Category Archives: startups

Hello, Venture News

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I have to admit it: I’m a news junky. I’m addicted to my Twitter timeline, RSS feed, and often frequent the comment sections of Hacker News, Quora, Reddit, AVC, etc. I love it all. There is so much great stuff out there.

My news habit comes with great rewards. Building startups is such a difficult task, it helps to be a sponge and soak in the knowledge people are sharing across product, design, development, growth, marketing, community, data science, analytics, industry trends, etc. Everyday, I come across awesome stuff that alters my perspective, teaches me valuable lessons, or even solves my current problem of the day!

The only problem is that all of this requires a significant amount of time and effort. Let’s take Twitter as an example. It takes time to learn how Twitter works. It takes time to find the right people to follow, as well as discover who to unfollow. And, it takes time to sift through 1000+ tweets for the golden nuggets that invariably appear. RSS, HN, Quora, and Reddit are different, but time consuming in other ways.

So how do I keep the rewards, but save myself the time and effort?

A simple experiment.

This summer, while rifling through ideas and hacks with my friend Leslie in the Pejman Mar Summer Founders Program, we stumbled across something. Among the hacks was a little tool to discover frequently-shared links by 300+ venture capitalists on Twitter. It started super simple, but proved useful as an instant way to capture the daily conversation in the venture capital community.

We hopped into Gmail and sent the top 10 links of the day to two people at Pejman Mar. The next day, after positive reviews from our sample set of two, we created a Mailchimp account and began adding more friends, colleagues, and advisors to the mailing list. After playing around with so many ideas, it was cool to be able to send out this daily email that people we knew enjoyed.

In the following days and weeks, people began trickling into the mailing list from word of mouth. Our friends continually let us know that they loved the email, and wanted us to keep them coming. New users would email in to tell us how it covered much of their startup news needs. Mailchimp analytics showed us awesome email open and click through rates.

Great! So, why not make this the start of a thing?

Venture News

We registered a domain at http://www.venturenews.co, and put up our mailing list signup, as well as a live version of the links. Soon after that, Chris Messina posted Venture News to Product Hunt, which was relatively well received.

What now? Leslie and I are experimenting on the newsletter and on the website. We’re balancing new product features, talking with subscribers, and developing a broader vision for the future. It’s exciting, and feels like the seed of a news experience that includes just the gold nuggets without requiring much time or effort.

If you’re interested in a quick fix of startup news with minimum hassle, please give Venture News a spin. Even better, sign up for the mailing list to get a curated daily digest delivered directly to your inbox. Hopefully we can help simplify your daily tech startup news habit 🙂

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If Twitter was your personal newspaper

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Since Twitter has gone public, we’ve frequently heard about their growth problems; in particular, their trouble converting new users into active users. These problems aren’t difficult to believe. As a new user, what do you tweet about? With zero followers, why begin tweeting? And, who do you follow? Your timeline is useless until you follow enough of the right people.

I’ve been mulling over this problem for fun, and thought I’d play armchair quarterback for a blog post.

Back to basics: what is Twitter?

First, it is important to understand the core product that is Twitter. What is it? Some might call it a social network. Others might call it a micro-blogging platform. These might have been somewhat accurate in the early years, but at scale, I believe Twitter to be something else.

Twitter is the world’s democratized newswire.

Anyone can add to the newswire by tweeting. And anyone read the newswire by following users who tweet.

From newswire to newspaper.

There’s just one problem with being the world’s newswire: most people have little to no use for a newswire.

Most people don’t create news to add to a newswire. And, most people don’t keep up with real-time news. This presents a big problem for Twitter. The only way to grow is provide value to a mass audience, and in the history of news, the newswire has never been widely used by the masses.

The good news for Twitter is that the masses do want the news: they just want an easily accessible form of the news. They want a great newspaper. Or a great news report on the TV.

If Twitter understand this, the next steps are clear: Twitter needs to become the world’s best personal newspaper.

Twitter power-users might say that Twitter is already their personal newspaper. I would be inclined to agree. I check it everyday and use it as my personal newspaper. But if that was the goal of the current product, Twitter would be doing a poor job of it.

The New York Times, Twitter style.

