Will Price

Moving to Tumblr

2012-01-10T15:52:00.001-08:00

After almost seven years on Blogger, I am moving to Tumblr.My new Tumblr URL is http://processanditeration.tumblr.com/Please plan to read me there from now on!Will

Reinventing the Banner Ad: Sweepstakes

2012-01-06T16:53:00.000-08:00

Flite video of the week. How do easily add sweepstakes to display advertising using FliteHub.

Nominate Flite!

2011-12-09T14:18:00.001-08:00

Managing Expectations

2011-11-18T11:31:00.001-08:00

How happy are you at work? On a scale of 1-100, how would you rate your marriage, your friendships, your relationship with your children, your career satisfaction?

Imagine for a minute that you are happy in your marriage 90% of the time. Is that good? 90% sounds pretty good to me. How about at work, happy 80% of the time? Is that good?

Another way to think through the scores is to translate the numbers into days. For example, if you have a great marriage and are happy 90% of the time, mathematically there are 36.5 days a year that you are not happy. 36.5 days, or more than entire month.

Similarly, if at work you are fulfilled 80% of the time, there are 74 days a year where you are not fulfilled.

What's the point? The key idea, hat tip to Marv Wenger for sharing this perspective, is that a happy and fulfilled life is full of days that simply aren't that good.

Furthermore, rather than being surprised by a tough day, it is important to be sufficiently self-aware to not only expect tough days, but to recognize that having a tough day does not fundamentally challenge the quality of your relationships or work.

As an entrepreneur, there are plenty of challenging days. It pays to realize that is both normal and that a bad day, or 36.5 tough days, still means that 90% of the time things are really good.

Agile Marketing

2011-11-15T15:34:00.001-08:00

I write to share an article we published today on iMedia, Why You Need to Consider Daily Marketing Messages.

The article introduces best practices, including a look at Gatorade's command center, for agile brand marketing.

Agile marketing allows brands to become more iterative, relevant, and responsive to the lives, interests, and trends impacting the customer.

Turning 40

2011-10-21T06:00:00.000-07:00

Today, I am 40. I write this from a small village in Baja, where I am celebrating the milestone with my wife and best friends.

40 is an iconic birthday and an occasion for reflection.

40 years ago, I was born to a US Air Force Captain and his wife, Kent and Marian, in Wiesbaden, West Germany. From birth, my life has been peripatetic. Six days after my birth, we moved to a small village on the Czech border. By the time I was twelve, we'd lived in Germany, Ireland (sister, Elizabeth, born), Northern Ireland, Nigeria (brother, Richard, born), the Ivory Coast, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom. My father's job with the military and then with Citibank required frequent moves. True to form, at 14, I left London for boarding school in Connecticut. The moves averaged one every eighteen months and left an indelible mark on me.

First, I became very good at being the new kid. Adapting, making new friends, and dealing with the trauma of change. Second, my body adapted to the rhythm of major change every eighteen months and I suffer from wanderlust.

The "risks" associated with change were blind to me, as evidenced by my equally peripatetic educational and professional experiences. High school in London and CT, college in LA, China, and Cambridge, banker in NYC, HK, and Singapore, teacher in Indiana, business school student in Chicago, and the last twelve years in venture capital and start-ups. My childhood blessed me with the ability to adapt, while leaving me with a true sense of restlessness.

Fortunately, my wife, Caroline, helped me understand what I'd missed growing up - the power of community and consistency. While my email address continues to change, I've lived in the Bay Area for twelve years and my children have attended the same public school for seven years. My oldest son, Jack, is 11. By his age, I'd moved eight times to seven countries. I now see through him the importance of reinforced, persistent human relations and my wanderlust has dimmed as I enjoy long-term friendships and a feeling of connection.

In fact, over 40 years, I've come to believe strongly in the following:

the value of investing in community

I love being part of the Bay Area start-up community, mentoring, coaching youth sports in the Los Altos-Mountain View, playing my Sunday morning soccer game, running into friends at local restaurants, and building rich relationships born of years of common experiences and context.

being present for my wife and children

While I struggle with presence and mindfulness, I work hard to be fully home and to really listen, hear, and understand the lives of my sons and wife.
Nothing gives me greater pleasure than time with my family.
Thich Nhat Hanh's book, the Art of Power, is a great book to read and reread to help reinforce the value of mindfulness.

pets

I've come to love the presence of animals...a hike in the hills with my lab, Sierra, or hanging at home with our bird, Storm. Caring for animals grounds you and children simply love them.

