Be concise, not precise.

Fundraising talk is hard. It’s a special combination of lingo, body language, and force of personality. The above advice is from one of the speakers at AngelPad. You can’t get wordy with investors early on, no matter how complex or nuanced the business, because if you get tuned out quickly you don’t recover. End of meeting. Despite the analogy being beaten to death, but it bears repeating: talking to investors is like hitting on girls. Since the investors (girls) hear over thousands of pitches (pick up lines) every year, they’ve developed shortcuts to quickly weed people out. It’s a matter of efficiency and some evolutionary thing I can’t explain.
 
Understanding the situation, many entrepreneurs still feel frustrated. Investors, professionals and angels, are generally intelligent people. So it’s not that they are unable to discern subtle differences. They just can’t afford to sit down for 30 minutes to pick out the gems from your verbal diarrhea. The key is selling the idea in the shortest amount of time. From there, if you pique interest, the investor will naturally ask the questions that get down to the nitty gritty. He/she may even figure out what you’re really doing.
 
The other problem is what I call the pigeon hole dilemma. Investors and media love to draw “X for Y” comparisons, like AirBnb for pets, or Match.com for basketball players. Again, it’s a quick shortcut that condenses your business into a neat soundbite. You probably hate it. Even though often inaccurate, it’s powerful because the person doesn’t have to spend much time processing your idea. Our AngelPad friend Brett (of Source Ninja fame) says it doesn’t matter how or what you say, you WILL get pigeon holed until you create that awesome billion dollar category of your own. You’re not XYZ until you’re XYZ.
 
This may all sound a little nutty for those not in the business. As for me, I’m in full acceptance phase. Time is valuable and if you can’t practice your pitch enough to capture attention of people who are writing you checks for huge sums of money, then how can you succeed building a valuable business out of scratch? One that requires projecting your vision and passion to bring on customers, employees, and partners? It’s a tricky song and dance, but one’s gotta learn it. Remember not to blow chunks.

Get out of the building.

Smart people have a tendency to make assumptions about too many important variables, such as how customers will react to their products, how big the market can be, how to sell, etc. But the really smart people know better than to not test these assumptions in the real world. There simply isn’t a good way to do that short of leaving the office and talking to real customers who you’re trying to solve problems for.
 
At AngelPad, the mentors push very hard for us to do things systematically. Gokul likes to tell us the story of one of his favorite AngelPad company founders. The guy would start or end every sentence with “my customer said.” He essentially talked completely in customer demands and left out any personal assumptions. While I believe that is indeed the holy grail, it doesn’t work for every type of product. For instance consumer apps such as games or websites.
 
Investors obviously prefer the solution to hair-on-fire problems; they’re less excited about what they call vitamins instead of cancer cures. Solving an acute pain is the surest way to build a revenue generating business, thus greatly reducing investment risk. That said, without these vitamins, Twitter or Instagram wouldn’t exist today. The mentors are smart enough to recognize that, as evidenced by our diverse group of founders building companies spanning the spectrum of product ideas.
 

Could Google+ be a turning point for Google against its competitors? Not in the product or revenue sense, but in the human capital arena? While everyone has focused on the typical measures of success for Google+, metrics like number of users or activities, I think we’re overlooking how positively this affects the company morale, keeping those smart people in place.

Only months ago we were reading about how the company bled talent. People were leaving in droves to either start their own companies or join the darling tech startup du jour, be it Facebook or Foursquare. Techcrunch posted confirmed news on Google offering individuals millions of dollars to counter these departures. Despite those outlandish offers, many were still turned down.

In the meanwhile, startups in the valley (and NYC) has been flush with investment cash, pouring rocket fuel on the war for tech talent on an order unseen since the first Internet bubble. Companies are still raising cash in bullish valuations at early stages.

Google+ has been a decisive coup for Google in this respect. Let’s face it, the tech echo chamber in its praise for G+ has been deafening. Although the average Internet user may not care, in the valley, tech people still care very much about what the likes of Robert Scoble are saying. If I were working at Google, I’d feel that sense of redemption after suffering from all the defection talks and product missteps repeated ad nauseum. The new product shows the world that the company is still capable of pushing out amazing technology that users can see and touch.

I don’t know how successful G+ will ultimately become, whether it will supplant any of the competitors out there. I doubt anybody can predict markets and user behavior, but that’s beyond the point. I am saying that the tech media approval translates to an immense win for retaining the company’s talent. Assume some engineers who considered fat offers now decide to stick around for a while longer. It’s fun, it gets attention, and everyone’s curious how it plays out. And perhaps they stay long enough for the market to cool off and external options start looking a lot less attractive. That outcome alone should be praised for.

[Not that I have not talked to any Google employee directly about my speculations above. This is purely my conjecture as an outsider to the company and insider to the G+ echo chamber.]

