Ephemera

Representation and Startups

2009-07-08T17:44:36-07:00

Charlie Crystle recently wrote an interesting post about honest self-representation among entrepreneurs. Assessing roles and contributions in early-stage startups can be tough. Ideas tend to morph quickly, there can be a lot of input from different communities, and The Cult of the Inventor tends to dictate history.

Because startups go through several phases before achieving exit or maturity, key contributors who join along the way often have little appreciation for what came before them and little appetite for what has to be done after they leave. And there's no shortage of ego in the mix.

The term founder can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Founders usually:

Create and shape an idea
Create a company
Fund or get funding for the company
Bring in resources to help execute on the plan

There are myriad books and articles on founders and founding but here's some dumb advice to anyone who has worked at an early-stage startup and hopes to leverage that experience into another opportunity:

If you joined a startup as an employee with a paycheck and others worked long and hard, often without compensation, to create what you've joined, give credit where credit is due. You may think that you're creating all the value going forward, but don't underestimate the value of what you've been given to work with.
Don't inflate your role; don't diminish the role of anyone else. It may seem tempting to claim sole ownership of something you worked on; it may be equally tempting to marginalize the achievements or involvement of someone else. This is usually transparent, and while it won't help you, if discovered, it will hurt you.
If you were an early employee, but didn't found, co-found, help conceive of, incubate, encourage, or inspire the creation of the company, don't say you did. There is plenty of glory and compensation for being an early employee, architect, product maven or leader. And, while being a founder per se probably won't open any doors, saying you were one when you were not will definitely shut doors.
Be careful about characterizing your involvement in fundraising, and be prepared to support any claims you've made with references. The people who raised the money are the people the VCs/investors believe were instrumental in their investment.

A final note, which should go without saying, but sadly, can't: When it comes to characterizing your background and that of others, don't be a jerk. Even if you think you came into a broken situation and turned things around, or if think you created something that someone else subsequently came in and destroyed, simply focus on your achievements in the context of the team and own your mistakes. Avoid assessing blame or implying fault- it will only raise questions and engender ill will and it won't help you.

A Different Word for Everything

2009-07-05T10:22:50-07:00

Today's NYT story on P.R. in Silicon Valley caused a bit of a stir in the blogosphere, most notably with TechCrunch and Scoble. Both make good points, and while PR has changed with social media, it remains as predictably stratified as any other business based on relationships, access, and attention. Not much news there.

The kerfuffle surrounding this, however, isn't really about P.R. It's about segmentation. When discussing the rollout strategy for Wordnik, one of his portfolio companies, Roger McNamee is quoted as characterizing TechCunch et al. as cynical. Perhaps it was a poor choice of words (are you really going to coach Roger on diction?), but in the context of Wordnik, it is an interesting choice of words.

Wordnik is a big idea, but it's not without nuance. It's a real-time dictionary and concordance and if it's successful, it will have some interesting and potentially sweeping implications- from how we acknowledge, learn, teach and use language, to the currency of language itself. It's a social experiment, enabled by technology, but driven by an erudite notion- a notion that a lot of people, including the readers of the blogs referenced, may not find that compelling (and may find trivial, hence the suggestion of cynicism).

Segmentation and targeting pose a dilemma for both sides- we all tire of promotional spam and yet being overtly excluded from outreach sends a pronounced message of omission. Would that this commotion were so simple.

Saying you DON'T care about a handful of influential blogs that can have an impact on your business, and saying it on the front page of the business section of the New York Times, can yield only one outcome- coverage by the disparaged. There's a word for that.

Symbian>Nokia+Android

2008-06-24T10:56:49-07:00

The Nokia/Symbian deal was announced today. The quoted phrase "simplifying the software supply chain" is priceless in context.

Also, Chetan sent over a link to the Wired story this morning. Interesting read.

CRMbrella vs Bad Software

2008-05-22T13:17:55-07:00

Charlie and Co. have just released their groundbreaking CRM product for SMBs, CRMbrella. If you're a small business an you're looking for a way to manage your prosepcts and customers, look no further. In celebration of this release, I am linking to customer reviews of one the the dominant competing products, Act!. My favorite review? The one entitled "Just Don't Want to Believe How Bad This? Read the Reviews!"

What a long strange trip it's been

2008-05-17T14:26:57-07:00

Check out Graeme on Graeme on Steve. It's a great story told by Graeme, one the most dialed-in marketing guys (and bloggers) in MSP.

Breakthrough Devices

2008-05-17T11:18:25-07:00

SAI has a bit here about Kindle sales. The fact that the original Blackberry, which I owned in 1999, sold only 165,000 in its first year surprises me. That the Amazon may ship as many as 600k units in the Kindle's first year, presumably in the Americas, is pretty impressive when a poll suggests that ~25% of Americans don't read books.

