Quote from Steve Jobs, via Miguel de Icaza:
We have to let go of this notion that for [us] to win, [our purported competitor] has to lose. We have to embrace the notion that for [us] to win, [we] have to do a really good job. And if others are going to help us, that’s great. Because we need all the help we can get. And if we screw up and do not do a good job, it is not somebody else’s fault, it is our fault.
I remarked to a friend that Mark Suster’s entrepreneurial roots show in his approach to being a VC – he’s come out of nowhere and in short order aggressively pushed himself into being one of the most relevant voices out there. He seems to be working a lot harder than the others guys, exactly as you’d expect an entrepreneur to be. Not exactly what you’d expect of a VC.
His blog is fantastic, and I quite often agree with his advice.
That’s why I found it odd that his The Best Entrepreneurs Are Hyper Competitive & Hate Losing struck such a dissonant chord with me.
Shuffling through the successful business people I know and trying to gauge whether they would be the type of people who are obsessed with winning, even in a family game of scrabble, I don’t come to a clear conclusion. I know hyper competitive people, but I also know plenty of people who are able to separate their business behavior from their personal behavior. And not obsess with beating the competition.
Maybe that’s what’s not sitting well with me – Mark’s definition of winning seems to be beating the competition.
Some of the best entrepreneurs I know don’t obsess with the competition. They obsess with their own behavior.
Here’s a contrived example – look at Apple. Do you see Jobs competing with the others in the industries he enters, or do you see him trying create the best possible product, distinctly separate from what his competitors are doing?
Frankly I have a hard time picturing a lot of these guys stressing out over scrabble or Guitar Hero.
Mark’s a very successful guy and his approach has certainly worked for him, but I disagree that you need to be obsessed with winning in the way that Mark describes it.
Look at this way: you could destroy all your competitors and still not win. You could also win without destroying any of your competitors.
First, pick the right game. Then, pay attention to playing that game as best it can be played. Competing may be an important tactical part of playing the game, but it’s probably not the part to obsess over.
I’ve seen a bit of uninformed chatter on this, so let me add my own uninformed 2 cents:
First, I think Google actually does want the web to be faster and better. They recognize that the web is their platform and any improvement to it has an eventual benefit for them.
But Google DNS also provides other benefits. It’s true that there is an advertising opportunity in hijacking mis-typed domains and displaying ads against them, as OpenDNS does. This is potentially a large market – domain squatters, for example, make a tidy living doing something similar. I don’t think Google will actually do this. At least not anytime soon – it’d just be too creepy coming from Google.
What Google is really after is data. In particular, traffic and usage data.
By using Google DNS you effectively tell Google exactly what sites you’re visiting, when. Google gets access to your browsing patterns without having to install a toolbar or spyware on your computer.
How valuable would usage data be to Google? Knowing exactly what sites you visited, when, and how frequently?
Extremely valuable. They could use this information to develop refined models of your interests and behavior, and use it to better target ads to you. Nice.
However, their privacy policy states that they won’t do this.
What they will do is use the data to form a better model of the web. They’ll know, for example, how popular sites really are and how much traffic they get. They’ll also be able to build user and browsing pattern models – eg. people who use facebook are also likely to use sites X, Y, and Z. They’ll use this data to improve search and advertising.
Look for Google to start offering its DNS services for free to internet provides, corporations, or anybody else with large amounts of users. Instead of paying ISPs for access to their usage logs, now they can get their own, and it’ll only cost them the overhead of running a large scale DNS service.
Peter Norvig’s message has been that more data trumps better algorithms. Google DNS is a beautiful way for Google to get a tremendous amount of data with very little intrusion while looking (and behaving) like saints.
I’m noticing how much the practice of finding a candidate and interviewing them has changed over the years.
First step is to look up the person on the web. Since I’m looking for a technical person I’m expecting a blog, contributions to open source projects, a twitter presence, etc. If I don’t find them, the candidate becomes less attractive.
If I do find a blog or twitter feed, I take some time to read them. You can tell a lot about a person with just a short overview – for example, even a delicious feed can give you a very good feel for how good someone is technically.
Hopefully the person has an open source project or two they’ve contributed. If so you can dive right into the code and get a good sense of their skills at work. I love this – you can see great coders almost immediately. And of course bad ones.
If the person is still looking good it’s time for a review of the resume and their linkedin profile.
By the time I followup with the person I have a very good sense of who this person is, what they’ve done in the past, and what their real-world coding looks like. The people who make it to the interview are so well filtered you almost can’t go wrong.
It’s very time consuming, but if you’re as fanatical about hiring good people as I am it’s worth it.
Contrast this with the old pile-o-resumes approach, or the recruiter-filter-by-keyword approach, and I think we’re in a much better place.
Now if I could only find a recruiter I could trust to do the technical deep dive I’ve described here and be ingenious enough to find diamonds in the rough I’d be a very happy man.
Gmail is once again unavailable this morning. Normally I’d let it go – fail happens – but it’s part of a disturbing trend that looks a lot like neglect. The service has been getting slower and slower over the last few months, with search taking ridiculous amounts of time.
