Do You Want Your Receipt?

I don’t know anyone who says yes to the above question for small, personal purchases.

Do you need the toilet paper roll of barcodes that’s printed every time you go to CVS? How often do you go back to your personal ledger and even up your daily take in coffees from the receipts you're handed?

Paper receipts seem more outmoded because they’re paper - a physical duplicate of a record that exists for any future reference in online banking statements and other, personal financial management tools. 

The two responses I got when I tweeted about why we still have paper receipts for every retail transaction were: to avoid employees stealing from registers and for audits. Both valid and both capable of being monitored automatically online when a transaction is completed.

It feels like the hanging chad issue from the 2000 election, though more an annoyance than determining factor in a presidential electoral review. Maybe Square will make this discussion moot. People will realize that receipts can be emailed and records accessed online. But for the sake of everyone who comes home with crumpled receipts in their pockets and for all the trees wasted printing, how are these tiny squares of economic antiquity still necessary? 

Calypso Walks Into My Life

Calypso, our little lady stray from Tamboo beach, is coming back with us from Puerto Rico.

Wes World x2

So Proud of you today

An EIR on Campus

Last weekend, I went back to Wesleyan, my alma mater, to talk to undergrads interested in startups about internships in New York this summer. These meetings were part of a new initiative from Digital Wesleyan, a group represented by Jim Friedlich, Jake Levine and myself, to fund 10-week internships for Wes undergrads at startups. We’ve noticed a supply-demand paradox that would benefit from an entity funding, matching, and placing students at companies. Interns are smart and eager but not all can afford to work for free; startups are in constant need of body and mind power but few have cash to spare even for 10 weeks of genius. So, if we can find a way to cover the cost of living for a few interns and place them well, everyone stands to benefit, short and long term.

We’ve been thrilled by the response from students and companies alike and hope that the program blossoms in coming years. Yet, there’s another, more systemic reason we felt compelled to seek funding for nyc-based internships: our campus didn’t know about startups.

 As two graduates who happened into entrepreneurship and are now immersed, Jake and I experienced the lack graduating startup knowledge first-hand and continue to see it in current undergrads from many schools. Graduates are not presented startup as a career-path of record or opportunity. Traditional industries still pull the best and brightest because they’re known. Career Resources Centers at schools have specialized employees for these fields: law advisors, finance advisors, science advisors, healthcare advisors, and non-profit advisors. Whither the startup advisor?

Enter: The University Entrepreneur in Residence who would give presence to startups and be an expert in industry trends, alumni introductions and strategy for working as an entrepreneur. In amplifying the liberal arts mission – to have an impact, to go out and change the world – schools need to show their students the field of entrepreneurship, where immediate, essential impact trumps all others. Students want it and the schools want them to want it, so brand it and promote it through an EIR. Opening the gates to a larger and younger talent pool with more awareness does nothing to dilute the startup mystique or lessen the profound passion required to succeed. If anything, this role would touch toe to water for students who I’d bet can already swim, the plunge is up to their vision, intellect, and ambition. 

Backwards TVs and Harmonized Commutes

My roommates and I are reorganizing some stuff in our apartment as some people are moving out. While we moved our TV yesterday, the mass of cords and boxes required to make it all work struck me as absurd. 

Here’s a picture: 

That’s the pre-req for watching Game of Thrones and maybe checking email at home. 

Here’s what it takes to do the same at Konditori, our local coffee shop just around the corner: 

Konditori likely has a router but the point is clear - there’s no technology more antiquated than the TV screen and cable provider as the output and conduit for internet media and televised consumption. As if a 21st century Frankenstein looms large in our living rooms and offices, the TV cannot come alive without foreign modems and chargers plugged-in. 

Might we soon approach a watershed moment for the TV? Its strange to think the flatscreen - so new and shiny a few years ago - is behind the times. It is because standing alone the set carries a fraction of the value of its in-store price point. Apple TV and Boxee offer a better experience than most providers, but they’re still boxes. Lasting innovation should come through the set itself. Custom add-ons should exist as a choice for those that are particular not a necessity for the mainstream. Crazy that it hasn’t happened yet.

