hey amber rae: Things To Do Before You Die: putting your passions first (my skillshare class) »
Disciplined dreamers all have one thing in common: A mission. The mission is often risky, unconventional, passion-driven, and tough as hell to achieve. But possible. The kind of discipline that turns a dream into a mission, and a mission into a reality, really just comes down to a process of…
2/9/11 foursquare HQ
Almost a year ago we were working crazy hours; late nights and weekend, all in preparation for SXSW 2010. The iphone app was getting its first visual overhaul, which was a pretty big deal. We had less than half a million users. There were fewer of us then, in fact I wasn’t even a full time employee yet (I was an art director at Hard Candy Shell). That didn’t happen until March 1st and I didn’t move desks until much later. One Saturday I brought my SLR into the office. It was almost 10pm and I snapped a picture of the guys working and posted it on Flickr.
What followed was a stream of documentation. From late nights, working on the weekends, hand cutting tattoos, being too big for the 5th floor, Tie Tuesdays and our eventual move to the 6th floor. But then something happened. I stopped. As our employees grew and the material on our walls became more sensitive I stopped snapping photos.
This week I decided to start again.
beautiful moment of reflection.
Sean Parker: The Social Network is a complete work of fiction
Sean Parker and Paulo Coelho‘s two man panel at DLD raised a number of interesting points about the future of content but it was Coelho’s question to Parker on his thoughts on the The Social Network, that grabbed everyone’s attention.
Parker said he enjoyed the movie, thought it was beautifully shot and had great respect for director David Fincher but, in his own words, the movie is “a complete work of fiction.”
Scenes involving drug use and Victoria Secret models?
“I wish my life was that cool.”
Parker elaborates, “The part of the movie that frustrated me most was when the character played by Justin Timberlake who just happens to have my name – writes a cheque to Eduardo who I remain in contact with and consider a friend, and throws it at his face and has him thrown out of the building. That’s just rude. I mean who would do that?”
Update: now with video, skip to 5.00 if you’re just interested in The Social Network info.
Startup School Recap
Oct 18
Yesterday I spent the day at Startup School, an annual event hosted by Y Combinator. The agenda was packed to the brim with talks from some of the most well-known founders in Silicon Valley.By the end of the day, I had the familiar sensation of thinking back to something that had happened early on in the day and feeling like it took place weeks ago. This typically happens on days when I’ve been mentally engaged for long periods of time - so it’s a Good Thing and a testament to the quality of the speakers.I found myself scribbling down some notes, which by the end of the day had spread fully into any available margin on the agenda.Rather than do a simple recap (there are a few of those already, and I recommend checking out the video clips of each talk as well), I thought I’d do my best to highlight some connections and themes that I noticed across speakers, as well as to dive into some of the topics and add some color.
Ideas versus Execution
Andy Bechtolsheim started things off and noted in a few different ways that big companies spend tons of time and money on the later stages of product development, but not as much on the idea stage. I jotted down a more colorful version of one of his points as “Throwing money at problems is LAZY. You should be throwing brains at them.”Startups tend to focus much more on this idea stage, which is good, but it’s not limited to startups. Apple is an example of a company who spends comparatively little on R&D but understands that you need to throw brains at this early stage in order to succeed.Two speakers later inadvertently dished out some related pragmatic advice. We heard from Linus Pauling (via Tom Preston-Warner) that “the best way to have good ideas is to have a lot of ideas.” Reid Hoffman shared his view that startups are essentially a set of hypotheses, and that you should start testing those hypotheses as soon as possible.
The Evolution of Venture Capital
Paul Graham talked about how the VC industry is changing and the “battle” between VCs and super angels. My big takeaway was that it’s actually best to focus less on these terms and more on what is actually changing about the deals. Deals are no longer easily categorized into “angel”, “Series A”, etc. as VCs are taking the best of both of the categories in order to be the most appealing to founders (awesome).Other highlights:- “It might seem like these guys are just stupid, but, well, these guys aren’t stupid, so I thought more about this”. I would do well to repeat this to myself whenever I come to that conclusion about someone or something.- We may see something with VC’s similar to what we’re seeing in journalism, where your personal brand is what matters most. I think this is very much already here.- Funding rounds are no longer all or nothing. You know exactly where you are at any point, with no chance of something big falling apart at the last second (PG related some horror stories of this happening frequently in the past). This reminds me of the difference between so-called “agile” software development and more traditional, waterfall approaches.- The question of board seats/control came up here, but I thought Ron Conway addressed it even better later when he said he had “accomplished 10 times more in a 10 minute meeting just now with Dalton than I would have over the last 4 board meetings. Board seats are a waste of time.”