As a fun thought exercise, lets imagine a Twitter-like New York Times experience:

  1. A friend raves about their version of the NYT. You go online to check it out, and can’t read it.
  2. You subscribe to an empty paper, and are prompted to follow your favorite reporters and columnists.
  3. You are given a reverse-chronological feed of stories, and need to figure out what is important for yourself.

Sound like a terrible newspaper experience?

A Twitter that could be.

Fortunately, these points lead directly to product suggestions:

  1. Let us see other newspapers. If I have a friend that loves Twitter, I want to know why. The easiest way to do that is to let me see what my friend sees.
  2. Let us subscribe to someone else’s newspaper. If I think my friend’s Twitter feed is interesting, I’d like to start with it. If I’m into startups, and find that @pmarca has an interesting newspaper, I’d like to merge it into my newspaper.
  3. Tell us what matters. If there are a few important stories, tweets, or tweet-storms from the past 24 hours, I want them to be easily accessible.

And this is just the beginning; the newspaper analogy can be taken further. As an example, The New York Times has various sections including International, Technology, Weather, Sports, etc. Perhaps my personal newspaper should have sections for my interests. These might be generalized Twitter lists, or something else.

Obviously, these are high level suggestions. Designing specific mechanisms for enabling these interactions isn’t trivial. For example, suggestion 2 might change how following works on Twitter, potentially breaking Twitter’s follow limits and increasing follow spam. Suggestion 3 would change Twitter’s relationship with some apps built on top of Twitter (which has always been a shaky relationship anyways).

Twitter for non-tweeters.

In a recent interview, Dick Costolo, the CEO of Twitter, acknowledges this, saying that it is OK for users not to tweet (excerpted below).

Farhad Manjoo: Do you ever meet people who don’t use it or don’t know why they would use it? What is your pitch to them?

Dick Costolo: I meet people who way, “Oh, I don’t tweet.” I think there’s still a misconception that the reason they’d sign up is to tweet. When I meet then, I tell them, “No, you don’t have to.”

Twitter seems like they are beginning to understand the importance of the news consumption experience, although they haven’t been good getting this across, and they haven’t been good about designing for it.

There is one startup seems to get it. Their product isn’t glitzy, fast, or beautiful, but it solves a need. Nuzzel takes your Twitter account, and generates a daily newspaper of frequently shared links from the people that you follow. This is great for Twitter users who are busy and can’t keep up with the barrage of tweets in their timeline every day.

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The Nuzzel landing page

If you check out their home page (above), you’ll also see that Nuzzel lets you see the links frequently shared within other people’s newsfeeds (just like suggestion 1 earlier).

If I were Twitter, I would think about acquiring Nuzzel.

On the limits of constrained media and self expression

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After writing my last post on easing content creation, I’ve found myself repeatedly thinking about constrained media.

Here is the excerpt that got me thinking (with the most salient part of it bolded):

You can drastically simplify content creation by constraining the media format. There are many examples of this

  • Twitter limits you to 140 characters. Now you don’t need to worry about content length.
  • Tumblr makes certain types of posts super easy: photos, quotes, links, chats, audio files, and videos. You could write a long blog post, but it is easier to quickly share an image or quote that you like.
  • Pinterest and Instagram limit you to a single image, with an optional block of descriptive text.
  • Vine limits you to a six seconds of video.

The flip side of constraining the media format is that it limits self expression. Fortunately, media often has weird properties related to self expression, similar to doing arithmetic with infinity. Divide infinity by 2, and you feel like you’d have less, but you still have infinity. Divide it by 10, or 100, and you get the same thing. Media often works the same way. A blog post offers an infinite amount of self expression. An image or a 140-character tweet feels like less, but still offers infinite self expression.

If you follow this line of thought, it naturally leads to some interesting questions. Are there limits to constrained media? At what point do you lose the potential for infinite self expression?

Coincidentally, the YO app has just recently exploded and raised $1.2M. For those who haven’t seen it yet, it is a stupidly simple app: press a contact’s name, and the app will send the a push notification which says ‘YO’. Did I mention that it is stupidly simple?

