Lyrics after the break –

This one goes out to you and yours
worldwide
I say hey I’ll be gone today
But I’ll be back all around the way
It seems like everywhere I go
The more I see
the less I know
But I know one thing
That I love you
I love you
I love you
I love you

I’ve been a lot of places all around the way
I’ve seen a lot joy and I’ve seen a lot of pain
but I don’t want to write a love song for the world,
I just want to write a song about a boy and a girl
Junkies on the corner always calling my name
And the kids on the corner playing ghetto games
When I saw you getting down well I hoped it was you
And when I looked into your eyes I knew it was true
I say Hey I’ll be gone today
But I’ll be back all around the way
It seems like everywhere I go
The more I see
the less I know
But I know one thing
That I love you
I love you
I love you
I love you

Now I’m not a highly metaphysical man
But I know when the stars are aligned you can
bump into person in the middle of the road
look into their eyes and you suddenly know
Rocking in the dance hall moving with you
Dancing in the night in the middle of June
My momma told me don’t lose you
‘cause the best luck I had was you
I said Hey I’ll be gone today
But I’ll be back all around the way
It seems like everywhere I go
The more I see the less I know
But I know one thing
That I love you
I love you
I love you
I love you

And I said rocking in the dance hall moving with you
I said Hey momma hey momma close to you
Rocking in the dance hall moving with you
I said hey papa, hey papa close to you
Rocking in the dance hall moving with you
I said Hey Momma close to you
Rocking in the dance hall moving with you I said
hey momma, hey momma, hey momma, hey momma
hey momma, hey momma, hey momma, hey momma
what you gonna do?

My momma told me don’t lose you
Cause the best luck I had was you
And I know one thing that I love you
I said Hey I’ll be gone today
but I’ll be back all around the way
It seems like everywhere I go
The more I see the less I know
I said Hey I’ll be gone today
but I’ll be back all around the way
It seems like everywhere I go
The more I see the less I know
But I know one thing that I love you
I love you (3x)
I love you (3x)
I love you (3x)
I love you (3x)

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… until you find that strength. It matters how you’re going to finish. Incredible.

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2019, really? let’s make this happen sooner. 10 years is a long long time in tech years.

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“Remember there are 3 kinds of people; Those that MAKE it happen, those that WATCH it happen, and those that wonder WHAT happened. These startups are people that MAKE it happen. They should be respected and supported by those of us in the later two categories.” — Don Dodge

Don, well said.

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via @brianshin

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1. Clarity of Purpose
Summarize the company’s business on the back of a business card.

2. Large Markets
Address existing markets poised for rapid growth or change. A market on the path to a $1B potential allows for error and time for real margins to develop.

3. Rich Customers
Target customers who will move fast and pay a premium for a unique offering.

4. Focus
Customers will only buy a simple product with a singular value proposition.

5. Pain Killers
Pick the one thing that is of burning importance to the customer then delight them with a compelling solution.

6. Think Differently
Constantly challenge conventional wisdom. Take the contrarian route. Create novel solutions. Outwit the competition.

7. Team DNA
A company’s DNA is set in the first 90 days. All team members are the smartest or most clever in their domain. “A” level founders attract an “A” level team.

8. Agility
Stealth and speed will usually help beat-out large companies.

9. Frugality
Focus spending on what’s critical. Spend only on the priorities and maximize profitability.

10. Inferno
Start with only a little money. It forces discipline and focus. A huge market with customers yearning for a product developed by great engineers requires very little firepower.

source: SEQUOIA CAPITAL

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Curiously enough, what got Segway into this problem was that the company was itself a kind of Segway. It was too easy for them; they were too successful raising money. If they’d had to grow the company gradually, by iterating through several versions they sold to real users, they’d have learned pretty quickly that people looked stupid riding them. Instead they had enough to work in secret. They had focus groups aplenty, I’m sure, but they didn’t have the people yelling insults out of cars. So they never realized they were zooming confidently down a blind alley.

– Paul Graham, YCombinator

My take:

- I agree, raising “too much” capital for an idea is poison. Having to do a lot with a little instills discipline, and forces one to be uber-resourceful, razor focused, and quite frankly a little paranoid :) I’m extremely lucky to have mentors like David who have drilled this mantra into my head. We achieved a lot with little at both Lookery and Compete.com, and now Shareaholic.

- Iterative design is the way to go. All of us that create applications for which we can push updates and upgrades at-will at not much cost are blessed. Criminal not to take advantage of this gift.