While TV strikes a tangled pose of closed system struggling to consolidate, a related breakthrough begins to emerge. On the morning journey from Konditori to my office this week, a crackle of noise came through my headphones between stops on the F Train. Like a CD skipping or a distant radio station, my Songza playlist pushed through the silent subway ride, every 3 or 4 seconds a beat hitting my earbuds.  Could it be? Streaming music and so internet on the subway?

 Wifi is made available at stations every other week it seems but the first hook to reach from my phone to my ears on a moving train was beautiful (Full Disclosure it was Action Bronson - Not Enough Words). Innovation imbues the NY subway and music is the spark. Some comment that internet on the subway will further eliminate human-to-human interaction in public spaces, but when was the last time you struck up a conversation with someone you didn’t know on the train? More access means more connecting with the people you want to, less time warner and superfluous boxes in our apartment, and more music all the time, which is always a good thing.  

What's In A Click?

Today, I gave a class about bitly data at Social Media Week NY called ‘What’s in a Click?' 

Un-Cramping The Kitchen

When you say two heads are better than one and collaboration is key, you   scratch the surface of why a team can be more adept than a single person at hashing out an idea and executing a project. 

But when too many of those key collaborators evolve into cooks in a cramped and musty kitchen, brainstorming becomes a tooth and nail death match for which ingredients in which proportions should be added when. The proverbial cramped cooks converse: 

Cook 1: Two hard boiled eggs 10 seconds after the water’s boiling

Cook 2: its time for the sardines I wrapped them in prosciutto, bacon, and seaweed

Cook 3: I thought we all agreed red velvet cake batter was going to be our secret ingredient? I’m adding it! 

Sounds crazy and disgusting. Even worse imagine a less crowded kitchen that affords each cook space to concoct to their own frankensteinian delight yet still required to combine their offering with their fellow chefs’ - one big, sloppy meal with myriad input and guttural results. 

At a time like the above, someone has to stand back and say: What the hell are we cooking and why? 

Define the core reason for a team and a project to exist. What is your purpose? 

Without defined purpose our three cooks serve up stomach aches and gags for dinner; with it they craft a three-course meal to delight the most sophisticated palette. 

Technicolor Dream Quilt

On Friday, I had coffee with a guy who’s interested in a sales position at bitly. We talked for awhile mostly about what bitly was and what it meant to the web. Just before he left, David pulled this picture up on an iPad and said he hoped bitly became something similar. It stuck with me and I started thinking how often people ask what bitly will end up being…

…a profitable SaaS? An outmoded geeky utility? the next Pinterest? omniture 2.0? I’d prefer to think that each of those short links and corresponding clicks have created a company that’s more adjective then noun. Bitly is: 

Representative - of people’s perceived and actual selves online. Hegel would be proud that in 2012 a URL shorten has grown to toe the line of his identity in difference. The shorten telling of how people present themselves to the world; the click detailing what people are actually into and, in a way, who they really are. Matt LeMay - Our in-house Hegel - would call this the Kitteh vs. Chikin syndrome.

Descriptive - of interest online. Products, Articles, Presidents, News Outlets, Pop Singers, and Kardashians. What’s popular and what isn’t right now? From academia to advertising, this question begs an answer for web consumption. With bitly, an in-depth, filtered view of topic popularity or a general report on top worldwide publishers is actually possible. 

So why the painting? two years in the making, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte - 1884 is Seurat’s most famous work as it established pointillism as an art form. The 6 x 10-foot canvas is made up of tiny individual points of highly curated color - unique as snowflakes - but, when seen as a whole, expressing a unified hue to any viewer. Iconic, gorgeous, and utterly dependent on each point for the consummate effect. 