Whatever you may think about it, the YO app is gaining traction and gaining in usage. And from a constrained media perspective, it is fascinating. The YO app is about constrained as you can get from media creation. It is effectively a 1-bit creation app. You either get a ‘yo’, or you don’t.

So what are the limits of self expression for a single bit of information?

It turns out that there still aren’t any limits: the potential for self expression is still infinite. Why? Because all of the context around the ‘yo’ matters: the sender, the receiver, the timing, and the situation.

A ‘yo’ could mean:

  • Yo, whats up?
  • Are you free?
  • I’m free now.
  • (from your SO) Love you — just thinking about you.
  • (from your annoying friend who send you 50 yo’s today) I’m going to continue bugging the shit out of you
  • (after a date, from a friend) How was that date last night?
  • (after a date, from the date) I had a good time. Would like to see you again.
  • (a week after a date, from the date) Why haven’t you called me back?
  • you could go on and on varying people and situations…

This is exciting.

The Internet has been around for quite a while and we are still inventing new ways to create content and express ourselves. On one end of the spectrum, we have apps like Medium and Storehouse who are letting users create elaborate stories using multimedia. At the other end of the spectrum we have apps like YO. And in between, there is a ton of possibilities.

When it comes to content and self expression, there are no limits.

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Photo credit: paintingsthatmove

Content creation for all: 8 ways to simplify online publishing

 

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The World Wide Web enables publishing at an unprecedented scale. Anyone can create content, and any piece of content can be instantaneously distributed to anyone in the world.

Pretty awesome, right?

There is just one thing: although content creation has never been easier, the number of people who create is surprisingly small. This has become known as the 1% rule: 1% of people create the content, 99% of people consume.

There isn’t anything wrong with the 1% rule, but it isn’t ideal. The web enables everyone to have a voice, yet 99% of people don’t take advantage of it. If more people created content online, we would have more shared perspectives, more communication, and in general, more people connecting over their passions and interests. You have to believe that the world would be a better place.

Content creation should be easier, and fortunately, it can be. Seemingly small product design decisions can make a big impact for encouraging content creation.

As a thought experiment, let us start with this blog post. Long form blogging turns out to be a particularly difficult form of content creation. If we study what makes this post difficult to create, we can uncover several ways to simplify and ease content creation.

 

1. Strip away identity.

If you look at the top of this blog, you’ll see my real name. Do you know how difficult it is to write under my real name? I’m afraid of publicly being wrong, sounding like an idiot, or even worse, coming off as a complete jackass.

If we separate my real identity from my online identity, writing becomes easier. I become less fearful of what others think, and may write things that I otherwise wouldn’t.

Historically, handles (or user names) have been used for anonymity. They were used back in the days of IRC and forums, and are still used today on many popular sites like Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. Handles help with anonymity, but don’t ensure it. As time goes by, users leak information which can often be pieced together. With enough time, a motivated third party may learn the real identity behind a handle.

You could go further with anonymity by dissolving the idea of an online identity. For example, Secret uses transient handles. You have an identity, but it is a weak identity, a random icon that lives within a single conversation. Or, you could go all the way and completely dissolve online identity (e.g., Startups Anonymous).

The more you strip away identity, the easier it gets to create content about anything. And the more honest people get. It isn’t surprising some of the juiciest secrets are surfaced in anonymous social networks.

 

2. Constrain the audience.

This blog is public. That means that anyone anywhere in the world can read any bit of this blog and catch me looking like an idiot. As I continue to write, the chances of looking like an idiot increases. Doesn’t sound too good, huh?

Writing for the world is hard. There are things I will publicly announce to the world on this blog or on Twitter, but it is a small subset of the things that are on my mind. If we constrain the audience to my Facebook friends, things get easier. I’m more likely to share my current status. If we limit the audience my close friends and family on Whatsapp, I may share a rumor, a racy joke, or what is actually on my mind.

Audience matters, and the more comfortable the audience is, the easier it is to create honest and authentic content.

 

3. Constrain the media format.

The content in this blog is unconstrained. A post may be of arbitrary length and include any combination of images, videos, and text.