No Permission Necessary
Tom Preston Warner: We didn’t need permission to build something cool. This reminded me of Lawrence Lessig’s point about the birth of Facebook and not needing permission there, either. There are some deeper philosophical underpinnings here about not needing the approval of any central authority (ahem, App Store) either.
No Guarantees, Either
Andrew Mason showed an image of the Groupon lobby, in which the Forbes cover featuring Groupon is surrounded by eight other magazine covers with the likes of MySpace, Napster, and AOL. This rang true with a few of the anecdotes in the most recent book I read - “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good” by Sarah Lacy. A meteoric rise and tons of press does not guarantee anything.
The Commencement Address
Ron Conway gave a throughly inspiring talk that is better experienced than described.
Just Add Zuck
After starting with a brilliant takedown of The Social Network (it was actually pretty diplomatic in comparison to some of Ron Conway’s remarks), Mark Zuckerberg took off zigzagging through a wide range of topics. Some highlights:- Regarding Hollywood’s need to create Facebook’s fictional raison d’être (a girl dumping him): “some people just can’t wrap their head around building something just for the sake of building something cool.”- Right now Facebook is really just looking to break even. More revenue means more spending. Why turn a profit? Right now they want to just plow any revenue right back into the company.- The first summer he came to Silicon Valley was just to “hang out” - there was no master plan. This reminded me of something that Reid Hoffman mentioned in his talk: that physically being in the Valley shows you how fast you should be moving. It’s very unsurprising that once they were here, they never went back. I think Mark recognizes this - he noted that the Valley is like “instant startup mix” since everything a startup needs is readily available. One attendee quipped: “Just add Zuck.”- Coming soon for Facebook: Build once, experience anywhere. Social applications for all platforms.- Facebook as the McKinsey of entrepreneurship. Similar to McKinsey’s program where you come to the company for two years and then go on to do incredible things elsewhere because of what you learn in those two years, you can come to Facebook and learn a ton about entrepreneurship and then go on to apply those skills. Exhibit A: Adam D’Angelo, former CTO of Facebook who founded Quora.
Birds of a Feather
As with just about any gathering, interacting with other like-minded attendees proved to be the ultimate highlight. You couldn’t throw your name tag without hitting ten interesting people to talk to. The social norms at both the reception and Startup School itself were noticeably different than anything else I’ve ever experienced. People have absolutely no fear of just walking up to a group of strangers, introducing themselves, and talking candidly about their ideas. If Y Combinator did nothing else but create this extraordinary environment once a year, that alone would be a contribution that outweighed many of the better known entities in the startup ecosystem.
Core Peer Groups: How I Found a Co-Founder, Built a Prototype, and Raised $5M in Less Than 4 Weeks »
The $5M Keg
In 2007 I was 23 years old, working full time as a product manager at ZoomInfo while moonlighting on a number of entrepreneurial side projects. I had previously started a few companies with angel funding and a couple small exits, but certainly nothing of scale. In a whirlwind of a month, all of that changed based on an inebriated conversation while standing over a keg of beer. As the title of this posts suggests, this random keg conversation transformed into finding an amazing technical co-founder [1], building a prototype, and raising $5M dollars in VC funding. These major events that typically take months (sometimes years), happened in less than 4 weeks. [2]
While I don’t consider these items as the definition of startup “success,” [3] it does represent a period of my life where I made a giant leap in progress on my professional career and passion. Consequently, I have invested a considerable amount of time thinking about what caused this leap of progress and if they can be recreated. What I found isn’t a short answer, quick fix, or a hack to starting a company and raising money. Rather an answer that if we invest the time in, will lead to progress in our personal and professional goals that is unachievable through other common avenues.
Following Success
Many entrepreneurs (including myself) spend time following and reading other successful entrepreneurs. Whether it’s countless business books, blogs, or Quora, there never seems to be a shortage of content of someone telling their success story and how they got there. We try to emulate aspects of these success stories in our own life. However, most success stories are told in hindsight with a predefined ending in mind. In an effort to tell a good story, they often gloss over the real learning experiences, such as near death experiences, failures, and moments of luck. We can find great inspiration in stories like these, but we will never find the answers to our entrepreneurial challenges.
