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The Illusion of the End

December 4th, 2009
Jean Baudrillard in 2004
Image via Wikipedia

“We have the particle accelerator that has smashed the referential orbit of things once and for all.” – Jean Baudrillard

Fyi, don’t read this if you are in the mood for light reading.

It seems that late night pondering of the real time economy has  sparked a train of philosophical thought in me lately. Maybe it’s that the holidays and a new y ear are coming up, or maybe it’s that working at a startup is always very transitory, but those thoughts come a rumbling. Information is flowing faster and faster, and the modes and methods of communication have been producing more data than we know what to do with. Information is produced, then copied  and transformed (or transmogrified for Calvin and Hobbes fans) ad nauseum – copies of copies of copies.

Jean Baudrillard, the French “postmodern” philosopher has been truly inspirational on the subject, and while his attitudes are more or less deterministic and provide little alternative, I think they are worth delving into. Thus, I present the 3 metaphors of information and significance:

  1. Physics Metaphor #1 – The significance and meaning of data are masses with gravitational weight- the faster that new information revolves around these masses, the quicker it reaches it’s escape velocity, and flings from orbit, decoupling data from meaning.
  2. Physics Metaphor #2- Data itself is a mass, and the more data that’s available, the “heavier” it all becomes – too much data means and incredibly dense mass which draws everything to a halt (much like a black hole bending and slowing down time).
  3. Music metaphor- We are obsessed with “high fidelity”, replicating sound to replace the original. Musicality replaces music as we push towards this end, as we fiddle with amplifiers, special effects, reverb and the like. The same occurs with television and magazines as we have post-production effects changing the nature of history. Magazines use photoshop to touch up models to make them more real, or add smoke to make a fire more gruesome. Television adds sound effects, and declares imaginary wars using exciting graphics on terrorism, liberalism, conservatism, etc.

So what does Jean have to say about all of this? What do we need?

“A degree of slowness (that is, a certain speed, but not too much), a degree of distance, but not too much, and a degree of liberation (an energy for rupture and change), but not too much, are needed to bring about the kind of condensation or significant cystallization of events we call history, the kind of coherent unfolding of causes and effects we call reality [le reel]“.

Or to translate this to the real time economy, we need more filters. Systems that create information are adding to the problem, not aiding it. The solution is a way to limit our information, give us distance, and give us depth.

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Venture Capital Consulting

November 23rd, 2009

About a week ago, I had the distinct pleasure of meeting with the charming Liz Knopf of OpenView Partners. We met for a drink and she was kind enough to enlighten me on how OpenView was revolutionizing the venture scene.

OpenView, founded in 2006 and on it’s 2nd fund, typically only invests in “expansion stage” software companies that are making about 500k per quarter and growing…and growing fast. Obviously these companies have achieved product/market fit and are no longer floundering to find their place in the business world – they just need to aggressively expand, something which takes a significant amount of dinero. Because these companies have found their market, and have found a repeatable sales cycle, the amount of inherent risk is incredibly limited compared to other startups. The risk that remains is operational, and it is a risk that OpenView seriously attempts to mitigate by providing strategic consulting to their investments. In fact, Liz goes so far as to say that OpenView isn’t a venture capital firm but rather a consulting firm that makes it’s money through capital gains.

It’s nice to see a firm that has this kind of culture.

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DartBoston Panel

November 6th, 2009

Last night, I had the fortunate experience of appearing on my first panel at DartBoston.  We were picking apart the startup RiotVine, who was kind enough to fall victim to our snarls. I had the pleasure of sitting next to some very interesting minds, notably (going from right to left) our graceful moderator Cort Johnson, Nick the ultranurd, Vadim the microfinance revolutionary, and then me, the babbling incoherent idiot. Luckily, Nick and Vadim carried the show, and I, by association was made to look relatively cogent. If you’d like to take a gander, check it out below. It’s about 30 minutes of high packed action.

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The Fun Theory

November 4th, 2009

I’ve been noticing a trend recently among car makers who are implementing game play in their products to change otherwise ingrained behavioral patterns. Note the following sequence of events:

First, a week ago, I was forwarded an email from my father which had a link to The Fun Theory. This is VW’s site wherein they try to get people to recycle more, or clean up their refuse, or even, god forbid, take the stairs occasionally. Here are the 3 videos from their site which are all delightfully addictive.

Next, I was watching TV when I spotted a commercial featuring a the new 2010 Ford Fusion. I’m unable to find the commercial, but below is a nice demo video. Notice around 45 seconds in, how increasing your MPG allows you to magically grow a tree or a bush or whatever that plant is. If driven in Florida, it will even sprout oranges.

