Getting Ahead of the Curve, Lost of Reason

I’ve been busy in the weeds, the real work to make iLetYou as useful to people as possibly can be.  Blog posts have been slow in coming, and this post might even be a little light on substance (although most are).

As of this writing, I’m about 8 months into my San Francisco/Silicon Valley/Bay Area adventure.  I could make hundreds of observations thus far, but I’ll make one stand out: acclimation comes quickly here.

When applied to the hype machine of the Valley, live here for a while and you start to see things the way the collective “we” of the patch stretching from approximately San Jose to San Francisco (maybe partially into Marin County) sees things…  And I think most people actually believe that is a positive.  I tend to agree.

This is a land of forward thinkers, borne of reason and deep contemplation (there’s the Ivy influence for you).  I always fancied myself a forward thinker, but this is where forward thinking is pushed to boundaries.  That boundary where most reasonable people would label people a “nut job”.

Steve Wozniak was a nut job.  Bruce Sterling can seem like a nut job.  On and on.

And it’s in the fabric here.  Everyone who’s anyone has an idea, everyone’s an innovator of some sort small or not.

An aside about Twitter: I have not yet set up a Twitter account.  To balance the sides out, I can see how a lot of people don’t get Twitter.   I can see how it’s enjoyable as is updating your Facebook status, but I really can’t understand it myself because I’m not addicted to it.  There’s just so much going on, that sometimes I choose to filter noise to the better cause of focus.  Lots of people here choose to always be the prototypical early adopter - some wisely, some not I would think.  For me, sometimes you can’t always allow yourself to hear the noise - it’s much better to concentrate on the signal.

So now when people ask about Facebook apps, social networking monetization, online video monetization, Twittering, Office versus Google apps, altruistic and open source projects, cloud computing, software as a service, I just tell people that it’s just a matter of time.  In these easy cases, the signal is loud and clear.

To do something interesting and to have the best chance of success, you have to get ahead of the curve.  This is especially the case in technology.  Like I said, I think I possess the ability to see ahead but it’s a process that I’m glad my peers in the area embrace likewise.  And, yes, you do have to be right.  And you do have to be in a position to take advantage of trends.

Sometimes you get trampled.  But it’s necessary to lose that sensibility that every naysayer espouses.  That loss of sensibility is what drives the area, what makes me really embrace all that the Valley is about.

It’s iPhone Time!

Reported by Gizmodo according to Fortune, a $199 3G thinner and lighter iPhone is coming this summer.  Apparently it’s been just around the corner, and according to Walt Mossberg, we’re no more than 5 weeks away.

Whatever the price, I’ve been planning to buy the 3G version since I’m now out of contract and stuck with a company that just isn’t innovating (Palm).

It’s easy enough to dismiss the iPhone based on its shortfalls, the worst of which is the lack of a tactile keyboard.  I do wish they would fix it or make it easier to do workarounds.  As I’ve said before, I’m on board with the Mac.  But the godphone is a really great device, and hopefully I’ll be on board with the legions soon enough.

Are you funded?

I’m making my way around some Web 2.0 Expo events this week. Last night, I went to a smaller mixer but that had some very interesting people running around. It’s an inverse proportion much of the time.

David Hansson at 37Signals writes, Are you sure you want to be in San Francisco? He also gives one of the more tremendous talks that balks at the raise lots of money, ride the big way, and sell out mentality that motivates many in Silicon Valley.

One piece of unsolicited advice when emerging yourself in the tech scene: don’t ask startup people whether they are funded so early on in a conversation. I do understand that funding quickly asserts a level of validation. However, I find it a major turnoff.

Not only that, but most interested people probe about ideas. Most VCs I’ve spoken to acknowledge and respect an entrepreneur whose answer is “not yet, but when we’re ready, I’d love to talk.”

Go one step beyond, and if funding or press attention (another supposed source of creditability) were your main criteria, you’re going to miss the diamonds in the rough. Look at ideas, look at the people by all means, but use your head in judging. So while I mostly argue for the merits of the Valley and balk a little when the “raising money is bad” rhetoric goes too far, it’s not greed and ambition, it’s the free flow of ideas that really moves SF and the Valley.

Maybe I’m ranting because we’re privately funded and bootstrapped, and the follow up to that answer “Oh, well that’s a better way of doing things” seems like a fake answer. And maybe down the road I’d swagger and say “yes, so and so funded us.”

But I don’t think so. My answer would be a vague “yes” and I’d move along to someone more interested in the merits of ideas rather than relying on external validation.

Google and Salesforce.com: Spinning a better tomorrow

The interpreters of spin say this is just a partnership to stick it to Microsoft, and Marc Benioff admits as much, amounting to no more than adding a tab on Salesforce.com.