The unconstrained nature of a blog post makes it flexible and expressive, but also brings up many questions for content creators. How long should a post be? Should I add images? How many images? Where should they be placed? What about a video? Or a GIF? Should I have split this post into two posts or leave it as one? There are many questions to ask, and each question makes it less likely that the ‘publish’ button will be pressed.

You can drastically simplify content creation by constraining the media format. There are many examples of this

  • Twitter limits you to 140 characters. Now you don’t need to worry about content length.
  • Tumblr makes certain types of posts super easy: photos, quotes, links, chats, audio files, and videos. You could write a long blog post, but it is easier to quickly share an image or quote that you like.
  • Pinterest and Instagram limit you to a single image, with an optional block of descriptive text.
  • Vine limits you to a six seconds of video.

The flip side of constraining the media format is that it limits self expression. Fortunately, media often has weird properties related to self expression, similar to doing arithmetic with infinity. Divide infinity by 2, and you feel like you’d have less, but you still have infinity. Divide it by 10, or 100, and you get the same thing. Media often works the same way. A blog post offers an infinite amount of self expression. An image or a 140-character tweet feels like less, but still offers infinite self expression.

If you can simplify the media format while still allowing for infinite self expression, it is probably a win.

 

4. Remove the feeling of permanent publishing.

Most bloggers have a complex relationship with the ‘publish’ button. I definitely do. The button is the source of accomplishment (it feels great to ship a post into the real world!), but it is also a source of stress.

Blog posts feels final in two ways.

First, publishing a blog post feels like a one-time action. Once I hit that ‘publish’ button, it gets sent out to the blogosphere to RSS, my WordPress followers, and email subscribers. Most likely, if it is going to be read, it will be read at this point. Later on, someone may stumble upon it through a Google search, but old blog posts quickly loses interest as well as discoverability on the Internet. Second, the post feels final because it kind of is final. Once it gets cached in a search engine, or archived by archive.org, it is accessible forever.

Removing the feeling of publishing makes content creation much easier, and there are several ways to do this.

The first way has already been mentioned in (2) constraining the audience. A Facebook startus or a Whatsapp message doesn’t feel like publishing because it is relatively private (compared to this blog post).

Second, you can also remove by feeling of publishing by encouraging works-in-progress. In college, I used to manually write HTML for websites. I wouldn’t have any problem leaving my work online for people to see because it was a work-in-progress. Wikis are the same way. You can easily add to them because it is expected that the content will be edited/removed at some point in the future.

Third, you can delete by design. This has become a big thing with ephemeral content. Snapchat and Frankly are two great examples here; your content lives for only a few seconds, and then it disappears. Or, it feels like it disappears. I would bet that the content lives on their servers forever, but what matters is the ephemeral feeling.

 

5. Enable references to existing work.

This post includes original content. Original content is difficult to create.

You know what is easier to create? Existing content.

It sounds a little funny, but people do this everyday sharing links on Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious. Or, sharing images on Pinterest, imgfave, weheartit, etc. Or quotes from other websites.

“Creating” such content isn’t as much creating as it is identifying with content. There is so much content out there on the web, and more gets churned out on a daily basis. While we consume existing content, it isn’t difficult to find something that we identify with and want to share.

It turns out there is an extra big benefit to sharing existing content: it is simple from an interaction standpoint. Websites have employed one-click buttons for resharing, reblogging, repinning, etc.

 

6. Add context.

This post started with an empty text input field. There was no context. Just an intimidating blank canvas.

Creating content within a vacuum is difficult. Adding context makes creation easier.

A common way to create context is to add a prompt, such as an image to caption or a URL to comment on. Creating content within a context tends to be an emotional response, a sign of agreement/disagreement, or a perspective/comment. Sites like Quora, Quibb and Reddit lets users create prompts for other users to react to. Sites like Pinterest and Tumblr let users write a note within the context of an image, video, etc.

Oftentimes, a reaction to a prompt becomes another prompt. For example, a message which requires a response. Or a comment that invites a reply.

 

7. Constrain reactions of others.

Allowing others to comment on your content can be intimidating. Unconstrained commenting allows anyone to come along and shit on your thoughts.