The last component of this trifecta appeared before me in a brief apparition last night when I saw a commercial for the new Honda Insight Hybrid with “Eco” mode. The Honda site has a nice, albeit un-embeddable video which can be viewed here. Honda goes a few steps further than Ford and will notify you via 3 different meters how efficiently you are driving: 1) a color gradient which shifts from  green to blue as your MPG decreases, 2) a bar graph which will tell you if you are braking too hard or accelerating too quickly, and 3) surprise, surprise, plants that bloom when you are being efficient.

The true testament to whether these are gimmicks or  not will be whether or not the 2011 editions of these cars will have the same notifications. I personally think that Honda has the right idea with the acceleration/braking bar graph and the color gradient…I just think a plant growing is too cheesy to be effective. Honestly, a better implementation of game play would be to set up target MPG’s and then see if you can surpass it with each tank of gas. Ford/Honda could even have a website dedicated to high scores – it would be an arcade game for adults! Let’s be honest, who wouldn’t drive like an 80 year old woman with cataracts in order to conserve gas then?

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Weird Dream

November 3rd, 2009

**Curious readers** This is not turning into a random dream blog where I rant about my latest night time hallucinations, commenting on how I flew around like a bumblebee and then transmogrified into yogurt which was somehow being eaten by my roommate. It was, however, investing related so  I thought I would talk about it.

Bowl of clouds
Image by kevindooley via Flickr

Last night, I had a dream where I was going through my Google Reader catching up on my favorite entrepreneurs, VCs and randoms.  While catching up on a local venture capitalist by the name of Bijan Sabet, the post count kept scrolling out of control. First 10 posts to read, then 50, then a 1000.  I couldn’t keep up! I couldn’t read fast enough! The dream ended in a very bizarre way which doesn’t actually make any sense, and at the time I didn’t really think anything of it. That is, until I got to the office, started catching up a bit and saw that Bijan’s post today was entitled, “Dream“.

I love coincidences.

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Quick update to the shoe shine survey

November 3rd, 2009
Shoe polish with a shoe brush.
Image via Wikipedia

I wanted to post a quick update to the shoe shine survey I had up here a few weeks ago.  I didn’t get a huge number of takers, but I did manage to convince about 20 of you or so to respond. Here are the results:

  • About 60% of you wear dress shoes multiple times per week with 30% wearing them once per month. The rest were split between never and once a week. This seems to make intuitive sense- your job either requires you dress up or doesn’t.
  • 70% NEVER shine your shoes. 20% shine about once per month and 10% multiple times per week.
  • The reasons for not shining were fairly even across the board (except nobody thought it took too much time). The most popular responses were that you either didn’t have the materials or didn’t know how to shine your shoes.

The moral of the story is that people are wearing dress shoes but not polishing them. You slackers, you.

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Getting drunk with Venture Capitalists

October 27th, 2009
Wine and cheese tasting @ Strewn Winery
Image by Vincent Ma via Flickr

Last Thursday, I had the immense pleasure of doing a little drinky drinky with some of the financial titans of industry at the 4th annual New England VC Wine Tasting. Dana Samuels of TUGG was kind enough to provide me with a complimentary ticket (they normally range about $150), so I was much obliged.

Luckily, I happened to know quite a few people who showed up. There were about 6 people from fama PR whom it was awesome to see (Keri, Keith, Marta, Whitney, Zach, and Liz). If you don’t know fama and you’re in the tech inudstry, you should.  I also ran into Healy Jones of Startable fame, and the new VP Marketing at Pixily, who’s one of my more recent acquaintances.

From there I met an absolute hodge podge of characters ranging from VC’s who were bidding on $5000 dollar cases of wine, to a clean tech entrepreneur who had just sold his $200 million dollar business and miraculously had the chutzpah and energy of an 18 year old. In all, everyone was rather convivial and jolly, no doubt lubricated by the libations, and making random introductions was hardly a problem.

By the end of the night, I had probably consumed about 8 to 10 glasses of wine with nary a bite of food, so my memory gets a bit hazy,and as such, my desire to network diminished accordingly. All in all, it was a phenomenal time and a rather enjoyable experience…I hope to be at the next event. Good luck to Dana Samuels, Jeff Fagnan, et al. and of their aspirations with TUGG.

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Posted in Boston, Business, Finance, Startup

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How NOT to pitch your business

October 15th, 2009

A couple months ago, I was approached by an acquaintance who was expanding his business to the East Coast and was curious if I’d like to earn some extra money by devoting a bit of time to it. I said I was interested and asked if he would just forward on some information. He politely declined, and said for competitive reasons he would prefer to speak on the phone.  It felt rather odd to me, but I agreed and gave him my phone number.

