The Gong Show

Innovators Patent Agreement

Wed, 22 May 2013 07:32:13 -0400

I love the Innovators Patent Agreement (IPA). I think it perfectly captures the spirit of how intellectual property should work in today’s era. Rather than butcher the description with my own short hand, here’s a concise description right from the GitHub page where the IPA is hosted:

The Innovators Patent Agreement (IPA) is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from a company to its employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. The company will not use the patents in offensive litigation without the permission of the inventors. This control flows with the patents, so if the company sells the patents to others, the assignee can only use the patents as the inventor intended.

I’m delighted that four Spark Capital portfolio companies have already embraced the IPA: Lift, Jelly, Stack Exchange, and Twitter. If I were an engineer considering multiple job offers, I know the IPA would factor in my decision-making. I’ve seen countless inventors embarrassed by how their patents have been used offensively without their permission, absurdly long after their date of invention and leaving their company.

While I hope more Spark portfolio companies will follow, that’s up to the companies to make that decision, and, along the same lines, please don’t confuse the musing on my own blog with Spark’s official stance. I sweep the floors there.

I feel strongly that offensive usage of patents is net-innovation-destructive. It’s not a position i’ve come to lightly; I’ve arrived over 5-7 years of consideration and internal debate.

garychou: This is a sign of a healthy and prosperous Yahoo!...

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:57:37 -0400

garychou:

This is a sign of a healthy and prosperous Yahoo! Group.

People totally underestimate the asset Yahoo has in Yahoo Groups. Once they build a killer mobile app to access these communities, they’ll realize the Ning vision that Ning never could. Networks of networks.

Self-Driving Cars: Software Will Eat Auto Makers

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:03:13 -0400

The auto industry is on the edge of a revolution. Self-driving cars are on the path to commercial viability, and once they arrive, the industry will go through the same transition that cellular phones, portable music players, cameras, and publishing have all experienced. Software will become the competitive differentiation in car choices, eating lagging manufacturers inside-out.

Google’s demo of a self-driving car taking a blind man on his first drive around town in the driver’s seat was amazing. More importantly, it was the bang of the starting pistol. And since then, Audi, Lexus and Mercedes have all demoed their own versions of self-driving car technology, built by themselves in competition with Google.

Some might applaud Audi, Lexus and Mercedes for being quick to respond and recognizing the threat early. From my view having watched the cellular industry struggle with this type of transition, I think they’re all mistaken.

The auto manufacturer that’s going to win the next decade of innovation and consumer adoption is going to complete the following SAT analogy:

Apple iPhone:AT&T::Google Self Driving Technology:_______

Who will fill in the blank with their own name? There is a distribution deal to be done *yesterday* that involves partnering with Google on commercializing their self-driving technology in exchange for exclusivity. I’m sure it would be expensive and create substantial new marginal costs in manufacturing (like AT&T gave up big marginal cost on every iPhone activated). I’m sure it would require giving Google total autonomy to their part of the project. I’m sure it would be painful in ways I can’t even think of right now.

But an auto manufacturer currently in the second-to-third tier of popularity with nothing to lose and everything to gain (just like AT&T seven years ago) is going to make this painful bet, and I think this to-be-identified-company will end up looking brilliant when it happens.

A little Tumblr history from Marco

Tue, 21 May 2013 09:55:00 -0400

A little Tumblr history from Marco:

david:

:’)

Two funny things about this post:

1) Everyone is going to look at this photos and think this is Tumblr’s office. It’s true that this is where Tumblr worked, and its a wonderfully designed office, but it wasn’t their decorating. It’s a sublet from NextNewNetworks. The current Tumblr offices (which are their own) reflect their much more spare, clean design sensibilities.

2) David found Marco on Craigslist. I’m surprised Marco didn’t mention that fact in this post, though he told me he has spoken about it before. I love this fact. Craigslist is amazing.

brycedotvc: After all the talk of VCs vs. Founders. This. This...

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:27:23 -0400

brycedotvc:

After all the talk of VCs vs. Founders.

This.

This is the kind of relationship we’re all hoping to build with the founders we back.

Congratulations to all involved.

via bijan

I love this photo so much it hurts.

Congrats to the Entire Tumblr Team

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:13:44 -0400

Tumblr just announced that Yahoo is acquiring the company for $1.1BN.

I am in awe. David has unbelievable vision and fantastic execution. Huge congratulations to him and the entire team.