Because of this, it is often a good idea to constrain the reactions of others. Products do this in different ways. Quibb constrains its membership, only allowing vetted members to comment. Secret constrains comments to your friends and friends of friends, effectively removing the vast majority of trolls on the Internet. Tumblr is designed to encourage likes and doesn’t emphasize comments. Medium and many other blogging platforms require comments to be OK’ed by the original poster. Some bloggers implement a timeout functionality where the comments section for posts become closed after a fixed number of days.

Most people enjoy thoughtful comments and reactions, but this is the Internet, and there be trolls everywhere. Finding a way to limit reactions to content can be a big win.

 

8. Watch the content container.

This blog post doesn’t exist on it’s own: it lives within a blog called ‘On life and startups’.

Blogging isn’t easy. If you’ve ever started a blog, you’ll know friction involved here. There are a lot of question involved with creating a blog. Which platform should I use? What should the tagline of the blog be? Will the tagline be too restricting? Should I blog about everything on my mind, or specific topics? How often should I update the blog? What if I stop writing? What if I run out of ideas?

Giving users a single container often has these problems. For example, I have the same problems on Twitter. My twitter stream has become the startup version of Alex. I don’t share many other things on there, even though I have other interests in my life outside of startups.

One approach is to give users multiple containers. A great example is Pinterest, which gives users the ability to create multiple boards. The boards allow a user to be their full selves. They can share DIY stuff in one board, good recipes in another, and their favorite infographics in yet another board.

Another approach is to free containers from user accounts. Medium makes posts and collections feel independent. I can curate multiple collections, and my posts can be syndicated on all collections that want to contain them.

Yet another approach is to simply free content from containers. Secret does this by making each secret independent. Secrets don’t live within a user profile. And since user identities only exist within a single secret, all secrets feel independent.

It may seem like a small thing, but the relationship between the user, content, and the container makes a difference when it comes to content creation.

 

Enable content creation, change the world.

Did you notice a trend throughout this post?

Some of the largest and most successful social media sites are defined by their methods for simplifying content creation. Twitter is defined by its 140-character tweets. Pinterest is defined by allows users to curate multiple collections of images. Snapchat is defined by images that self-destruct. Medium has been purposefully vague about intentions, but it is clear that it changes the relationship between users, content, and collections.

One of the biggest promises of the web is that is allows anyone to publish. Anything that makes this process easier is a huge win for the world.

Have some other ideas on how to simplify content creation? I would love to hear them in the comments.

Better yet, build the idea and get it out there. If you discover a new way to simplify publishing, or create a new combination from the examples above, you just might change the world.

 

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Photo credit: want2scrap

Blogging everything you know

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I came across this awesome and hilarious picture today on Twitter. After laughing a bit at the picture, I immediately began thinking about blogging.

Specifically, I was thinking about bloggers in the startup world. Is it possible that with the seemingly endless supply of startup-related blog posts, the best secrets to success are still unpublished? It makes some sense, right? If you have knowledge that puts you at a competitive advantage, why would you risk that advantage by revealing it in a blog post?

My guess is that for the most part, this isn’t true in the startup world.

Founders, entrepreneurs, and VCs could write everything they know, and it probably wouldn’t hurt their chances of success when compared to others. One, startups are all different; there is no recipe for success. Two, even with the best advisors/mentors, startups still seem to have a ridiculously high failure rate. Three, most startup advice isn’t 100% right or 100% wrong. There is a gray area, and they may apply in certain situations but not in others. Four, entrepreneurs tend to be the kind of people who forge their own path. They have their own ideas, vision, and strategy. Even if provided “perfect” advice, many probably wouldn’t follow it exactly.

There is probably more to say, but you get my point.

I’m not sure how to feel about this as a blogger. It means that no matter what I write, it probably won’t hurt my chances of success. But it also means that no matter what I write, there is no guarantee that the writing will be useful to others. Chances are, what I write is flat-out wrong, or wrong for many people.

I suppose that is OK.

Earlier, I wrote about my reasons for why I write. In retrospect, I still very much agree with it.

I write for myself. I can’t guarantee that what I say is right. And I can’t guarantee it is right for the reader. But I can guarantee that the thought process is useful to myself.

Building a startup? There are no rules.