- Focus groups? Community Managers (= everyone in the company) should be curating the feedback loop from in the field – talking to real users, asking them how we can improve our products, create the most value for them, and knock down the most roadblocks in the process — in short, make their lives easier.

Users first, always.

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This morning I rediscovered this (previously unpublished) transcript from February 2008 in my archives.

I was Product Manager of Compete.com at the time, and it goes into how we managed and thought about our user community at Compete, a critical component that helped us surpass 1 million monthly unique visitors to Compete.com very quickly. I’ve carried much of this thinking over to Shareaholic, a tool that has been used by over 1 million people. At Shareaholic we obsess over our users, always putting our users first.

Hope you find this to be a useful read. Enjoy!

1. Who do you work for, what do they do, and what is your official job title?

Compete, Inc is a competitive web analytics company. We have a diverse sample of over two million U.S. internet users that have given us permission to aggregate and analyze all the web pages they visit and ask them questions via surveys. We believe that web analytics means analyzing what consumers do across the entire web, not just what they do within a particular site, and that marketers can use this rich information across the entire company, not just for online media planning or site design decisions.

We’ve been doing custom web analytics work for big brands such as Verizon, Chrysler and Wells Fargo for over 7 years now. Just over 13 months ago we launched compete.com. Compete.com is targeted towards the millions of people dependent upon their website/online presence to drive their business. Up until the launch of compete.com there really was no affordable, reliable and consistent source of competitive web analytics for the average marketer.

As for my own role with Compete, I’ve been with the company for just over 3 years, and my official job title is – Product Manager, Compete.com

2. Now that you have experience actually doing it, what does community management mean at Compete?

We won’t be satisfied until compete.com is the go-to industry source for the most precise competitive web analytics data available. For this to happen, we need to build a large community users that regularly use, trust and recommend Compete data – our advocates.

Generally, communities do not build themselves. They need some nurturing. I like Chris Brogan’s description of the role:

“The people gathered before you aren’t an orchestra and you are not a conductor. At best, you are a jam manager. You are the person helping bring about the experience, but with your hands as far off the overall end results as possible.”

At Compete, community management/evangelism translates to encouraging and supporting early users, enabling two-way transparent conversations about Compete, looking for and enabling people who might be interested in what we do, listening and responding to feedback (the good and the bad), setting up and managing user expectations, integrating user feedback into product roadmap decisions, being the customer’s voice within Compete, and generally being available, easy to reach, and responsive.

3. If a community manager does their job well, what happens as a result?

We hope good things :) In all seriousness, in my experience users tend to feel a greater sense of ownership of the product. This leads to our users being happier, they engage more with the product, tend to talk more favorably about their experiences, and give us more (constructive) feedback in return. They become our advocates.

4. What is much more of a challenge than you originally anticipated?

As Product Manager of Compete.com, community development is not my only focus. I wish there were more hours in the day! (well, doesn’t everyone?) Balancing the two roles simultaneously is a little bit of a challenge as community management can be a full time job in-itself.

At Compete, we made sure product and community go hand in hand. Our users heavily influence product direction. I love being close to our users, and I am also lucky to have great colleagues who also love interacting and cultivating our community, and they do a fantastic job at it.

5. What technologies do you use to interact with your community?

The Compete Blog (wordpress) is used extensively to educate our users on how to most effectively look at and analyze Compete data. We use Technorati to monitor incoming blog links, and our local analytics package (IndexTools – now Yahoo Analytics) to monitor non-blog mentions like Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, etc. Shareaholic to spread and seed content on social media sites. We also use twitter, email, im, newsletters, mybloglog, facebook and field regular feedback surveys. Twitter’s “track” feature in particular has proven to be very effective. Google Alerts are also great to monitor conversations about Compete.

6. What specific metrics (if any) do you focus on for success?

We focus on unique visitors to compete.com, repeat visits, registrations, feed subscribers, incoming links, and the quality and frequency of blog and press mentions. We track these metrics on a daily basis, and make them available to the entire company weekly. We also field a user feedback survey at least once each quarter, in which we ask our users to rate our performance, and whether they would recommend us to a friend or colleague (Net Promoter Score) — we track this closely.

7. What is the most important skill to have as a community manager?

Listening skills, humility, being attentive, inquisitive and responsive. Community management is a constant process of listening, sharing, and enabling.

