Dennis Crowley, talking to Dan Frommer about where Foursquare is going:

Our belief has always been, in order to connect people to places, and places to people, there’s a way to insert a dialogue with a merchant that in a way doesn’t feel like advertising, because the users are getting some tangible benefit out of it. It can be just special treatment, like you get to cut the line. It could be that you save a couple bucks. It could be that when you bring your friends, you get something special. There’s a whole wide variety of it. It’s just rewarding the user for things that they’d be doing anyway with Foursquare.

The key behind Foursquare’s monetization ethos: it’s native to what people do. Think about how Foursquare talks about how they facilitate “advertising”, or how Kiip talks about enabling brands to reward people for moments that matter (key achievements in games), or about how Buzzfeed enables “in-stream social advertising”, or about how Tumblr is launching a feature for people to pay to highlight posts (likely to be impression-based in the future), or about how Pinterest is making money, and what’s striking is how each monetization model is deeply tied into the different ways people use each service.

Facebook’s future is its social utility, not its social network.

This has special relevancy for the topic-du-jour, Facebook and advertising. Behind that $3 B in revenue is a bit of a mystery: exactly how all the different ad units performing, and how their various different kinds of advertising opportunities are expected to grow. Obviously mobile advertising is a big key, but that’s simply an attempt to extend their existing advertising model to a new set of under-monetized impressions. Beyond efforts like mobile, how will Facebook grow their advertising revenue? There’s a couple routes:

• Increase impressions: add new users, increase active users, direct more users to brand pages, etc.
• Increase clicks: Alter the ad units so that they way they are displayed are more engaging, inviting, and natural.
• Increase clicks: Target and optimize the ads being displayed to make them more relevant, meaningful, and appropriate to the audience and their intent.
• Increase rates: Based on success in new ad units or increasing clicks, increase the rates they are able to charge.
• Change the product: Alter the product so that the reason why people use Facebook isn’t purely about using the social networking features.

Search is a highly efficient form of advertising because it’s highly tied to why people are using search. And that’s the fundamental problem with Facebook’s advertising model: people don’t go a social network to use ads.

This isn’t a new argument, obviously. And it’s no different from how advertising has siphoned off mindshare, eyeballs, clicks from content for decades.

But it exposes the issue Facebook faces: Facebook’s biggest business opportunity isn’t advertising, but something more core to the how and why people use Facebook. Facebook’s future is its social utility, not its social network.

Of course, Facebook knows this. The social network is the core asset and the enabling platform behind their other initiatives to expand how people use Facebook. And it’s these new features and range of first- and third-party products built on top of the social network (leveraging Open Graph et. al.), that expands Facebook’s future beyond it’s current advertising-supported social network model. It’s not just about more impressions and more sharing, but about creating the new way for people to use Facebook. Once you change the way people use Facebook, you’ve created new business opportunities that have either 1) have nothing to do with advertising (e.g. facilitating transactions, which is already a sizable business for Facebook), or 2) create interactions and moments that are more tightly integrated and attuned to advertising than display-based advertising. *

Obviously Facebook will make a lot of money in the meantime, but like Google has used their advertising cash cow to subsidize their pursuit of other business initiatives to support a broader scope of how people use Google and the web, Facebook has the potential to use their advertising cash cow to expand the ways in which people use Facebook.

The key for Facebook is to not let their cash cow blind them to their future beyond the social bubble.

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* A tangent: This holds for mobile advertising also. The future in mobile advertising isn’t simply in porting over the methodology of display advertising from the big web to the small web, but about creating new forms of advertising more native to mobile. More on that later.

Ben Horowitz’s post Why Has Andreessen Horowitz Raised $2.7B in 3 Years? is a great explanation behind how they approached investing in founder CEOs by noting the reasons that founder CEOs get replaced by professional CEOs, understanding why the structure and background of most VCs influenced their eventual preference for professional CEOs, and then approached building an investment thesis, operating structure and partner network to execute on that strategy.

But he didn’t quite explain why they raised $2.7 B in three years.

Here’s why I think they did. Because…

• They can.
• They want to be able to fund founding CEOs throughout their growth, and being able to lead further expansion rounds enables them to support founding CEOs.
• They want secure access to capital to be able to make a steady investment pace that is independent of the performance of the public markets.
• They need the capital to lead and participate in expansion-stage growth rounds for their portfolio, positioning themselves to capitalize on the increasing amount of value created by technology companies before they go public, rather than after.

