applications like Twitter are the new browsers for the mobile age. Instead of typing in a url to an address bar or getting 10 links from Google, we get a bunch of links shared by our friends. Instant Articles is finally the first big leap forward in what happens “after you tap on the link”. Here’s why I believe it will succeed and be the future of the web:

It’s centered around links

The URL still exists and that means it’s shareable. If you got rid of the URL, that wouldn’t be sensical for Facebook. URLs are the atomic unit that we share with others. They’re also a brilliant trojan horse. I don’t want web views anymore. If I click on an Instant Article enabled piece of content in Twitter or an email, I hope that it one day opens up in Facebook. We’re getting URLs,the great part of the web, with the performance of a native app. To me, the web is not about standards set by the W3C or a web browser, but the ability to share and access content of any kind via links.

It’s focused on the user first, not the publisher

I love publishers, but they have a tendency to get in their own way when it comes to UX. They put the priority of advertising in front of the best user experience possible. With Instant Articles, we’re given a clean reading experience that will delight the user. Facebook is one of the few organizations in the world to have the power to convince publishers of this. The web we know has become a cesspool, because of bad user experience from almost every publisher imaginable. Facebook can right those wrongs.

It’s publisher friendly

My biggest fear is that most publishers are going to die out in the next four years, due to lowering CPMs and poor UX. If publishers go away, links go away, and then the web becomes far less important. Facebook is letting publishers serve their own ads AND have creative control – the two biggest issues they care about. It’s also nice icing on the cake to see Facebook give 100% of revenue to pubs that serve their own ads and a very generous 70/30 on revenue they sell. This is huge for publisher adoption while bringing forth constraints that ensure the user experience. I hope that a WordPress plugin for smaller publishers comes about, that lets all publishers adopt instant articles.

It’s mobile only

As much as most of the publishing industry likes to talk about being mobile-first, it’s a lie. Their sites were started before mobile and a big part of their revenue is on desktop. Instant articles though, give them a chance to have a mobile-only feel. It’s 2015, the experience I get from the web and tapping on a link, should be amazing. The user experience is designed around not just text, but photos, videos, and maps – the web of today. I want to experience the web and content on it, as if the web were invented in 2015, not 1989. Instant articles do this.

I don’t know how serious of an initiative this will be for Facebook in the long term. I hope that it’s a big one though. I hope that over the next twelve months, the majority of links that I open from Facebook will be an Instant Article. It’s a better user experience and the web that we deserve in 2015 after tapping on a link.

Over the past month or so, many have had issue with Twitter and how they’re turning on startups like Meerkat and Datasift. Though it’s unfortunate, these companies are run by smart individuals and they likely never planned to be too dependent on Twitter. The issue isn’t about being too dependent on one platform as this is the exception, not the rule for most startups. The real issue is preventing your company from having the bulk of its distribution concentrated in one source. What does this mean?

As a startup, your customers are going to come from many different places. For example, it might include – search (SEO backlink packages), viral channels, public relations, direct sales, 2 sided referrals and many more. In the beginning, you’re going to want to focus in on one or two channels at most, as you can only focus on so many resources. Over time, you’re going to want to diversify through as many sources as possible. If you don’t, you can end up like Zynga or Demand Media. Zynga relied heavily upon Facebook for distribution and Demand Media, relied heavily upon Google for distribution. Both companies ended up hurting because of this in the end. So how do you avoid this? You should have a good multi-prong approach to distribution. The four main prongs to think of are – direct sales, paid acquisition, referral marketing, and digital marketing. In some cases, it’s not possible for all startups to benefit from all channels

Direct Sales

Direct sales was how we grew our publisher base at Onswipe and it’s how many SaaS companies grow their revenue as well. Direct Sales requires you to have a customer lifetime value that can justify hiring expensive folks to sell the software. If you can do this, then you need to think about customer concentration. A good rule of thumb is that your top ten customers should account for no more than 80% of your traffic. At Onswipe, we worked very hard to keep that number at 50%. The continued growth of the business should never be in the hands of one large customer. Of course losing them would hurt, but you don’t want it to be fatal. If you employ a direct sales staff, make sure that the top ten customers account for no more than 50% of direct sales volume.