routine exercise

I work out every morning from 6-7am and then have coffee with four guys. Its a ritual and commitment that makes the start of every day magical. Every Sunday at 7am, I play soccer with the same eighteen guys, hit Peet's after the game, and head home tired and happy.

never acting in fear

Being new every 1.5 years at school is a lesson in overcoming fear and insecurity. As I studied mindfulness, I came to realize that I let fear limit my joy of live, which led to poor decisions. Being afraid to fail, to try new things, fear of looking foolish, ignorant, silly....these fears are self-defeating and something I've worked really hard to overcome.

nature

Simply put, I love being outdoors in the wilderness and work hard to find time every year to spend time with my family off-the-grid. In my secular life, the church of nature fills a spiritual void and provides solace, energy, and peace.

redefining risk

In my early 30s, I was diagnosed with a kidney disorder. At the time, I was told that my kidney would fail by the age of 40 and I would need a transplant. Thankfully, I am in remission and have been for six years. Nevertheless, for a few years, I lived with a heightened sense of mortality and a revitalized commitment to make every day really count.
The modern economy is volatile and life-time employment a quaint memory. As I've worked on start-ups, my friends at McKinsey, Merrill, HP and other pillars of stability often remarked that they found my career path too risky. Many of them were later laid off as the economy soured.
I've come to believe that greater risks lie in not finding out what you are truly capable of, in seeking safety at the cost of possibility, and in thinking that there will one day be a "good time" to take a chance.

Here's to the next forty years and to my parents, wife, family, friends, teachers, and colleagues for making my first forty simply wonderful. I love you and thank you.

How to Fix The Economy

2011-10-13T17:26:00.000-07:00

The Way Forward
Moving From the Post-Bubble, Post-Bust Economy to Renewed
Growth and Competitiveness

by

Daniel Alpert, Managing Partner, Westwood Capital
Robert Hockett, Professor of Law, Cornell University
Nouriel Roubini, Professor of Economics, New York University

Good read.

Abstract of how to fix the problem. Read the paper to better understand their diagnosis for how we got in this mess.

5-7 year plan - a Marshall Plan, if you will, is required

We face an oversupply of capacity and a "demand hole as as the private sector de-levers
Requires sustained and strategically concentrated public investment in infrastructure, domestic energy, and technology. Need to provide businesses confidence that demand will return.
Need to restructure private sector debt - reduce relative debt burdens. Major program of debt restructuring, refinancing, and relief. Will require recapitalizing banks but will avoid Japanse problem of "zombie banks" with billions in loans where LTV is upside down
Rebalance global trade and address structural deficiencies (best reflected in the US current account deficit), whereby China and growth economies begin to consume. Requires currency appreciation of the Renminbi.
Specifics

US Public Infra Spending

$1.2 trillion/5 year public investment program targeting high return investments in energy, transportation, education, R&D, and water-treatment infra

Debt Relief

Debt restructuring and regulatory capital loss absorption. Drive resolution of trillions in impaired debt where the nominal value of the debt is > asset value. ex. mortgages that are underwater

Increasing domestic demand in current- account surplus nations

Global Rebalancing - currency realignment, domestic demand growth, reduction of current account surpluses. China, Germany, Japan, and petro-dollar economies need to spur domestic demand, allowing local currencies to appreciate against the USD, letting wages rise, etc. Requires China to develop social safety net, reduce export subsidies, pay out dividends and incomes, and increase wages, and most importantly, allow for currency appreciation

Wall Street and the Failure to Prepare Graduates for the Real World

2011-10-12T17:02:00.000-07:00

The financial services industry is growing its proportional share of national GDP and has done for decades. The best and brightest flock to Wall St with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, #hedgefund iconic names that call like sirens to our graduates. Literally, tens of thousands of our best minds work on Wall St inventing new methods of securitization and instruments.

While there are many reasons for our best minds to join Wall St, I believe that universities are failing to prepare students for the real-world and in faling to do so leave them vulnerable to bright shiny objects and paths of least resistance.

Since 2008, we've come to rue the size and power of Wall St - the leverage, financial instruments, and too-big-to-fail institutions that have been bailed out but not fixed. Moreover, there is an acute sense of resource misallocation. What are the long-term costs of so many talented young people investing their talents, drive, and innovations in finance?