I’ve come to learn that a URL shortener by itself is simple to build and that anyone click isn’t meaningful to anyone beyond the clicker. But at scale with real-time metrics and almost four years in the making, Weissman, Levy, Cohen, Mason, Borthwick, Czebotar, Kortina, Tomlinson and Ridgeway’s famous link shortener has taken every individual click - each a unique point of data - and quilted an image potentially as vivid as Sunday Afternoon….

Title: The Web, Artist: Bitly, Date: 2008-present, Description: an expansive work that defines who we are through its own creation and growth. 

Let's Talk Anytime

At bitly, we’ve always stressed a Let’s Talk Whenever policy with everyone. We also have weekly meetings to talk about the past five days, ideas, issues, and anything in between. These one-on-ones are so crucial because everyone can talk freely.

When else do you catch up with colleagues? When you update each other on the progress of a particular project or meeting…or during the hey, good morning exchange that happens when people arrive.  By removing such formality, our weekly sit-downs sometimes become the most engaging, honest, and productive conversations of the week. Our business has grown as much in part to these weekly meetings as well as random coffees, or stairwell conversations as anything else over the past two years.

Transparency: next to trust, people call it the most important item in any relationship, co-working included. At work, its easy to get sucked into a silent vortex comprised of your desk, computer, and headphones. Eight hours later you might not have actually talked to anyone. Even in opening your mouth, if you’re only conversing within a structure of your immediate responsibilities, you can lose opinion and emotion; stepping outside of the pace and expectation of day-to-day can become rare. 

You create transparency through conversation because you know how others feel and everyone knows what’s going on. It's impossible and inappropriate to do all the time as you grow but essential to maintain in any culture you’ve created. 

So let’s talk whenever…but in person…cause talking on the phone sucks and my thumbs are too awkward to text. 

Earn It, No Experience Required

One of the most common reasons I’ve heard from anyone, regardless of age, who’s interested in moving to a startup from a different field is a desire to ‘have an impact’. This could be taken as a generic, well-worn answer to the vague question: why startup instead of 'x’ profession?  Maybe sometimes it is, but I believe that this answer is a packed statement that reflects how entrepreneurship and the rising popularity of working at early-stage companies has exposed an outmoded form of traditional career path. 

Did this broken or at least boring dynamic begin with the American profession? Absolutely not. In fact, that impact wasn’t really available to anyone save inherited royals dating back through most of human existence. Kings and Queens took thrones when they’re parents died or were killed. Without any qualification, this often transpired with catastrophic results. One of the greatest wartime kings in British history, Henry V who, for the briefest time held France and England under one crown, had that dominion lost by a son who was too feeble and honestly way too young to deal (like infant young). 

How insane is it to pass things down this way? Influence, power, and control remained amongst a tiny, paranoid minority and entrepreneur was an adjective, not a noun or profession. Just crazy. It was, perhaps, the greatest revolutionary achievement from America’s Founding Fathers to extract power from the hands of families passed down and reward democratic choice, present achievement and popularity with leadership. The United States would never have arrived at President Barack Obama if this had not been done and we would never have become a progressive, global power without it either. 

What’s happened then? Well, in my mind, the 20th-century professional world has grown to reflect that of political ruling classes from centuries past. CEOs aren’t giving the reigns to their children but career ascension is a reward for years served. speckled white hair means someone’s ready for a corner office. We’re taught to earn gradually over time, not through overtime. This sounds like prison, not progress, unfortunately, its reality. Pursue the careers that seemed so logical and safe post-WWII in the U.S. and surrender certain drive, creativity, and personal vision to 20-30 years of repetitive experience. And then maybe join the board. The sickening fact is that these 'safe’ professions aren’t even safe anymore. One too many WSJ reports on advanced degree graduates who aren’t finding work are a testament to this insanity. And just to be clear, am I arguing that everyone should always be in a startup throughout their career? No, startups are by nature transient, not an end goal. Do we still need advanced degrees? Absolutely…Is an MBA worthwhile in startup land? Sometimes, yes…Is there still a place for a gradual career focused on masterful decades of dedication? no doubt…but…

…you say want to have an impact? like tomorrow?  Startups have no age limit, height requirement, or a record of years in an industry necessary to have a massive impact. The wise are not exclusively the elderly, youth is not wasted. Anyone can do anything at any time. Should everyone? No. Can anyone? Oh yes, and please do. Impact - direct, meaningful, rewarding - exists in startup, in fact, its the essence of why many of the most successful companies of the past 20 years were started. People had passionate desire to have an impact, to change the world and they did. 