Paid Acquisition

Paid acquisition is a blessing when the economics work, but the well can dry up fast. Groupon and daily deals were the early adopters of Facebook advertising, many commerce companies for SEM, and now games+on-demand services are going crazy with Cost Per Install ads through mobile ad networks. As for Youtube, The Marketing Heaven are a guarantee of real youtube likes which do not deteriorate with time, no matter where you lurk in the marketing funnel. At first, one paid acquisition channel will be very lucrative, but eventually the space will get crowded and drive prices up. To fix this, you have to constantly be adopting where you can pay for advertising on the top of the funnel, but the biggest work comes on the bottom of the funnel. The best companies will have the marketing funnel setup to increase the conversion of a customer. If the cost of acquisition doubles, but conversion increases by 50% over time due to knowledge of the process, you will net out. A 50% increase in conversion is not easy, but you get the picture of how you can extend the utility of a paid acquisition channel by diversifying and optimizing the bottom of the funnel.

Referral Marketing

This is my favorite channel as it doesn’t get stale as long as the other channels continue to bring in customers. Referral Marketing is what you see with Instacart or Uber offering money to both you and your friends if they sign up. A company I’m an advisor to, Ambassador, offers this as as service as well. Though referral marketing often uses social channels, SMS is becoming a big channel to share the message with your friends. The beauty of this channel is that you own it and it won’t go away. It’s also a strong multiplier on the value of other distribution channels.

Digital Marketing

mThis is where traffic comes for most content and media businesses – search (google) or share (Facebook). According to many internet marketing agencies, most of the great companies we use today have been built upon being shared heavily on Facebook or found in the search results. It’s how most people find this blog. The problem is that, you are a business living on leased land. If Facebook or Google change their algorithms, you will lose much of your distribution. The first strategy is to diversify outside of digital marketing. The second is to diversify your sources evenly across social and search. Lastly, you need to have a way to capture the customers that come in from these sources. Think something as simple as email capture.

To sum up, the key is to diversify your distribution not just from many sources, but also within each source individually. Too many entrepreneurs can’t scale a business from one source of distribution to many and end up playing a game of Russian roulette. By reducing your distribution concentration, you not only grow the company, but ensure it’s success for years to come.

I think local discovery is one of the big software problems we haven’t solved yet. The problem is akin to this – Google helps you find what you need online by putting in a parameter and drives traffic to the online world. No one has perfectly cracked the nut of find what you need in the real world by entering in a parameter and therefore driving traffic to the real world. Approximately 5% of spend is done online, yet 95% of spend is done offline, so through that lens we’re looking a pretty worthy problem. With everyone now having a smartphone in their pocket, it’s a problem we need to see solved. PCs helped us find and make things happen in the digital world (Google), smartphones help us find and make things happen in the real world (Uber). Below are some of the problems I see:

Not enough intent data points, therefore no “page-rank”

This is the biggest problem in my mind. Google has data to make relevant search results to show “authority”. They can look at which pages are linking to each other and use the page rank algorithm to determine what’s the best result for said query. Right now the only data points we have to determine the best result are as follows:

Reviews

Reviews are very subjective and often not a valid indicator of authenticity. Imagine if Google’s ranking were based upon reviews of websites. You would have a system that was clearly gamed and results that likely weren’t the best. Results would be based upon which websites could game the system and get the best+most reviews. This scenario is a mixture of cynicism meets reality of what’s happening today on sites like TripAdvisor or Yelp!. Businesses hawk their customers to write reviews and the small few that actually write reviews help determine the ranking of “what’s best locally”. Reviews at best, show which places might happen to deliver a good one-off experience and base this upon the small % of experiences that are actually persuaded to write a review.