Workaholics
While some have their head in a book, others just have their head down. It is easy to think that the more hours you put in the more progress you will make, but this leads us to incremental and linear progress, when we need to be on an exponential path. Ultimately, the progress produced by working harder is limited by the hours in the day and the capacity of the human body. The entrepreneurs who brag of 100+ hour work weeks, are also the entrepreneurs that burn out the fastest.
Networking
For every entrepreneur with their head down, there is another competing in an endless of game of “Who can collect the most business cards.” It’s not what you know. It’s who you know. Right? While it is great to have a large rolodex, these types of relationships are extremely limited. You may get introductions and other light help from these relationships, but when you or your business faces real challenges and problems, are these going to be the people that are able to help? Most likely not. As a result, a large network of light relationships leaves us feeling like something is missing.
Mentors
In addition to a large network, every successful entrepreneur has great mentors in their life, but this is even limited. A mentor relationship is typically one sided. The flow and balance of knowledge and experience is heavily weighted in one direction and we become limited to the Mentor’s available time and generosity.
Linear Progress vs “Scale”
The startup world talks about how startups and their business models need to “scale.” “Scale” is depicted by the typical “up and to the right graph” where the return on investment is exponential, not linear. Similarly, our path to success requires exponential personal progress where every unit of investment we put in, we are getting more then one unit of return. All of the activities described above share the same limitation. They lead to linear progress, not exponential.
“By Our Powers Combined…”
If all of these avenues are limited, what was it that lead to my whirlwind of 4 weeks in 2007? Six months before starting Viximo I was lucky enough be one of the original members of
Betahouse, the first ever co-working space for technology entrepreneurs in Boston [4]. It was a diverse group of individuals who were each working on our own projects, but there was no hesitation to collaborate and overcome problems on each others projects. We were invested in seeing each other succeed. Everything that happened in the early days of Viximo I can credit to Betahouse. The original idea was formed by Greg Gibson, another Viximo co-founder, and myself. Betahouse member, Dan Choi, built the early prototype of Viximo, and my technical co-founder, Sean Lindsay, was introduced to me by another Betahouse member. The funding came from VC’s within the network of Betahouse members. Oh, and that famous keg conversation? It was at a Betahouse party. It wasn’t the skills, network, mentors, or great beer selection from Betahouse that was the catalyst to this leap in progress. The catalyst was the relationships between members of the group. At the time, Betahouse was the beginning of my first Core Peer Group.
Core groups are composed of a small set of exclusive relationships that provide unfiltered, honest, and deeply invested relationships. Core groups become so invested in each other that a positive feedback loop occurs. As one-person gains success, so do the others. They build off of each other’s knowledge, networks, and brands, leading to exponential progress. As a result, Core groups can help achieve things that an entrepreneur can’t on his own, producing results unattainable with the largest network or list of mentors.
One of the most widely known examples of a core group is the “Paypal Mafia
.” These early members of Paypal have continually invested in and alongside each other. Post PayPal they have gone on to found (with each others help) companies like YouTube, LinkedIn, Slide, and Yelp. Most attribute the ongoing success of the PayPal Mafia to the success of PayPal; however, the reason they are successful in the first place is because of each other.
Changing The Economics For Entrepreneurs and a Tech Community
The concept of core groups for personal growth isn’t new. Multiple books have been written about the subject including “
Who’s Got Your Back” by Keith Ferrazzi, “Vital Friends” by Tom Rath, and “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. I am realizing the impact that these types of groups can have for early stage entrepreneurs, and furthermore, a startup community as a whole. Yet, core groups don’t get as much attention as they should.
The books about core groups discuss high level effects such as personal accountability, motivation, and achieving your life goals. Betahouse and other experiences have shown me that core groups also have very practical effects for early stage startups. They help raise funding faster, find co-founders and early employees, and acquire your early customers. These are often considered the toughest items in starting a company. As core groups help you increase these components, it can increase the probability of success, and therefore the economics of entrepreneurship.
As exemplified by the PayPal Mafia, the effects of core groups impact more than just individuals of the group. The benefits created overflow and become a cornerstone of a successful community. As the PayPal Mafia continues to invest in each other, their success helps fuel the entire technology community; creating a new breed of entrepreneurs, angel investors, and ultimately core groups.