We missed each other a few times over the last few months – mostly my fault due to being ridiculously busy, but we finally connected last week. We caught up a bit on our personal lives and my having moved from Kansas City to Boston, and then started talking shop. What ensued was a rather frustrating conversation from my end, that I’m fairly certain was some sort of scam.

Me: “So what does your business do?”

Him: “We provide social media marketing assistance for companies.”

“Oh, okay, so what does that mean?”

“Well, you know how Facebook works with advertising affiliates? Like, Mark Zuckerburg will partner with companies to provide them marketing.”

“Oh, so you help companies with their social media advertising?”

“Well, not really, we help them get involved with social media”

“I’m still confused”

“Well, we work with companies like: Big Company 1 and Big Company 2.”

“Okay…so for instance, with Big Company 1, what do you do?”

“Well, I could talk about this for hours, but I just need to know if you are interested. If you aren’t interested, its probably not worth going into.”

At that point, I politely declined. I’m HEAVILY involved in social media, advertising, SEO and SEM. It’s my job to be…yet I have no earthly idea what he was talking about, and he couldn’t provide one cogent example of what his company does.   This is a crucial example of why a startup needs to have a succinct elevator pitch that explains your company and its benefits in a minute or less.  And per my post yesterday about refining your market message, if you can’t answer the question “Who cares?” then your job isn’t done.

[image courtesy of jepoirrier]

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Best advice I’ve read in a while

October 14th, 2009

Best advice I’ve read in a while: http://venturehacks.com/articles/new-york-meetup-awesome

1. Build a minimum viable product. If your market is big enough, it doesn’t matter if you piss of 10,000 customers along the way with a lame minimum viable product. If you’re really worried about your brand, market your product under a different name.

2. Get the MVP into the hands of few people. Use Twitter updates, Facebook updates, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, standing on a corner, blogging, etc. to get your product in front of people and see if they make it to the finish line. If you can’t find 100 customers this way, it won’t do you any good to be on the front page of the New York Times.

3. Iterate your product with these customers through surveys and interviews, until they think your product is a must-have. Yes, they might not embrace your product if you show them something too early —that’s fine. Don’t fear the false negative — just build the next version and test it again.

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A new kind of insurance

August 16th, 2009

First and foremost, I apologize for this post. It’s going to be a bit rambly, and a bit disjointed, but tough…deal with it.

Since Obama has announced his health care plan, I’ve been considering some of the bill’s various implications. I assure you, I have no earthly idea whether or not it’s a good idea as the health care system is far too complicated for me to adequately understand or appreciate. All I know is 2 things, and the rest is just over my head:

  1. The system is far too costly as is and health care costs are growing enormously fast. The National Coalition on Health Care has estimated that health care spending will grow to 20% of GDP over the next decade.
  2. Any system where there is a decoupling between the beneficiary and the payer seems to be odd to me. When I go to the doctor, I pay $20 for my copay, but I have no idea how much he charges my insurance company, but when I go to a restaurant, I know exactly how much I’m paying for my steak.

Anyways, back to Obama. What he has laid out is essentially a POLR (provider of last resort) for insurance. I’ve been playing devils advocate over the last week or so in my random musings on the “public option”, which is always great fun. So here’s what I’ve been thinking: if I’m the CEO of an insurance company, and I see the government is a “come one, come all” kind of insurance policy, why don’t I just start denying all of my high-risk policy holders coverage? Why don’t I just cancel every obese/elderly/smoking individuals policy and have them go to the government for insurance? I could effectively lower my rates for all of my low risk policy holders, competing even more effectively with the government while the government would likely have to raise their own rates. Everyone still has coverage, so this is hardly an “evil” plan, but it does make me wonder if this is more efficient.

It also has led me to wonder why insurance companies don’t do this now, which is why I asked my much more intelligent and better educated girlfriend for help (it helps that she has an advanced degree in economics). While she doesn’t have any experience with the health care industry per se, she postulated that because an insurance company has a greater portfolio of risky policy holders (which allows them to raise the rates for everyone including non-risky policy holders), this more than makes up for the greater cost of the risky policy holders.  It’s an interesting thought, and one that certainly could be right, but this led me to start thinking about Geico (not as random as a diversion as you might think).

Geico got its start as a niche auto insurance company, offering insurance policies only to risk averse government employees (who are statistically less likely to get into accidents). Because they had a less risky portfolio, Geico was able to dramatically lower its rates, and cleaned up the competition. So why is there no Geico health insurance for low risk, young, active, healthy adults? What are your guys thoughts? What am I missing?

[image compliments of thinkpanama]

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