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Building a startup is tough. Because it is so hard, it makes sense for entrepreneurs, founders, and VCs to trade advice. We see advice everywhere. The blog posts. The essays. The coffee meetings. It is all useful. Yet, it kind of isn’t.

One of the things I’ve begun to realize is that there just aren’t any hard and fast rules to building a successful startup.

OK, there may be one: create value in the world which can scaled and captured.

That seems true and obvious, but unfortunately isn’t very actionable. Other than that, I’m not sure I can give you a rule which is 100% true.

You may hear that design matters, but I can point you to successful website that are ugly and janky.

You may hear that you should raise as much money as you can, but there are successful companies which have been bootstrapped.

You may hear that the Lean Startup movement is the way to go, but I am show you many of the Alexa Top Sites that didn’t follow the principles.

You might hear that you need a cofounder, but there are startups which have succeeded with a single founder.

You may hear that these accelerators and incubators are great, but many great startup successes have been built outside of these communities/ecosystems.

You may hear you should move fast and break things, but there are other successful startups that don’t seem to move fast on product at all.

You may hear about the benefits of a private beta, but other founders have found success just getting their stuff out there.

I could go on and on.

For any piece of advice, you could follow it and be successful.. or you could not follow it, and be successful.

How do you proceed?

Too much analysis results in paralysis. And, at any moment, there are a ton of decisions to make. For each one, you can deliberate and ask for advice, but at the end of the day, you have to make a decision and run with it. If it is a mistake? Change directions 😉

My current project: Soulmix

This will be my 139th blog post. That means that I’ve published 138 times while barely talking about my actual work! That isn’t so cool. In an effort to be more open, I plan to start writing more about what I am actually doing.

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Those who have been following my blog have probably seen me link to my current project Soulmix.

Soulmix beta 1.0.

I started working on Soulmix last June, and initially, it was conceived as a niche community site for sharing content related to living a good life. People would share content related to life (personal development, relationships, psychology, lifehacks, etc.), upvote the posts they liked, collect their favorite posts, and discuss within the comments.

After building the site, I beta tested it for a few months. It seemed to have potential. Return traffic was growing steadily, but slowly. I sent a weekly email newsletter curating the best posts on living a good life, and it was well received. People sent emails thanking me for it, and I could track email clicks throughout the entire week. I think if I kept pushing for another year, it could have grown into a great little community for life-related content.

Making the decision to pivot.

A few months in the beta testing, I came to two realizations:

  1. I was getting bored of it. I enjoy reading great content about life, but after a while, it gets old. I have many other interests. I found myself wanting to discover and share content related to all of my interests; not just on living a good life. In short, creating a niche content site felt too restricting for me. I strongly believe in finding founder-market fit, and that means creating a site that I personally love and want to use everyday.
  2. I realized I was building interaction mechanisms. Soulmix was conceived as a niche site, but what I was building was general interaction mechanisms. Upvoting allows masses of users to choose great content. Collections allow users to save the stuff they like. Comments let users talk about stuff. Nothing about these interactions is specific to a niche. They are general, and can be used for general content.

These realizations made the next step obvious for me. I had to broaden the scope of Soulmix, and focus on the general interaction mechanisms.

Focusing on interaction mechanisms.

Furthermore, I’ve begun to strongly believe in keeping products simple. Soulmix had content shares, upvotes, collections, and comments. That felt like too much. I decided that I could go two routes:

  1. The discussion forum route. This would include content shares, upvotes, and comments. The problem was that I couldn’t think of anything much better that Reddit. I would like the Reddit community to be slightly more friendly, but at scale, I understand why it is difficult (if not impossible) to control the Internet masses. The other problem was that historically, I haven’t been a discussion forum kind of person. I lurk, but I’ve never been a big commenter. That means I would never be the power user of a discussion forum site.
  2. The collection/curation route. This would include content shares and collections. This route seemed much more appealing for two reasons. First, the large sites in this space (Pinterest/imgfave/weheartit/etc.) are mostly image collection sites. As much as I like images, much of the content that I consume are links, not images. This leaves me space for building something that I might love. Second, I love the passive social model behind these types of sites. It lets you interact with others through shared interests, but I don’t need to actively think about (or inject myself into) conversations.