Why is it disturbing?
It’s important to understand that Google doesn’t directly make money on email. Think of it as a loss-leader of sorts.
Yes, I know there’s advertising on there. I also know a bit about advertising systems.
Gmail brings in a relatively a much smaller amount of revenue than Adwords and Adsense, and the margins are much lower. You have to pay for all that Gmail infrastructure, and click-thru rates on email ads (or ads placed next to most other compelling content) are very low.
Google is smart enough to know where their money comes from, and they go to great pains to ensure their search remains superior. They invest a lot in search.
But what do you do with properties that make money, but at small amounts and with much lower margins?
For example, Yahoo Finance, Small Business, My Yahoo, and many of the other businesses are nice, profitable business, but not large enough or high-margin enough to get a lot of love or resources.
You neglect them. You put resources on projects that move the top or the bottom line.
My concern with Gmail is the trend that looks like neglect. It’s a relatively large property for Google, but it’s been experiencing problems. I know fail happens, but I also know that if Google put their mind to it they could make it much more available than it has been.
As Google branches out into more new and different products, it needs to be very mindful of neglect. Rot at the edges of your systems deteriorate the overall perception of your offerings. And search market share is very dependent on perception: witness the studies that removed branding from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft search results and found nearly identical user satisfaction scores.
So Google’s outlook has to be: if we’re going to do something we’re going to do it extremely well. The apple philosophy.
And if we’re not doing something extremely well, we need to fix it or shut it down.
It’s a tough balance – how do you foster innovation and allow people to quickly create and launch projects, while maintaining a commitment to long term maintenance of quality?
It’s crucial to identify your core offerings, mark the rest as alpha, beta, “labs”, or any other label that signals the service might go away, and be absolutely fanatical about the quality of the core offerings on a continuous basis.
Here’s hoping Gmail gets its act together so I don’t once again have to switch providers.
Very interesting presentation on company culture at Netflix. I’d love to hear from people working at Netflix on how close is this presentation to their daily reality.
My first real job was consulting for Encyclopaedia Brittanica. It was fantastic work, bringing the giant of encyclopedias onto this new platform called the Web.
What most people don’t know is that Britannica was actually a tremendous innovator early in the days of the Web. Harold Kester, a very smart guy, a good friend, and later CTO of Websense, ran the advanced technology group here in San Diego. His team was smart enough to spot the importance of the Web very very early (we’re talking NCSA mosaic days, before Netscape existed), and make fantastic advances, particularly in the field of search. I was lucky enough to work with them.
Unfortunately Britannica’s core business, selling encyclopedias door-to-door, was getting killed by this CD based encyclopedia from Microsoft called Encarta. Who would pay over a thousand dollars for something you could get practically free?
Britannica’s business model didn’t survive the age of the CD, but the company did manage to transform itself and leap to the next technology, the Web.
Then it ran into this thing called Wikipedia.
All of this nostalgia is stirred up on reading that Microsoft has decided to close down the Encarta business. A technology and model that killed a long-running, well established business itself killed by a newer, shiner model.
The power of Linkedin: I changed my profile info and got a flood of emails asking if I had left Yahoo, and I realized I hadn’t really announced it. So here it is.
A little while ago I left Yahoo! to go full time on yet another startup, Xpenser. Xpenser is expense tracking and management simplified: record and manage your expenses from any device, any time. As soon as you get out of the taxi, call and say “Taxi $27 office to San Jose airport”. Your expense is recorded and you can forget about it.
Or you can email “Lunch $35.13 with Jack”. Or SMS it. Or iPhone it. IM it (Yahoo, AIM, MSN, GTalk). Twitter it. Use the browser search box. The FireFox plugin. Or, believe it or not, the Web.
As you can imagine this was born of personal need – I travel a lot, and expense reports have been the bane of my life for as long as I’ve worked.
Xpenser is an expense management tool built by someone who hates wasting time on expense reports.
The site has been growing wonderfully, with a bit overy 20k users, and in Nov/Dec was featured in Consumerist, Mashable, Lifehacker, Stepcase Lifehack, BNet, and even briefly in the Motley fool. The users are passionate, the feedback is great, and all the metrics are off the charts.
In short, it was an obvious move.
My 4 years at Yahoo! were fantastic – I was fortunate enough to work on make-or-break projects with a group of very smart, very dedicated people. I learned a lot, am very thankful, and continue to root for Yahoo! to make its way back to the top. Keep fighting guys!
So, back to the startup world for me, and I couldn’t be more excited. I’m also advising a few other startups and investors here and there, so I’m fully in it. This is actually a fantastic time to do a startup if you’re planning to build a real business.
Needless to say, if you see opportunities for Xpenser in your network, do let me know ( parand at xpenser dot com ). And if you’re around San Diego or LA drop me a line and we’ll grab coffee and catch up.
2009 here we come!!!
Microsoft’s Cashback program is an attempt to take a bite out of the lucrative search marketing market. It’s a big market, and it’s supposed to be a big play: it’s what Microsoft announced to much fanfare after the Yahoo! take-over fell through.