So, the next time you hear this from a interviewee, don’t pass it off as boilerplate. Accept it as a reflection on other industries’ status quo and applaud the person across from you for not wanting to spend a lifetime waiting to inherit a right to impact that should have been encouraged from day one. 

Surviving Web To Mobile

A few days ago, Fred Wilson wrote a post discussing native mobile apps that wouldn’t exist without mobile as a platform. This got me thinking about which web first services are building effective mobile apps that will keep them user-relevant as mobile becomes the dominant platform for online consumption? 

The mobile concern is obvious all the way up to Facebook, which has seen web-based traffic lost to mobile, along with complaints about UI and speed from mobile users. Instagram may be a model and well-timed crutch for Facebook as its mobile presence adapts. What becomes apparent though is that many of today’s most beloved services face a significant challenge in maintaining their popularity on a smaller screen with fewer opportunities to retain user attention. 

HBOGO from HBO and Seamless come to mind as services that have crossed into the mobile space with few hiccups and are delivering an experience akin to the quality of their websites and, in HBO’s case, TV channels. Seamless is more efficient on mobile because I can order dinner, tip the delivery guy, and process payment while I’m walking home. HBOGO brings the network’s dynamic programming to all my mobile devices with no drop off in picture quality, episode updates, or increase in pricing. I’m fairly certain both of these services would thrive in a world where only their mobile apps existed. 

I wonder which others will thrive and which ones won’t? 

Levon New York

“New York, it was an adult portion. It was an adult dose. So it took a couple of trips to get into it. You just go in the first time and you get your ass kicked and you take off. As soon as it heals up, you come back and you try it again. Eventually, you fall right in love with it.”

— Levon Helm, The Last Waltz, RIP

A Sense Of Urgency

A common metaphor that’s often used to describe starting your own company is that of building an airplane and learning to fly it while it's falling from the sky. The downside risk of starting a company from nothing stacks all odds against you, requiring nimble intelligence, fearless determination, and the vision to see something where others don’t. Its a gamble with passion prerequisite and without almost blind determination you’re not acing the AP. 

The words you hear most often associated with this process are: innovate, ideate, pivot, brainstorm, develop, productize, and pivot again. All fantastic and all the active verbs required for taking something you thought up and crafting it into a product, a business, a company.

So what’s the problem? 

What I’ve seen forgotten in the magic of starting something is that window is small. In fact, the many windows that open for those rare moments when your idea just might hit are tiny. The money you have either from yourself or outside investors is always running out. There’s a countdown clock that monitors your start-up’s survival and its measured not by the hour and minute hands but by the diminishing digits in your bank account. Investors are going to tighten their belts during a down cycle and the ability to gain traction particularly from paying customers or even dedicated users is difficult when ‘everyone’s down on tech’. That’s not the case today, in fact, we have irrational exuberance in our industry, which is fantastic as long as that doesn’t translate to a perception of time never running out. The period that you can keep a team, meaning anyone more than yourself, dedicated to an idea is often transient - people butt heads, get dissatisfied, distracted, or their lives’ move in new directions. You can’t stop this but only hope to maintain the talented individuals who take the leap alongside you as long as you can. 