True, but it’s still a partnership between what I would consider to be the two biggest, most important platform, cloud computing, software as a service providers. Or in Valleyspeak: “this is a validation of the Web OS.” Amazon.com is right there too, as may be others, but Amazon.com also has a much more diversified revenue base as of today.

It’s not a stretch at all to see Google buying Salesforce.com.

We’ve put a lot of stock in software as a service at iLetYou.

And I would add that the semantic web is a somewhat unpractical and somewhat unnecessary creation of technologists. Although the semantic web will play a part, realize that the Web OS is where the action is. I have very little doubt about that, and the proof is ample and world-changing.

April Fools & the “Is this a joke?” Spectrum

One of the funniest byproducts of April Fools jokes and the tech startup, blogger community is discerning whether something is a joke. This year’s breed of jokes seem to be somewhat unoriginal, stuff you’d expect from the tech community with its own sense of humor.

So a funnier question is: if you’re a Web 2.0 startup, could your startup be an April Fools joke?

There’s a spectrum of joke businesses. A surface scan says you want to be something like eBay. Auctioning your stuff to strangers was a weird idea. You don’t want to be like Pets.com though, weighing your future on freighting pet food around the country for cheap.

I encounter this in reactions to rental businesses I mention in reference to interesting stuff that can be rented. Fake wedding cakes, baby toys, jewelry for rent: these elicit different levels of skepticism and downright laughter from people.

If you’re not doing something that at least someone laughs at, it’s probably not original enough to go very far. There’s actually no shortage of these businesses in Web 2.0: many of which will fail because it takes much more than a silly idea. But that seemingly silly idea is far better than something so unoriginal that it elicits no strong response whatsoever.

SNAP Summit, Facebook Apps and the Open Web

This last Tuesday, I attended SNAP Summit which was a pleasantly surprising and meaty collection of interesting insights into the art, science and business of creating social applications.

Facebook launched its developer platform in May 2007. The glow is off, but now big players have settled down to make the social application ecosystem work.

As a financing and exit strategy panelist, VC Jeremy Liew pointed out that the social app exits are small-ish. Mid single digit millions are the maximum exits to date, and usually in a combination of cash and private stock. They pointed out the inherent issues that the potential exits are not big enough to justify the still low chance of a home run and high opportunity cost of not participating in other areas. The same panel continued to point out that patience is the only thing that will solve this. It’s only been 10 months since the launch of FB platform, and Open Social is only slowly becoming something.

Jeremy Liew also pointed out (possibly bad paraphrase) that to many Facebook, social applications, and Open Social will be viewed as another distribution channel. It’s very important to note that it still happens to be a highly effective and potentially viral distribution channel hence it’s popularity among developers, even if you believe that the best time is past.

BJ Fogg, a Stanford research professor who co-taught the Facebook app class at Stanford, talked about Mass Interpersonal Persuasion. Probably the most eloquent way I’ve heard of why Facebook opening its platform up means some powerful things. A critical, organized mass like the one that’s developing around social networks means that masses of people can be moved like never before.

Dave Morin, platform manager at Facebook, believes that you’ll see more interesting applications leveraging the Facebook API to access the social graph off of Facebook. He has admitted earlier that the progress has been slow in this area. Off-Facebook leveraging of the social graph has not been explored because it’s much easier to get distribution when staying in the Facebook sandbox. But as people look to add value, some of most valuable uses of Facebook’s social graph will be on the open web. You’ll be able to utilize the flexibility of the open web combined with leveraging the value of that social graph.

What was revolutionary about Facebook was that it became the biggest Internet network to ever open proprietary and valuable data, allowing developers to leverage this data to create compelling applications through its easy-to-use (fun for developers!) API. It would be as if Google opened it’s search algorithm and gave you immediate access to many (not all) of the calculations that go into brewing up a search or data discovery system.

Now that the dust has settled, I agree that you’ll see integrated development and marketing strategies that include Facebook and other social platforms moving forward. That’s the obvious observation.

But as with everything around the Valley, be aware that the longer horizon of maybe five years out is where you’ll see the really interesting stuff when people really dig in and focus on building out compelling applications and uses. False hype be damned.

Leadership

There are many things that have been said about Senator Barack Obama’s speech on race in America yesterday. And like many, I struggle to attempt to avoid political viewpoints on a largely business-related blog. Senator Obama’s speech is too good not to say something, and it’s more than just oratory. It was brave in many ways.

I see politics and campaigns as two separate arguments: the idealized, “what is right” version and the reality of getting elected. I think this is a watershed moment as some pundits say, quite honestly telling one everything you need to know about Senator Obama. It’s quite possible that we will look back at this moment as a turning point. Whether this was a smart speech for getting elected only remains to be seen, but I hope it was.

