Caveat Lector

Zero Fixed Cost Mass Transit

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 16:53:00 +0000

I published this post on Medium as an experiment. You can find it here.

Startups and Small Businesses: Stop Focusing on Bandwidth

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Tue, 29 Dec 2015 17:49:00 +0000

Most people focus on bandwidth when they think about internet connections, but speed is only one metric for measuring internet performance. Often it's not even the right one. For example, for real-time applications such as voice and video calling, what matters most is reliability. VoIP conversations (including Skype, WhatsApp, and Google Hangout voice calls) take up minimal bandwidth - much less than 1Mb - but bandwidth has to be consistent. Even a momentary dip in bandwidth - or a couple of seconds of downtime - can make conversation impossible.

With residential internet technologies, such as cable, DSL, or Fios - even though the physical medium for Fios is fiber, its architecture is effectively still residential-grade - your actual bandwidth is constantly fluctuating and rarely if ever reaches 100% of your advertised bandwidth. It may even drop to zero at points. That's because you are also sharing that bandwidth with your neighbors in your building, and possibly your block.

I've tried to illustrate this with the image below:

if you look at the graph, you can see that most of the time the speed is relatively high, but at point 1 upload speed drops to zero and download speed gets pretty close; at points 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, they both drop significantly, if not to zero. If you were on a VoIP call, the call would probably drop at #1; at #2, 4, 5, and 6 you would have to ask the other person to repeat themselves; and at #3 you might understand them but it would be distorted. Note that when you are browsing the web these blips may not even register or at worst are experienced as minor annoyances (eg slow page loads), but when you are using a real-time app - ie a phone call - they can make things impossible.

On the other hand if you had a Dedicated connection, also known as Dedicated Internet Access or DIA, the graph would look like a straight line across at the bandwidth you paid for. DIA comes with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that guarantees your bandwidth, or your money back. DIA internet with an SLA is crucial for any business that depends on its internet service or that runs its phones over VoIP and depends on working phone lines.

The other thing to know about shared connections is that with the exception of Fios they are asymmetrical. Upload speed is usually about 10% of download speed. You'll see a plan listed as 100/10, which means that the download speed is 100Mb and the upload speed is 10. Dedicated connections on the other hand are always symmetrical; a dedicated 10Mb connection has upload and download speeds of 10Mb. This is important since voice and video calling use equal bandwidth up and down. When you combine the fluctuating bandwidth of shared service internet and with their upload speeds at 10% or less of their download speeds, a 10Mb DIA connection will always beat a 100Mb shared connection for voice and video. It will usually beat a 200Mb or a 300Mb shared connection as well.

How do you know if you are getting Dedicated internet? If it comes with an SLA, it is dedicated. If you're still not sure, ask! Almost all fiber besides Fios is dedicated, and all fixed wireless that I've seen is as well [1].

The downside of dedicated internet is that it is more expensive; think of it as having your own lane on the highway vs paying to sharing the road with everyone else. It's more expensive because they provider can't get paid multiple times on the same space. On the other hand, you don't need to pay for such a high bandwidth in order to get the performance you need, and the reliability is incomparable. What kills me is that companies will think nothing of spending $15,000/month for office space and >$100,000/month for each of their software engineers, but then try to save a few hundred dollars on internet to go with cable or Fios over dedicated fiber.

--

[1] Fixed wireless is an alternative to fiber that uses a microwave signal to the rooftop for last mile delivery from the fiber network rather than running the fiber all the way to the building.

Who Owns Technology Spend?

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Thu, 08 Oct 2015 01:18:00 +0000

I was listening to an a16z podcast on the way home about legacy businesses navigating the digital world, and I was struck by the following statistic: according to 2015 PwC's Digital IQ survey, 68% of enterprise tech spending this year is happening outside of the the IT organization. Even more striking, this number was only 32% in 2013. That's a 45% CAGR; the percentages controlled by the IT org and the rest of the business have flipped in only two years.

Since total tech spending can't be shrinking, there are two explanations. Either the IT organization's budget is being shifted to other parts of the business; or the growth in the tech spend outside of IT must be growing even faster than 45% yoy. That's an insane growth rate and if it is correct, an insane opportunity.

One Simple Customer Service Fix

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Sun, 27 Sep 2015 16:11:00 +0000

Have you ever noticed that e-commerce receipts and online reservations tend to come from an email address in the form of "noreply@domain.com", followed by a message at the bottom of the email reminding you not to reply to that email? There's such an easy fix to this that it's embarrassing the customer service industry hasn't caught on.

Here's one that I got from Enterprise Car Share, a ZipCar competitor (red highlights mine; personal information removed):

from: Enterprise CarShare <noreply@enterprisecarshare.com>
subject: Enterprise CarShare - NEW Reservation Confirmation

NEW Reservation Confirmation
Your reservation details as of 10:43pm Thursday, September 24, 2015:

Vehicle:

[car details]

Start:

[start time and date]

End:

[end time and date]

Total Time:

7 hour(s)

Reservation ID:

[reservation ID]

...

Reservation Estimate

Time:   $105.00
Distance:   $0.00  Taxes:    $20.87
Estimated Additional Fees:   $0.00 Total:   $125.87
...

We are committed to exceeding your expectations. If there is anything we can do to make your experience better, please call us at 877-411-6468 or email us at info@enterprisecarshare.com and let us know how we can help.

Please DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL. For problems or emergencies with your reservation, call our 24-hr vehicle and roadside assistance line at 877-411-6468.

Nonetheless I am sure that many people just hit reply and send their customer service inquiry into a black hole, because most people don't read to the bottom of very long emails with a lot of extraneous information. This experience never turns out well. And yet it is so easily solvable:
Right there, on the very line above where Enterprise shouts at me DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL, they give the address to which I should send write for customer service.

To fix this: send the email from the customer service address. Or change the reply-to address to the customer service email. Either way, don't make me as the customer have to figure out that I need to copy-paste a new address to the To field.

Don't Guess, Learn

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 13:30:00 +0000

I'm currently building a product for WiredScore. We're not talking about the product publicly, so that's all I'm going to say about it.

To continue learning to be a better product manager, even while I'm practicing, I've been immersing myself in the best talks and videos on product management I can find. This morning while getting ready I watched this great video by Tom Chi on Rapid Prototyping at Google X. And Tom did really rapid prototyping; the first prototype of Google X took him about an hour, and they produced 15 hardware prototypes a week.

If there's one line to take away from Tom's talk it's, "Don't guess, learn." (link goes to a two-minute clip of just that section). Most meetings are "big guessathons." "I think the customer will want this." "I think they'll want that." "Stop guessing, go build the thing, and learn," Tom says. It's good advice. Most of us won't have access to the tools, brainpower, and endless test subjects that Tom had at Google, but I'm going to do my best to stay in this ethos.