Kindle Up

2008-05-10T11:46:31-07:00

I've had the Amazon Kindle for just over two weeks. Having followed E Ink for a few years and having played with the Sony Reader, I was a skeptic. Not so much now. A few observations:

It is smaller and less odd looking than it appears in photos. This is attributable to the angles used to acheive the form factor.
The display, as anticipated, is great, even in direct sunlight.
The design and usability are quite good; there is some unpredictable latency.
While "always on" it lacks simple sharing functionality, presumably because of DRM.
Whispernet makes it a standalone device- I've not had a need to tether it to my laptop.
The overall portability makes it great for business travel.

The business model has been beaten tirelessly (and often not well), so I won't address it other than to suggest that anyone who still uses Gilette as a proxy for a consumables business model should pick up a head cleaner for his/her VCR next time he/she is at the local radio store.

Critics who pan the device for lacking a color display are missing the point. The baseline here is ink and paper and a bound publication or newspaper.

Outside of typography, print publishing has arguably seen no consumer-facing innovation or product management for the last five centuries (graphic designers will likely disagree). This, coupled with the fact that most coporeal publications are buried in artifacts of production and efficiency (or lack thereof), means that the reading experience has never been about the reader. The Kindle is meaningful attempt to change that.

Will authors, publisher, and rights holders follow suit quickly enough (or at all) to make the Kindle a success in the mass market? I won't speculate. For the moment, the Kindle has a spot on my nightstand.

03/08/08

2008-03-08T12:07:20-08:00

I'm at LAX waiting to board SQ011 to Narita, and I'm posting this from a Nokia E61, which has emerged from the drawer as the most versatile world phone I've had. This will be an interesting trip and I'll attempt to blog it as I go. More to come...

Human Banners- Oh Wait, They're Called Sandwich Boards?

2007-11-08T08:25:04-08:00

HB recently wrote a pretty compelling summary of the relative size of Google, both in terms of market cap and share of the ad market. Eye opening, to say the least: Welcome To The Googleconomy.

Those who have been viewing the gPhone-Android-OHA developments of late as a Symbian rehash or a non-event should look at Google's position in the overall advertising market. It's amazing to me that when a company that makes its money in advertising (and not just any company) leads the launch of a new mobile platform, so much of the discussion remains around software platform and applications.

It's not spam, it's very costly and ineffective unsolicited email outreach.

2007-11-02T13:09:01-07:00

Chris Anderson publishes a list of banned flack here. Scan the list for familiar names- if you're on the client side it may be a good time to revisit that monthly retainer.

Much ado about...

2007-08-24T09:14:29-07:00

Over the past few days the discussion around who "invented" video overlay ads has reached a new level of, well, intensity Videoegg greeted YouTube's announcement with a gutsy positioning "welcoming YouTube" to the format, which provoked a response from Jeremy and the discussion devolved into this (you can see my comments here).

While Videoegg's response to YouTube may have seemed a bit silly, it helped create a debate (admittedly with the help of someone looking to start a debate) in which Videoegg is mentioned in the same breath as YouTube and Brightcove.

The interesting thing here is not the debate over the overlay ad, but, given that there are an infinite number of potential formats for ad units in digital video, why anyone would focus on the format itself. The challenge for Internet video is to make new saleable ad units, and that requires participation from major stakeholders- consumers, agencies, and advertisers. The divide between the what is technically possible with Internet video and what is being bought by advertisers is vast- and the energy around something as seemingly simple as an overlay ad only highlights this gap.

Quote of the Day

2007-07-27T17:15:15-07:00

From the Washington Post:

"Drinking and driving is never a good idea - least of all when the vehicle involved is a multi-billion dollar Space Shuttle or a high performance jet aircraft," said Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), chairman of the Science and Technology committee.

You can read the story here.

System of a Down

2007-07-23T10:05:22-07:00

As a Flickr user, I concur with Techcrunch- the last line is quite funny:

Adding Another Axis

2007-07-18T09:56:21-07:00

Speaking of email, this solution is so off course that it's amusing.

Break the Box

2007-07-05T16:28:55-07:00

Om has written an interesting blurb on email. Email inherits many of the targeting and noise problems inherent in physical mail, only the problem is much worse because the cost of electronic postage is dramatically cheaper.

Folks have been working on aspects of this for a long time. Goodmail is doing a few interesting things in certification. Boxbe is taking the time-honored approach of trying legitimize your inbox as a marketing channel. Others are making a run at validation, electronic postage et al.Google has tried to solve part of the problem with search (presumably Yahoo will through its Bloomba acquisition).

There is no doubt that authentication, categorization, search and relative prioritization are important in email.

Email may need improvements in technology, but it is broken as a consumer product (perhaps it's a victim of its own moniker). The physical mailbox doesn't scale. The mailbox metaphor in email doesn't either. It's a monolith.