I don’t know if everyone knows the inspiration for Tumblr or not. David was very transparent about what inspired him when he launched the service. So I’m reblogging here now:

Last year [2006], a site called project.ioni.st showed us a completely different form. A form with a different focus:

Sharing.

The long editorials with meticulously formatted links and images we were used to seeing on blogs seemed absent. All of the editors’ thoughts, creations, experiences, and discoveries poured down the screen. It was like flipping through the scrapbook of a like-minded person we had never met.

The editors seemed to post with zero obligations. Anything neat they came across went up. Little or no commentary was needed. The only context was the author. How absolutely beautiful.

A tumblelog isn’t better than a blog. It’s not a replacement. But we’re certain it will be a fabulous alternative to the 90% of web users who don’t care to maintain a blog.

It’s something we knew we wanted the moment we laid eyes on it. Something we were even inspired to build.

I finished Gun, with Occasional Music last week. Jonathan...

Fri, 17 May 2013 17:32:45 -0400

I finished Gun, with Occasional Music last week. Jonathan Lethem’s first novel, published back in 1994.

It’s Sci-Fi meets a Raymond Chandler-style detective novel. The book cover above captures both elements nicely.

It’s a quick read. If you’re motivated, you could finish it in a handful of sittings. Like any good detective mystery it has page-turner qualities.

If Lethem had never written Motherless Brooklyn, I would wholeheartedly endorse Gun, with Occasional Music. But, Motherless Brooklyn is also of the “spiked” detective mystery genre, and its a far superior novel.

If you’re looking for a beach read this summer and like Lethem, then pick this up. Otherwise, there’s more thought-provoking fiction awaiting you elsewhere.

Google's Social Network: Gmail

Thu, 16 May 2013 09:33:57 -0400

Google+ doesn’t make sense as a strategy. Its superfluous to Google’s existing assets. Why did Google need a Facebook-clone-like social network product? They already had an amazing social network in Gmail! I have 10x the social interaction inside of Gmail compared to Facebook.

Facebook has photo sharing, but Gmail gets all the really good photos of my family that the luddites in my network are unwilling to share on a social network.

Link sharing? Yep, Gmail’s got the covered too. That’s a primary use case for email: a recommended link with a two-line description.

Gmail has my address book and knows how frequently I communicate with each person. The social graph they could build from that data is stronger than Facebook’s social graph.

Best of all, it’s distributed. When I’m on Facebook, I can’t talk to my Myspace friends… but when I’m on Gmail, I can talk to my Yahoo Mail friends. It’s the Diaspora vision, just 20 years “back to the future.”

Why build Google +? Google already had everything they wanted right under their nose.

Leaking to the Press in a Hyper-Connected World

Wed, 15 May 2013 10:34:14 -0400

Wired yesterday released a step-by-step guide on how to leak information to the press confidentially in today’s modern, uber-connected, constantly-tracked world. They are a Conde Nast property.

Today, the New Yorker announced Strongbox. An open-source solution for anonymously contacting the New Yorker with tips for stories. They are also a Conde Nast property.

Surprisingly, the Wired article doesn’t mention the Strongbox release. I guess the right hand wasn’t talking to the left.

But, even without an explicit mention, I’m sure the timing for both Conde properties is not a coincidence. Strongbox and Wired’s article are both appropriate moves on the chess board of privacy that has become very complicated in recent days. Specifically, we found out this week that the DoJ is tracking AP journalists’ communications.

“He loved Big Brother.”

Quantopian Launches Live Data Trading

Wed, 15 May 2013 09:35:23 -0400

Quantopian hit a major milestone yesterday. They launched their live data trading release, so now quants can forward test their algorithms with current market data and you can see the algorithms update live.

They demo’d the process of trading real money on the platform at the Finovate conference and are offering a pilot program to a limited audience for people who are ready to put real money behind their strategies.

This is a huge step for the company and its been a big sprint for the team to get to this point. I’m so impressed by these guys.

PandoDaily has some great coverage.

Bitcoin: the Company? or the Currency?

Tue, 14 May 2013 14:32:51 -0400

Charlie wrote a great post about Bitcoin recently. It’s a great read. There is one key point that’s banging around my head that I can’t get out since reading his post yesterday:

If you believe in the Bitcoin ecosystem with enough conviction to make an investment right now, are you better off investing in a startup making a business in the space or simply taking your capital and buying the currency itself?

Given the deflationary nature of the currency, can any single company build value faster than the current itself will appreciate if the whole system takes off?