Buzzfeed Explained

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Tue, 28 Apr 2015 19:04:00 +0000

I think it's safe to say that Buzzfeed remains an enigma to most people, even in the digital media industry. They do things so differently than everyone else [1] and in such a non-obvious way [2], and yet how is it that they are worth so much [3]?

There's been a lot of talk about their internal tools and platforms, but since no one outside the company uses them, they remain shrouded in speculation. How else can you explain Episode 40 of The Exponent podcast by Ben Thompson and James Allworth, two of the most respected tech and digital media analysts out there. At around 16:55 of the episode, James asks Ben, "Have you seen any of their tools? ... There's all this talk about the tools and the learning organization. I understand it conceptually, but if you're a writer sitting down to write one day at Buzzfeed ... what is it that the system gives you that gives you an edge over the competition?" Ben then hypothesizes that it's about making it easier to create a listicle, and then makes some other highly abstract conjectures about the tools, what works, what channels to use, ending with, "quite frankly I don't see how that's any different than a newspaper sharing its actual page with an advertiser. They're just sharing the tool, and the canvas. They're not sharing the actual writers ... " [4]

But Chris Dixon and Jonah Peretti sat down last August for a podcast, and did a pretty good job of explaining exactly how and why Buzzfeed works, in concrete enough terms that I feel like I finally get it. There's no need to explain how listicles and adorable cat pictures work, but I'll do my best to try and unpack the three parts of Buzzfeed that are perhaps less obvious based on what I've heard other say about them:

When Peretti helped found the Huffington Post, he got to witness the construction of a sophisticated technology platform that was built entirely for the benefit of the editorial team, while the ad team's platform consisted only of simple banners into which the ads would be slotted. When he launched Buzzfeed he wanted to build a platform that was for the advertising side as much as for the news and entertainment editors.

In other words, the Buzzfeed business team uses same tech to make their ads go viral that the Buzzfeed editorial team uses to make their content go viral. Buzzfeed's "ads" don't even have to run on Buzzfeed; they can run on whatever social network they want. Given that Buzzfeed's editorial team writes articles for specific channels (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Whatsapp, etc.), I can imagine that the business team gets credit - ie paid - for views or shares of the ads they create, wherever it goes. Combine that with the way each piece of a Buzzfeed post can be shared separately and you can some interesting business models. For example, if a piece of branded content gets 1M views on Buzzfeed but 11M views on FB, 2M on Twitter, and 4M on Pinterest, Buzzfeed might get paid for 18M total views [5]. If that sounds expensive, remember that from a media buy perspective this is "free" traffic for the brands, vs buying the views directly on each social network.

Once you understand that editorial and branded content are being handled with the same tools and derive learnings from the same places, it follows fairly naturally that they follow the same form. This is the so-called "native advertising" that at least when well-executed doesn't detract from the editorial experience. One example is fashion magazines. As Peretti puts it, "you could go through Vogue and rip out all of the ads, and it would be a worse magazine." The really great branded fashion photography enhances the really great editorial fashion photography. Another common example is the Super Bowl, which a lot of people watch "for the ads". Even Google Adwords are an example of brand-sponsored content that runs side-by-side with organic content, to a certain degree powered by the same technology but separated completely in terms of organizational responsibility (the proverbial "separation of church and state").

When you go back and look at the history of advertising, it look a lot more like Buzzfeed and a lot less like the web. Radio broadcasters read out their sponsorships between reading news stories. Television commercials are 30-second video and audio clips that attempt to make an emotional connection and tell a story. In-theatre movie previews are like mini-movies. The list goes on. Web banners which have nothing in common with the page format are the weird anomaly, not Buzzfeed.

What I love about Jonah Peretti is that he is a serious student of the history of media. I've always felt that great founders view their industries through the lens of the long arc of history and he's no exception. When you read his staff memos, he references Halberstam on the birth of Time Magazine; the great battle between the New York Times and the Herald Tribune for dominance of the largest media market in the country; Edward Murrow at the British Press Club [6]. Most of the web is still, oddly, stuck in the Bulova watch age [7], and Buzzfeed is one of the few media organizations that is capable of truly original thought and business models for the web.

[1] Which is not to say that no one tries to copy them. See for example http://mashable.com/2014/07/10/an-israeli-buzzfeed-copycat-is-suddenly-in-the-top-10-of-facebooks-publishers/.

[2] A common question when reading Buzzfeed is, where are the ads?

[3] Andreesen Horowitz led their most recent round at a rumored valuation of $850 million.

[4] http://exponent.fm/episode-040-buzzfeed-and-amazon/

[5] https://medium.com/@peretti/is-history-repeating-itself-33390aeb6cd9

[6] (though I can imagine them having different rates for shares on each site)

[7] The first TV commercial was taken straight from radio, with the only adaption for TV being a picture in the background. A 10-second spot for Bulova watches featured a still image of a watch dial over an image of the United States while a voiceover actor read, "America runs on Bulova time!"

The Rise of the New Edtech

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Sun, 12 Apr 2015 00:29:00 +0000

Edtech used to be this sleepy, backwards corner of the technology industry where idealistic entrepreneurs with fantastic ideas and even fantastic products would try to make enterprise sales to impossible educational bureaucracies – I saw this firsthand when I sat on the Wharton Technology Advisory Board, and we were relatively one of the best technology organizations out there - only to burn out or sell for disappointing outcomes in the best cases.

In recent years though a couple of factors have pushed ed-tech forward to the point where LinkedIn would pay $1.5Bn to acquire Lynda.com:

broadband market penetration has made high quality digital video widely accessible, which has also in turn created much greater awareness of and interest in short-form, bite-sized content ideal for learning;
a sea shift in the jobs market has put in stark relief the failure of the traditional educational system to teach the skills the today’s higher paying, more secure careers demand.

These factors allowed edtech to finally figure out how to do an end-run on the establishment and go straight to the consumer.

Personally, the edtech revolution enabled me to keep the promise that I made to myself, that a decade after I completed my computer science degree and effectively stopped programming, I would relearn to code and master today’s modern web paradigms. After years of procrastination and not knowing where to get started, Udacity and Udemy have gotten me back in the game to the point where I've been able to pass the coding tests that a few startups use for screening engineering hires, and scrape website data for research for a business consulting job I am currently working on.