For most people (at least people I know), I would venture to say that email is a firehose of too many kinds of information from too many kinds of sources and relationships. I just logged into a Yahoo account that I don't even use that often and I have 12,000 unread messages and 1200 messages marked as spam (assuming it takes me 3 seconds to scan, open, and delete an email, I'd spend 10 hours clearing out my inbox). The solution is NOT to automatically push all of these messages into different folders, nor is it to just let me search for what might be important. The solution is build suitable channels for respective kinds of messages and create software that best handles the channels.

Meebo, Gizmo, Meetro, 37Signals,and the like are doing a great job innovating in messaging and collaboration. Xobni is doing some clever stuff. I have yet to see any radical recasting of email.

As I write this I'm down to 11,999 unread messages. Wish me luck.

Happy 4th

2007-07-04T15:55:54-07:00

In the last few days, the poets have surfaced in an unexpected way in the blogosphere. Fred Wilson quotes Whitman, and Fake Steve (FSJ) riffs on Shelley.

If you live in the US, have a happy holiday.

If you don't live in the US, imagine everyone you know in the US with a beer bottle in one (or both) hand(s) in reasonable proximity to a smoking grill. It might be a good time to send them an email assuming that if you don't receive a reply within a few hours, you'll conclude something that enriches you at their expense.

iPhone

2007-07-01T11:03:14-07:00

First impressions, in no particular order:

The device and OS are great.
The network is not great(no surprise there).
It pairs seamlessly with the Prius hands free system.
It lacks MMS.
The SIM is removable with a paper clip.
It doesn't seem to recognize and properly configure GAFYD accounts (at least it did not work with mine).
Battery life is as claimed- great.
Irony: the GSM radio interferes with my computer's sound system. If the rebuttal to this is a suggestion that consumers need to understand RF shielding, it's a miss (to be fair it's an age-old issue).
It represents a huge breakthrough, not in technology but in product. Industry pundits will rightfully suggest that a lot of the technologies in the iPhone have been around for a while. This is true, but Apple has artfully combined them, in conjunction with their own IP, to create something that will have a much more interesting legacy that a Wikipedia article. I recommend that everyone (who reads this blog) spend some time playing with an iPhone.

OK

2007-06-30T16:35:56-07:00

I walked into my local Cingular/ATT store and bought an iPhone this morning. They had plenty of inventory. I'll post some observations soon.

The Jet

2007-06-30T10:43:39-07:00

Cirrus finally announced The JET. To quote Alan Klapmeier, the CEO of Cirrus "Three words: My Personal Jet."

Beautiful indeed. The VLJ industry is one of the most exciting areas of innovation right now. Eclipse and Diamond are also doing some interesting things.

As you may note from the sidebar, I'm reading Free Flight by James Fallows. Great read.

Personal jets and reinventing air travel may almost be as important as the iPhone. You heard it here first.

IPhone Amusement

2007-06-29T10:01:42-07:00

From CollegeHumor by way of TechCrunch:

iPhone Redux

2007-06-27T10:13:20-07:00

Walt's review the the iPhone gives a great assessment while highlighting what we've always known to be the issue: Apple is great at what they do and the phone itself is a breakthrough, but ATT's network leaves something to be desired.

On a lighter note, an interview with the first guy in line in front of the Apple store in NYC from FakeSteve.

Worlds Collide

2007-06-10T09:45:38-07:00

It's always fascinating to me when accomplished and seemingly collected folks lose it in the face of market realities. At least "The Dean Scream" could have been attributable to a microphone. Via Search engine land and The Register , MacMillan executive Richard Charkin details in his blog how he and a colleague took some laptops from Google's booth at Book Expo America, waited nearby for an hour until Google folks figured out the laptops had been taken, and, when asked, returned them. Why? To make a point about Google Book Search and intellectual property.

The is from the CEO of MacMillan. Never mind the bizarre nature of the "prank" and that it doesn't really parallel the IP issues. The guy and a colleague WAITED AN HOUR. Was he tittering uncontrollably while hiding behind a booth wall clutching the laptops against his blazer and shorts? Perhaps they made a fortress behind the modesty panel of a nearby table?

File under "misfire."

Oh, I thought it was "carbon fiber" footprint......

2007-06-01T11:37:12-07:00

Charlie touches upon the situation leading to the renaming of my blog here. The Prius has become a badge of good intent for some who would otherwise not suffer inconvenience for the sake of the environment. It's also part of a more serious series of life changes for many of us.

Lest we forget, for some it's a car that gets essentially the same mileage as an '86 Honda CRX. For others it's a way to buy into the carpool lane. I'll take the intent.

Location Redux

2007-05-22T09:39:25-07:00

Vipin has taken a pass at the geography issue. It's hard to dispute that The Valley is the crucible of a lot of innovation. It's also hard to ignore the great innovations that come from other areas.

But Vipin's thesis, I would say, transcends geography- I think it provides good counsel for any entrepreneur. Whether you're starting a company in Palo Alto or Lancaster, Pennsylvania, if you want to succeed, the ingredients are the same.

The Valley Vs. The City; Amusing (from Valleywag).

2007-05-18T09:08:48-07:00

Charles Wilson