Value of Information/Influence

Mon, 13 May 2013 09:11:42 -0400

In yesterday’s post I ripped on Paywalls a bit. I should elaborate.

Fact-Based Information has value. Its value is often *inversely* proportional to its distribution. (Think: the value of knowing Warren Buffet’s latest trade before and after he announces it to the world).

Influence also has value. Its value is often *directly* proportional to its distribution. (Think: the value to Warren Buffet of his annual investor letter sent to just 1 person VS publishing it to the world).

Paywalls work for facts. Paywalls are idiotic for opinions distributed for the purpose of gaining influence.

Influence can snowball to thought leadership, which can be very valuable in other ways. So if you’re going to write opinion-driven content, spread it as widely as possible, without friction.

The Millennial Article I Can't Read

Sun, 12 May 2013 15:41:21 -0400

Some curmudgeon Joel Stein apparently wrote a post for Time (think: squid ink smeared on dead steamrolled trees, with gloss — being divested from TimeWarner due to its unprofitable irrelevance) saying that Millennials are selfish, entitled narcissists. I presume it’s the offline media equivalent of trolling.

The punchline? He put it behind a paywall on Time.com such that no Millennial will ever read it. :)

If I tried to make this up as a part of a plot line in a novel, my editor would cut it for being too predictable.

No link here because, as I said, it’s a paywall. Nothing to see.

Text Collaboration

Fri, 10 May 2013 10:00:29 -0400

Version Control Systems (VCS — think Git, Mercurial, CVS, SVN) have been an essential part of software development since… well, since groups have been developing software ;)

Yet, in writing non-code (fiction, essays, blog posts, legal docs, manuals, etc…), VCS is a foreign concept. Collaborating on writing is still unnecessarily difficult.

Geeks think Git (or specifically Github) is the answer. I’m bearish on that approach. I think the learning curve on all existing VCS (especially distributed VCS like Git/Mercurial) is simply too steep. Unless Github masks 90% of its features and drops much of its esoteric VCS-based lexicon, I think it’s going to be hard to get poets to collaborate using Git.

On the other end of the spectrum of existing solutions, Microsoft Word supports “Tracked Changes” today, and you can make newer versions of Word spit out a redline diff between two docs. But to call these features ”collaboration” would expose a lack of appreciation for what VCS makes possible. Tracked Changes and redlines help people pass a doc back and forth with mildly improved efficiency, but it falls down hard when people are simultaneously editing and then later merging.

It’s going to take a special entrepreneur to crack this nut. One that has a geeky appreciation for the productive power of VCS and also a maniacal obsession for simplicity and approachability in software design.

One feature of text collaboration that I think will be important in solving this problem is creating a clean layer of abstraction between editing and merging. I shouldn’t have to give up my favorite text editor of choice just so I can write collaboratively with others. VCS for code get this layer of abstraction. None of the user-friendly solutions to collaborative text I’ve seen appreciate this nuance. They are all vertically integrated solutions which require switching text editors.

If I had to guess where a great solution will emerge, I think it’s going to come from a startup focused on the legal market. Legal docs are kind of like code, but written in English. The pain of collaboration is more acute in the legal field where teams of people work together on one document (in contrast to say a novel, collaborated on by no more than a handful of people). The legal field has plenty of tech-geek early adopters, but it also has mountains of trailing-edge late adopters so anyone successful in this market will have to serve both audiences well. I’m curious… what is the state-of-the-art for text collaboration in the legal field today?

Copper in ICUs Reduces Hopsital-Acquired-Infections

Thu, 09 May 2013 19:47:53 -0400

Copper in ICUs Reduces Hopsital-Acquired-Infections:

Hospital ICUs are scary places. If you’re in an ICU you’re *very* sick. But in recent years they’ve become even scarier because they are home to “superbugs” like MRSA, bacteria that are resistant to nearly all types of antibiotics we have to combat infections.

The “superbug” meme entered the zeitgeist in 2010. Stats were tossed around that MRSA kills more people each year than AIDS. I was not spared the FUD and have a elevated fear of ICUs for that reason.

So, with great interest, I just read a new research paper about the results of lining ICU contact surfaces (like bed rails) with copper. Copper provides a less hospitable environment for bacteria and as a result, a copper-lined ICU was found to lead to a 60% reduction in hospital-acquired infections. That’s amazing!

I’m sure further confirmatory studies are necessary, but look to see copper-lined medical supplies become a new market in the future.