I graduated from Harvard in 1994. Shortly after graduation, I reported for duty at 1251 Avenue of the Americas, the then-home of Morgan Stanley. Along with scores of my classmates, we descended on Manhattan to begin work as analysts, junior traders, and future financial mavens. Why did so many of us join Wall St?

I see three key drivers:

Path of least resistance

Banks run incredibly efficient recruiting processes. With young alums driving the process, the banks make it incredibly easy to interview, visit, and ultimately accept banking offers.
Dinners, lunches, senior banker discussions...the recruiting process hoovers up talented young people, mostly unsure of what to do next

Money

Finance companies pay materially above the mean and provide cash-strapped graduates with ready income and a path to income growth

Failure to Educate

Lastly, most colleges to a terrible job preparing graduates for the real world. At Harvard, the career counseling center and the College do very little to educate graduates about options, choices, and career paths.
Education demands preparing students for life and giving them the intellectual tools and frameworks with which to develop and grow. Little emphasis, however, is formally placed on preparing college graduates for life as working professionals.
The liberal arts bias makes such mercenary education an anathema, however, in hindsight the lack of real-work preparation is inexcusable.
The completely random nature of how most people choose their first jobs is shocking. Think of the preparation we place on SATs, AP exams, GPAs, majors, and yet we don't work with our kids to lay out, explore, and select vocations with equal verve and discipline.

Recent research suggestions that the human brain does not reach maturity until ~25 years old. College students are early on the development path, often aimless with respect to major and vocation, and leave school book-smart but far from educated with respect to the super-set of career paths and vocations possible. This lack of education and preparation leaves students vulnerable to the siren song of corporate recruiting processes.

As a father of two boys, I talk to them about gap years - allowing them to live, work, and experience the real world, while continuing to reinforce the importance of education. We are, I am afraid, not providing a balanced approach to education and the imbalanced focus on academics leaves young graduates truly ignorant about life as working professionals and how best to map their interests, passions, and talents to the wide variety of possible career paths our economy offers.

How can we better prepare students for a life of work? How can we balance liberal arts educations with greater insight into vocational choices and possibilities?

Do Happier People Work Harder?

2011-09-16T18:03:00.001-07:00

Great article from NY Times.Abstract: worker autonomy, sufficient resources and learning from problems = happy workers.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/opinion/sunday/do-happier-people-work-harder.html?smid=fb-share

Flite's New Company Video

2011-09-16T17:50:00.001-07:00

Please find below Flite's new company video. Let me know what you think.

Flite Company Video from Flite on Vimeo.

Mastering Change: Lessons on the Pivot

2011-09-16T14:35:00.000-07:00

I spoke today at a Churchill Club Event: Igniting Innovation and Mastering Change.

My fellow panelists were:

Randy Komisar, partner at Kleiner and author of Getting to Plan B
Ujjal Kohli, CEO, Rhythm NewMedia
Sudhakar Ramakrishna, EVP & GM of Unified Communications Solutions, and Chief Development Officer, Polycom

The panelists and the subject matter were wonderful. A few insights follow:

Intellectual honesty

All the panelists agreed that mastering change and pivoting requires intellectual honesty. The courage to confront hard truths, face challenging topics head on, and to share the truth up the chain is fundamental.
Given that businesses are funded on Plan A, Randy noted that too many teams and boards hide the truth in fear of admitting the fallacy of plan A. The expectation, he noted, should be that Plan A is simply an hypothesis and that is is to be expected that a Plan B will be required.
Ujjal noted that team members are too oft afraid to share bad news across departments and that too many CEOs fear telling the board the truth
Ujjal made the excellent point that Series A investors need to build a culture of absolute trust with the CEO and to stress to him/her that the truth is paramount and no one will ever shoot the messenger.

Agile, data driven, rapid cadences

All the panelists stressed the need for speed and agility. The movement from water-fall to agile development is driven by a need to quickly incorporate real-world feedback and signals into the product, strategy, and company.
Randy noted the need to ask the right questions and to validate or disprove hypothesis as quickly as possible.
Processes, cultures, etc that thrive on agility, metrics, and clearly stated assumptions win.

When to Pivot

Randy stressed the need to avoid waiting for a near-death experience to change. Change should be assumed and too often it takes a disaster to shake a start-up from complacency and intellectual dishonesty.
Pivot early and avoid running the cash balance, team morale, and credibility with the board down to zero.

I really enjoyed participating and it reinforced my conviction that the entrepreneurial process demands comfort with ambiguity, agile execution, absolute intellectual honesty, and a process of vigorous debate, insight, and, vitally, realignment across the team.