When I was in VC, I had the negative view of edtech espoused in the first line of this post. Being in New York, especially, the closest I got to edtech was when I was at a loud event and couldn't tell whether someone was trying to say they worked in ed-tech with an 'e' or ad-tech with an 'a'. I'm usually pretty good at predicting market evolution, but I'll be the first to admit that I got this one totally wrong.

I'm excited about what the future of edtech holds, especially as it becomes more influenced by the spread of gamification. I have another, selfish, reason to be into edtech, namely that I'm beginning to approach the parenting years of my life and I think the idea of my kids having more tools for self-learning than I ever had is super cool.

Brokerage vs Fulfillment

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Sat, 21 Mar 2015 21:22:00 +0000

A few weeks ago a marketing consultant named Tom Goodwin wrote the following opening line in a post called The Battle Is For The Customer Interface:

[In 2015] Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.

The thing is, this isn't quite true. What Uber, Airbnb, et al have shown is that you can separate the brokerage layer from the fulfillment layer, and that even though legacy brokerages have lower margins, if you automate 99% of the brokerage layer with software it becomes so much more capital efficient that that's where the money's going (so capital efficient btw, that for accounting purposes most people consider the money collected by companies like Uber and AirBNB to be merely passthroughs, which is why they talk about bookings instead of revenue).

Excepting customer and driver acquisition costs, which will decline dramatically once the current venture boom stops injecting capital to money-losing companies, there are virtually no marginal costs to running Uber or Airbnb. Whether you like Uber or not, it seems to be a foregone conclusion that in 10 years you will be using your phone (or wearable device) to order your rides from an Uber-like service, which will dispatch a driver who will receive your request via a phone (or wearable device). Or to paraphrase Chris Dixon, the idea that taxis once drove around aimlessly, hoping to randomly encounter people who wanted a ride, will seem quaint, like going to the payphone to make a call.

I wonder if a new technology revolution will come along that will enable the fulfillment layer to be so valuable again.

The Power of Physical Words

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 17:38:00 +0000

The Holstee Manifesto

I went to a potluck dinner last night at Holstee, a business that describes itself as "a Brooklyn-based design studio offering sustainably made posters, cards, and frames that inspire people to live mindfully." They are known for the Holstee Manifesto, a declaration of what a successful life would like, which they wrote for themselves at the outset of their journey, with no intention of turning it into a product.

The mix of people included total newcomers such as myself, as well as two of the founders and a number of members of the Holstee "family," who had been there since the beginning (or almost beginning). I was sitting next to co-founder Dave Radparvar, who was talking with a couple of these Holstee family members about the Manifesto and its runaway success. They sell so many posters of this simple statement of purpose that it's become the economic engine that enables the rest of their activity. Apparently people even get it tattooed on their body. They have a whole page of Holstee Manifesto products, ranging from $12 for a 5" x 7" print, to $180 for a 48" x 64" wall decal; it's almost as if they've become a company that sells the Manifesto as its primary line of business.

On the face of it, this seems highly unlikely. Don't we lament the death of print, even while we argue that content should be free? Why would people pay for content that any five-year old who has used the Internet could find for free. Holstee themselves have a downloads page where you can get a high-res copy that you could print and hang yourself. So what's going on here?

The conversation turned to the parallel question of, what is Holstee, exactly? Is it really a company that sells posters, or is it something else? They've been around for nearly seven years now, six of them with the founders working full time. That's a lifetime in startup terms (not to mention actual lifetime terms, when it's your full-time gig and it's a constant hustle to stay above water. Having been an entrepreneur and a VC I'm super impressed with their perseverance). Dave told us how the company had pivoted its product many times, but always within the original mission and ethos.

Dave gets it though. Almost apologetically, but with laser insight, he said, "People aren't really buying the poster." So, if they're not buying the poster, and they're not buying the words, what are they buying? And suddenly it all came together for me: They're buying the physical representation of the words, the words on the poster, because physical writing has power. Physical words impart their meaning to the thing they are written on.

We've fetishized paper, books and magazines, because for so long that was the only physical medium for words that we knew, but it was never the paper that made books special; it was the permanence of the writing imparted to the object. Before paper it was tablets, cuneiform, parchment, animal hides wound into scrolls and regally decorated to indicate their importance. Tactile sensation is one way of communicating the sensation of permanence, but not the only way; you don't have to touch a poster to know that it's there.

But meaning goes the other way too. What we write on imbues meaning to the words. The physical form is an indication of the importance we place on the content, an homage to its value. That's why we buy elaborately tactile invitations for our weddings and heavy cardstock for our business cards. That's why people are willing to pay more for the same words in a 48" x 64" wall decal than for a 5" x 7" letterpress print. That's why it matters that the posters are printed by a press that puts a dent into the sheet and doesn't just spray ink on the surface.

The context, the physical location, geography, and position of words, additionally impact their value. The wall decal takes on additional meaning because of the way it becomes visually part of the wall, with a permanence and integration into your life that goes beyond that of even a framed poster. Meaning can even be said to be proportional to the degree of permanence, or the amount of persistence in time we expect the object to have. A book is more meaningful than a magazine, but something "written in stone" has greater meaning than a book. [1]

The problem with digital mediums, then, is their impermanence. The words aren't really there; they're just a transient arrangement of pixels, at the whim of electromagnetic fields pushing and pulling colored electrons [2], like words in the sand by the sea. They are great for communicating, consuming, and storing content, but they will never have the same meaning, because by definition the words and the medium are separate. No amount of skeuomorphism will work, now matter how clever the simulated page turning, as long as you know it is impermanent.

So why are books and print news mediums in such decline? Maybe its because paper was never the ideal medium for such broad applications of writing. Maybe most writing is perfectly suited to digital, transient mediums, and doesn't need to be permanent. We used paper broadly because for hundreds of years it was the best tool we had, but maybe its set of use cases is much narrower, best reserved for communications in which we need to imbue a bit of extra meaning, such as a business card transaction, an important invitation, or a declaration of purpose. Maybe if we stopped taking paper for granted as The Medium on Which All Things Should Be Printed, we would realize what is special about it, and what is not. I didn't really know where this essay was going to end, but it seems as if Holstee's goal of inspiring mindful living has succeeded in this one particular case.

[1] Indeed, at one point this very comparison was made by Victor Hugo in Hunchback of Notre-Dame, which in 1831 featured an archdeacon lamenting that the book would kill the cathedral. I discovered it through this article in the NY Times book review.

[2] I know this is not actually how screens work; I claim poetic license.

IoT Is Not Mobile on the Wall

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 17:43:00 +0000

I’ve started listening to a16z podcasts during some meals. I recommend them if you're interested in the future of technology. About a month ago I listened to this fascinating conversation between Benedict Evans, Preethi Kasireddy, and Zal Bilmoria, though I'm just getting around to writing about it now (better late than never). Post-CES, they try to tackle the question of, where is this Internet of Things we keep hearing about? Is there an Internet of Things, or is it just “things connected to the Internet”?