Even with that said, reviews don’t focus on the two most important lens’ – personalized recommendations and popularity. Review sites don’t collect enough signal of intent from their users’ activity within their city. If we knew where every Yelp user went in the city, we could of course tell what’s the most popular, but there’s no way of getting that data. We also don’t have intent data for personalized recommendations. Recommendation systems require a lot of data and a lot of signal. I’m “reading”, not “writing” on review sites for the most part, so it’s tough to tell what I might be interested in. I could state my interests like American restaurants, burgers, mexican food, seafood, but that isn’t granular enough. The key to personalization is really: “I’ve been to x,y,z, look at the rest of the data from the network, and tell me places a,b,c that I should go to.”

Review sites are great when you know where you want to go and want to see if it’s any good. They’re not good for when I don’t know where I want to go.

Check-ins

I’ve been a Foursquare user since the early days and still check-in on Swarm. I personally love it, but the truth is that the majority of people don’t want to check-in. In a perfect world, the check-in would be a good signal indicator of my interests. The problem is that it’s not something masses are going to do. Check-ins also need to be consistent. One of the most important signal indicators in an algorithm would likely be “loyalty”. When looking at data network wide, a location should rank higher if it gets more visits from a person. i.e. – simple cohort analysis to show what % of people come back >1, >2, etc. If check-ins aren’t consistent, there’s going to be lapse in the data set. If I used the check-in system on a daily basis, BUT not consistently across everywhere I visited, then you might miss some interesting signals of what I actually do. You might miss the Yoga class I go to or the bar that I’ve now visited a second time. Losing random data points messes up the picture of my tastes.

My friends’ tastes

Just because my friend likes something really has no bearing on whether I’d like something. Someone might have odd tastes in food, be a picky eater, and allergic to seafood. Their friends love seafood and therefore would potentially kill them. Seeing where my friends have been is interesting to see, but not a good indicator of where I want to go personally.

Lack of simplicity and too many results

There are too many results in local discovery. It presents paradox of choice and analysis paralysis.
Hunter Walk has a great post about “Hotel Tonight for Local”. One of the key selling points of HotelTonight is that it doesn’t provide an endless stream of hotels to choose from, it simplifies the list. Look at their language in the picture below.

Google might provide hundreds of pages of results for a query, but the UX is clearly setup where most people don’t go beyond the first page. We are all simple creatures and less is more. Hotel Tonight is successful from a UX standpoint, because it gives us less choices.

No purchase attribution in the business model

Now I want to start to talk about the merchant side of things. Not only should local discovery be valuable to the user, but it needs to be useful to the merchant itself. Google offers advertising where you pay per click on an ad and as a merchant, you can place a tracking pixel that shows whether that person made a purchase and how much that purchase was for. Yelp makes it’s money by offering advertising on the site too, but it can’t offer attribution. Just because you clicked on a Yelp ad, there’s no way to attribute a click on that ad to an actual purchase and what the purchase amount was. Real World Merchants should be able to deliver digital campaigns and track the results, the same way that digital merchants do. That’s a very tough nut to crack as there’s been no way to do it. Your digital world isn’t really linked to your physical world. The closest match to this is Facebook’s partnership with datalogix. Once again, it’s not complete as not enough people purchasing give their info such as phone number to a store. I actually don’t like when I’m asked that at check out.

Helping foster relationships and rediscovery

Great local discovery isn’t just about initial discovery, but rediscovery of businesses by helping them build a relationship with the consumer. The relationship between review sites, the merchants, and the users is contentious at best. That’s a big opportunity. If I’m going into a business frequently, I likely want to hear from them or follow them – The right local discovery platform isn’t going to just help me discover new businesses, it’s going to help me build relationships with those businesses and build more loyalty. My favorite place in NYC is Sticky’s Finger Joint. I go there frequently and I want to hear new updates from them about new stores or new seasonal chicken fingers. I get this info on Twitter, but it’s lost in the stream.

Solution Overview

Get a clear consistent stream of signal from every user to show what’s popular and deliver great recommendations. Do it with a simple and limited list of results. Make the business model something that can have a purchase attributed back to the platform and let merchants build more relationships with their customers. Someone should go build that, I think it would be a monstrous company if built right.

As long as beacons require an app, that you probably don't have, there's a fundamental chicken-and-egg problem.

— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) January 12, 2015

Benedict Evans had a good tweet earlier today and expressed my biggest concern about iBeacons – it’s a chicken and egg game. In order to trigger a notification to a consumer about an iBeacon, they have to have the corresponding app installed. That’s a tremendous chicken and egg problem from multiple angles:

If an app exists for a location, many won’t have it downloaded

I shop at many different stores on a regular basis, but I rarely have their apps installed – Whole Foods is a great example. A user’s home screen is valuable real estate and they’re likely to only have a ~20 apps on the home screen. Each retailer isn’t just competing with other retailers, they’re competing with Instagram and Snapchat. I don’t see it happening. The real promise of beacons is around the form of discovery – show me what I didn’t know I didn’t know about. If I’m walking through SoHo and there is a sale or an interesting exhibit to check out, tell me about it. If I’m in a store I frequent, but didn’t know about the ability to explore it more in-depth without beacons, I likely will never know that I could. Yes, you could put “install my app” signs everywhere, but that doesn’t convert well. It’s too much friction.

Many locations don’t have or need an app

The even bigger problem is that most locations don’t need a native app. This isn’t a native app vs. web argument either, as most restaurants don’t need a website either – the info I need is available on Foursquare, yelp, and Google itself. We’re still talking at a “Store level”, but beacons are more interesting to me when it could be for specific items such as statues, parks, and more fine grained places. There should be beacons for hundreds of millions of physical objects, not just millions. There is no need for an app for each of those. So if an app is needed to trigger an iBeacon and most locations don’t have apps, then we’re still stuck in the same problem.

What about automatically letting anyone trigger iBeacons?

No way this happens. Your phone will constantly be buzzing and going off with spam from marketers. Even if Apple got drunk and let this happen, users would turn them off fast. This would taint and ruin the iBeacons opportunity. I don’t see iBeacons being triggered without an app or passbook installed, so we’re still stuck in the same position.

The SDK Solution?

One idea could be to put an SDK distributed into apps akin to what an ad network does. If you had coverage across thousands of apps, you’d likely reach a large enough population. In theory, this gives you coverage, but it isn’t clean. It would be odd to have Angry Birds push me iBeacon notifications about the museum. IT’s also likely to just be a way to spam people with coupon nearby offers akin to Airpush tactics. I don’t see Apple or even Google letting this go on – the SDK would get banned fast. So no dice on this option either.

Safari:Browsing the web::?????:Browsing the real world

BLE is the protocol to transfer real world information, the same way HTTP was for the digital world. My gut feels that there is going to be an aggregation play of sorts here – fone app will be how we interact with beacons and the like, in the same way a web browser was how we interacted with the web. The real question is incentive – you would need a lot of beacons to display or something enticing. Right now, a beacon browser is like a web browser with no webpages. There has to be a hook or something clever here. A few options on how the aggregation strategy works:

Yelp, Foursquare, or Google Maps – Enable Beacon notifications and make themselves the premiere beacon platform. They are widespread and the incentive to have the app downloaded already exists. It might get complicated and I don’t know that the product or interactions look like.

Raise a ton of funding, give every small business a beacon – Tough strategy and requires a lot of capital up front. With this option you can have a destination app and also offer a Twilio like developer platform. It’s a big vision, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll provide an ample more amount of utility than Yelp/Foursquare without beacons. This is similar to the concept I talked about here.

Create some novel type of wedge – What is the simple toy you could make that gets people comfortable with beacons and makes the app downloaded a huge success? It’s likely something very simple and potentially silly. The question is whether the novel hook can thematically connect to the bigger vision. Example – A beacon tag game would get users used to beacons, but transforming that game into a beacon browser isn’t a thematically logical next step.

Messaging apps – This might be the most natural place to put this. iBeacons are likely to focus on push notifications as the primary entry point. The apps that send the mosh push notifications are messaging apps. I also see the WeChat Official accounts model coming to the US, where you can message and receive updates from any business/location. The beacon interaction and notification can be sent from that account you’ve added. It could also allow you to have fine grained controls of suggestions and other notifications you’d like to see.

