There’s something about Quora. Its interface has just the right ratio of cleanliness to sexiness. Its seamless implementation of Facebook Connect login catches one’s mouse from across a crowded monitor. Its lithe speed makes the heart beat a little faster. But the quality of its questions and answers makes one fall in love. The rest of Silicon Valley seems to share my infatuation; after all, everyone is on it.
Yet for the Silicon Valley set, “everyone” equals fewer than 8000 users. This has led to an insidery Q&A wonderland filled with rarefied folks in our world… Plus a whole lot of fanboydom. To wit, a recent question: “If Quora were a reality show, who would the archetypal characters be?” Evidently, the Quora crowd crushes on Keith Rabois the Jock, relishes Yishan Wong’s profundity mixed with humor, and is mesmerized by -- albeit slightly scared of -- Eunji Choi, the Bad Girl.
Speaking of Eunji the Bad Girl, we now work together. How’d we meet? On Quora. Of late, it seems every startup worth its salt is recruiting employees there. I know three separate founders who’ve met and hired people via Quora in the past few weeks. Question and Answer quality is an excellent screen for both general knowledge and domain expertise. Moreover, the interplay between users – as captured by follower:following ratio, comments, and voting – is in most cases a solid proxy for how one engages with others in the physical world. LinkedIn had better be watching these guys and gals closely.
Quora is also becoming a destination where VCs suss out new companies and evaluate potential investments. Want to quickly gauge social proof around a startup? Search Quora. The startup I work at – Topguest – has been deliberately under the radar since we wrote our first line of code about 8 weeks ago. After all, we’re pre-launch; no need to make a big fuss. Yet after we popped up in a few Quora questions earlier this week, I was deluged with inquiries from close to a dozen VC firms.
If you work at a startup but aren’t on Quora, you’re missing out on one hell of a stash.
*Please excuse typos. Written on my iPhone*
4/09/2010
1/18/2010
The New Star Maker Machinery
I was a free man in Paris
I felt unfettered and alive
I'd go back there tomorrow
But for the work I've taken on
Stoking the star maker machinery
- Joni Mitchell
We've been a celebrity obsessed culture for over half a century. But until recently, fame was largely it's own reward. The stars were richer than most, but the machinery that today catapults America's top celebs to stratospheric wealth was largely absent. That changed in the 1970s with the emergence of the Big 4 talent agencies: CAA, William Morris, ICM, and UTA. In that decade, people like David Geffen -- the "Free Man in Paris" Joni Mitchell sings about -- turned famous people into platforms that could become both vehicles for brand messaging, and brands themselves.
Fast forward 35 years, and we all get a shot at something resembling fame thanks to the social web. Microcelebrity. Even though the term was coined just a few years ago, it's now almost passe to speak of how it's become lifestyle for so many. At SXSW last year, Chris Anderson advised the audience to "Create microcelebrity and then monetize it."
This time around, there's no man behind the curtain. Microcelebs are their own agents. Will "fame" be payment enough for the long tail? Or will they want some of that "monetize" stuff too?
The "create" part is fun. Services like Facebook and Twitter provide the fundamental plumbing. Apps like foursquare help us sustain microcelebrity by sharing interesting data about what we do in realtime, and even give us points and badges to keep score. Facebook photos have been one of the key vehicles by which the frat presidents, cheerleading captains, and party animals among us have achieved microcelebrity, and hence emerging services like Photocheck.in are interesting to me.
Where it gets scary is the "monetize" part. The old answer of "it isn't tacky for celebrities to get paid for promoting stuff because they are different from the rest of us" does not work if celebrities are no longer very different from the rest of us.
We are now entering a new wave of self-service star maker machinery that will provide low touch and scalable ways for people to monetize their microcelebrity if they chose to. Ad.Ly, Izea, and presumably Blippy [soon] all provide influencers with a form of monetization in exchange for sharing. Analytics tools help us fine tune the content we create to maximally delight our audiences. New web series UnderTheArch selects a group of popular NYU students each season, furnishes them with product placements, and films them at sponsor locales. When I spoke at Southern Methodist University last week, I was asked for advice on how to start a similar initiative there.
The trickle down of celebrity has societal implications we've only begun to understand. It is exciting, but potentially dangerous.
I felt unfettered and alive
I'd go back there tomorrow
But for the work I've taken on
Stoking the star maker machinery
- Joni Mitchell
We've been a celebrity obsessed culture for over half a century. But until recently, fame was largely it's own reward. The stars were richer than most, but the machinery that today catapults America's top celebs to stratospheric wealth was largely absent. That changed in the 1970s with the emergence of the Big 4 talent agencies: CAA, William Morris, ICM, and UTA. In that decade, people like David Geffen -- the "Free Man in Paris" Joni Mitchell sings about -- turned famous people into platforms that could become both vehicles for brand messaging, and brands themselves.