Why this is a great speech from a leader who I think can be this country’s great leader (some of which many, many have echoed):

• He is smart. This is an intellectual, analytical speech.
• He speaks to us, the public, as adults instead of children incapable of forming their own thoughts and conclusions for their own.
• He is a living, breathing human being, with weaknesses. As Marc Andressen starts in his endorsement post of Obama, he is a normal guy.
• He embraces weakness in others and does not condemn them. He does not embrace or excuse hatred or ignorance that may manifest itself from this weakness, but does not condemn the person whose shoes you can never, ever truly understand.
• He embraces the notion of change, but has no illusion that there is no disillusion everywhere: black, white, Asian, Latino, man or woman.
• He speaks the common words of kindness and understanding instead of from hypocritical talking points for advantage, such as “do unto others”.
• He does not avoid the hard issues or the hard words. While sweeping under the rug may be the politically prudent thing to do, it is not the right thing to do for this country.
• He is willing to say what you need to hear, not what you want to hear.

I am a Barack Obama supporter for specifically these reasons because he is a leader in the truest sense of word, something we should aspire to but also want for ourselves, to lead this great country. This is leadership.

Metaphor of the Day: Caught in the Rain

On the way home today, I was caught in the rain. It was a sunny day, with a 30% chance of rain. However, the sky did not hint much that rain was too much of a possibility.

How quickly the rains change. Now, you can always carry an umbrella which may not be a bad idea. But sometimes, you consciously chance it or you don’t even realize the rain that’s right around the corner. Sometimes you’re a nervous wreck if you try too hard to never get rained on.

There’s not much you can do but dry off once the rains pass. You’ll survive getting caught in the rain. But if you keep getting soaked, there might be something wrong.

A great post on what they don’t tell you about being an entrepreneur (via 37Signals), quoting Marc Andressen:

First, and most importantly, realize that a startup puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced.

You will flip rapidly from a day in which you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again.

Over and over and over.

And I’m talking about what happens to stable entrepreneurs.

So true. The fact that this happens to successful, mentally healthy entrepreneurs means entrepreneurship will make you crazy. Kind of like getting caught in the rain, except with acid rains mixed in.  And you have no clue when the acid rains will come. No umbrella protects you.

I highly recommend entrepreneurship, but it’s never without its caveats.  And don’t worry… I’m dry now.

Startups That Win

There was a big uproar over Jason Calacanis’ post on how to save money as a startup (rebuttal here). The statement that invokes the ire of bloggers everywhere is “fire people who are not workaholics”.

And there are plenty of responses. I read TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley and Michael Arrington’s responses. David’s 37Signals response takes the polar opposite “fire the workaholics”. If you are so passionate about your work that you’d rather do that work than watch TV or hike, then that’s what most people key in on as the core of the people you want for your startup.

Summation: Love what you do, work like hell, treat it like the game that it is, have fun, play to win (and contact me for a job ;-)).

Billions with the Next Google!

Being unreasonable can set yourself up for failure, quite frankly a very hard fall. I’ll take the extreme example of aspiring to be a billionaire technology tycoon:

1. In 2007, Forbes counts 946 billionaires in a world . Anyone who remotely thinks a billion dollar net worth is anywhere near trivial is delusional.
2. Low expectations are the secret to happiness. So is a sense of security. These are two traits that 60 minutes found in Denmark, the happiest place on earth. But they are quick to point out that is not equivalent to a lack of ambition.
3. As David writes on the 37Signals blog, the next is never the same as its predecessor - that’s why it’s NEXT!

But presumably- if you’re even thinking about billions or building the next Google, you derive a sense of happiness for accomplishment, making a difference and success. So what’s with the aspiration to lofty status symbols of a billion dollars or the “next Google” then?

Ambition is commendable. Max Levchin is well known around the Valley for saying he would not be happy with an exit for Slide below $1.65 billion. Max’s lifestyle does not remind you of a greedy capitalist, rather a fierce competitor.

When I think of aspiring actors, I always believe that you should only follow that vocation if you would still do it if you didn’t get paid for it. In the duality of Hollywood, this attitude always pumps out the most inspired work.

Oprah has said that she is not a goal setter. She just gets up every day and does what she does. I’m a fan of her attitude.

Is it any surprise that some of the unhappiest people in the world are also the richest?

Rome was not built in a day. But if you’re following your passions day in, day out and one day a billion dollar opportunity comes within your sights, certainly you should go for it. When anyone says they aspire and will work endlessly towards greatness and love every minute of it, but will not be unhappy without hitting arbitrary goalposts are on the right track to happiness and greatness in my mind.