Check out some examples from their portfolio: mixed in with their many smaller, early deals are large investments in Groupon (participated in $950 MM Series D), Box (participated in $48 MM Series D and $81 MM Series E), Airbnb (led $112 MM Series B), Foursquare (participated in $20 MM and $50 MM rounds), Skype ($50 MM debt round), Lookout ($40 MM Series D), Shoedazzle ($40 MM Series C), Fab (led $40 MM Series B), Actifio ($33.5 MM Series C), Lytro ($50 MM Series A), Kno ($27 MM Series B and $30 MMM Series C), Pinterest ($27 MM Series B), and many other large rounds. With $2.7 B, Andreessen Horowitz is positioned to continue to fund these founding CEOs through additional rounds of funding and help them grow into professional CEOs. And with a larger share of value created by early-stage companies before they go public *, they are prepared to fund and support these companies through their entire growth cycles from private to public companies. In essence, they are positioned to be a venture hedge fund in a way few other investors can position themselves.

Facebook’s potential “record IPO” has more to do with the growth of the private secondary markets than Facebook itself.

— Taylor Davidson (@tdavidson) January 30, 2012

Why are we seeing massive late-stage (pre-IPO) investment rounds in technology companies today? Essentially, because the biggest investment opportunities today are in the private markets, not the public markets.

Sarbanes-Oxley is often blamed as a major reason why companies are delaying going public, but that’s not the entire reason. A larger rationale may be that the big innovation today is around “large networks of engaged users that has the potential to disrupt a big market”, that the revenue model for these types of businesses simply takes longer to turn on, and that only private investors are properly attuned to the opportunities and risks specific to these companies. A company can go public with an unproven revenue model, but their fundamental business model has to be very clear. The fact is that many of the innovative technology companies today simply don’t start with clear business models, or at least, they wait to turn them on until far, far later. Venture investors are ok with that. Public investors aren’t ok with that, and simply can’t the same type of business model risks in their investment choices as venture investors can.

Facebook is a perfect example of the current market. Remember that when Amazon went public in 1997 they raised $54 MM at a valuation of $438 MM, there were still a lot of questions about Amazon’s revenue model, and many believed Amazon was vastly overvalued. Amazon is valued at $80 B today. The vast majority of that value creation happened after Amazon became a public company.

Where will Facebook go from the potential $75 B to $100 B valuation at IPO? Hard to say, but there’s no question that there’s $70B to $80 B less value to be shared with public investors.

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* What I would love to see: an in-depth analysis of all IPOs over the past ten years showing their valuation at IPO and their market cap today. Hopefully that would prove my hypothesis. In lieu of that, read Tech IPOs Just Ain’t What They Used To Be.

Peeking out, New York, NY, 2011

Good to see Techcrunch write this weekend about data and its potential impact on ecommerce.

But not only did they miss the point about personalization, they missed the biggest opportunity in the space.

The biggest opportunity isn’t from retail sites building better personalization engines or mining social data, but in the social clipping and curation sites (i.e. intent engines) leveraging their curation and inspiration features to build ecommerce and affiliate platforms to power their built-in business models. And if you’re wondering, the really valuable data isn’t third-party social data, but first-party intent data.

Data, data, everywhere. But not a byte to use. *

Pinterest, the new hot thing, is already driving real traffic to ecommerce sites; Tumblr, the still-hot thing, is closing in on a billion page views a month; Polyvore recently raised a new round to capitalize on their growing community and traffic; and the web abounds with niche social clipping services.

And in each clip, store, share, pin, re-pin, tumble, re-blog is a tremendous amount of data.

Granted, the data isn’t clean, and the intent behind each action may not be clear, but it’s a signal of intent and desire just like a search and a click.

First-party intent data and third-party social data aren’t the same.

If you’re excited about the opportunities of the social graph, you should be just as excited about the opportunities of the intent graph.

Why?