Fast forward 35 years, and we all get a shot at something resembling fame thanks to the social web. Microcelebrity. Even though the term was coined just a few years ago, it's now almost passe to speak of how it's become lifestyle for so many. At SXSW last year, Chris Anderson advised the audience to "Create microcelebrity and then monetize it."
This time around, there's no man behind the curtain. Microcelebs are their own agents. Will "fame" be payment enough for the long tail? Or will they want some of that "monetize" stuff too?
The "create" part is fun. Services like Facebook and Twitter provide the fundamental plumbing. Apps like foursquare help us sustain microcelebrity by sharing interesting data about what we do in realtime, and even give us points and badges to keep score. Facebook photos have been one of the key vehicles by which the frat presidents, cheerleading captains, and party animals among us have achieved microcelebrity, and hence emerging services like Photocheck.in are interesting to me.
Where it gets scary is the "monetize" part. The old answer of "it isn't tacky for celebrities to get paid for promoting stuff because they are different from the rest of us" does not work if celebrities are no longer very different from the rest of us.
We are now entering a new wave of self-service star maker machinery that will provide low touch and scalable ways for people to monetize their microcelebrity if they chose to. Ad.Ly, Izea, and presumably Blippy [soon] all provide influencers with a form of monetization in exchange for sharing. Analytics tools help us fine tune the content we create to maximally delight our audiences. New web series UnderTheArch selects a group of popular NYU students each season, furnishes them with product placements, and films them at sponsor locales. When I spoke at Southern Methodist University last week, I was asked for advice on how to start a similar initiative there.
The trickle down of celebrity has societal implications we've only begun to understand. It is exciting, but potentially dangerous.
12/06/2009
Words to live by
"Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary."
-Cecil Beaton
-Cecil Beaton
11/25/2009
The Better the Press, The Harder the Pivot
The best startup advice I’ve gotten but didn’t listen to soon enough was from Sean Parker. He warned: Be careful about doing too much press too early, because the product will pivot, the model will change.
*Don't get me wrong, the folks at CNBC are awesome -- especially Darren Rovell -- and we are totally grateful for them covering Udorse. It's just that they covered a company that is now morphing into a meaningfully evolved company. And the coverage -- as fun as it was -- will make the morph harder.
Sean was right. Perceptions are far harder to change than early stage tech products.
We launched Udorse in “private alpha” at the awesomeness that is TechCrunch50. While I was busy doing CNBC * and MSNBC and WSJ interviews in the warm and fuzzy aftermath of the conference, I was not talking to alpha users or iterating or whiteboarding with my teammates Trevor and Jon on how to reshape the product. While I was being wined and dined by VCs at Madera
Turns out, our initial model was sub-optimal and our alpha product needed a lot of work before it could be considered "minimum viable".
No biggie, and par for the course for a startup less than four months old founded by three dudes who’ve never done this before. And Udorse is pivoting. Big time.
Luckily, our burn rate is a lot lower than our energy level. But I am worried that all the press we got early on [before we even knew what we were really building] will, among a certain set, “lock in” perceptions of our company/product that are false [namely, that we have anything in common with "sponsored tweet" companies like adly and izea, which we do not].
Luckily, our burn rate is a lot lower than our energy level. But I am worried that all the press we got early on [before we even knew what we were really building] will, among a certain set, “lock in” perceptions of our company/product that are false [namely, that we have anything in common with "sponsored tweet" companies like adly and izea, which we do not].
When we ship our next iteration in a few weeks, I hope the strength of the product alone will be enough to evolve perceptions. Because I don’t plan on doing another press junket until our product has the traction to back it up. Press is like like crack… However, I would love for @scobleizer to stop by our office next time he is in NYC :-)
I have a sense of déjà vu as I see other new and very early stage startups get caught up in a wave of media attention, e.g Ad.Ly. I hope their current model works and that they have a product that offers real, sustainable, defensible value to a meaningful number of real people, since ‘get acquired fast by Twitter’ is imho not a sound exit strategy for them. And no, Kim Kardashian does not count as a real person.
*Don't get me wrong, the folks at CNBC are awesome -- especially Darren Rovell -- and we are totally grateful for them covering Udorse. It's just that they covered a company that is now morphing into a meaningfully evolved company. And the coverage -- as fun as it was -- will make the morph harder.