Decision-making around a new company is a thoughtful, creative and exhausting series of steps towards producing something meaningful. But it doesn’t need to take forever, in fact, it shouldn’t. My friend Andy often talks to me about going with your gut. This is something I’ve taken to heart in my own decision-making and I believe it holds true for entrepreneurship generally. The important thing to note is that your gut doesn’t take a long time to develop: gut instinct hits immediately. You know deep in your core when you feel strongly about something. Act on it. Develop from it. From cultural progress as documented in Galdwell’s Blink or back to the start-up with McConnell’s Rapid Development, these thoughts happen very quickly, unpredictably. Do they require unfiltered, unorganized discussion to develop and ideate? No doubt, Steve Johnson tells us that with more clarity than anyone. But if inspiration and concept are unpredictable then all we can do is take those moments and conversations that move us and act. Act with a sense of urgency that tells everyone else that if I don’t do this now, we’ll all be worse off. 

The point is that day and night and night and day focus and urgency are genuine commonalities amongst the companies and entrepreneurs that shape the future. That airplane in the metaphor above is falling. If your idea is going to change the world, there’s no time like the present — there’s no time other than the present.

Everything I Know About Business I Learned From The Grateful Dead

“The Dead were pioneers in nontraditional marketing…focused on first creating high-quality products and only later working out how to turn those products into profits.”

— Barry Barnes, Everything I Know About Business I Learned From The Grateful Dead

On Brainstorming

I think many people spend a lot of time thinking about ideas. I spend far too much time thinking about thinking about ideas. What is the structure and emotion of the mindset that comes up with a ‘great idea’? You are you supposed to have blank canvas right? Where you can be uninhibited, creative, counter-intuitive? But… then you might start thinking about everything and so not one actual thing meaningfully. There aren’t answers I suppose and I don’t like getting stuck here, though my mind often drifts from ideas to the specific canals of thought process that lead to ideas. 

When actually focusing on defining a new idea many factors can influence the process: trends, light bulbs going off, levels of passion, gut feeling, problems, what’s next, the desire to hit a home run in a snap second. Those rare few that don’t wade through a field of muck to arrive at innovation baffle me. I can’t not stumble, at least at first. AC, my friend and first ever employer, says that at first brainstorming is really just throwing stuff up on the wall and seeing what sticks. I get this and it sounds doable, unbounded, and possibly fun. So a first hint from AC: you have to start. There’s no reason to stress about the particulars before there exists any generality to beget them. But what are we throwing? where are we throwing it? What does it mean to stick? 

Another friend Jake often talks about defining an authentic problem and specific audience that experiences it before addressing concepts that solve said problem. The problem seems at least more concrete and quantifiable than the idea. To give a parameter to why an idea should exist, the problem helps set the stage for the idea and define, at least at first, its scope. So there’s the ammunition. We’re tossing problems against the wall.

Of course, it doesn’t end at 'a problem’, that’s too general. Details emerge.  What are the real issues causing the problem? Is there a vacuum?  An inefficiency? A lack of information? And so begins the slipping and sliding down alleys and tributaries towards a specific idea. A process can emerge and vanish, a concept can crystallize, shatter, and reform. In the madhouse of your own mind and with the whiteboard as an arrested crutch, the idea will pitch and froth and mutate as the clarity of the idea arises. 

My advice items on this journey are extremely limited but here goes.

keep it simple - you want to change the world but you aren’t going to change the whole world all at once. The necessary focus should be maintained around the simple problem-solution-idea that you’ve diagnosed and how to execute around it. Very few companies that set out to do too many things end up accomplishing any of them. Its hard enough to achieve a simple goal, so stay there until you do. 

write it down  - our brains are simply not retaining information the way they might have a few years ago. And, no one remembers every whiz-bang idea they come up with in the shower. Use Evernote, OmniFocus, notepad, Moleskin, or just email yourself, but record it. Otherwise, brilliance is lost on transient thought and ADD. 

There shouldn’t really be structure here. It needs to be frustrating, its meant to be chaotic. There’s no cloud yet for this process, its called storming for a reason. I’ll stick to a path that looks like problem - hypothesis - concept - idea with the notion that every step can disappear or change and maybe one day, in an instant, the lightbulb just goes off.