While social clipping sites like Polyvore, Pinterest, Svpply, et. al. are great sources of personalization data, they are particularly valuable for fashion and “soft goods” where tastes change quickly. Why? As David points out, data-driven personalization simply doesn’t work the same for fashion the same way it works for books. And social data isn’t the solution either: friendship and taste are two separate things. First-party intent data (or, “taste data”) from social clipping services are more powerful signals of relevancy or potential purchase intent than third-party social data (i.e. social data mined off-site from Facebook, Twitter and other social sites). The data created in these services is much more relevant, and it’s not just because people are signaling purchase intent through what they clip and share: it’s because tastes and intent is more clearly aligned in these tighter, more focused communities.

Granted, the intent data from Polyvore may not be as portable as social data from Facebook (i.e. it may apply to a smaller amount of contexts), but that’s up for the data scientists to figure out. What I do know is that intent engines will power the golden age of Internet marketing. The hardest part will be figuring out how.

Native Monetization Engines, powered by First-Party Data

The most powerful way for intent engines to leverage their first-party intent data is to build native monetization engines that tap into the types of products, services, and transactions that are popular in their communities.

Recommendation engines work when they are like magic. As in, “How did Pandora know I wanted to listen to this song?” And we love them when they succeed. But when they fail, they fail badly. The hit-rate of a recommendation engine needs to be very high to succeed. Of course, “how high” depends on the community, the products being recommended, and the UX/UI implementation of the recommendation engine.

Now, this isn’t a trivial task. Amazon has spent years on their personalization engines. Netflix found the problem of improving their recommendation engine so hard they ran a public contest to find innovative ways to figure out what you want to watch.

I believe most of these social services have not created recommendation and discovery engines tied to their first-party intent data because 1) they have more immediate product and scaling issues to deal with, 2) growing traffic is more important at the moment, and 3) it’s a hard, hard problem to solve.

There’s room for a new solution to help solve this “hard, hard problem” by creating a universal native monetization engine. The monetization platform could first be launched as an API that pulls in a service’s unique intent data, parses out significant intent, and passes it back to the service to tell them what to recommend.

Each service obviously has unique data properties and signals (i.e. the intent behind a pin probably doesn’t equal a re-blog), so it’s an open question whether a third-party could build an optimization engine across these unique sites. I’ll leave it to the data scientists to figure out if the learnings from one algorithm could work for another.

Matching First-Party Intent Data with Third-Party Data

Obviously, I understand that Tumblr and Pinterest may not want to outsource their intent monetization engines to the same company, but the model is already used in many other industries (for example, many airlines use the same yield management and revenue management software).

But even without a universal monetization engine, there is an opportunity for a DMP (data management platform) to manage these services’ first-party data and match it up against second-party and third-party data supplied by a host of cookie, geo, site, and social data providers. That’s a successful model used in online marketing and advertising for years. Third-party data can be a powerful way to target and optimize marketing messages **, and many services are already using third-party data for personalization and discovery (Spotify and Rdio using third-party social data to recommend songs, for one).

Taking it one step further, could this DMP tie together a range of different monetization services? Start with an affiliate network clearinghouse to power ecommerce affiliate sales, add an ad server that allows marketers and advertisers to use a service’s first-party intent data for onsite ad optimization, and see what else others could build on top of intent data. The online advertising world knows how this works: same model, new data.

Selling Intent Data

The next leap, and perhaps the scariest one for these services, is selling first-party intent data through intent exchanges for other people to use for targeting, retargeting and optimization purposes. One of the biggest problems for Google in unifying their data sets across services is that it breaks the original contract that Google made with their users. We’re not really mad that they are unifying all our data together, we’re mad because this isn’t what we agreed to when we started using Google. This is why we get upset when Facebook changes the layout, news feed or data policies to sell more relevant ads. That’s why we worry about the business model of any new service: we know that free comes with a cost, and what we may love at first may end up very different once the service figures out how to make enough money to support itself.

Selling data is troublesome for these services because from a user’s perspective, it sounds horrible. Sell my data? Without me earning anything from it? Without me agreeing to this shift in policy?

Some companies can make it through that change, others can’t. And it’s all about how it’s implemented and communicated.

Turning on Built-In Business Models

Can Tumblr, Pinterest, Polyvore and others turn on their ecommerce engines? Or will they remain media-driven, sponsorship and advertising-based companies? Time will tell.

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* Sounds a lot like what Hunch could have been, right?
** As an investor at kbs+ Ventures, we have investment stakes in multiple companies leveraging both first-party and third-party data in a variety of ways for marketers and advertisers.