10/01/2009
Script Idea: There's Something [Mythological?] About Journalism Online, LLC
If a warped Broadway producer were to stage old media's struggle to monetize content as a re-imagination of the Trojan War, then Steve Brill would not be on the callback list to play Heroic Commander of the Army.Yet this is precisely the role Brill is auditioning for. The man who brought us CourtTV [think COPS; need I say more?] wants to be recast as the savior who'll preserve quality journalism. He deigns to do this by building a wall; by charging users who are willing to pay a small monthly subscription fee for content that's currently free. Enter Journalism Online, essentially an outsourced digital wall-building company for content publishers too small or scared to try it on their own. When it comes to subscribers, the thinking is that if Brill builds it, some of them may come.
Much like Brill himself, Journalism Online is a new media start up that is jarringly "of" the old media on every level. This almost deliberate oldness extends even to their logo, which appears as if it was slapped together in a few seconds by someone playing around with Aldus Pagemaker circa 1985.
Supporters of Journalism Online's model point to iTunes as an analogy. iTunes managed to get some of the "free music toothpaste back into the tube" [to paraphrase Brill himself in a recent address to the OMMA Conference]. Why can't the same be true for news online? The same can't be true because the analogy is fatally flawed; "good enough" music is a far more scarce resource than "good enough" news and is thus far easier to monetize online. There are a limited number of talented artists producing a limited number of catchy songs that listeners want to hear. There are an innumerable number of good enough content creators publishing good enough free content online, and their ranks will only continue to increase exponentially.
Brill's recent track record is one of ideas that are brilliant on a micro level, but fail because they are somehow wholly out of step with the larger macro picture. Clear, his latest failed effort, addressed a real consumer need at it's time of founding early in this decade: Passing airport security took way too long. However, Clear wrongly bet that this dynamic would remain true for enough people long enough to turn a profit. Earlier, Brill's Content rightly believed that a subset of consumers of information were hungry to know which sources of media were trustworthy and which weren't. Yet Brill cast as Universal Media Watchdog didn't play very well with a key faction in the equation: The Media.
In the long run, nobody can stop the relentless decentralization of journalism. Brill vs. Free Content: It's just bizarre enough to possibly work on a limited scale for a limited period of time. Short of most old media institutions willfully embracing a painful march toward obliteration, I don't have a a better idea. There are a lot of desperate old media people perched high in decaying wood paneled offices: That Journalism Online has received so much pre-launch press is a testament to just how desperate they are.
The American business landscape is filled with unlikely heroes, and I certainly admire Brill's moxy. But ironically, even if Brill ends up as Hero to Media Plutocrats, his quest will be viewed in the opposite light by the media consuming masses. Will he avoid Priam's fate?
9/08/2009
On frothiness
Enjoying a caffeine fix as I walk to the office in the morning has become one of the only "routine" parts of my day. Usually, I opt for a latte. The secret to a great latte is the right proportion of frothy milk-foam goodness on top to strong, robust espresso beneath. You never want more than 1 part froth to 2 parts espresso. The problem with froth is that you can't tell what's beneath it until you drink it up. If I slurp down the foam on top and there's not enough substance [mmmm espresso] beneath, I feel let down, and never return to that coffee bar.
There are lots of coffee bars for me to chose from, and there are lots of early stage startups for A+ potential employees and A+ investors to rally around.
When it comes to a startup, froth = buzz and press. Without a little froth, it is very difficult -- although not impossible -- to attract A+ employees and investors. I'd argue that in the case of first time entrepreneurs without a proven track record [e.g. us here at Udorse], some froth is an absolute must in the first 12 months to set a company up for long term success.
In a startup's case, the espresso, the substance = product. In the case of a consumer internet startup, the product needs to delight users [the key for the first few years], and then effectively translate this user delight into revenue while maintaining -- or increasing -- said delight. Users, and customers, don't give a damn about froth. A user doesn't care how many times you were mentioned in the WSJ or on TechCrunch. They don't care how great you look in an AmericanApparel startup logo T-Shirt. They care about the product solving a real problem and being a joy to use.
Froth / Substance is a tough balance to strike. Yet, like so many other elements of starting a business, getting this balance right is critical.
Where things go badly off the rails is when startups get drunk on their own froth and forget substance. This can happen even with really smart founders [Cuil gets picked on a lot, but it's a good example of The Affliction Know as Frothy Inebriation]. I've watched from afar as a number of startups took their froth to the bank too early without the right proportion of substance beneath. There was a ton of froth around widget companies in 2007. Now, not so much.