Envelope for Risk: What's the Mindset of Your Investors?

2011-09-14T15:45:00.000-07:00

Just got off the phone with a CEO friend of mine. He'd just finished a board meeting that left him exasperated and frustrated. Yes, I played therapist.

The root cause?

His investors are surprised by pivots, are focused on the downside, lack political will in their partnerships, and inject insecurity and fear into the company rather than serve to relieve it.

I am very lucky to have investors (Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Hummer Winblad, NCD Investors) who are committed to building durable, stand alone businesses, who recognize that all overnight successes are born from years of hard work, persistence, and obstacles over come, who are comfortable with a large envelope of risk and volatility.

Too many venture investors focus on plan A and are shocked to hear there is a need for a plan B - the best are surprised if there ISN'T a plan B or a need for one. Too many investors shrink from risk and encourage safety and certainty over ambiguity and daring.

Mindset...find out the mindset of your investment syndicate and recognize that their ability to live with risk, ambiguity, and change may well be a key determinant in whether you create a stand-alone, enduring business or are forced into a quick sale or, worse, liquidation.

The Next Step in Disrupting Venture Capital: Emerging Manager Funds

2011-08-23T10:33:00.000-07:00

The Venture Capital industry is ripe for disruption. Too many firms, too few returns, and an industry predicated on investing in disruption that fails to disrupt itself.

Over the last few years, super angels offered new capital to the market and groups such as Y-Combinator provided young entrepreneurs new avenues to success. The venture industry, however, lacks a very common model that the hedge fund industry has mastered - the emerging manager strategy.

Emerging managers are young, smart, and successful analysts or portfolio managers who cut their teeth with a major hedge fund. After 3-5 years of stellar returns and performance, they often leave and raise small funds from their former employers, hedge fund leaders, or limited partners who specialize in identifying and seeding up and comers.

For example, Julian Roberston is not only the founder of Tiger Management, but he is also the "father" of the so-called Tiger Cubs. Many of today's hedge fund leaders got there start working with and then being seeded by Julian Robertson - including, John Griffin, Lee Ainslie, Andreas Halvorsen, and 40+ others. Paul Tudor Jones, another leading investor, continues to seed deserving managers, including Two Sigma.

Why don't we see a similar model at play in the venture industry? Having spent six years in venture, I know there are many talented young investors chafing to rip up the playbook and disrupt the market.

Sadly, it is virtually impossible for them to raise capital. Why?

Venture returns take years to produce, while the hedge fund industry is marked to market daily and over a year or three, one can build up a track record and demonstrate "alpha," the holy grail of alternative investments. Moreover, given venture investments are illiquid, redemption and getting your money back is much, much harder than in the hedge fund asset class.

Recently, I had the pleasure of visiting Tiger's NYC offices and spending time with a senior executive. Tiger, you see, does not solely rely on alpha. Over the last twenty years, all hires and prospective Tiger Cubs have been given a IQ, personality, and logic test. With twenty years of results, Julian is able to benchmark any new candidate against the industry's very best. The combination of investment strategy, results, test results, and in-person interviews allow him to allocate capital to an emerging manager with a system and then to measure and watch.

So, in order to pull of an emerging manager strategy, one would need to be able to identify talent independent of cash on cash returns and solve the redemption problem. I believe that both limitations are solveable.

We all know who the rising stars are in the industry and I am confident that a decent share of them would be willing to hang their own shingle and create their own destiny. Moreover, with the rise of secondary markets and innovations that I can only imagine exist, the liquidity/redemption issue seems workable as well.

Will we see an emerging manager strategy work in venture? Will a lion of the industry emulate Julian Robertson and seed the next generation of top firms? There is a capital allocation problem in venture today - bad firms are getting allocations at the cost of new firms starting with hungry GPs ready to kill it.

Until the industry can allocate capital to the future stars and not to a 10 year old investment track record, I don't think we will see the disruption in our asset managers that the technology industry deserves.

Thoughts?

What Every Social Media Marketer Should Know About Flite - SocialTimes.com

2011-08-23T08:29:00.000-07:00

What Every Social Media Marketer Should Know About Flite - SocialTimes.com

Business Insider Article on Flite

2011-08-22T14:27:00.000-07:00

Iowa Straw Poll

2011-08-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

How broken is politics in this country?

After weeks of reading about Iowa and the Republican Iowa Straw Poll, I wondered how many people actual vote in the poll.