My small contribution:

“Instead of asking “What’s my Facebook strategy?”, start with “What are my goals for using social media?” If you start with your goals, and then spend the time understanding how your goals fit into the different social media sites and communities, then that gives you a solid grounding on how to create an overall social media strategy that allows you to participate in each community appropriately. The most important best practice is to listen first, then talk. Understand how each community works and then step into the community in a way that fits you and the community.

Get the entire handbook for 70 pages of in-depth advice about Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+ and more.

Also, more guides to the photography business from Photoshelter.

Outside The In Crowd, New York, NY, 2011

A couple weeks ago I wrote about how the crowd is disrupting the photojournalism industry. Put a camera in everyone’s hand, and it’s not a surprise that the photography industry has to adapt a bit.

As the crowdfunding bill winds its way into Congress, the venture capital community has to start thinking about how the crowd could change how new ventures are funded and how they could have to adapt.  Let anyone invest a money in startups, and what happens?

First off, here’s happening in Congress: there are a couple different pieces of legislation aimed to change significant limitations for entrepreneurs raising private capital.  While one simply aims to raise the 500 shareholder rule to 2,000 shareholders, and one aims to reduce registration requirements for IPOs under $50 MM (potentially bringing back the small-cap IPO), the most interesting is the Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act, which would allow entrepreneurs to raise up to $2 MM in capital per year directly from individuals without having to register them with the SEC, essentially allowing companies to crowdsource investment capital from “non-accredited investors”.  Individuals would be limited to $10 K or 10% of their annual income, whichever is less.

Will it pass? It was passed by the House in Nov 2011, but it’s far too soon for me to tell if it will clear the Senate. But let’s think about the long-term impacts here, because even if it doesn’t pass right now, the long-term pressures are here to stay.

Here’s how I think it will play out.

The dollars will come from the crowd, but the badges will still come from the big names.

If you’re an entrepreneur and you found out you could now raise $2 MM by going directly to individuals, what would you do tomorrow?  You’d probably setup a link on your website telling people you’re raising money, and you’d start promoting it.  You’d also start looking for platforms and communities of engaged potential investors to tap into the right crowd that would be interested in your idea.

The first one would get pretty crowded pretty quickly, as getting attention is pretty tough. Long-term, the platforms offer you the best chances of actually raising money.

But it’s not just about raising money. These platforms and communities are important trusted-third parties that can be important “stamps” or “degrees” or “verifications” for an entrepreneur. And stamps are important: raising venture capital is one thing, raising money from Kleiner is another. Going to university is one thing, going to Harvard is another. And raising money from the crowd will be one thing, and raising money from Kickstarter / Second Market / Angellist would be another thing completely.

If you’re an individual investor, you’ll need some way to figure out if this company is going to make it big.  You’ll do your research, you’ll listen to tips from friends, you’ll hear about things in the press, you’ll see where others are investing your money. You’ll make independent decisions, but you’ll still need signals to help you allocate your attention.

The importance of a trusted third-party isn’t going away. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ll still want that stamp of approval that comes from raising money from an important source of capital.  If you’re an individual investor, you’ll still want the security that comes from investing through a trusted third-party or from a verified source.

Who is best positioned to be that third-party?

Kickstarter, SecondMarket and Angellist are the best positioned from the early-stage crowdfunding, investing, and fundraising perspectives.  But any company with a trusted party relationship with masses of engaged individuals and the resources to create robust responsibility mechanisms could create a crowdfunding community.

Apple, Google, and Amazon would all be able to create very interesting crowdfunding platforms, using their existing payment platforms or trusted payment relationships and leveraging their engaged bases of users.  Amazon would be an incredibly interesting platform, or perhaps they would be better served to power the payments platform behind a Twitter-sponsored crowdfunding platform. But in the case of Apple and Google (and increasingly, Facebook), the play is a different: they are highly incentivized to help engineer innovations that leverage their platforms, and creating crowdfunding platforms would be a very intelligent way to market and promote their own services.

Crowdfunding is about the community, not the technology.

But like most things today, the important thing isn’t the technology, but the community. And that’s why any company with a strong community ethos could be a strong player in crowdfunding.

