Let’s End the Myth that Ideas are Worthless
Posted January 2nd, 2011 in Social Web | View Comments
I love Silicon Valley. I love the entrepreneurial energy and the blister and pop of passion being painted into reality every day. But if entrepreneurial density is the Valley’s greatest asset, it can also, sometimes, be its greatest weakness.
Conventional Wisdom spreads here like wildfire. A blog post from an influential VC about how to run your startup can go from thesis to gospel truth practically overnight. Because every entrepreneur is ultimately, making it up as they go, there is an incredible and legitimate attraction to insights that seem to give us an advantage. The conventional wisdom gripping the Valley today that I most disagree with is that “ideas don’t matter.”
So what is this idea and where did it come from? Every week, it seems like, there is a new post on some blog about how ideas are worthless and that everything comes down to execution. Inevitably, these posts get retweeted ad infinitum and pumped up the front page of Hacker News, showering linkbait glory upon their entrepreneur-authors. The point of almost all of them is that, if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re going to change your idea, and that a million other people have thought it before, and don’t be so stupid you think your ideas are special, and your team matters much more than anything else, and just get out there and actually do it cause that’s where you will or won’t fail.
It seems to me that the grip that this concept has on the Valley mind right now has been driven by the ascent of Y Combinator and the Lean Startup Methodology. The Lean Startup Methodology is the most influential intellectual force in the Valley right now. Anchored by thinking by serial entrepreneur and Berkeley professor Steve Blank and up-and-comer Eric Ries, the Lean Startup is a methodology that helps startups create iterative cycles with real customer feedback to more effectively achieve “product-market fit” – or people who actually want to use your product. The Lean Startup has embedded the idea of the “pivot” — where a company makes a big, often painful shift from an old model to a new model — into the Silicon Valley lexicon.
The Ultimate List of Lists and 2011 Trends in Startups & Beyond
Posted December 22nd, 2010 in Social Web | View Comments
Every few months, I publish a personal newsletter called the N-List full of links to stories I’ve liked. For the holiday edition, I put together a set of lists on everything from music to startups to social innovation and more.
Hope you enjoy it.
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The end of the year is here, which means the twinkle of holiday lights, the deliciousness of egg nog, peppermint, and gingerbread lattes, and the love and joy of friends and family. It also means an absolutely gluttonous smorgasbord of end-of-year lists.
We love lists. In a world of never ending information, we love their clarity and their brevity. We love their sense of anticipation and their aspiration. Who hasn’t found themselves watching a countdown of the most ______ of ______, in which they don’t care about anything even remotely related to whatever it is the list is counting down, but still can’t stop watching? I’m pretty sure that’s how VH1 is still in business.
Having spent the last two years building a blog community, my love of lists goes beyond even the most slackjawed, time-killing holiday zombie. That said, I love lists that are untraditional. For this end-of-year N-List, I thought it would be fun to share just a whole bunch of lists that I’ve been thinking about recently. While there are some mainstays (I gotta put my 2 cents into the Album of the Year conversation), lots of them are lists that you just won’t find anywhere else.
I hope that this message finds you surrounded by decorations, cookies, and gives you something to do when you literally cannot have one more awkward conversation with an extended family member whose name you forgot.
Go 2011!
Zuckerberg: Person of the Year and First CEO of our Generation
Posted December 15th, 2010 in Giving | View Comments
Time magazine today declared Mark Zuckerberg the Person of the Year. The designation is not meant to be an honor, but rather a recognition of power and influence. Zuckerberg was chosen for the outsized footprint Facebook has on the landscape of not only the Internet, but on our relationships in general. Importantly, Time recognized that Zuckerberg was both “a product and an architect of his generation.” I’d go further. Zuckerberg is the first Millennial CEO to bring the distinct shape our generation to the global power mainstream.
While its community is now made up of millions from every age demographic, the Facebook experience is anchored in an understanding of the world that is distinct to our cohort. There is its comfort with transparency and bias towered sharing rather than internalizing. There is its breakdown of the barrier between personal and professional. There is its tendency towards shorter, ongoing perma-communication rather than long-form irregular communication. There is its believe that what it has to say is valuable. There is its faith in its friends and its believe that, when organized, they are a powerful force.
Some of these generational characteristics are the shape of historical forces that have nothing to do with technology, but many are the distinct result of having grown up wired. The same forces that shaped us are now shaping every other generation, and the entire world of business and culture with them.