The idea is to offer cash to customers in order to incent them to make use of MS Live Search, and therefore attract more advertisers to advertise on Live.
According to this Fatwallet thread and several others there have been significant problems with the cashback program. The users make purchases, receive Microsoft’s cashback email confirming the cash back, and sometime toward the end of the 60 day cycle receive another email telling them their cashback is denied. Apparently there is no good way to contact MS and correct the issue.
If true, this is a very significant problem. Even if not true, the current state of complaints is a very significant problem.
The whole point of this program to create a positive image in the users’ minds and habituate them to using Live. If instead the cashback program creates an image of difficulty, dishonesty, and headaches, it will backfire and drive users to other search engines.
My guess is Microsoft is outsourcing the cashback operations to one of the rebate handling firms, who in turn are employing their regular tactics of rebate denial in order to save money.
The problem is the millions of dollars saved here are squandering away the billions this program is supposed to enable.
It’s fairly surprising that Microsoft would let this happen; someone high up needs to wake up and fix it quickly.
Let me start by saying: I’m voting Obama.
However, this analysis by Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economist who wrote “the book” on macroeconomics, is bringing tears to my eyes:
If there were no taxes, … then $1 earned today would yield my kids $28. That is simply the miracle of compounding.
Under the McCain plan, … a dollar earned today yields my kids $4.81. That is, even under the low-tax McCain plan, my incentive to work is cut by 83 percent compared to the situation without taxes.
Under the Obama plan, … a dollar earned today yields my kids $1.85. That is, Obama’s proposed tax hikes reduce my incentive to work by 62 percent compared to the McCain plan and by 93 percent compared to the no-tax scenario. In a sense, putting the various pieces of the tax system together, I would be facing a marginal tax rate of 93 percent.
The bottom line: If you are one of those people out there trying to induce me to do some work for you, there is a good chance I will turn you down. And the likelihood will go up after President Obama puts his tax plan in place. I expect to spend more time playing with my kids. They will be poorer when they grow up, but perhaps they will have a few more happy memories.
I am an incredibly cheap bastard frugal. I don’t like to pay for things.
Yet I just paid for Flickr without hesitation or a moment of doubt. Odd.
Here’s why, I think:
I feel comfortable spending money on Flickr in the same way I feel comfortable spending at Costco – I feel they’ll make things right for me without giving me a lot of trouble. So I spend.
This is the way to build a sustainable fremium business – make gaining your customer’s trust your top priority.
I’m noticing: there’s a high statistical correlation between people getting more than one recommendation on their LinkedIn profile and switching jobs. In fact I haven’t found a single case in my network where 2+ recommendations have not been coincident with an effort to find a new job.
A new tool for managers, perhaps? Monitor LinkedIn to see which of your employees are about to flee.
In case you didn’t believe my earlier ramblings, here’s the short version:
A small group of schools account for a disproportionate amount of billionaire education. Just 20 universities and colleges account for 52% of the billionaire graduates while 182 schools count for the remainder.
Via Yahoo Finance.
Don Dodge discussed the very small percentage of content creators versus viewers:
in a group of 100 people online, one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or adding to it) and the other 89 will just view it.
True enough. However, it’s important not to discount the value of “just viewing”. Viewing is an expression of attention, and attention is an immensely valuable metric to track. View and click data, for example, play a significant part in how Google/Yahoo/etc rank their search results – the more users click on a given item in the search results, the more prominent rank it gets in the results.
Consider a list of 100 random headlines pulled from random news sources. Consider 100k users viewing those headlines and clicking on the ones that interest them. Immediately you have a system for finding the most interesting stories of the day, simply by tallying which headlines get the most views.
A big part of the power of the web is the latent data that can be gleamed from the day-to-day, non-explicit actions of the masses. Content creators create obvious value, but lurkers and viewers play a vital role in unlocking, exposing, and magnifying the value of that content.
I gave a talk at UCSD a couple of days ago. After the talk several students came up to me asking about how to find internships and full time positions at Yahoo. As it so happened we had our HR folks right there and they got connected up.
I told every one of the students that I spoke with that they should drop me an email; that the best way to find a job you like is to connect with people in industry.
Two days later and not a single email. I remember being the same way as an undegrad, somehow intimidated to connect with others. I remember how surprised I was when I got several offers for an internship I had applied for.
Here’s a clue: if you want a job, ask for it. Make an effort. Write the damned email. The fact is we are hiring as fast as we can get good candidates. The positions are open and available. All you have to do is connect with somebody. And here’s a shocker: dropping your resume into a pile of other resumes is not the best way to get noticed. Talk to somebody.
There’s a strange disconnect here: I’d love to get access to excellent students; there are many positions at Yahoo and I have visibility into lots of other opportunities as well. Students want to find good jobs and internships, and there are plenty of good ones that haven’t found it. But we’re not connecting nearly as well as we could be. Odd.
Manage your expenses via Email, SMS, iPhone, Twitter, Voice (Call and say your expense), IM (Yahoo, AIM, MSN), or Web.