Around 1:49 Benedict Evans makes the most compelling argument: our grandparents could have told us how many electric motors they owned: one in the car, one in the fridge, and one in the vacuum cleaner; and now motors are so common that the side mirror of your car probably has a dozen. But no one goes out and buys electric motors; they buy a microwave, a blender, a coffee machine, etc. – devices that solve a problem that just happen have an electric motor as part of the solution. So it is with the IoT: other than early adopters. it will enter our lives slowly, as we buy device that solve our problems by adding a bit more intelligence to existing devices, a bit at a time.

The analogy makes sense, but it has one fatal flaw: the functionality of electric motors is self-contained (with the exception of transportation, but we are discussing household devices here), whereas connected devices are not self-contained by definition.
When I use my blender, the result occurs wholly within the blender; it doesn’t interface with the coffee machine, and it doesn't generate externalities that I have to worry about, whether it is a privacy concern or merely the cognitive load of making the best use of my data.

Connected devices don’t just create a result, they create data. And that requires human beings to interpret and act on that data, and that’s where it becomes a conundrum for the market. Because if there’s one thing we don’t need more of, it’s data. Beyond early adopters and programmers, for whom this sort of thing is second nature, no one wants the cognitive load of having to do data analytics or write if this then that kind of rules to get the value of a device they just bought. So, we have to create devices and systems that are self-contained, or at least provide the user with the illusion of self-containment. Interoperability won’t cut it; it has to “just work.”

This will require a tremendous amount of effort on the part of OEMs and vendors towards simplification, but I don’t buy that that means that smartphone apps will be the enabler. Not because I have any reason to doubt the smartphone - and no doubt that in the short term apps will be the one of the primary centralized interfaces - but because it’s just too easy an answer to throw out to a novel problem. It’s like the metaphor that to the man with a hammer, everything is a nail; we have a smartphone, so everything is an app. I think we’re too early in the life cycle of connected devices to be able to conceptualize the ultimate interface; we lack sufficient user and market experience.

To offer my own rough analogy, the Internet of Things is where mobile was before the iPhone. The components were all there, but it was missing the unifying paradigm. Knowing everything was there didn’t matter. Remember pre-iPhone, when manufacturers were trying to force WIMP-based interfaces onto our tiny phones with their tiny screens, and mobile application discovery and installation was limited to only the most tech savvy among us? Then Apple comes out with the MPG UI paradigm and the app store, and suddenly everything just works, and it was obvious that this is how mobile computing should be done (obvious at least to the early adopters; remember people swearing there was no way they could use a phone without a keyboard?). The best way to predict the future of IoT too will be to invent it.

So what are the possibilities, in the meantime? Industrial applications, which Zal mentions in the podcast, seems like one way to go. If using connected devices requires significant cognitive load, then it makes sense to deploy it initially in the workplace, where specialists are already doing the heavy cognitive lifting, systems planning, and data analysis.

Another possibility I see it is a market for IoT home contractors (it’s already beginning for builders). I don’t have to know how to wire my home, or what electrical supplies to buy for all my rooms to have electrical outlets, cable jack, and fuses; I just hire an electrician. Why shouldn’t I have the same option for connected devices? The electrician could even set me up with custom dashboards and instructions for my personalized killer apps, and offer ongoing tech support, either on an as-needed basis or as a subscription (why is this starting to sound like cable?)

One potential issue is that it's still too early in the game to agree on what a “standard” connected home setup should include. I think this still work on high end of the market, as a concierge product, and then gradually moves downmarket as prices come down and use case standardization evolves. Companies like Wink and Nest might even do well to offer this service, both as a way to create sell-through, but also to keep a pulse on where consumers’ heads are at with as the market evolves. The customers that this would attract might even be pragmatists rather than early adopters, providing a beachhead into the mainstream part of the proverbial chasm.

Your Email Newsletter Is Not Spam, It's Just Information Overload

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 18:28:00 +0000

If you're like me you might have noticed that it's become really common for people to say something like "We hate spam too" when asking you to sign up for their mailing list. The problem isn't spam though. It's just information overload, plain and simple. I want to read Medium's suggested posts, and Twitter's relevant tweets. I'm really interested in the new feature your startup just rolled out, and I want to get your event updates, because you have some really cool speakers. But I just. Can't. Keep. Up. So you'll forgive me when I don't subscribe. It's not because I think your emails are spam. It's just because I need a diet.

Why Innovation In Payments Is So Rare

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Thu, 08 Jan 2015 05:30:00 +0000

I think a lot about payments, even though I haven't worked in the sector for over five years. I just think it's mind-blowingly cool that this abstract concept we call money manages to work, everywhere around the world, in mutually recognizable forms, not with perfect interoperability but damn near close to it on a local level, with universal understanding that it is simultaneously a medium to measure value (a price); a medium to transact (making a purchase); and at a minimally higher level of financial literacy, a value store (an account).

Yet as cool as a concept as money is, retail payments in the US haven't changed all that much since the advent of credit cards. Your options are basically check, card, or cash. I was reading an interview this morning that StrictlyVC did with Todd Chaffee of Institutional Venture Partners, that goes a long way towards explaining why.
Todd goes beyond the usual chicken-and-egg problem of payment devices and payment receivers (ie cards and readers), and gets to what I consider to be the heart of the payments ecosystem: trust.

[T]he thing about payments systems that people forget is that it isn’t a technology problem; it’s a system of guarantees. That’s what makes a payment system work – not whether the wireless NFC [reader] or the magnetic strip on the credit card will work.

Let’s go through the guarantees that have to be made – independent of the technology requirements – when you buy a shirt at the store with your MasterCard (or your Apple Pay, which is just a digitized means of authenticating your card, in a different form factor). The bank that gave you the card (the “issuing bank”) has to check that you have enough credit or funds to complete the purchase; if so, they have to make a guarantee to the bank that the store use to access the MasterCard network (the “acquiring bank” or “merchant bank”) that it will pay them the amount charged. The merchant bank makes a guarantee to the store that it will pay them; and you make a guarantee to the issuing bank that you will pay them. That’s three guarantees right there, and I haven’t even touched on questions of settlement, clearing, and fraud prevention that have to be run on each transaction. [1]

At the system level, the issuing bank has to guarantee that it will perform the above for all of its cardholders in order to participate in the MasterCard network. The merchant bank has to make a fourth type of guarantee, that in the event of a refund, error, or chargeback, they will send the payment through the network in the other direction. To do that they require the merchant to guarantee that to them, possibly even holding on to a percentage of the merchant's sales, if the merchant is not sufficiently creditworthy; it goes without saying that the issuing bank guarantees to pass it along to the consumer. What’s a chargeback? In the event that a merchant makes an erroneous or duplicate transaction, or is unable to deliver the goods or services offered, and the consumer and the merchant are unable to work things out, the consumer can appeal to MasterCard directly. If MasterCard decides on behalf of the consumer, the merchant has to pay the amount back to the consumer. This by the way is one of the reasons MasterCard doesn’t work directly with individual merchants but rather with regulated financial institutions that “sponsor” the merchant into the network: banks are less likely to fail than a merchant, leaving MasterCard on the hook for the chargebacks.