And that’s important to remember, because it’s likely that we would see an abundance of crowdfunding platforms. “The crowd” actually consists of many crowds across many industries, technologies, countries, and niches, and I would expect to see many different crowdfunding platforms emerge in their own spaces.

Crowdfunding platforms could emerge around the innovation platforms set up to engage highly interested and engaged consumers (i.e. the innovation platforms created by HP, Dell, Procter & Gamble, and other companies pursuing Open Innovation strategies), and they could also emerge around companies with extensive supply chains (i.e. GM, Ford, Apple, Cisco, etc.), as an extension of their vendor-sourcing and vendor-financing efforts.

But the important thing here isn’t the technology: look for the communities first.

As I’ve said before, beyond raising money, crowdfunding is a highly evolved form of sales and community engagement. Well-run Kickstarter projects are about more than money: they can be great footholds to build a community and establish base of supporters that can evolve into customers when the time is right.

Crowdfunding won’t kill the venture capital industry. But it will force VCs to adapt.

Yes, the wave of “dumb money” of the crowd will put pressure on traditional angels and venture capitalists, but crowdfunding won’t kill venture capital. Smart entrepreneurs will learn to use all forms of potential funding (the early-stage crowd, customers, angels, institutional venture capitalists, late-stage public investors), and institutional venture capital will still have a very valuable role. The key for VCs is to remember the role they play and position themselves appropriately.

VCs will still play very important roles in providing access to resources, relationships, strategic advice. But the role of a partner and a mentor will be even more valuable: an entrepreneur can tap into the crowd for money, but they’ll never get the same close relationships or advice from the crowd than they’ll get from a professional venture investor. And as money flows from the crowd to startups, I believe we would see a lot more companies started as projects, a lot more entrepreneurs looking for early exit opportunities, a lot more acquisitions by very early-stage companies, and a larger need for institutions like venture capitalists to make those connections and transactions happen.

The important thing for investors would be to pick their industries and stages carefully. Very early-stage valuations could raise substantially, cutting out opportunities for early-stage angels and VCs, and push more venture investors farther upstream to later-stage momentum capital.

Really intelligent venture investors will learn to collaborate with the crowd, rather than merely competing against the crowd. We could see big venture capital firms create their own crowdfunding platforms and raise sidecar “crowd” funds from the masses. VCs would act as the trusted investment advisor for the crowd. Early-stage investment could finally see it’s own mutual fund. A Kleiner + Amazon crowd fund could be a huge hit.

If new legislation passes, the “problems” of crowdsourcing investment capital will create a lot of business opportunities.

Will it create a new wave of speculation? Undoubtedly. But once the wave passes, that’s when the real activity starts. We have to get through the wave to get to the good stuff. The lesson we have learned throughout time is that limiting access to a small amount of participants in opaque markets creates massive problems with wealth concentration. Crowdfunding could disrupt that in the early-stage investing area, and allow a much larger number of people to participate in the value creation that occurs in the early-stages of company development.

And it could also create a lot of interesting business opportunities around data, company performance transparency, tracking and accountability, registration, communication, and investment management. I’ll leave it to the entrepreneurs here to think about the possibilities, but the lesson is clear: crowdfunding is a simple idea with wide-ranging impacts on existing and new businesses. Everybody involved in funding, supporting, and benefiting from early-stage innovation will need to create a point-of-view on how to best position themselves to take advantages of potential legislative changes.

Whether we like it or not, the crowd is at the door. And whether the laws change now or later, the underlying pressure of the crowd isn’t going away. Better to disrupt than be disrupted.

Glimpse, Lisbon, Portugal, Dec 2011

The opportunity of digital intent.

Best one-line comment about the report that Facebook is due to launch a broader set of applications based on Open Graph:

This new release is an effort to decrease the friction in sharing, but it will be seen by most users as intrusive for two months before everyone decides they can’t live without it.

And will be sure to kick off yet another round of debates about information overload, privacy, the value of frictionless sharing, and the business opportunities in social data. As the debates swirl about, companies will eagerly build applications (and raise money) to take advantage of the incredible tailwinds of Facebook as everyone gets newly amped up about the amazing opportunities of all this data (even if they don’t use it).

As an investor, it’s something I’ll continue to pay close attention to, because social data is having a disruptive impact on the advertising and marketing technology industries. As Darren mentioned, we hear the word “intent” and “intent graph” a lot in business plans and pitches, often in the context of mining intent-rich social data for optimizing, personalizing and customizing advertising or marketing offers.