5 Thoughts on Entrepreneurship Inspired by Kanye West’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”
Posted November 29th, 2010 in Social Web | View Comments
Last week, Kanye West released his new album “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” and already, the pundits are clamoring to anoint it as one of if not the best hip hop album of all time. Indie music review site Pitchfork gave it a 10 out of 10. Rolling Stone gave it five stars. Review aggregator Metacritic has it clocking in at a staggering 92 out of 100 average across all reviews, a rating usually reserved for the heroic comeback album of an ancient glory (see: Dylan, Plant) or an album from an international artist who, while legitimately great, is so outside of the reviewer’s understanding that they give it a great review in part so as not to look uncultured (see: Ali Farka Toure).
But for my money, they got this one right. The album is unreal, and largely because of its daring willingness to reconstruct hip hop, pop, and rock into exactly whatever the hell its maestro wants without any fear of classification or offense to genre stalwarts.
As I’ve listened to the album over and over (and over) I couldn’t help but think about some of the parallels between Kanye, the album, and the record industry, and entrepreneurship. Here are five thoughts about entrepreneurship inspired by the record.
1. The Great Ones are a Little Crazy.
Why the Interest Graph Will Reshape Social Networks (and the Next Generation of Internet Business)
Posted November 19th, 2010 in Social Web | View Comments
With the massive supremacy of Facebook in the social networking space, it’s easy to assume that the door is closed for social network innovation. The reality, however, is that we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of how we interact with and derive value and pleasure from our networks. There is good reason to think that even the way we think about who is in our social networks is going to undergo massive change, driven in part by our new access to strangers with common interests.
Thesis 1: The Interest Graph is Different than the Social Graph – In a great post on TechCrunch in October, Naval Ravikant and Adam Rifkin articulated the difference between the “social graph” (the network of people you know personally) and the “interest graph” (the network of people who share interests with you, but who you don’t necessarily know personally). If Facebook is the service with the internet’s most complete (visible) social graph, Twitter is the service with the internet’s most complete (visible) interest graph. “Following” a person — even one you don’t know — is an affirmation of your interest in their insights and recommendations. “Friending” someone is simply an act of acknowledging an existing relationship, that in many cases, has more to do with a previous shared experience (think: your freshman dorm) than with a really active shared interest.
Thesis 2: The Interest Graph and Social Graph are good for different things – After spending a day or two in Silicon Valley, one could be forgiven for thinking that the future is everything you’re doing now, but done with your friends and that the best filters and recommendations are not algorithms but friend recommendations. But for as valuable as friend recommendations and sharing can be for some things, they aren’t a panacea. One look at the landscape of social music services validates that fact.
The Personal-Professional Barrier and the “New” Enterprise Market
Posted November 13th, 2010 in Enterprise, Social Web | View Comments
For most of the rise of web 2.0, the enterprise market has lagged behind the consumer market in innovation. Yet the forces shaping the consumer space — mobile, social, geo, etc. — impact businesses, as well, and there are stirrings of excitement among entrepreneurs at companies like Box.net and Socialcast that are going after the big shifts in the enterprise. The challenge for these entrepreneurs is to build models that coincide with the actual, rather than perceived, state of change in the enterprise, and to locate the true levers of transformation.
In a piece published on TechCrunch today, Andreessen Horowitz partner Ben Horowitz cautioned entrepreneurs that although the conventional wisdom in the startup space is that there is a “consumerization of the enterprise,” there are many countervailing forces that anyone entering that space needs to recognize. These include the structural barriers to adoption, regulatory hurdles, and the general inertia that compels companies to stick with what they know.
The most interesting barrier Horowitz mentioned, however, was “People in Big Companies Work to Live.” His point was that employees in most big companies are more interested in getting their well-defined responsibilities done so they can enjoy the rest of their life than they are investing themselves deeply in improved efficiency for their corporation. This is almost completely opposite of the work-life mentality of an average startup founder.
The Revolution in Cool: Why Doing Real Sh*t is the Next Big Thing
Posted November 11th, 2010 in Human Capacity | View Comments
There is a revolution in “cool,” and more than any other shift in the cultural zeitgeist, has the potential to change the world.
Historically, cool has been fundamentally about not caring about things. Anyone who went to high school passionate about academics, music, or just about anything other than sports knows how true this is. And this mythology, propagated by media and perpetuated by young people everywhere, created an incredibly powerful dampening force on passion, commitment and engagement.