All of this may be for nought. There’s no proof right now that beacons are solving a problem that consumer want, but I tend to be optimistic. I’m optimistic because we just haven’t seen any developers identify the problem and the clever solution associated with it. It’s bound to happen and it’s a big opportunity.

I’m a big believer in the thesis that software is eating the world. One main driver is the fact that software is so much cheaper to produce and now there are billions, not millions of devices. Those factors don’t describe the core product change that is happening though. When people hear software is eating the world, they think that it means software is being created for every industry. That’s actually nothing new. You can check this out for the best software solution.  You could look back to the 80s and find niche software for many industries.   What’s really happening is that we’re shifting from software being created for 3rd parties, but software being created for 1st party use by a startup that wants to replace incumbents on the Fortune 500.  It sounds crazy, but the hotel and taxi industries were upended in approximately five years. 

What is a 3rd party software startup?

3rd party software is when you create a piece of software and sell it to enable an existing player in an industry. You are the 1st party creating the software and you are selling it to a 3rd party, the actual company that uses it. Think of it like this, if Uber were a software company, they would be selling software to the taxi industry and helping enable them. In return, they’d receive money for the software on a monthly basis as SaaS. Believe it or not, Bill Gates’ first company was a 3rd party software provider for school buses. It didn’t work out. Many 3rd party software companies exist for many different verticals – Escapia for vacation rental management is one that I’ve spent time looking at recently.

This statement doesn’t mean that I believe 3rd party software and therefore SaaS is a bad business. On the contrary, I think it’s a great business if you’re selling for horizontal functions that exist in any company. Hubspot for marketing, Salesforce for Sales, Slack for communication, Hootsuite for social media marketing, etc. The list goes on of 3rd party software companies that help with horizontal functions in a company and I think they’re all great companies that entrepreneurs should start.

Where I don’t think 3rd party software has as lucrative of a future is in vertical applications. Vertical 3rd party software is often a bug, not a feature of a company. It tries to make a non technology or software company in a vertical industry “have technology” for their industry, but that never works out well. You can’t just add technology to an old company’s DNA. It has to be at your core from the beginning. 1st party software companies change this.

What is a 1st party software startup?

A 1st party software company uses technology and software at their core to reinvent an industry from the ground up. The software it develops isn’t sold to incumbents, but is made for internal use to help efficiently scale and disrupt the current industry. Uber has done this with the taxi industry. Another great example is Buzzfeed, which originally tried to deliver software to media companies (3rd parties) to make their content go viral. They realized that software would be better used internally to actually disrupt and therefore eat the media world. This is the fundamental fire that is changing the economy of the world. Mobile and the cost of software development are the gasoline to this fire.

1st party software startups are akin to full stack startups. Since they’re not just making the 3rd party better, but replacing it as a whole, they have to bite off a lot more than a normal software company. From afar, it looks like they’re biting off more than they can chew, but they’re actually shifting resources that are now available. A decade ago many of a startups’ engineers had to focus on things like building bare metal, but that’s all a commodity now with AWS. Horizontal software companies for developer functions and infrastructure have now allowed resources to shift onto other parts of the stack.

1st party software startups also require an intense understanding of branding and marketing. 3rd party software startups were primarily B2B and only needed to know how to sell to businesses. 1st party software startups end up becoming the brand and connect directly with consumers. Uber and AirBnB have built tremendous brands. The same will have to happen for any other 1st party software startups.

The Opportunity

We haven’t seen anything yet. Uber, Airbnb, Buzzfeed are just the first wave. The right thing to do would be to spot large existing industries that may have large dedicated 3rd party software companies servicing them, like those depending on others to Buy Office For Mac instead of using the cloud. While Altera Corp components for sale are being used in almost every single device on the planet in today’s world, they still have managed to remain discreet about their working and have only provided for the betterment as a 1st party software component developer. In advertising, there’s ad-tech, in the healthcare industry there are software companies selling to doctors, and hundreds more. Over the next 25 years we are going to see every single industry reinvented from the ground up by 1st party software. Companies started by product/engineering founders that utilize software at its core to reinvent an industry instead of just servicing it. Now is the best time ever to be an entrepreneur or venture capitalist. Normally, entrepreneurs (of high risk ventures) and VCs would only really be investing in 3rd party software companies. Now they are investing in 1st party software companies that are going to replace every major Fortune 500 company that has come before them. This sounds crazy, but in under 4 years we’ve seen AirBnB and Uber both completely upend the hospitality and transportation industry. There is absolutely no reason why any other industry is safe.