Core groups have substantial impact, but they aren’t easy to build. They require a significant time investment. The people, elements, and expectations are a unique combination of four principles that form an unstoppable force:
Deep Relationships
Core groups can’t exist without deep relationships between each of its members. These are relationships that go well beyond your average professional relationship or even friendship. It’s a unified bond with one common goal: Excellence.
These relationships aren’t built over coffee, lunch, or networking events. They are built over repeated interactions with each other within, and well outside of the professional context. They take time and investment in each other.
When interacting with people in our network, we often discuss what we want to achieve. In core groups, the conversation is focused on why we want to achieve these goals. Knowing why requires understanding someone’s motivations, personal history, family background, and impactful life events. Knowing why leads to a deeper sense of investment in each other and paves a clearer path to actually achieving those goals.
Any path to great achievement isn’t easy as it faces great challenges and failures along the way. While it is difficult to discuss these things, they contain the largest opportunity for progress. With deep relationships, we can openly admit our challenges, weaknesses, and failures and quickly get on the road to growth.
Brutal Honesty
Oddly, we tend to lie to ourselves more than anyone else in our lives. It is extremely difficult to be brutally honest with ourselves. Much of the time what we think is the truth is just emotional rationalizations. We’re human. Everything we do, especially in startups, contains components of emotional investment. But, emotional investment is not rational investment.
One of the golden rules in sports gambling is to never bet on your favorite teams. You know the most about that team so theory should have it you have the best chance of winning with that team. But too often the emotional stake skews your decision making ability. We also see this in romantic relationships. We’ve all had that “friend” in a detrimental relationship who ends up rationalizing the relationship for longer then they should. Emotional investment once again skews are ability to see the truth.
Furthermore, the people that we typically go to for advice in our lives aren’t able to provide us with brutal honesty. Parents, siblings, friends, advisors, investors. Most of the time they aren’t knowledgeable enough about our specific goals to truly help. Even if they are, their opinions and advice are biased with their personal incentives. While they have good intentions, then subconsciously push you in the right direction for them, not the right directions for you. [5]
We avoid brutal honesty with ourselves and others because it’s uncomfortable. But the truth isn’t going anywhere. If you turn your back to it, it will bite you in the ass. Avoid it, and it will surface eventually. Accept the truth, and you can start to move forward.
The deep relationships between members of core group allow us to be brutally honest with each other. We can remove the filter that prevents us from saying what we really think because we can challenge each other with out fear of alienating others. With brutal honesty, interactions become more blunt and genuine. We can get to the core of issues much quicker and focus on solutions. We push each other to the max and keep each other on course for what truly matters. As a result, real progress is made quicker then you could ever make it before.
Peers
As you search for your core group, it is easy to become engrossed with brand name individuals or those that have had more success. Most assume a positive correlation between how successful a person has been and how much they can help you.
However, success is a large misleading indicator of one’s ability to help you. In hindsight, people tend to take more credit for success than is actually due. There are a lot of factors that go into being successful, one of them being luck, whether they admit or not. Most commonly, those that have been successful in the past aren’t in touch with the current challenges you will face in today’s rapidly changing market.
We underestimate what we can learn from our peers. The path to success is one giant obstacle course. Just like an obstacle course, those that are at a similar point on the obstacle course are in a much better position to help you than those already at the end. The power of core groups is when members can all help and challenge each other as equals; it leads to deeper investment and relationships in each other.
When we see previously successful people achieve something new we tend to attribute this achievement to something we don’t have ourselves. But when you see a peer who is on the same playing field as you overcome a challenge and achieve something, we have no excuses for why we can’t do the same. It makes us more aware of what is possible and motivates us forward.
Diversity
We naturally gravitate towards building deep relationships with those that are similar to ourselves. We do this because it’s easier. While its easier, these aren’t the relationships that will challenge us the most. We end up doing the same things, having the same conversations, and getting opinions too close to our own. Einstein summed the result of this by saying, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.”
Core groups thrive on diversity of skill sets between its members. It isn’t about surrounding ourselves with people smarter than us, it is about finding people who are smarter than us in different areas. This gives us the opportunity to invest in our own strengths, yet fill holes where we are weak. Trying to be strong in every skill set on our own just leads to mediocrity.