What we have is a huge system of guarantees that tell the merchant, “if I accept this guy’s card, I will get paid, even if it takes a few days for the money to arrive,” and tells the shopper, “you will be able to use this card to make purchases, because we, the issuing bank and the payment network, are giving you the full backing of our reputation (as long as the network is working and we have communication with it, and sometimes even when we don’t).” This has nothing to do with the form factor or authentication factor(s) of the payment and everything to do with the reputation and word of the actors and the system.

For each of those guarantees of payment, there is an equal and opposite relationship of trust. Ie, the merchant bank’s guarantee to the store owner is only as good as the store owner’s trust in the merchant bank. Luckily the system works pretty well, so our trust in it is taken (mostly) for granted, but we’re like the fish that don’t realize that they’re swimming in water. If you’ve ever tried to do a relatively large transaction in an environment without trust, you understand how important this seamless, all-permeating layer is to commerce. All of the above guarantees ultimately rest on the guarantee of the federal government that a) it regulates the financial entities providing the banking services; and b) if all hell breaks loose, it will be the guarantor of last resort and do whatever it takes to ensure all exchanges are honored.

This is one of the reasons banks find it so hard to innovate; they are locked into their role as reputation-supporters for the financial system, a role that is in inherent contradiction with experimentation and innovation. The difficulty they have innovating in this realm is directly proportional to their size, aka the amount of the financial system’s reputation that rests on their shoulders. On the flip side, there are certain activities that are reserved for institutions with a certain level of stability, ie regulated banks. Most financial products branded with a non-financial institution brand, such as Moven’s or Simple’s cards, are actually issued by an FDIC-insured, government regulated bank whose name lurks somewhere in the fine print.

[1] This is a dramatically oversimplified version of the transaction process, but it touches on the main players from a guarantee/trust perspective. It also glosses over how everyone gets paid.

Lyft vs Uber in a Broader Cultural Context

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 18:14:00 +0000

About a week ago I wrote about how the United States was reindustrializing, and how a personal connection to the production of goods, or a personality in the case of services, was a key component of the new offerings. Today Mashable wrote an article called "Why Lyft is trimming its pink mustache" that speaks to this topic in the context of the Lyft vs Uber, David vs Goliath battle.

As Lyft's new CMO, Kira Wampler, puts it, Lyft is the more human alternative in the ride-sharing/personal transportation market. Personality is an asset in its fight. I'm glad she said this; I was going to talk about this in my reindustrialization post, but I decided it was too much to add to one post. In a world where consumers care about the personality and story of the companies they interact with, and where the general business ethos is moving towards greater social responsibility, it was inevitable that a company like Uber, whose ethos is based on ruthless efficiency, would make more than a few people uncomfortable even before its latest round of scandals. I would go so far as to argue that our underlying discomfort with Uber is the reason its scandals struck such a nerve. Uber's personality leaves a huge space of opportunity for Lyft, with consumers, drivers, and potential employees.

However if Uber goes too far in the direction of ruthless efficiency, Lyft errs too far in the direction of amateurism. In April of this year I was in Denver for the Craft Brewers Conference. Lacking my own vehicle I used both Uber and Lyft to get around. I started with Lyft, which was cheaper and more available, but I ended up switching to Uber because I needed more personal space. Lyft was cool at first, mostly because I was interested in the experiences of the Lyft drivers and getting to know Denver a bit better, but having to talk to the driver every time I "took a cab" (to use the old-fashioned parallel) was exhausting.

But that was the Lyft expectation. When you get in a taxi, or an Uber, it's clear: the driver is a professional, doing his job, and you're the customer. You tell him where you're going, and he leaves you alone unless you want to engage or he needs to ask something related to the ride. When you get in a Lyft, it's ambiguous. The slogan is, "Your friend with a car." It would be weird to get into your friend's car, tell him where to go, and then ignore him the rest of the ride. Most of the Lyft drivers would start a conversation to break the silence, and even when I told them I had a headache, or just wanted some personal space, some of them had trouble with the concept. I can't blame them; it's just part of the ambiguous dynamic of the sharing economy.

That's why I was glad to read the article about Lyft trimming its mustache. I think it will be easier for Lyft's brand to grow up than it will be for Uber to make its brand more friendly. That's not a guarantee of its success; Uber remains a formidable opponent and currently has a vast lead in market share and cash on its balance sheet. It's hard to ignore that efficiency is tremendously important in the transportation and logistics market. But it should make for a more interesting battle.

I Read the NY Times Offline. It Sucked. Here Are Eight Reasons Why

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 22:21:00 +0000

A while ago, a migraine forced me to read the NY Times in its print edition, something I haven't done in years. It was such an awful user experience. Here are the reasons why:

It was big and bulky, which made it especially hard to read on the train.
I had to flip pages in the middle of every article, sometimes to a completely different section of the paper, forcing me to struggle with the big and bulky pages (see #1 above). Whoever came up with the idea of continuing an article that starts on the front page on page P7 (or A14 for that matter) clearly did not have the reader in mind.
I couldn't share anything. Not to Twitter; not to Facebook; not to email. I suppose I could have clipped something and put it in an envelope like my Aunt Myrtle. Even Myrtle uses email now!
Developing stories were out of date. Not hours out of date, but a whole day.
The sections I liked weren't there, or were diluted. There was no Technology section, and Business was only a couple of pages. And each article could only be in one place.
My hands were covered in black ink after reading it.
It was big and bulky in my bag all day, carrying it around until I could read more.
It was still big and bulky at the end of the day on my kitchen table.

It's amazing that we tolerated such an unfriendly form factor as print for so long. Granted the web version has its own share of problems, but the mobile app is a thing of genius. I'm sticking with it.

Not to Defend the North Koreans, But ...