Biz Dev

Thu, 09 May 2013 09:16:17 -0400

As an early stage startup, engaging in biz dev conversations with large established (Global 2000) companies is like buying lottery tickets. It’s largely a waste of resources, but there’s a slim chance to hit it big.

I don’t buy lottery tickets.

But you can’t ignore things like Yahoo’s search-white-labeling deal with Google in the early 2000s, firefox’s distribution via Google homepage, being a launch partner app in Facebook’s F8 ecosystem, or being featured in an Apple Ad. These can be company-making events.

If you find yourself in BD conversations, the best piece of advice I’ve heard came from Yaron of Outbrain. To paraphrase:

You need to recognize that the person sitting across from you at the table represents their company but will not necessarily act in their company’s best interests. Don’t get distracted by crafting the perfect proposal for the BD target company. Instead, (once you know you’re talking to a decision maker) focus on the person across the table. Be brash enough to ask how that person is bonused. Be creative enough to strike a deal that makes that person look like a rockstar to his/her boss instead of designing the perfect deal for the partnering corporation.

Big BD deals get signed between people, not companies.

Advanced Chess

Wed, 08 May 2013 08:50:26 -0400

An entrepreneur once told me a story of the evolution of Advanced Chess, and it’s been rattling around in my head for awhile now.

Advanced Chess is a form of Chess where each player is allowed to use all possible resources at his/her disposal to make a move. One can use computer AI or ask friends for help. Anything goes.

The Grandmasters use Advanced Chess to help expand their minds in play. It allows them to get a different perspective on their typical Chess instincts. It’s useful in training. There are international Advanced Chess competitions.

In the beginning of Advanced Chess (I believe in the 90s), A single Grandmaster could beat a lesser opponent even if the opponent was leveraging Computer AI as a crutch. A single human could rule.

Post-Deep-Blue, Grandmasters could be beaten in Advanced Chess if their opponent had amazing Computer AI at their disposal. It was the rise of the machines. So the new unbeatable combination became a Grandmaster that leveraged Computer AI well.

But in the middle of the last decade a new winning combination emerged: a combination of Human Computation and Computer AI. The best Advanced Chess algorithms now start with a Computer AI recommended list of moves and then a crowd of expert humans vote on the best move. The combination of a crowd plus excellent AI can best a single Grandmaster plus AI.

I love this story. It’s another example of how Soylant Green (“It’s made of humans”) algorithms are taking over the world. I look for this characteristic in every startup I talk to. I consider it a special subset of a Network Effect.

This is how I’ve seen P2P commerce evolve. In the offline...

Tue, 07 May 2013 10:00:01 -0400

This is how I’ve seen P2P commerce evolve. In the offline world, newspaper classified were sub-divided by location, and each paper covered all categories. Then Craigslist blew that up using Internet scale. Now there is so much liquidity in online P2P commerce that each vertical can support its own destination, but they cover all locations. I’ve said something similar before.

I was going to write a more thorough blog post on this subject, but I think these images tell the story more cleanly.

After the Boston Marathon bombing I wanted to do something....

Mon, 06 May 2013 07:30:26 -0400

After the Boston Marathon bombing I wanted to do something. I’d still love to run the race next year, and if the opportunity is available I will. I decided on donating blood, and yesterday I followed through.

That’s my bag, filling up. So this post is a #GPOY(blood)M, and gives “gratuitous” a new meaning.

Disruption From Left Field

Fri, 03 May 2013 10:50:00 -0400

Apple is running a new ad in which there is one simple line of dialog:

Every day, more photos are taken with the iPhone than any other camera.

Simple, tight, concise message. And the ad is beautiful.

When I saw this ad, my first reaction was a simple, emotional response to the raw, human editing style.

But then on further reflection, I thought of Kodak. For years Kodak was a dominant brand in photography. As photography started to move from analog film to digital, Kodak made small attempts to participate in the shift, but were largely left behind. In Kodak’s prime photography was a “razor / razorblade” model and Kodak was minting money selling film. When film went from “essential” to “nostalgic” the company never recovered.

After reading the Innovator’s Dilemma or a few VC blog posts, one could expound academically that Kodak should have tried to launch a sub-brand to make the transition through technology disruption. Textbook incumbent behavior… in order to live to fight another day in the digital photography transition.

But, even that academic approach would have ultimately failed in this case. A phone! That’s the dominant camera choice today. Kodak needed to make critical, company-saving decisions by seeing that one of these was going to be everyone’s camera in the future:

How could Kodak possibly have the foresight to battle a phone? They never stood a chance.