Vanity vs. Voyeurism

Last week at Betaworks, Britta Schell, the Director of Digital Insights at MTV, gave a talk about how millenials - those comprising the 13-29 age group - are converging their offline and online selves. The most interesting finding was how these individuals have begun to curate their facebook profiles to reflect not their real-life personas but their own ideal self-images. Come to life in pictures, links, and comments, this self-presentation might not be the actual person behind the profile, but who that person wants to be perceived as by their social groups. In a way, this is simplified self-actualization, achieving your ideal self online via profiles. It also begs the question whether anyone will want their actual self, the one that includes the parts and flaws they dont particularly care to promote, presented online? People tend to vet their online identities and its reason #1 why I hear of friends disabling their facebook accounts: because there are things about them that they don’t want their increasingly large facebook network to see. 

These extremes of activity online - curating a facebook profile to promote the ‘ideal’ you or disabling it because it can’t - accentuate the dynamic of vanity verus voyeurism on the social web.  In plain terms, will it be a place for you to show off or creep around? 

This brings to mind a more interesting question surfaced with the first open social graph and the development of mobile OS support for apps that run in the background. One of the most fascinating current innovations in the app world is how these apps can utilize geo-location to interact with you in real-time with very little effort from users. If, for example, future check-in from Foursquare checks me into a store when I walk in and that generates a Groupon or better yet a sales deal from the store, that’s awesome! Right? Well yes, it will get me engaged with two services I use less today because I have to remember to use them. 24/7 operating apps that actively engage the user when there is a meaningful reason to do so are brilliant. People will continue to check-in and post to tumblr, but when an app can become the initial actor in a given app-to-user exchange, its a different type of engagement and there’s a much wider spectrum of users that may opt-in. 

 The problem, of course, is apparent when I’ve walked into a store that I don’t want people to know I’m in or a restaurant I’d rather not be checked into. I’m sure many have read this story about a man catching his wife cheating via Find My Friends. So, is there a there a limit to how far it can go or how many people will willingly adopt? 

The intersection of real-life spontaneity and online trackable publicity is where some of our most popular social companies currently live. It seems at least yet undefined as to where users will gravitate towards - total openness that invites both the vain and the voyeuristic, or a more closed network that favors the former. 

Digital Identity: Alone In The Car

I’ve read a ton of posts over the past month about identity and how online experience influences identity. Some of my favorites are: Everybody Wants To Be Special Here and The IRL Fetish. Maybe I’m just delayed in my thought process around identity or maybe it took me re-reading a favorite section of Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men to begin to represent online identity in my head.

There is a quote in the first half of Warren’s novel from narrator Jack Burden, who is discussing being alone in the car on a rainy night - the whole quote is below, I recommend reading the whole thing: 

“There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain. I was in the car. And I was glad of it. Between one point on the map and another point on the map, there was the being alone in the car in the rain. They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren’t any other people there wouldn’t be any you because what you do which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people. That is a very comforting thought when you are in the car in the rain at night alone, for then you aren’t you, and not being you or anything, you can really lie back and get some rest. It is a vacation from being you. There is only the flow of the motor under you foot spinning that frail thread of sound out of its metal guy like a spider, that filament, that nexus, which isn’t really there, between the you which you have just left in one place and the you which you will be where you get to the other place.” 

In some ways, the internet is the car and while its more like being in Ken Kesey’s bus than being alone, I relate the vacation from being you to existing as different yous on the internet. Some of the theses outlined in a few of the posts I referenced above are about how the internet allows you to be another persona, not just once but as many times as you want. You might exist as a wild and crazy DJ with tons of fans and a reputation for bringing every room to head-bobbing life on Turntable.FM and only be known as your handle (like DJDaddyLongLegs). The point is that there is an escapist silver lining to the diversification of identities online. The internet allows us to not be us as much as it allows us to be someone else. The you who you are in the physical world, to your family, friends and colleagues, can disappear entirely as you mount the DJ booth, post the tumblelog, or comment mid-track on SoundCloud. 