8. What are the best/worst parts about being a community manager?

The best part of the role is connecting directly with people who use Compete.com, and those who are just waiting to be converted! As Product Manager, learning how the products are actually being used is invaluable. The job can also be very different every day, which is exhilarating.

9. Let’s imagine that there was a company directive to “increase engagement” with your customers. How would you, in a community management role, go about doing that?

The end strategy would depend upon how “engagement” is being defined and end business goals. At a high level – at Compete.com we have the luxury of over 700,000 monthly unique visitors, and over 70,000 registered users that are quite active on the site. I would likely first reach out to them, followed by people who are already talking about us (positive or negative). I would ask them how we can improve our products, create the most value for them, and knock down the most roadblocks.

As we engage the community more in such conversations, and as we start incorporating their feedback, overall user engagement should hopefully increase.

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explaining his philosophy and commitment to the customer-service culture of Zappos:

• Obsess over customers. For Amazon, everything starts with the customer. While they pay attention to competitors, they don’t let competitors drive what they do.
• Invent. Amazon listens to customers, recognizing the need to invent solutions for them, since they can’t do it themselves. Jeff see this as a critical part of what Amazon does — invent on behalf of customers.
• Think long term. Amazon strategists try to look five years out. They don’t worry about taking actions that, while they might pay immediate dividends for customers, won’t pay off for the company or its investors for five to seven years. They have a willingness to be misunderstood, since so many people only understand short-term needs and short-term thinking.
• It’s always Day 1. There are always more opportunities to invent more for customers. It’s never over or too late.

via Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia.

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“When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I’d sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called “business stuff.” I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager’s schedule and one on the maker’s.”

– Paul Graham, YCombinator

Wow, this is very similar to my schedule these days.

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“Music helps me when I’m coding, which is still my priority. When you’re coding, you really have to be in the zone. I’ll listen to a single song, over and over on repeat, like a hundred times.” — Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress and Automattic

Funny, I do the same thing. It makes me more productive.

(source)

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Tal: I’m hoping to join a tech company as a programmer or user experience designer, a small startup would be ideal.

bijan: do you have a blog or linkedin account. happy to send your contact info to a few of our portfolio companies. where are you located?

If you’re looking for a startup/any job, and don’t have a LinkedIn account — get one! Also recommend starting a blog if haven’t already.

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To give a fund’s investors a 20% annual return, the firm needs to triple the money raised within a six-year period, Kopelman said. For a $400 million fund, that means returning $1.2 billion to investors. Since VCs typically don’t want the risk of holding more than 20% of the companies they invest in, they have to help build a few companies with a total of $6 billion in market value. But in the past few years only a handful of companies have sold or gone public for more than $1 billion. “You sit there and say, ‘Holy crap, that model doesn’t work,’ ” said Kopelman.

What’s a venture capitalist to do? For Kopelman and other super angels, the answer is to get small. Super angels still aim for billion-dollar exits, but their model doesn’t hinge on home runs. Instead, they can profit by hitting singles and doubles and reducing their strikeouts.

– Josh Kopelman, First Round Capital in a BusinessWeek interview.

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Shared ideas and values, tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change.

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LOL :)

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Thanks @habibh !

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On work ethic:

Something that my dad always told me growing up, which is a simple piece of advice that really shaped my approach to life and to business.

My dad worked for Ford for 30 years. When I was a kid, he’d say: “If you’re going to do a job, do a job. If you’re not going to do a job, don’t do a job.” What he meant was, if you really want to accomplish anything, you have to be committed, motivated, tenacious and smart about what you do. That’s really just the essence of the American work ethic, but it’s one of the most important things I ever learned.

Lessons on leadership from growing from 30 employees to 90,000:

I’ve come to believe that to be a great leader, you have to combine thought leadership, business leadership and great people management. I think most people tend to focus more on one of those three. I used to think it was all about thought leadership. Some people think it’s all about your ability to manage people. But the truth is, great leaders have to have a mix of those things.

The most challenging part of his job:

Finding the right balance between optimism and realism. I’m an optimist by nature, and I start from the belief that you can always succeed if you have the right amount of focus combined with the right amount of hard work. So I can get frustrated when progress runs up against issues that should have been anticipated or that simply couldn’t have been foreseen. A realist knows that a certain amount of that is inevitable, but the optimist in me always struggles when progress doesn’t match my expectations.

Read the entire New York Times interview here.

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Today, I am pleased to announce that the Open Share Icon has a new website!

Learn more about Open Share Icons here

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