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 03:33:00 +0000

Did it occur to anyone that making a movie about assassinating the leader of another country, in peacetime no less, might be in really bad taste? Not even a historical leader, like Hitler, but an actual, living, sitting leader.

I don't find it offensive; I wouldn't advocate for Sony to be censored; nor do I condone cyberattacks on Sony or making terrorist threats on movie theaters. It's just that the premise of the movie is in bad taste.

The Reindustrialization of America

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Sun, 14 Dec 2014 04:09:00 +0000

Society is undergoing a process of reindustrialization. Unlike the previous century of industrialization, which produced most of the basic tools and features of our daily lives, the current reindustrialization is less about inventing new categories and more about rethinking how things are done from a new perspective. [1]

At a basic level, the first three-quarters of the 20th century produced the inventions that solved the biggest problems in Maslow's hierarchy. Our physical needs, more or less, feel met. We have basic utilities (electricity, indoor plumbing); transportation (airplane, automobile); basic communication (telephone, radio); food preservation (refrigeration; vacuum sealing); means of entertainment (Internet, television); temperature control (A/C, reliable indoor heat), etc. We took the basic items (e.g. cars) and added on new features (e.g. automatic gear shifting, windshield wipers). That's not to say that there aren't wholly new categories left to invent (space travel and health care seem particularly promising areas for this) – but mostly we feel pretty satisfied, at least on the physical/feature level.

Starting with Generation X the physical trappings of our lives, of our parents lives, began to feel excessive. We began to feel a little embarrassed, even, by material wealth. We began moving back to the urban core, to smaller living spaces, to carless lifestyles. The financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed only accelerated our shift in values and cemented this attitude in our traumatized brains.

Our generation's discontent lies deeper (or higher if you're using Maslow as your reference). We've seen unchecked industrialism and consumerism destroy the environment and exploit weaker populations. We've been alienated by maddening bureaucracies representing the pinnacle of cost cutting and reengineering. We believe in capitalism and entrepreneurship as the only way forward, but we're hungry for authentic experiences, for self-actualization, for connection. The financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed only accelerated this, and left many individuals with more time than money and an inclination to start producing things with their own hands.

The result is a slow-but-steady rethinking of the production of all of our goods and experiences. There's a craft economy that's sometimes a caricature of itself but that's growing into a massive portion of the overall economy. You name it, there's an artisanal version of it: handmade chocolate, heirloom pork, Jersey tomatoes; organic soaps; even rethinking the brand and chemicals used in condoms to be more female-friendly. Craft beer is closing in on 20% of the overall beer market and other categories can't be too far behind.

Nowhere do you see this more clearly than in the grocery store. In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, where Whole Foods just opened its largest store in the country, there is a Key Foods that is much closer to us. My wife and I sometimes go there out of convenience, but every time we are surprised by how little we can find that is appealing to us. It's a very strange feeling, to realize that these are many of the same foods that you ate growing up, or even a decade ago, but they're just no longer appetizing. Another friend's wife has said she doesn't like any of the grocery stores in her neighborhood; she only buys her produce at the farmers' market.

How does this apply to tech? If the craft economy is the rethinking of the products in our lives, the "Web 2.0" startups are the rethinking of the services. It’s not enough for them to innovate in the distribution and efficiency (information management) of their chosen vertical. They have to integrate personality into their products and focus on experience as much as functionality. You see this in AirBNB's new "Belong Anywhere" brand. It's tricky for a multi-billion dollar company to be local, but by being simply a conduit between you and your host, the effect is complete. You see it in the friendly, personalized face of companies like Paintzen and Homejoy, for painting or cleaning your home.

Every area of the economy, every type of production or service, is ripe for being reinvented this way. If it hasn't been done yet, it's just a matter of time. The more intellectually challenging question is, what happens when the most ambitious of the small producers start to grow? Will their social consciousness scale with them or will they become as faceless, bureaucratic, and polluting as the old behemoths of commerce? How they handle their success will determine whether they as companies and the movement they are part of will be sustainable or merely a fad.

[1] 3D printing and the internet/mobile/ubiquitous computing are exceptions to this, and in fact are enablers of this reindustrialization, but that's a topic for another post.

Web 3.0 Is Already Here

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 00:16:00 +0000

I had this realization as I was reading my friend Matt Turck's TechCrunch post, The Internet of Things Is Reaching Escape Velocity. Matt referred to the Web 1.0 giants as being Google and Amazon, and Web 2.0 being Facebook and Twitter. The speculation then, is will there be a similar pair of giants to come out of Web 3.0?

The answer is there already is. If Web 1.0 was connecting computers with their data; and Web 2.0 was about connecting people with their data; then Web 3.0 is about connecting people with their things. Thing-to-thing might be Internet but it will never be Web, because Web implies the user interface level. There might be a Web 4.0 that is more advanced than we can imagine at this stage, but it's going to have people/users in it.

Web 3.0 is what we more commonly call Mobile, but I'm going to be more specific because it is both mobile and desktop, but also not all of what we consider mobile is Web 3.0. It's mobile in the sense of, apps that only work out in the world, like Uber or AirBNB; they're not physically tethered to a domain in your control. Their experience very quickly requires mobility. Ie. you can get the full Google/Amazon/FB/Twitter experience without leaving the house. Just try using doing that with AirBNB (unless you're the host). Indeed, Uber and AirBNB are so far the Facebook and Twitter of Web 3.0. Uber was recently valued at $40Bn, or 1.6 times Twitter's market cap; while AirBNB was valued at $13B, after only 6 years.

A corollary I will write about another time is that e-commerce 1.0 was letting you buy things; e-commerce 2.0 was letting you discover things; e-commerce 3.0 is letting you buy services and experiences including those that may never have existed before.

Let the Russians Have PBR

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 19:09:00 +0000

There's been a lot of activity on the Twittersphere today about the purchase of 170 year-old Pabst Brewing Company by six year-old Oasis Beverages of Russia. Yes, that's right folks, the Russians now own such iconic American brands as PBR, Colt 45, Schlitz, Ballantine, and National Bohemian ("Natty Bo"). Some see this as something to mourn for. I say, thank you Russia for the $700M in cash.

Dean Metropoulos, the billionaire who bought Pabst for $250M in 2010 and turned it from mere hipster darling into the force it is today, sold at the top. This graph from Huffington Post says it all:

PBR took off in 2008, around the same time that craft beer started exploding. What need did PBR fill that craft beer didn't? An alternative to big beer that was low in alcohol. Something that said you were not a mindless drone of the establishment that you could throw back a few of without getting wasted. Craft at the time was an arms race to produce the hoppiest, highest alcohol beers,. which was fine, but sometimes you just wanted a cold beer without supporting The Man. Enter PBR.