The usage of “intent” is a powerful conceptual idea, and while it still appears to be more of a buzzword than something people really know how to leverage, we’re coming closer to seeing it have a real impact on marketing and advertising. The real applications of the web’s intent engines for marketing and advertising are still to come. Matching intent engines to advertising and ecommerce is a big opportunity, and I believe that’s one reason why we’ve seen millions flow into the ecommerce space. It’s never been possible to leverage intent in this way, at this scale, across so many different products and services, worldwide. And that’s why “intent” is something we’re going to hear a lot more about.

The overhead of digital intent.

But thinking about the personal side of this, many of us will feel overwhelmed by the mental weight of digital intent.*

In many ways, our public intent isn’t just intent, it’s identity. When intent is captured, ranked, and followed, it becomes something we want to manage. What we share, what we bookmark, what we save to buy, what we put in our playlist, becomes part of how we represent ourselves to other. And unlike intent that flows off into the web, identity is heavy, something for us to manage, monitor and tweak to fit our current digital representation of ourselves. Our identities become overhead for us to manage, rather than streams for us to enjoy.

Many will feel the need to adopt every new service, to test everything out, to embed each new service into their day’s digital chores. And that’s what it becomes: a chore, not a joy.

And that’s when we’re forced to make choices: adopt, alter, or untether? How do you choose which digital presence of community to treasure, which to invest in, and which to say goodbye to?

They key in my mind isn’t which ones we spend time on, or how many we use, or even what we do with them: the key is to be mindful of what we’re using, what is valuable for us, and what we really enjoy. The key is to remember it’s a choice, and to use the power of choice consciously.

During yoga yesterday morning, the teacher said something that stuck with me:

It’s not a direction, it’s an invitation.

She said it while she was giving us directions on how to find a pose, but embedded in her directions was an insight: as much as she was directing us what pose to do, she was really helping us find the pose that we wanted to find.

The lesson applies more broadly. The web is an invitation. We’re not forced to adopt every new service, or use them how everyone else does. Listen to yourself, pay attention to what you enjoy, and let your true intent shine through. It will be better for you and the web in the long run. **

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* Inspired by Ross Hill from his Field Notes, “Notice the mental weight of physical things”
** And interestingly, that’s also pretty important for companies mining intent. If all we throw off into the web is noise, that makes it pretty hard for companies to decipher signals.

Life’s a party, New Orleans, LA, Oct 2011

It’s not Life’s responsibility to make our lives great, happy, meaningful, fulfilling, enjoyable, adventurous. That’s our responsibility, and it comes from every choice we make and and every action we take responsibility for.

Life isn’t against us or for us, it’s there for us to shape and mold into the life we want for ourselves.

Is it a puddle or a sinkhole, a playground or a battlefield? That’s not Life’s choice, that’s our choice, and we show our choice by how we approach and what we make of the opportunities we have.

And for me, that’s something that I enjoy waking up to every day.

Here and There, New York City, NY, Dec 2011

From a bitly announcement the other day:

“Bitly has an office?” she asked her father. “I thought it was, you know, just part of the Internet.”

Technology can disappear. And once it does, that’s when it’s truly valuable, because that’s when we stop worrying about the technology itself, but about what it actually does.

Interestingly, the same goes with data.

Roger Ehrenberg, Data is the new .com:

There is a world of difference between the mere presence of data (say, an inert corpus of data accumulated from customer transactions) and its activation (putting that same data in a form that can be analyzed in real-time to provide intelligence about trends, pricing, feature attributes, etc. and classified and stored in a way that subjects itself well for future analysis).

Data gets really interesting once it disappears into the background. Harnessing the power and application of data is a key component to moving up the information – intelligence – wisdom stack. Instead of being overwhelmed by the depth of data we create everyday, it should be a natural part of what we do: data should simply be part of the magic behind how things work. And that’s a key component to a lot of the startups harnessing the power of big data: it’s not about the data itself, but how it’s being applied to very human problems.

The greatest opportunity that great problem solvers, developers, and designers have today? To use their tools of technology and data to make it all magically disappear.

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Originally letter #87 from the letters.