Related post: Service Scheduling Software.

David Sacks joined Zenefits this week as COO, which is a huge win for the company. David could have done anything he wanted from starting his own company, joining as CEO, becoming a VC,etc. With the announcement, it made me realize that there’s an increasing importance of having a COO at an early stage startup. Some of the time, the title will be “President”, but COO is usually the right term. Here’s why I think it’s becoming more important and how founders should look at it.

What should a COO do at a startup?

This is a question a lot of people ask and there has been a lot of discussion from smart people like Bijan at Spark and Mark Suster at Upfront . In my mind a COO runs the part of the organization that scales primarily via people and processes as opposed to the part of the organization that scales via software. Finance, HR, Sales, Support, *Specific Vertical Operations* (more on this later), etc. are all functions that can only scale their value to the organization by adding more people. Software like Zenefits or Quickbooks can certainly help people in these functions, but the only real way to grow HR or Finance at a startup is by hiring more people. The COO makes sure these functions run on time. The technology and product organizations will certainly need to add more people over time, but their value can easily scale without adding more people. The same team of five engineers and one PM that created a feature to add value to 1 million users can likely create a feature that will let them scale to 1 million users. Product and technology should ultimately fall under the jurisdiction of the CEO.

Domain Expertise – Why a COO is different at every company

Finance, HR, and support are general COO skills. Every company has them and I find them to be table stakes for COOs at any startup. In the past, most COOs hired someone to only take on these duties. Though important, I agree with Mark Suster, that these roles by themselves do not warrant a COO for a startup. The key differentiating factor between a COO at a traditional company and a COO at a startup is vertical domain expertise. Many successful companies are attacking very specific verticals with very specific processes and operations. They’re nuanced and the key to success. In the ad-tech industry, ad operations, publisher operations, and client management are very nuanced processes that only someone with previous experience can make run like a well oiled machine. A COO at a startup should be the one that manages the teams who look after domain and vertical expertise that is specific to that startup’s market. Hiring a COO also makes sure you do not overlook mistakes that you don’t even know you’d make by bringing on someone with operational domain expertise in the field.

At Onswipe, we brought on Rich as our COO about a year and a half into the company as we began to scale up. Aside from having a great sense of humor, Rich had a good decade of domain expertise in digital media and publisher services. As a founding CEO, I knew what a CPM was and that’s about it. Rich ran the publisher operations and support teams as COO, allowing us to scale up fast. He had the deep domain expertise needed for publisher operations. Without Rich, it would have been hard for us to scale the business as we didn’t have the industry know-how and operational knowledge to continue moving at a fast pace.

The movement of atoms over the movement of bits

Many startups such as Instacart, Uber, AirBnB, and many more are working on the movement of physical items (atoms) as opposed to just digital ones (bits). This requires the massive coordination of thousands to millions of individuals that are either full time workers or part time workers. We haven’t seen technology startups scale in this manner before: going after vertical industries while applying software in conjunction with large pools of labor. The margins are thin and the margin for error is even smaller. A COO at companies focused on moving atoms and managing large pools of independent labor is critical as founding CEOs likely won’t have the bandwidth or know how to manage this. As we start to see more and more companies focus on existing industries, moving atoms, and large labor pools, the COO role is going to become increasingly important.

When is the right time to bring in a COO?

I think it’s something a company does after an A round or a growth round. A company should do it after an A round if they’re preparing to really scale product market fit as you want the kinks out by then. B Round investors are going to focus on numbers way more than the A round and want some operational efficiency. Another option is to bring in a COO after a large growth round to scale the company from good revenue to incredible revenue. An example of this is what Zenefits just did with David Sacks. I do think it’s a mistake to hire a COO too early. They won’t have as much to do and there won’t be a foundation for them to mold yet. This is the easiest way to have an executive leave fast.