Around 2012-13, a new trend in craft beer emerged: the so-called "session beer." Lower in alcohol without compromising taste, you could drink 4-5 of them in a "session" without needing to be wheeled home (IMO it's impossible not to compromise some taste, but it's an acceptable compromise). The trend was a hit: Founders, who was one of the first to capitalize on the trend in a big way with the launch of their All Day IPA in 2013, saw it hit 27% of their sales in that first year. That's huge. Suddenly PBR, which had only the slightest taste advantage over Bud Light, wasn't needed. Metropoulos, smart man that he is, starts looking around for the greater fool and bingo, he finds one in the Russians.

In the cycle of creative destruction it is better for us to sell at the top while we move on to the next thing. It's as true in hipster beer as in macro beer. Proust!

Reid Hoffman and Carl Icahn Are Both Right

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 22:46:00 +0000

Reid is right that commerce and payments are a powerful combination, not disparate platforms, but Icahn is right that eBay is covering up PayPal's value.

PayPal needs to be the parent company and eBay the subsidiary. Only then will they be able to compete with Square, Amazon, and Google for the top talent in the payments and commerce spaces and complete the vision that Reid and others had when they engineered the eBay deal nearly 12 years ago.

It's never as simple as Wall Street vs Silicon Valley.

Google's Sneaky New Map Trick

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 18:01:00 +0000

Google maps stopped showing you addresses. Huh?

One of my calendar productivity hacks is to open Google Maps, start typing the name of the venue, and when the search bar auto-completed the full address, copy and paste it into the location field of the invite. When I'm on the run and I need to quickly pull up directions to my next appointment, I just open the calendar event on my phone, tap on the location, and walla: directions!

Imagine my excitement when Google Calendar started autocompleting addresses inline in the location field. I could do my hack without opening another browser tab!

Wait a second. That's just the street name and the city. Where's the address? Where's the zip code? Wtf Google?

It turns out you have to type the entire venue name, street number, and the first letter of the street name before google will autocomplete that for you. In this case (closing brunch for NYC Beer Week, natch), that was 19 characters. Not to mention you have to already know the address.

Anything less and Google gives you really strange results:

As it turns out, Google Maps now works the same way, so when you tap/click on a location with venue name, street, and city but no street number, it shows you the right location (presumably that combination of data is not a perfect primary key, but is sufficiently unique that the occasional collision can be managed on the UI side of things with a "Did you mean ___?" popup).

How nice of Google to simplify location information for us. But in the non-Google world, people use addresses and zip codes. Maybe they don't know where 1500 Main St is, but they know it's between 1400 and 1600. Zip codes matter. Google has just locked us one step deeper into their world.

You can still get the full address. When you complete the search, it's right there above the map pin:

But now you have to take another step. You have to complete the search. You have to move your attention to where Google wants you to put it.

Google had the opportunity to give us the information faster, but not only have they locked our cognitive patterns in to theirs, they've created an new ad unit. Brilliant.

I will grant that there are probably some engineers and UI experts at Google who genuinely think they've done us a favor by relieving us of the need to track two unnecessary, outdated pieces of data: street number and zip code. Personally I feel that that's a slippery slope of condescension that reminds me of I, Robot (inspired by Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics), in which altruistic robots relieve humans of their freedom in order to protect them from themselves.

Definitely not where I was expecting this rant to lead, but it sums up my concerns about Google pretty nicely.

Money and Disputes

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 12:52:00 +0000

Paul Graham wrote an interesting essay back in 2010 called The Top Idea in Your Mind. He writes about two situations that can take over your thinking in the sense that they push out other ideas. One is getting money (fundraising, if you are a startup), and disputes. I had never thought about this, but it's absolutely true; fights are such a mental energy sink that the only people who do them well are those who are essentially professional fighters: activist hedge funds, litigators, certain types of real estate investors, etc.

The problem is not the amount of effort of the action you ultimately take in the dispute, but the pain of having the fight - and the implied insult - take up so much of your thoughts. In Graham's words:

Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. I've found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn't deserve space in my head. I'm always delighted to find I've forgotten the details of disputes, because that means I hadn't been thinking about them. My wife thinks I'm more forgiving than she is, but my motives are purely selfish.

Why do money and disputes dominate our thoughts so much? Probably because we're just chimps (or whatever social animal you prefer to imagine yourself behind), and both of these threaten our survival. A lack of money is a direct threat; money represents resources, i.e. food, shelter, etc.; disputes threaten us indirectly through our fear that they threaten our social status, which as social animals is how we get money i.e. food, shelter, etc. [1].

If money and disputes are such time sucks, then disputes about money are the worst. Try to avoid these at all costs. Definitely something for me to keep in mind as I rev up for fundraising.

Incidentally this idea of money and disputes may explain some of the interest in Lawyers, Guns and Money. In addition to the obvious reference to money, having lawyers and guns are the two ways to resolve disputes: argument or force.

[1[ We often back up our stubbornness in clinging to our disputes with the argument that if I given an inch he'll take a mile, or some other idea that losing the dispute is a precedent for diminished social status. That may have been true when we were chimps in the wild and scarcity was a real problem, but in the modern world it's rarely true.

How I Stopped Using an Alarm Clock and Got Up Earlier

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Thu, 08 Aug 2013 12:59:00 +0000

Waking up for work has always been a challenge for me, historically enabled only by the aid of a ringing alarm clock. Yet today I wake up earlier than ever, without an alarm. How is this possible?

Some background: I've been chronically sleep deprived for as long as I can remember. In high school, when my alarm went off at 6:30AM, I would curse existence and try every trick in the book to squeeze out another 15 minutes of sleep. Not much has changed since (except for getting less exercise).

Every day, no matter what I had to do and where I had to be, I would start with my first appointment and work backwards from there, to precisely calculate the last minute I could wake up. I would allow myself minimal margin; sleep was simply too precious a thing to waste. The first thing I would do upon waking up was look at the time; if it wasn't "time to wake up," I would go back to sleep, even if my alarm was set for 30 minutes from then. It was like there was free money on the table - why wouldn't you take it? Most of the people I've known, except for a few annoying morning people, have operated on a similar paradigm.

Miserably stuck in this pattern, I recently I started reading about sleep and sleep hygiene. I researched biphasic sleep. I learned about 90 minute sleep cycles. I noticed that I almost always woke up before my alarm, and that I was pretty awake when that happened, but then when I would go back to sleep I would wake up exhausted when the alarm went off. On a hunch, I decided to sleep without an alarm, and just get up when I got up.