So, about a month ago, I decided to pivot. The next version of Soulmix would be a general site for collecting stuff I liked online.

Soulmix beta 2.0.

This brings me to what I’m working on now: the new and improved Soulmix!

Soulmix is now an online tool for organizing and sharing the stuff you love on the web.

Your favorite images, links, and videos are typically scattered all across the web. Soulmix lets you take them all, and organize them into remixes (or collections). It gives you your corner of the web where you can collect and share the stuff you like. You can also follow others users (or their remixes) to discover new great stuff.

Sound good?

Soulmix recently became functional again and is in private beta. If you’d like to check it out, just request an invite *nudge nudge* 🙂

I’ll be letting people into the beta with time, and if you join, I would love to hear your thoughts!

Not yet a good bet

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Yesterday, I wrote about my new goal to be more open on this blog. This means being more personal about my own strengths/weaknesses, delving deeper into my own psyche, and writing more about what I am actually doing on my enterpreneurial journey. It will make blogging more cathartic for myself, and should hopefully make a better read for you.

Here is an example of what I mean.

Earlier, I wrote about securing investment from others. The main idea behind that post was that in order to secure investment from others, you must seem like a good bet.  The problem is that you won’t always seem like a good investment. In those circumstances, the only thing you can do is bet on yourself. With time (and of course with working smart), you will eventually become a good bet.

If I look at that blog post, it sounds interesting in theory. The problem is that it is abstract. If you read between the lines, you will see what I was trying to get at. But, to make things easier, I could just come out and say it.

What I meant to say is:

I am not yet a good bet. But I hope that one day I will be.

Specifically, I speak in terms of startups. I am not yet a good bet for seed or angel funding. I know this because if I was looking at myself from an outside perspective, I wouldn’t invest.

In startups, a good investment seems like it has some sort of unfair advantage. There are several ways you could have an unfair advantage, and I don’t meet any of them. Here are what I can come up with:

  • Experience: Founders or early employees with a success under their belt have valuable experience. It gives them an unfair advantage compared to most, and it is no wonder why some of these people can raise on simply an idea. Guess what? I have no experience in startups. Zero points for me.
  • Team: You hear about team all the time. An experienced team is the best. If they aren’t experienced, a few super smart friends who have banded together may also be a good bet. It isn’t surprising that accelerators prefer teams. The bad news is that I am a inexperienced solo founder at the moment. Again, zero points.
  • Market insight: This is another form of experience. Even if I have no experience in startups, if I had deep knowledge about my niche, that would give me an unfair advantage; one that may be worth betting on. My area of expertise is in computer architecture, and now I am building a social media web app. Those aren’t the same thing: zero points.
  • Traction: If there is one thing that trumps everything else, it is traction. If doesn’t matter who you are. If you go to a VC with massive traction in a big market, you will be probably be a good bet. I have no traction.

Let’s check out my total score: zip.. zero.. zilch. This is why I am not yet a good bet.

So, I’m doing the one thing that I can do: investing in myself.

21 months ago, I quit an industry research job and jumped into the deep end. I picked up front-end and back-end web programming. I’ve dabbled in product design. I’ve built and scrapped three different products along the way. I’ve played with different consumer web apps and studyed them to figure out why they are great (or why they aren’t). I’ve spent a good amount of time on Hacker News, reddit, USV.com, etc. I’ve been blogging to develop my own thoughts. And, I’ve been slowly building a network of founders and operators. Through this time, I’ve been living off of savings, which obviously won’t last forever.

To be honest, I haven’t gotten far. But I still feel good about myself because I have learned a whole hell of a lot. I can feel the growth. Yes, there is a lot more to do, but progress matters.

I’m like a tiny sprout in the middle of the forest. Around me are the giant redwoods; the Googles and the Amazons. They dominate the forest, and are impossible to miss. Some are smaller, but still difficult to miss: the AirBnbs, Dropboxes, Pinterests, and Tumblrs. And even smaller, you see all the saplings. They aren’t huge, but they have grown a good bit, and show potential. These might be worth investing in.