Don’t get lazy as CEO with Finance or HR

My last piece of advice is for the CEO to not get lazy with finance or HR. When bringing in a COO, it’s easy to think it’s all off your plate and you should just forget about it. As founders, we’d rather focus on product than finance or HR. Every founder should let their COO do their thing, but still focus in heavily on the cash operations of the business.

I’m a big fan of deeplinking – it takes the best of the web, the ability to seamlessly jump from site to site, and brings it to mobile apps. Many such as Facebook, Google, and URX are trying to move deeplinking forward by making it easy for developers to implement them. Here’s an example of how it works: I’m in the Google Maps app and I tap get an uber, which launches uber. Another example might be opening a link to a tweet on the mobile web and instead of it opening the mobile web version of the tweet, it opens the Twitter app. As you can see deeplinks need to happen or apps will continue to sit in silos. In short deeplinks solve a very simple problem: letting apps talk to each other and open one another just like webpages

There is one fatal flaw: The user must have the application they are being deeplinked to installed on the device already.

If they don’t, they’re taken to the mobile web version or simply asked to download the app. This is a terrible user experience. Imagine it if the web worked like this for the past 20 years: You could only access a youtube video or this very article you’re reading, only if you had the app installed for my domain. If you didn’t, you’d have to wait a good bit for it to install and then redirect you finally. You would eventually repeat this process hundreds, if not thousands of times, until your system was overloaded with applications you didn’t really need. Luckily, that’s not what happened and the web allowed us to instantly access what we were being linked to without the need to “install the site”.

This works great for the head, applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Spotify, etc., but it doesn’t work for the torso and long-tail. As anyone will tell you, that’s where the magic happens and why the web was able to grow. The web combined with search/social allowed us to instantly access hundreds of millions of smaller places instantly. We weren’t relegated to having the site installed. Until we fix this problem, we’re going to be in a pre-netscape and pre-pagerank era. There needs to be a way to instantly access apps when we are driven to them via links. So what’s the answer?

The answers is simple: cards. Cards will allow us to instantly start utilizing an application or a piece of content we are linked to on mobile without having to install the app. If we have the app installed, the corresponding deeplink will bypass the card and open the application. Most won’t fit into that use case. Most won’t have the app installed and they should be able to get value from the app without having to go through the friction filled process of installing it. Cards allow us to link applications together and make their utility instantly accessible. For example, when I was linked to Uber for the first time a few years ago, I shouldn’t have had to download the entire app. I should have been linked to a card where I could order my first ride to get started. From there, I could install it if I wanted to use it further. If I’m linked to an commerce product on an obscure e-commerce site, I don’t want the mobile-web, I want the app experience without downloading it and I want it instantly. Cards give me the frictionless access provided by the web and the experience of a native app.

Cards are useful for first time users of software applications that should eventually end up on the home screen. Cards are for the: I don’t use this yet and don’t want to install it quite yet, but I want to give it a go. Cards are also useful for the content that we never will install. We will never install the millions of websites and e-commerce sites out there. <10% 2 10 of their traffic is through the homepage, but driven by links on google and facebook. we access content via referral traffic. instead accessing mobile website, i should a card for that article or product. cards solve pre-netscape problem “i have to install an app in order use it" not being able instantly software like could web. shouldn’t just be linkable, they embeddable. why did youtube soundcloud grow so fast? were embedded across can’t embed uber, great from flipboard, dark sky forecast, etc. thing is: totally to. think as application video card. if embeds it would never taken off. embedding lets us page rank ability apps. seeing who linking applications, can start measure where apps are them. more also installed, higher rank. this going crucial bring next billion smartphones developing countries there sensitivity data usage. existing web provides webpages often too big size. at even 500kb per webpage, means pages alone consume 1% person’s data. other hand, using all nothing proposition. requires downloading entire app, eating up lot data, all. most go latter. With cards, we can let people try and use an app for a fraction of the bandwidth.