After the initial anxiety, I found myself sleeping like a baby. I realized having to wake at a certain time had been putting subconscious pressure on me to do sleep "right." I wake up most mornings before 7, sometimes before 6, occasionally after 8. After a few weeks of this, I have a pretty good sense of my sleep cycle, and can predict with reasonable accuracy what time I will wake up in the morning, naturally. I try to avoid scheduling appointments before 10, so that I won't have to calculate anything too closely, but mostly those morning hours function as my "me time," enabling me to write, plan, and focus on the day ahead free of distraction, sometimes in the office, sometimes at home. As a newly minted CEO and first-time founder, these moments of clarity are priceless for making sure that I'm focusing on what needs to be done and not just ticking off busy work.

A side benefit of sleeping without an alarm clock is that it enables me to sleep with my phone in the living room, another life hack to clear my mind of information overload and enable me to achieve more peaceful sleep. But that is a topic for another morning ...

Why It's a Good Thing that the Defining News Organization of Our Times Is "Powered by Cute"

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 02:25:00 +0000

I just discovered BuzzFeed, and I love it [1]. BuzzFeed calls itself "powered by cute," a statement that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. How can the watchdog of democracy be powered by cute? What has happened to society?

I love that it's powered by cute. I love that it's powered by cute because I think that's a better paradigm than powered by fear.

When we talk about the dumbing down of the media, we take for granted the way traditional news media did things as being based in some sort of intellectual paradigm. Media has always used the tools at hand to increase volume, and going at least as far back as the great battles b/w Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst in the 1890's for dominance in the NY market, that has tended to mean taking what was happening in the world and reporting on it in the manner best suited to outrage your readership. [2]. From there you might get them to read about politics, culture, or international news, but it always started with outrage.

Now take the BuzzFeed model (which I will admit made it rather difficult to focus on writing this post): reel you in with pictures of cute fluffy animals, then deliver thought-provoking coverage of race relations in America.

I'm often reminded of Earl Warren's famous quote that he goes to the front page of the paper to read about man's failures and to the sports page to read his successes. BuzzFeed has effectively shifted the model from reeling people in with negative feeling to reeling them in with positive feeling (from outrage porn to cuteness porn, if you will [3]).

It turns out there the way humans are oriented, there aren't enough emotionally engaging positive stories to report on, so they had to resort to pictures of cute animals to arouse those positive feelings.

Would you rather live in a world where people associate news - real news, things people need to know in order to make important decisions about their lives and their governments - with negative feelings or positive?

--

[1] Of course I knew about BuzzFeed before. I heard Jonah Perretti talk. I have friends who work at BuzzFeed. But I always did my best to avoid it. I decried it as the dumbing down of journalism; the end of democracy, etc. Today for the first time I got BuzzFeed.

[2] It's tempting to view outraging your readership as having a social calling; outraging them in order to mobilize them towards some sort of socially positive outcome. If you have that temptation read chapter four of The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, especially this choice headline (a headline!) from the April 3, 1887 edition of the San Francisco Examiner, then under Hearst's editorialship:

HUNGRY, FRANTIC FLAMES. They Leap Madly Upon the Splendid Pleasure Palace by the Bay of Monterey, Encircling Del Monte in Their Ravenous Embrace From Pinnacle to Foundation. Leaping Higher, Higher, Higher, With Desperate Desire. Running Madly Riotous Through Cornice, Archway and Facade. Rushing in Upon the Trembling Guests with Savage Fury. Appalled and Panic-Striken the Breathless Fugitives Gaze Upon the Scene of Terror. The Magnificent Hotel and Its Rich Adornments Now a Smoldering heap of Ashes. The "Examiner" Sends a Special Train to Monterey to Gather Full Details of the Terrible Disaster. Arrival of the Unfortunate Victims on the Morning's Train—A History of Hotel del Monte—The Plans for Rebuilding the Celebrated Hostelry—Particulars and Supposed Origin of the Fire.

[3] My friend Adee has pointed out that I use the term "porn" a lot to describe things of all sorts bearing a common characteristic that you can't look away from. Guilty as charged.

Memorial Day Resolutions

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Wed, 29 May 2013 12:49:00 +0000

I have some resolutions to make, and I’m not going to wait until New Year’s. Memorial Day marks the start of the summer season in many places; in that spirit I am making Memorial Day resolutions.

1. Exercise more. This shouldn’t be too hard since at present I don’t exercise at all. Summer in New York City is actually quite amazing. We’ve come a long way from the days that there was nothing to do but escape the city for the Hamptons. There are parks, biking, Governor’s Island, West Side Bike Trail, Coney Island Bike Trail etc. On weekends you can hop on Metro North to go hiking on Bear Mountain.

2. Eat at regular times. It’s very tempting in the life of an entrepreneur to ignore regular cycles and feel that whatever you’re doing at the moment is so important that it has to be finished right away, but in reality it doesn’t. Life will be fine with an hour pause.

3. Get regular sleep. See above. This is going to be an experiment since I don’t think I’ve done this since ... high school?

4. Don’t check email at night or in the morning. I haven’t decided exactly when this will be. After reading “Programmer Interrupted” and “Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule”, I’ve decided to experiment with not checking or answering email at all after a certain hour. I haven’t decided what hour. It’ll be something like after 11pm and before 11 am. There will be emergencies, particularly close to product launches, etc., but for the most part things can wait. This will require planning in my personal life and building a culture of self-sufficiency and risk taking at Beer Dreamer. Scary.

5. Be more open. Share. Accept people’s help. Relinquish control a little bit. Listen. I make decisions without having to control every step of the process.

A special thanks goes to Adee Telem. You have been my muse and my biggest supporter for the last six months that I have been trying to start this company. You are very special to me and your words of wisdom were the inspiration for this post

On Jason Collins, Chris Broussard, and the (Non) Uproar

noreply@blogger.com (Jordan Waxman) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 04:49:00 +0000

Chris Broussard's anti-gay statements on ESPN today provoked some backlash, but I'm more struck by how little reaction there has been. Maybe this is because they were voiced relatively respectfully, or maybe it's because no one wants to spoil Collins' big day by focusing on something negative. I think it's because there have been so much prominent support of Collins that a statement against homosexuality by a second-tier sports journalist just doesn't feel like that big of a deal. The degree of backlash to a politically incorrect statement has more to do with how culturally sensitive the topic is than how "bad" the statement was. Like disagreeing with miscegenation, disagreeing with homosexuality seems on its way towards becoming quaint and harmless so long as no physical harm is threatened. ESPN seems to get this; I hope that Broussard continues to keep his job as a reminder of how the thoroughly the outpouring of support from within and outside of the sports world marginalized his views.

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