But the sprouts? They are tiny. As an outside observer, there isn’t much you can do with all of the sprouts. You can’t really see them unless you look close. And if you look close, they are everywhere. Which one would you bet on?

As a sprout, the only thing you can do is (1) remember that everyone started as a sprout, and (2) give yourself the chance to grow.

So that is where I stand.

I am not yet a good bet. But with time, I think that one day I will be. Hopefully, it comes sooner than later. My savings won’t last forever.

Entrepreneurs: the eternal optimists

 

boats-sunset-flickr-jeantil

Recently, my girlfriend and I have started running together a few days a week. It is the perfect chance to exercise, talk about how our days went, and chat about anything that may be on our minds. So far, it has been awesome.

During our run today, I began to get excited about my current work on Soulmix. I started talking about how great things could be, and how exciting the big vision could be. I didn’t get more than a minute or two into this before my girlfriend stopped me.

The following conversation went something like this:

Her: “Alex, the big vision is great and all, but you need to figure out how to get it off the ground from nothing.”

Me: “I know, I know.. I’m just talking about how I’m starting to see more potential in the project.. of course, if it pans out.”

Her: “I just don’t want you to count your chickens before they hatch. In the past two years, you have gotten this excited 3 times already, and then later on decided to work on something different. It might be good to not focus on the big vision that much right now, and keep focusing on what comes next in the short term.”

Me: “Yes.. it has already happened a few times. But hey! I’ve been learning a lot, and I have to choose something to be working on. I’m only going to choose, it might as well be something which I believe has a big vision behind it. Whether it actually does? I’m not sure. I guess I will find out somehow. But I need to believe it.”

The last sentence seems to be one of the defining characteristics of entrepreneurs: we want to believe.

We are eternal optimists. Actually, it is more than that. We have to be eternal optimists.

The entrepreneurial journey is tough. It is a rollercoaster of a ride, and it would be difficult (if not impossible) to withstand the continual ups and downs without believing in ourselves, and believing in the vision. At times, that belief is all there is.

We are eternal optimists, but not eternal blind optimists.

The trick is to believe, and then forge ahead with eyes wide open, looking for the obstacles and market realities that will render the belief useless.

How do you manage this?

I don’t know.. I’m still figuring it all out. But I can tell you it certainly ain’t easy.

 

To feel alive

RUSH

I recently watched the movie Rush, a movie on the 70’s rivalry between Formula 1 drivers Niki Lauda and James Hunt. In a voice-over early on in the movie, James Hunt talks about women, driving, and feeling alive:

I have a theory why women like racing drivers. It’s not because they respect what we do, driving round and round in circles. Mostly they think that’s pathetic, and they’re probably right. It’s our closeness to death. You see, the closer you are to death, the more alive you feel, the more alive you are. And they can see that in you, they feel that in you.

This quote immediately rang true, and stuck with me: not the part about women (I’m sure it may be true), but the part about feeling alive.

The closer you get to death, the more you feel alive.

The thing is, this is pretty extreme. I’ve never had a real brush with death, and most of the people I know haven’t either.

For us, there may be another less-extreme way to put it:

You closer you get to failure, the more alive you feel.

This feels very true to me, although I admit I have only learned it recently.

For most of my academic/working life, I wouldn’t say that I did much which made me feel particularly alive.

In school, many things didn’t matter. Sure, an ‘A’ was tough to get. But for the most part, passing (i.e., getting a D- or better) was pretty easy. Grad school was similar. Getting a specific paper published was difficult, but with time, most PhD students figured out how to graduate with a paper or more. With so many PhDs graduating, failure didn’t feel like a huge concern.

Since I quit my job, things have drastically changed. Failure is a real option. I have already worked on several projects that have not panned out. These failures have cost me time and money, both of which are valuable. I make no money at the moment. I am spending from my savings, and each month without some sort of success eats into these savings. Each month brings me closer to going broke, which would feel like a real failure.

In short, I’m trying to say that my ass is on the line. I feel it every day, and it can be pretty stressful.

But you know what?

After nearly two years of this, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I feel alive. I feel that my work matters. There is real upside, and there is real downside. I am pushing myself, and I am trying to creating something meaningful in the world. Honestly, I can’t think of a better job.