Dream Amplifyer, Lisbon, Portugal

David Hoffman, Put your ideas to paper, talking about his experiences during college in revolution.is:

When I bought new notebooks, I would draw a line down the center of each page. The left side was for lecture notes and the right side was for website and business ideas. Every time I’d study for a final, I’d review my notes and notice that the ideas always far outnumbered the class notes.

I used to “take notes” during classes by drawing boxes, and then filling in the boxes with different patterns, instead of writing down the lecture itself. It actually helped me focus on the lecture and the bigger ideas by giving me mind a “different something else” to wander to: drawing was just different enough that it didn’t interfere with the listening and thinking about the lecture itself.

I’m a big believer in giving yourself space to wander around a place and an idea. Emotional space. Physical space. Time. Perspective. The key is to give yourself the space to let your mind, body and soul wander, and develop the right tools and perspective to capture, evaluate and execute on your ideas.

Do whatever you need to amplify your dreams.

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Related: Street art from Istanbul, Turkey.

A couple pertinent notes about the future of photojournalism from Where have all the photojournalists gone?

“The iPhone people are going to be there when the bomb goes off, when the house burns down, when the assassination goes down,” says Bennett. “They’re going to crush that market, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

And…

Darrow Montgomery, a staff photographer for D.C.’s alt weekly, the Washington City Paper, says that although photojournalism’s decline is “inevitable,” professional photographers should never be obsolete. “If the metric for successful image making is being at the right place at the right time, the professional is doomed based on the sheer number of warm bodies with image making whatnots,” he says. “But if the metric is to get the best, most telling, evocative picture of a given situation, and to be able to do that repeatedly, then the professional will win almost every time.”

Exactly. Which means that “photojournalism” is a more varied concept than we might think, and it points to how photojournalists have to change their product and business models to adapt. First to the scene is what mass media wants, but first doesn’t mean best, or most meaningful, or most enduring. Photojournalists have a valuable skill, and it’s not about getting the first pictures back from a scene, but about finding, capturing, curating and sharing the most important stories from a situation. And that takes access, experience, skill, dedication, resources, and the professional network that the crowd will struggle to replicate.

Unless, of course, you think you can crowdsource storytelling…

Granted, that may mean that the world needs less full-time photojournalists, but they aren’t alone: technological innovation and changing societal norms have a well-known way of disrupting major industries and professions.

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The iPhone often gets credit for killing the business models of professional photojournalists, but the iPhone can be a valuable tool even for the pros.

Photographer Michael Christopher Brown recently talked about how he used his iPhone’s Hipstamatic app to photograph in Libya after breaking his SLR:

“At this point I hesitate using a ‘real’ camera,” Brown told Time magazine a few weeks after his injury. “Using a phone has brought my attention less to the craft and more to what I am photographing and why. So, the question becomes not where I see the phone taking my work, but where the work will take me.”

And he’s not the only one to use an iPhone extensively. Benjamin Lowy recently published a series in the NY Times from Afganistan called “Life During Wartime”, a series shot entirely with an iPhone and the Hipstamatic app.

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From 2007 to 2010 I wrote extensively about the impact of the impact of the inexpensive digital SLR, but we’re beginning to see that impact fade a bit. Do you see as many DSLRs hanging from people’s necks as you did 2 years ago?

The everyday person has moved on to the camera phone: already in their pockets and purses, they are the minimum amount of technology the average person needs to take and share pictures. Photographs don’t have to be perfectly constructed images to be personally evocative memories. The minimum viable images we see everyday are all most people need to tell the everyday stories of their lives. An iPhone, Instagram, and Facebook may be all that most people need.

Everyone’s a photojournalist in their own way, for their own audience, telling their own stories.

But some are photojournalists in a very specific way, using their experience, methods, viewpoints, and vision to tell stories for the mass audience.

And that’s why there is still a role for the professional photographer and photojournalist to play, because beyond the everyday stories of individual lives lie the exceptional stories that span communities and societies. As much as the iPhone, Instagram and Facebook are a threat to the full-time photojournalist’s job prospects, they are an even bigger opportunity for the enlightened photojournalist to find and share meaningful, important, exceptional stories, and even earn a living in the process.

Let’s be frank: the crowd isn’t going away. Better to learn how to leverage the crowd than to fight against it.

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Related: Everyone can be a “professional” photographer.