This is incredibly attractive and underscores how the internet can let you represent yourself in ways that become challenging in the real world. How often to do you get the opportunity to reinvent yourself? Particularly as you get older? Although I have no justification for saying this as I’m only 24, I believe that life and the roles that people choose or don’t choose to fill has a way of funneling you, pinning you down as one or a few faces, until at some point your just an old person who used to be those few identities… Yikes…the internet blows the doors off of this notion. By dragging the funnel 180 degrees, it encourages you to redefine and reinterpret yourself; keeping your identities as wide as the mouth of a funnel you’ll never be squeezed you down if you don’t want. 

I believe this is why older generations will stay and continue to come online. Its true that as we get older, the group that represents older generations will have been online their whole lives. However, I’m inclined to think that older people will be more in-tune with online identity because it enables you as a seventy year-old to re-create yourself as if you were twenty years old trying acid for the first time. Returning to Warren’s quote, the internet let’s you break from the you that you are between wifi signals into a gloriously open world with a ’?’ over you and endless opportunities to make that question mark whoever you want it to be. 

Startup Sales

We’ve all been reading that the current tech period we’re in is more stable and less bubbly because the multiples are more concrete. Big companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Zynga have real, sustainable revenues to go along with their user growth and hype. Its a good sign for the longevity of the industry that along with disruptive products and innovative ideas, there is a focus on profitability as certain services and companies gain in popularity.  I know this is a soft subject for many and I’m not coming at it from the angle of the ‘dark side’ business person hell-bent on the success of the bottom line. I’m approaching this as an entrepreneur whose concern is the continuity of the eco-system from which innovations are born and thrive. Along with platform traction, user adoption, and unique service value, the business factors of revenue discovery, established sales cycles, client retention, and pushes towards break-even and profitability are tangible signs of success that can help sustain companies, allowing entrepreneurs to wash, rinse, and repeat with even newer ideas. 

Just as the products, designs, and infrastructure of a start-up company are built from scratch, with opportunities to brainstorm, pivot, leave one’s mark, and really drive towards something that matters, the sales process grows in parallel and more often than not overlaps with the growth of other aspects of the company. It's not simply making call after call about the same old offering; it's researching your market, identifying best opportunities, developing relationships, and finding out how and if your product or future version of your company can fit in and provide a value. Creativity abounds in pricing, vertical exploration, and, when APIs are involved, what your offering might actually look like. 

Along the lines of the quote from Denis Crowley that Bryce Roberts re-blogged a few weeks ago about Foursquare’s first 100 users and their influence on early product direction at the company, the same applies to first revolutions of fee products, like an enterprise service. One customer is all you need - like first users - to help you establish price points, actually use your product and reflect on its worth. Think of these early adopters (whether immediately paying or on trial) as partners more than clients. Their feedback and their usage should inform direction as the product continues to develop, expand, improve. Their word of mouth will play a huge role in whether your paying product sinks or swims. Pay attention to them and be very cognizant of who you pursue as these initial 'clients’.

A clear advantage is that these initial users have your ear and you have theirs - where an individual user of free product might become dissatisfied and simply stop using it, a paying client will voice their concerns loud and clear until they feel their getting their money’s worth. More transparency into your clients wants and needs is a good thing, let their feedback influence prioritization for next development goals and even pricing. People are almost always happy to talk at length about what they don’t have and what they would like to have in terms of products; these conversations are gold mines for future development. Of course, no one wants to become a chop shop for different companies and different needs, that’s rarely scalable given the costs and unpredictable business model, but when you have one or two or three clients willing to pay for your service, you should take strides to ensure they're satisfied. 