Excellent for Media Consumption

iPad Swap Story
With some careful planning and luck, I heisted an iPad2 by swapping in my old one and paying only an extra $100. Expecting the announcement of the iPad2, I sold my original iPad in February on Craigslist for $430 cash. (Remember to keep the box.) Then during SXSW in March I started monitoring Twitter for chatter on inventory levels. The first few days at the pop-up Apple store were madhouse and I couldn’t bother with hours in line for a mere chance to buy. But one night while browsing on my Xoom I came across tweets of a re-stocking the next day. I showed up around noon and 15 minutes later picked up the iPad2. My buddy who came along bought three and shipped them to his family in Hong Kong, it’s like Christmas in March. So remember, use Apple’s fairly predictable product roadmap to plan your purchases accordingly.

 
Hardware as in Heavyware
Both tablets sport very nice hardware specs: the display, underlying processor speeds, battery life, and overall finish. You won’t find either underpowered until way past replacement time. The new iPad’s weight loss pays off using over long periods of time. The Xoom feels quite heavy even compared to the original iPad. One big difference on the Xoom is the 1280×800 resolution which changes the aspect ratio (think longer and narrower) making portrait mode a joy for web browsing and reading articles. Nonetheless I want both to shed more heft as hours long book reading is still preferable on the Kindle. As for the cameras (both devices have front and back facing cameras), I found little use for despite being a heavy video Skype user on the computer. I do believe there will be more interesting usages of the cameras down the road, such as for recognizing input gestures.
 
Wishlist for Apple
For those unfamiliar with the Apple way, Apple places an iron tight grip on every aspect of user experience, curates its app store, and imposes demanding requirements on all the parties in its ecosystem. It’s perfectly within their right to do so. I don’t hold it against Apple to position its products whichever way and letting consumers vote with their wallets. Yet there are aspects on the more open [sorry for using this loaded term] Android platform that compel mentioning. One of them is ability to change input methods, like Swype and Swiftkey to name a few. If the tablet is ever to transform our computing interaction, then the input method should as well. In a thoughtful Future of Touch Interaction talk at SXSW, (ironically) Microsoft researchers presented that our natural input language for touch devices has much room to evolve. Knowing that existing solutions are far from perfect, companies out there are working hard to improve it. My favorite: Swiftkey’s intuitive thumb type method for Android tablets, reminiscent of my old BlackBerry days, runs on top of a word prediction technology that learns from you. Apple’s current and only text input method is still based on minor refinements of a years old method. To observe an exercise in frustration ask an iPad beginner to type a long email. After 4 iterations of iPhones and a whole year of iPad experience, the best Apple can offer is something that makes people long for hardkeys. This is a serious innovation deficiency because it ignores people who want to create messages over 140 characters or otherwise express their creativity in written form.

Swiftkey’s Double Thumb Tablet Input

So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, “excellent sheep.” I had no doubt that they would continue to jump through hoops and ace tests and go on to Harvard Business School, or Michigan Law School, or Johns Hopkins Medical School, or Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey consulting, or whatever. And this approach would indeed take them far in life. They would come back for their 25th reunion as a partner at White & Case, or an attending physician at Mass General, or an assistant secretary in the Department of State.
…
As I thought about these things and put all these pieces together—the kind of students I had, the kind of leadership they were being trained for, the kind of leaders I saw in my own institution—I realized that this is a national problem. We have a crisis of leadership in this country, in every institution. Not just in government. Look at what happened to American corporations in recent decades, as all the old dinosaurs like General Motors or TWA or U.S. Steel fell apart. Look at what happened to Wall Street in just the last couple of years.

We live in a system that churns out intelligent drones who create massive societal problems. Instead of generating true value for the world, they’ve destroyed economies in the name of creating shareholder value or personal gain. In essence we’ve trained generations of bright people on how to game the system to maximize their own gain (again, our own fault for elevating wealth as an aspirational value system) at the huge detriment of those who cannot. Yes, the Goldman’s and Carly’s of the world are labeled as leaders in the sense that they are so successful at fleecing their way to unimaginable personal wealth while creating so little, if not outright negative, real world value.
 
Deresiewicz argues that thinking and reflection, what he loosely labels as solitude, as a major way to develop personal leadership. While I explicitly warned against the distractions of thoughtless media in the previous mentioned posting, a year later things have become harder with the explosion of social media. My identity as a technologist, pits using these tools in trying to understand and improve against falling to their addictive cheap calories to the brain. It’s easy to slip between experimentation and mindless consumption. I must keep reminding myself that ideas or thoughts of deep value, require a level of thought and work that cannot be generated quickly.

Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.

I/we often succumb to mistaking conventional wisdom for original thought. After reading the same convincing argument from multiple sources over a period of time, it’s easy to assimilate it and claim as my own, without performing the sufficient work to challenge that thought, testing it with real research, and deeper thinking. The scariest part of this process is how unconsciously it occurs.
 
Along the same lines, my personal challenge in thinking about technology’s place in the world is rising above all that input and generating original ideas that sprout from the varied connections. As efficiently as I consume ideas from the best (which is absolutely necessary), the hardest step is still that of origination, inception if I may loosely borrow that term.
 
To close, if you’ve missed the essay, I highly recommend spending a chunk of time and reading it in one session. And then practice the introspection it touts. It will help you figure something out, either about the world, or yourself.