The Importance of Transparency

I’m a huge fan of the HBO show Boardwalk Empire, a period program about the roaring 20’s and prohibition in Atlantic City, New York, and Chicago. Its an amazing show and I’d encourage everyone to watch it. Among other themes present, the show is a study in sketchy business dealings. Partly because the business done is illegal and partly because everyone is shamelessly out for themselves, no one knows everything and everyone suspects each other. The result? Short-term wealth leads to short-term life expectancy, with many major characters murdered on suspicion or proof of foul play (sorry for the spoiler, but its a mob show, what’d you expect?)

Am I about to draw a parallel to today’s startup culture? Yes I am. I don’t believe anyone’s been snuffed on suspicion of failing to deliver on a product launch date or hitting a revenue expectation, but transparency in all aspects of starting up may be the most important cultural focus for a company going from one person with an idea to two or 500 employees. 

Have you ever been in a relationship and found out that the other person did something that you didn’t know about and after the fact it seems like you should have? That feeling can burn right away and, especially if it was the wrong thing to do, create lasting, toxic resentment. In startup, the exhausted phrase not everyone needs to know everything is often manipulated from its actual meaning - a growing company is complex, things will happen in parallel rapidly - into an umbrella conveying opaque control from unknown direction that inhibits growth because people don’t know what they’re doing or why. 

In my mind, just about everyone should be able to know just about everything at startup, save the board-level financial concerns that aren’t legal to share and anything that encroaches on a colleague’s personal privacy. Not every employee may be interested, but what’s the harm in sharing product road maps, break-even dates, or github repositories? Shouldn’t everyone at least have a chance to learn from other groups at a company and always, always know the grand vision? 

Any founder or executive worth their salt should convey vision for the company and how each team member furthers that vision with ease and detail. Any sincere and passionate founder, executive, or team lead should jump at the opportunity to do so for anyone, especially their teams and especially when things take turns for the unexpected as everyone should expect they will in this industry. 

Confusing? Communication begets transparency begets understanding begets honest motivation begets improved likelihood of cohesive culture and success. It may not have been the way Rothstein or Masseria did it, but neither survived long enough to write their entrepreneurial memoirs. 

The Terminology We Choose To Know

Classroom education begins with the definition of a discipline. What is Biology? Sculpture? Economics? French? From that point forward you enter into a continual rhythm of acquiring new techniques and terms for specific areas of study and, eventually, work. 

In the sciences, you begin this process in undergrad and without it, you may misidentify a new species or lose a life during a surgery because of miscommunication. In other fields, the process of acquiring relevant terminology may begin during a summer internship or the first two years out of school:

Market Cap, P/E Ratio, DCF? Banking. 

Air Sparging, Photovoltaic Electricity, Turbines? Energy Conservation. 

EIRs, APIs, Ruby on Rails, Mongo? Engineering. 

Less certain terminologies you face an uphill battle to break into a new industry or have a meaningful conversation about relevant issues or ideas. Everyone’s had one of those job interviews with some dickhead who drops a question about a term he knows you don’t know. There goes your candidacy and up come the barriers to entry that an unknown terminology can create. 

What’s interesting is how so much of an expertise or career can be boiled down to which sets of terminology we’ve chosen to memorize and understand. Furthermore, those terms create a definitive framework for where we may exist professionally. Can we break out of what becomes an increasingly narrow scope of intelligent professional understanding - particularly with new terms entering our own sets all the time?

Maybe it’s why Einstein studied Dostoevsky and Issac Newton considered Occult Studies as important as the Sciences. Our great thinkers had a genuine interest in and eventually acquired a deep knowledge of terms and concepts outside of their core disciplines. To explore beyond their fields may have meant a deeper, wider understanding of the human condition and surprise expansions or reflections on their own thinking.

So what the hell do we do? 

Read everything, reject hubris, accept knowledge, and always, always be open. That’s all I can think of to do in the face of so many equations and definitions that I don’t even know exist yet.

Bucket List

The other day I saw via Instagram the Patagonia Bowery team on a weekend hike in the Catskills. The gorgeous falls they’d arrived at in the picture were called Fawn’s Leap. I’ve recently been making an effort to get out and about in and out of the city with friends on weekends and I wanted to save this place as somewhere to visit. My first thought: Foursquare. 

What I’m now affectionately calling my Foursquare Bucket List is a new way to use the application, at least for me. Often, people save a place to a list on Foursquare because:

1). They loved it and want to remember it and recommend it to friends.

2). They’ve heard about a place that they want to visit the next time that they’re in a larger place where the former place is located, that place’s neighborhood, town, or city. 

In this new use-case, I’m employing foursquare as a motivational instrument, a wonderful pretext to travel, reminding me of a specific reason I wanted to visit an area or city in the first place. Instead of arriving in San Francisco and looking up my old list of places I loved, I want to use Foursquare as the app of record for thinking about my next trips.

Why do we visit places? Because of reasons we wanted to go beforehand. My foursquare Bucket List lets me capture many of those reasons and store them for when I’m thinking about a big vacation or an early morning hike or anything else in between. Maybe its just a way to listen to that part of my brain that says I’ve always wanted to go there more often. When I can discover something intriguing about a place before I go and then remember it, that may be all the motivation I need to actually go and enjoy it in the future. 

I’m excited about this new use and I hope more people are doing it too and using foursquare in other creative ways. Its an amazing application. 

We've Got It Simple

Simplicity. Sorry, Simple. Its just a very easy word. And tantamount to success for startups trying to build something that didn’t exist before. 

In a recent piece for the LA Review of Books, Tom Streithorst describes a current era of Post Scarcity Economics in the U.S. - the period saturated with myriad supply and nascent or at least confused demand. As an economics piece, Streithorst goes on to analyze what makes people spend and how the government should act. What I found most compelling however was the psychological dynamic between timid demand and over-supply. What does it tell us about usage, purchase and what products are needed?

If people and firms do face a market of over-supply where everyone offers everything or a slice of what all of their competitors offer, then simple will be a distinguishing stripe for companies that win. 

So what is a company with simple? Your idea can be said in two words and your core value is immediately understood: sell shoes, introduce investors, transform insurance. But more than just your mission, simple creates a focus, identity and culture within your company that will allow you to deliver on the simple idea you had. 

Do one thing, do it so fucking well that your brand becomes the metonym for your industry, product field, or concept. 

This is neither rocket science nor profound but in a world in which people have too many choices and instead of supply, demand becomes the economic determinant of the moment - in consumer tech the focus on # of app users or unique views for example - a company stands out because it solves a known problem or improves lives of consumers or firms and its damn simple to understand. 

Simple is grand. 

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.