To care about things was to be an outsider; abnormal and strange. Of course, the dirty secret is that almost everyone, if you get them alone and away from the pressure of their cliques and society at large, is passionate about something.
But there is a change afoot. All of a sudden, giving a shit is cool. Being passionate is cool. Getting involved is cool. Being creative is cool. Building real things is cool.
The evidence of this is all around us. More and more, celebrities are using their cultural cache to create empires of involvement. Oprah is the spiritual forbearer, and people like Jay-Z, with his $400m + empire of labels, companies, and charity work and Ashton Kutcher, who is quietly funding the next generation of the consumer web, are prototypes. But it’s not limited to a few people…It is quietly becoming the new normal.
The Government Should Provide Loan Forgiveness for Entrepreneurs
Posted November 9th, 2010 in Human Capacity | View Comments
The generation coming of age is immensely entrepreneurial. The default position for today’s student leaders is to be creative to fill gaps in their academic, social, philanthropic, and entrepreneurial experience. This entrepreneurial talent could be an incredibly powerful force for improving our world, but is threatened by the growing college debt crisis. The government should consider providing loan forgiveness for recent graduate entrepreneurs.
According to a recent analysis by the Chronicle of Higher Education there are now exactly 100 universities who charge more than $50,000 a year. That’s up from 58 the year before, and only 5 the year before that. Earlier this year, education debt ($830b) exceeded general consumer debt ($827b) for the first time ever. For the first time in a long time, there is a growing chorus asking about the wisdom of pushing people to buy $200,000 worth of education by default.
At the same time, college campuses have never been more interesting and dynamic than they are today. The connective infrastructure of the internet has allowed student leaders to organize in totally different ways, and the result is an explosion of student-led training conferences, social innovation learning programs, and entrepreneurship incubators. What’s more, these programs are not just insular to the campuses on which they originated, but are networked with their peers across the country and around the world.
Why Peter Thiel’s $100k Dropout Grant is Good for Education
Posted November 4th, 2010 in Human Capacity | View Comments
Peter Thiel is an almost mythical figure in Silicon Valley. A founder a PayPal and the first institutional funder of Facebook, Thiel has used his billion+ not just to fund new companies, but to support a variety of future-oriented initiatives. The newest on the list — 20 $100,000 fellowships for students under 20 to drop out of undergrad to build companies instead — has aroused serious ire. Ironically, the $100k dropout grant could end up being good for education by demonstrating how it needs to evolve.
From an evolutionary perspective, education is how we transfer knowledge from one generation to the next. It’s our collective downpayment on the promise that we give our children a chance to have a better life than our own. But in the post-Industrial Revolution world, formal education became primarily about training people to become part of a mechanized workforce. The Liberal Arts education was designed to help future leaders learn how to interpret and synthesize knowledge.
Much of what we teach now remains important. Giving every person an understanding of math and science is essential for helping them understand the natural laws that govern the world. Introducing people to the classics of literature, art, and philosophy is essential to help anchor them in the ongoing pursuit for understanding that transcends our immediate condition. And giving people the ability to situate themselves in history is simply essential for helping them learn from past mistakes.
3 Lessons Startups Can Learn from Instagram
Posted October 31st, 2010 in Social Web | View Comments
Instagram is one of the hottest new social applications. It’s a photo sharing tool and network that allows users to take photos, apply one of a number of filters, and then distribute it out to their other networks. A week after its release, 100,000 people had downloaded the iPhone app. A week later, the number stood above 200,000. For some comparison, it took super hot, media-loved Foursquare seven months to get to 60,000 users. Their success holds at least three great lessons for new startups
1. The difference really is in the details. There are dozens if not hundreds of photo filter and photo sharing apps. Nothing about Instagram is totally novel, but small decisions have a big impact, and the combination of the elements creates an entirely new experience. For example, on Instagram you get to select the filter after, rather than before, snapping a photo, giving users much more ability to customize the feel. Social applications ultimately have to be more than the sum of their parts, and tiny differences can make all the difference in the world.
2. Despite the conventional wisdom, people are willing to add new destinations to their rotation. One of the things anyone starting a new company hears is “people aren’t willing to go to a new site.” The conventional wisdom is that people are so saturated that they simply don’t want more services or products in their rotation. In reality, there is always the potential that people will integrate new services into their regular patterns; those services simply have to both be valuable enough and be perceived to be valuable enough to justify the cost of switching. Quora demonstrates this truth, and so does Instagram.