A few other topics that come to mind: 

Biz Dev Vs. Sales: There’s a lot of discussion around the difference between business development and straight sales. Some defining characteristics are apparent: the lack of pricing in biz dev, the involvement of accounting teams for contract discussions in sales. But really, its just a difference in the deliverable, which in the tech space I see as either money or integration. Again, creativity emerges with how these two can overlap: a biz dev integration with a large partner can turn into a paying relationship after given milestones; paid partners might integrate much deeper across a platform without fees rising. There’s more of an outward symbiosis in biz dev and these relationships can become some of the more complex and powerful across an industry. The budding relationship between Foursquare and Groupon is an example of two hugely popular services combining their most inimitable aspects to potentially create a product more valuable than the sum of its very powerful parts. The possibilities with biz dev and sales are endless and the challenge, particularly for a popular company, is to seek out the relationships that create growth value. 

Creating The Cycle:  For a sales person, this can be as creative a process as brainstorming an idea for a new company. You’re one part anthropologist, one part detective, one part sales person, and one part reporter. You’re putting a face on your product, selling it as a game-changer, discovering the niche that it fits in, engaging with various employees around their needs and how your product can help, and more than anything explaining value. Over and over and over. The success of your cycle isn't necessarily a volume game, but more conversations inevitably lead to more conversions. As usual, hustle is key. 

Sticky notes are a visual way to tracking your cycle, organize your leads, and show everyone that though you might not be coding, you are providing a value to the company. This is especially true of small companies, who aren’t yet ready for Salesforce to track the minutiae of each business email sent. Create a literal sales cycle on a wall in your office, with columns for different stages, groupings for paying clients and Biz Dev partners. Give each company an individual note. Move them as you make progress. As well as providing a clear organizational benefit, psychologically it reinforces accomplishment to move a sticky note into a paid or closed column. 

Start-up sales are as much a blank canvas as the the start-up itself once was. Who knows what your ideal price point should be? What vertical will drool over your product? Or what if they buy it and never actually use it? So just dive into the canvas with sticky notes as your KPIs from 1 to break-even. 

Jumping Into The Unknown

On Innovation in Education

A few weeks ago, I was talking to one of my best friends Newman about the U.S. education system. I’d recently watched Peter Thiel, Michael Roth and others debated the merits and shortcomings of higher education on PBS and we were typing over GChat about whether our system was broken, worth it, and what needed to be done.

At one point Newman said something really poignant that at first I didn’t get. He said: we don’t build things anymore. Being deeply rooted in NYC’s tech start-up world, I was almost offended. But he’s right and my vision is skewed. Outside of the recent tech surge in New York, California, and a few other states, innovative industries are few and far between in the U.S. Our universities tend to funnel our best and brightest towards traditional careers, in the John Adams’ sense of traditional, where age-old concepts and rules are laid out before you to be learned and interpreted, but never broken or changed. To build something new from scratch requires entrepreneurial spirit, but in most cases it also requires a technical and/or scientific skill set that has slipped to the back Bunsen burner of the American curriculum. 

A current law student himself, Newman went on to say we don’t need more lawyers, we need people who can create and innovate and build. And he’s right again. Neither of us are arguing that we don’t need law schools, lawyers, or firms. We do and will continue to into perpetuity. The point is that the proportion of college undergrads pursuing law, corporate management, business, and political science degrees to those interested in applied science and math cannot be so lopsided. 

So, do we do away with the four-year college campus experience that at times it might feel like an extended summer camp? Absolutely not. Do we need to shift some monetary and departmental focus and reward towards engaging and expanding the talented groups of young people who pursue engineering and computer science degrees? Absolutely. Grants and loans should be created in the vein of federal programs like the Stafford, Pell, and Perkins, available for the study of biochemistry and advanced mathematics. New departments should emphasize the entrepreneurial application of data science. Career fairs and alumni events should present the opportunities to immediately make a profound impact upon graduation in May. 

The college education needs to innovate by pushing and promoting those next generation innovators that it has the power to create. In a global landscape where other countries far outpace the U.S. in graduation rates for advanced math and science degrees, our American universities should realize that their undergrads have not lost the ability to build, they’ve just forgotten the emphasis on the need to build. We built railroads, we built space ships, but in an old-fashioned education system, founded under the belief that being a judge was the ultimate career goal, universities must recommit to teaching skill sets around what we are capable of building now, before someone else does it first.