In some ways, "froth / substance" is a perceptions game. Today I was reminded just how easy it is to unwittingly generate the perception of too much froth at the perceived expense of substance. After a summer of 80 hr plus weeks in the office, we took 1.5 hours off last week to snap a few pictures of ourselves on the roof of our building. The view is amazing, and a friend-of-a-friend is a great photographer. It was a fun break, and we got right back to building our product after the "photo shoot" was done. I posted the pics to Facebook today, and one of the first comments I received was from an acquaintance saying "you are supposed to defer the photo shoots until after you succeed." Oh boy.
If things around Udorse get too frothy in the coming weeks and months, please tell me. I'll be grateful. We can grab a latte together, my treat.
There are lots of coffee bars for me to chose from, and there are lots of early stage startups for A+ potential employees and A+ investors to rally around.
When it comes to a startup, froth = buzz and press. Without a little froth, it is very difficult -- although not impossible -- to attract A+ employees and investors. I'd argue that in the case of first time entrepreneurs without a proven track record [e.g. us here at Udorse], some froth is an absolute must in the first 12 months to set a company up for long term success.
In a startup's case, the espresso, the substance = product. In the case of a consumer internet startup, the product needs to delight users [the key for the first few years], and then effectively translate this user delight into revenue while maintaining -- or increasing -- said delight. Users, and customers, don't give a damn about froth. A user doesn't care how many times you were mentioned in the WSJ or on TechCrunch. They don't care how great you look in an AmericanApparel startup logo T-Shirt. They care about the product solving a real problem and being a joy to use.
Froth / Substance is a tough balance to strike. Yet, like so many other elements of starting a business, getting this balance right is critical.
Where things go badly off the rails is when startups get drunk on their own froth and forget substance. This can happen even with really smart founders [Cuil gets picked on a lot, but it's a good example of The Affliction Know as Frothy Inebriation]. I've watched from afar as a number of startups took their froth to the bank too early without the right proportion of substance beneath. There was a ton of froth around widget companies in 2007. Now, not so much.
In some ways, "froth / substance" is a perceptions game. Today I was reminded just how easy it is to unwittingly generate the perception of too much froth at the perceived expense of substance. After a summer of 80 hr plus weeks in the office, we took 1.5 hours off last week to snap a few pictures of ourselves on the roof of our building. The view is amazing, and a friend-of-a-friend is a great photographer. It was a fun break, and we got right back to building our product after the "photo shoot" was done. I posted the pics to Facebook today, and one of the first comments I received was from an acquaintance saying "you are supposed to defer the photo shoots until after you succeed." Oh boy.
If things around Udorse get too frothy in the coming weeks and months, please tell me. I'll be grateful. We can grab a latte together, my treat.
8/12/2009
Love your brand? Set it free.
The holy grail of marketing is for a brand to become part of the zeitgeist; for people to adopt it as shorthand for something they want to say about themselves but don’t know how to articulate. The brands that have crossed this synapse form something of a visual language in which things, not words, are the units of self-expression. It’s about what the product means, not what it does.
In a post-digital world where nearly everything that brand managers once thought true is now false, the equation for brand transcendence into this rarified universe has remained reassuringly familiar, if increasingly difficult to pull of; holistic marketing that breaks through the clutter.
Those brands that today exist as shorthand – from Polo Ralph Lauren (WASP perfection) to John Deere (rural masculinity) to Obama (progressive change) – did not get there by accident. Their ascent began with someone who fervently believed Product X ought to become Symbol Y within Target Market Z. The visionary then rallied the right team and resources to execute a brilliant campaign that made people believe X really does mean Y.
The paradox is that once a brand becomes part of the language, the very people who gave it meaning – the visionaries, the managers -- are disempowered from managing it. The users define the lingua franca which itself will evolve over time in use. Until the twentieth century, “branding” involved only a hot poker and a scared (and scarred) cow. A language is not a closed system.
Just when your brand finally becomes everything you tirelessly worked for it to be, it slips from your grasp.
You’ve lost control; whether you like it or not.
In a post-digital world where nearly everything that brand managers once thought true is now false, the equation for brand transcendence into this rarified universe has remained reassuringly familiar, if increasingly difficult to pull of; holistic marketing that breaks through the clutter.
Those brands that today exist as shorthand – from Polo Ralph Lauren (WASP perfection) to John Deere (rural masculinity) to Obama (progressive change) – did not get there by accident. Their ascent began with someone who fervently believed Product X ought to become Symbol Y within Target Market Z. The visionary then rallied the right team and resources to execute a brilliant campaign that made people believe X really does mean Y.