Those with different skill sets have a different perspective of the world. They analyze and approach problems from a very different direction then we do; as a result, they often end up at a solution that we would never come to on our own. We typically attribute this to someone “thinking outside of the box,” but in reality a person is just approaching a problem from the same lens they always do. It is just different from our own.
I have benefited from having a great professional network and personal mentors through out my professional path, but as I wrote this post, I discovered that I could tie every period where I made giant leaps in progress, to the fundamentals of Core groups. As for what happened after that 4 weeks, Viximo quickly out grew the space available at Betahouse so we had to move out. Viximo is now about 30 employees and one of the premier publishers in the social game industry. Nevertheless we have never forgotten our roots, and as a result have housed numerous startups within our office space. Betahouse lived on for a few years and went through various evolutions through the leadership of Jon Pierce, but is currently on hiatus.
Beyond Betahouse I have continued to facilitate the strengths of core groups through organizations such as PopSignal[6] and ReCatalyze[7]. I truly believe the next great companies and entrepreneurs will be born from core groups. The closer we are to having the deep, honest and diverse peer group relationships, the closer we are to building the most successful and innovative companies of our time.
———
Thanks to members of my own core group for reviewing and inspiring this post. Specifically Ariel Diaz and David Kadavy. Also, a special thanks to Antonio Rodriguez for contributing his thoughts to the subject.
—————-Footnotes—————-
[1] That amazing technical co-founder is Sean Lindsay, who beyond Viximo, has also established Founders Mentors.
[2] Success will only be determined over the long term of the company.
[3] Raising that much money, that early is something I don’t recommend to other entrepreneurs. Another day, another blog post.
[4] Other original members included Jon Pierce, Greg Gibson, Brian Del Vechio, Dan Choi, and more. Betahouse back then was very different to what has become the norm for co-working spaces today: non collaborative desk filling environments.
[5] Parenthood is a perfect example of this. So many kids end up being exact replicas of their parents, rather then their own person.
[6] PopSignal is an invite only networking group created by myself and Jay Meattle. Every couple months we invite a group of core members who all get +1’s. This core group acts as a signal to noise ratio. The events have lead to co-founders finding each other, companies being funded, quality partnerships, and numerous relationships built.
[7] ReCatalyze is still in the experimentation phase, but details will be released soon.
Trevor Owens: Common Mistakes at #LSMsf »
Congrats to our three winners at Lean Startup Machine San Francisco! These three teams rocked it and came up with awesome products. One even made money!
As a postmortem I thought I would go over some of the mistakes teams made as it’s our goal in future events to have every team perform at the…
Trevor Owens: What I would like to see in LSM presentations »
The purpose of LSM is to learn how to build & to actually build learning startups. I would like to see the presentations framed with this goal in mind.
1. Chronology
- I woud like to see how things unfolded throughout the weekend, a narrative would be most effective here.
- How did the team…
Apple releases iOS 4.3 to developers. Be excited, it has a basketfull of new features:
- Airplay for your your apps.
Pre-4.3, only Apple apps could use Airplay to push videos to your Apple TV. In a post 4.3 world, you’ll be pushing your favourite Hulu shows to your big screen and loving it.- 4 and 5 finger multi-touch gestures for the iPad.
Swipe up to return to the home screen; swipe left and right to switch apps; swipe up and down to show/hide the task bar.- Personal hotspot.
Share your data connection with up to five other devices. This is carrier specific; if your carrier don’t enable it, it isn’t going to work. AT&T are said to be ‘toying’ with the idea. Um. Okay.
DESIGN + JQUERY + DOPE
(via Josh Horn)
London’s @DesignMuseum has two wonderful exhibits at the moment, both beautifully curated: John Pawson Plain Space, and Drawing Fashion
Time’s a wasting - don’t talk about wanting to do something, just start doing it.
- Garrett Murray
DESIGN + IDENTITY + DOPENESS
DESIGN + TYPE + IDENTITY: Holy crap, this work is hot.
“i found the only way around a problem is to make space for solutions. so today, i made a new rule for myself - if you can list it, you can solve it. i realised most of the time a problem isn’t really a problem, its just insecurities that we have about us, people around us and sometimes circumstances. i will focus on what matters now and leave the rest to sort itself out over time. like relationships. you can’t force a solution. you can however stop complaining and act or shut up.”
