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March 23, 2014

The Future of the social web

The Internet of the future will look very different from how we enjoy it today. A driving force of this will be the recent explosion of social technologies. Just look at how someone just 5 years younger than you uses social technology. Then look at how your parents use these same resources and you will see social is here to stay. We are fortunate to live at the dawn of the “social era”.

As with with everything else in life there are only two ways to monetize the social web of tomorrow:

Help us become more social

In only a few years we have gone from sharing friendships to sharing thoughts, pictures, steps and even beers. It is almost a certainty that these technologies will grow stronger, faster, smarter in the coming years. The real question is whether or not we chose to adopt them. Perhaps we will live in a world where sharing is the norm and truly frictionless.

Help us become less social

Privacy and anonymity are all the rage on the Internet these days. Whether it is disappearing video or sharing secrets we now have the ability to leave our identities at the door. Perhaps the future is a more personal internet.

The current answer is to become selectively social. Despite its often lamented efforts with G+ Google gets how it should work. G+ is brilliant. Having the ability to categorize people into circles is ideal. The problem is nobody likes the task of putting people into buckets, we want it done for us.

Adam Smith will tell you that specialization is key to national prosperity. I believe that this will apply to the internet as well. We are already seeing the start of it with the Saas Revolution : niche products for niche industries. The really winners of the future will create products that appeal to a niche instead of everybody.

It is simply amazing that the consumer Internet is not yet 20 years old .It has not graduated college and it cannot legally buy a beer. It has not decided what it wants to do with the rest of its life.

I am very excited to watch the Internet mature and you should be too.

October 15, 2013

The Case for Founder Liquidity

Unless you are living under a rock you probably heard that the Snapchat founding team just turned down a $3 billion dollar offer from Facebook.

Everyone seems to have an opinion on how stupid this decision was, even Barstool sports covered it.

Let’s back up to late June 2013 when Snapchat raised a $60 million dollar round. Part of this round included two $10 million dollar checks to the founders of Snapchat.

Now in a world of trillion dollar markets and billion dollar valuations; 10 million per person is peanuts. But step outside of the valley and we realize that 10 million is “set for life” money. 10 million dollars in a CD gets you ~100,000 per year for nothing. Again, set for life.

Founders have the responsibility to act in the best interest of their company, not themselves. Again, the best interest of the company, not themselves.

So the founding team is sitting in a spot where their business has soared to unimaginable heights (somehow without earning a dollar) and they are asked to give up control of their baby for $3 billion dollars.

Had the liquidity not been present I would have understood the buyout.

Building a startup is hard, especially when you are bringing in $0. The founder liquidity changes the paradigm. I believe that the liquidity in the earlier round allowed them to focus on Snapchat’s long term future and continuing to build instead of cashing out fast.

October 14, 2013

How to deal with impossible people

I will be the first to admit that I can get frustrated pretty easily.

A few months ago I’d be quick to to tell you I hated the guy who cut me off in traffic or that I hated the cashier who gave me attitude at the grocery store.

Louis C.K. (one of my favorite comedians) has a great bit about how we “immediately jump to the top shelf” with our words and I couldn’t agree more. So many times I jump right to hate when its far from appropriate.

Most, if not all, of the people I say that I hate truly mean nothing to me and its taken me until recently to realize that. So I’ve developed a new strategy that I’d like to share with you:

Learn to “nothing” people

I firmly believe that we as humans love to judge people in absolute terms. We want the decision to be binary and only one of two outcomes. We love to love and to some extent love to hate. We want to say that in absolute certainty an individual is our friend or our foe. It is the grey area in between good and bad that we struggle with. We want to know with full certainty that the person we are judging is playing for our team or against us; but sadly it just isn’t that simple.

So let me repeat again:

Learn to “nothing” people

“Nothing”-ing people involves attaching absolutely no value them. You do not love them, you do not hate them, they are simply there. They are simply background actors in your game of life. Your brain does not devote memory to their memories.

So take a minute and think about all those people in your life that you say that you hate, if I had to guess I’d say that a lot of these people in your life fall into this new category of nothing. You don’t really hate them at all.

What is best of all is that once you move people in your hate category to nothing; you free up space for the great things in life.

Give it a shot.

September 25, 2013

Become a full stack entrepreneur

Some readers of our blog may be familiar with the term “full stack developer”. For those who are not let us use the following definition as a jumping off point:

“Full stack generally refers to engineers doing both server side (back end) and web (Front end) work” – Robert Greene, Technical recruiter at Elasticsearch.

We could get into APIs, hosting environment and other words that I don’t understand but it makes little sense to complicate an already convoluted world. In my opinion the line between the “front” and the “back” is very simple to draw. The front end of any website, application or experience is anything and everything you can see and interact with. Conversely the back end is everything and anything you can’t see.

Google Trends shows that in the last year alone the interest for full stack developers has experienced the much sought after hockey stick growth. So it seems that an ideal developer is one who can build both the foundation and the creatives on top. It stands to reason that if they are able to build the entire project that their work will be better than chopping up the job into multiple pieces and contractors.

I propose that we take the same full stack concept and apply it to entrepreneurship. So here is my definition:

Full stack entrepreneur (noun): an entrepreneur who is focused equally on pursuing their dreams and supporting others with their personal pursuits.

The application here is fairly simple. Do you work out of a co-working space? Spend some time helping the space flourish. Perhaps you’ve received funding from a VC or private investor? Take some time to help other portfolio companies with their goals. Maybe you attribute your successes to a strong education from a leading university? Strive to create the same opportunities for those who come after you. The list can go on and on but the point is help those who support you.

It should also be noted that this full stack mentality can make you feel happier than just working on your own goals. A recent Harvard study suggested that “regardless of income, those people who spent money on others reported greater happiness”.

So take five minutes from your day and support those have supported you; I promise it will be worth your time.

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