The paradox is that once a brand becomes part of the language, the very people who gave it meaning – the visionaries, the managers -- are disempowered from managing it. The users define the lingua franca which itself will evolve over time in use. Until the twentieth century, “branding” involved only a hot poker and a scared (and scarred) cow. A language is not a closed system.
Just when your brand finally becomes everything you tirelessly worked for it to be, it slips from your grasp.
You’ve lost control; whether you like it or not.
7/22/2009
The $900 Million HR Department
Amazon has entered into a deal to acquire Zappos for around $928 Million dollars worth of AMZN stock. Zappos is an online shoe store with an extraordinary corporate culture. I'd venture to say that Amazon is paying about $28 Million for the online shoe store, and $900 Million for it's corporate culture.At most companies, corporate culture is the domain of the HR department, where it exists as a muddled milieu of mission statements and handbooks that nobody reads. In contrast, CEO Tony Hsieh turned all of Zappos into a fantastical, Willy Wonka-esque HR experimentation lab.
Udorse has no qualms about shamelessly stealing some of the Zappos HR Lab inventions as we scale up. One we've already adopted is what we're terming "Ultra High Touch Hiring." We proactively identify specific awesome people we want to hire, and then go after them with everything we've got. In our 1.5 months of existence, this has included flying across the country to hang out over coffee with strong candidates, scouring all our networks for leads, and donating some solid coin to charity [as referral bonuses]. So far, it's working. Some other companies that seem to do Ultra High Touch Hiring [UHTH] really well include Rapleaf, and my former employer Clarium.
I posit that Bezos is far more interested in Zappos the HR Experimentation Lab than he is in Zappos the Shoe Store [though there are obvious synergies between Zappos and Amazon's Endless.com]. Hsieh's Ninja HR skills injected about $900 Million incremental value into a company that otherwise would have been entirely normal. Kudos.
[Special thanks to my business partner Trevor, who inspired this post]
7/19/2009
Hopefully this isn't a contrarian indicator...
Recently, I had to make some last minute copies of a bizdev presentation for Udorse. Since I've tired of the generally surly copy attendants at FedEx, I decided to give Staples Copy Center a try. I dropped my disk off, went around the corner for a coffee, and a few minutes later strolled back for pick up.
Instead of the usual grunting and groaning I'd been met with on previous copying excursions to my local FedEx, the staff at Staples had ear to ear grins when I walked back in.
One of them, a guy around my age, was holding up a copy of our presentation in the air, and exclaimed, "YOU thought of THIS!?" It was half question, half boisterous statement.
I replied that I had awesome teammates [now four!] and we came up with the idea together.
After a spirited discussion about the product which I can't reprint here since we're in stealth mode, one of the guys, Newton, said, "This is going to change the world, bro! You guys are going to be on CNN!"
We've received encouraging feedback on what we're up to from VCs, from CMOs, from other entrepreneurs, and from friends. But there was something uniquely powerful about seeing two everyday guys with no expertise in our space and in no way connected to us react so excitedly, so joyously, to a crappy iteration of our concept brought to life in static on some powerpoint slides.
While I have to adjust for the fact that this specific Staples Copy Center was located in the heart of Hollywood [La Cienega and Burton to be precise] and therefore their enthusiasm may have been pent up residual from auditions missed and parts not won, I must admit: It felt damn good to hear.
If we ever do end up on CNN, my first shout out will be to Newton and Andre from Staples on La Cienega.
Instead of the usual grunting and groaning I'd been met with on previous copying excursions to my local FedEx, the staff at Staples had ear to ear grins when I walked back in.
One of them, a guy around my age, was holding up a copy of our presentation in the air, and exclaimed, "YOU thought of THIS!?" It was half question, half boisterous statement.
I replied that I had awesome teammates [now four!] and we came up with the idea together.
After a spirited discussion about the product which I can't reprint here since we're in stealth mode, one of the guys, Newton, said, "This is going to change the world, bro! You guys are going to be on CNN!"
We've received encouraging feedback on what we're up to from VCs, from CMOs, from other entrepreneurs, and from friends. But there was something uniquely powerful about seeing two everyday guys with no expertise in our space and in no way connected to us react so excitedly, so joyously, to a crappy iteration of our concept brought to life in static on some powerpoint slides.
While I have to adjust for the fact that this specific Staples Copy Center was located in the heart of Hollywood [La Cienega and Burton to be precise] and therefore their enthusiasm may have been pent up residual from auditions missed and parts not won, I must admit: It felt damn good to hear.
If we ever do end up on CNN, my first shout out will be to Newton and Andre from Staples on La Cienega.
7/17/2009
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