Pick the right # from the list below

1,600,000
160,000
16,000
1,600

Any takers?

The absurd amount of press coverage for Michele Bachmann suggests a hugely important event. As the winner, she won 4,823 votes out of a total of ~16,000.

Read that again, 4,823 votes.

The fact that 4,823 mid-west voters are able to massively and disproportionately shape the debate regarding Republican Presidential politics is not only undemocratic but also absurd.

Why do we allow such small numbers of people such undue influence?

While I have nothing against NH or Iowa, I believe we have a fundamentally skewed process for selecting candidates and one that rewards extreme positions that cater to an absurdly small number of people.

Bachmann won less than 5,000 votes. This is a non-story and yet another example of how bizarre our political and news cycle systems are and how little they map to the reality the vast majority of us live.

Flite Interview with Robert Scoble

2011-07-24T15:00:00.001-07:00

How Publishers Can Stay Relevant in today's Digital Media World

2011-07-12T10:02:00.000-07:00

http://emediavitals.com/content/staying-relevant-world-ad-networks

Guest post on eMedia Vitals regarding how publishers can compete and stay relevant in today's digital media landscape.

Moonlight Breaks by Rich Price

2011-07-08T14:33:00.001-07:00

Google+, An iPad Moment

2011-07-05T14:11:00.000-07:00

iPad. The word evokes a magical product experience that opens up the mind to the possibilities and utility of technology - elegant, pleasant to hold, and a window to a world of applications and content.

For me, using Google+ hit me just as hard. Within an hour of using the service, I began to recognize not only the power of Google's social offering but value in the social layer over Google's incredibly rich product offering set - mail, calendar, video chat, IM, documents, search, photos, blog platform, Android phones, netbooks....

The + circle metaphor maps brilliantly to a world I know alt-tab between: LinkedIn, Gmail, Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, etc, while allowing me to design the appropriate filters and groupings of people I know, admire, keep to update from, etc.

Moreover, Google+ instantly changed my sense of Facebook's value. Prior to the + launch, Facebook's ascendancy and victory seemed written in stone. 100s of millions of users, no competition, brands flocking to Fan Pages, etc. In my first + session, I realized how easy it is to switch from Facebook to + - outside of my contacts and the occasional photo, leaving behind Facebook, just like I left Blackberry behind to go to the iPhone, proved a no-brainer and truly easy.

Google+ serves to further bind me to Google - mail, calendaring, photos, blog, social communication, video chatting...and when they tie in Google Apps, I will have my work colleagues, family, friends, and extended social circles all on a single platform. + makes me much more likely to buy a Nexus phone and dramatically increased the amount of time I spend with Google each day.

As with my first iPad session, I fell in love with + on first sight and it opened my eyes to the power of Google's product portfolio and to Facebook's precarious position in our lives.

Finally, I think + will put a major hamper on Facebook's IPO prospects, while revealing in a very tangible way how shitty Twitter is from a product perspective. Twitter is now in danger of being a $7bn company with a product offering virtually identical to the day it started.

Flite at the IAB Future of Display Event

2011-06-24T11:36:00.000-07:00

I am grateful to the IAB for giving me the opportunity to present at The Future of Display Event in NYC during Internet Week. The videos of my presentations follow. Flite's ability to bring the full power of the Internet to bear directly in ad units - sight, sound, and motion with social underpinnings - were on full display and 100% aligned with the industry's vision.

Demoing Cloud Ads

Click here to see the ads in action

IAB Interview

Product Marketing

2011-06-23T10:23:00.000-07:00

My good friend and old boss, Richard Walker, first introduced me to the Product Marketing schematic below.

The diagram is an excellent architecture of how to think through Product Marketing's key deliverables.

iMedia Connection: Flite delivers a cloud-based dynamic ad platform that may help restore the "big idea" to marketing

Yahoo! Scene: Ad Banners Becoming Miniature Website Destinations

A Wonderfully True Quote Re the Vulnerability Creativity Demands

2011-06-04T13:52:00.000-07:00

Powerful quote from Sim's Little Bets -

" I think it's necessary," Pixar Director Pete Docter says about the inevitable self-doubt that accompanies any creative process. "On Monsters, Inc, I really wore that. I would come home at the end of a difficult day in story and I would think, I'm a fraud, a failure. I don't know what I am doing. And now I realize, well, that's the way it is."

Amen, the creative process forces one to confront the prospect of failure, a sudden lack of orientation where one is not sure what comes next.

The Luck Factor: Do We Create Our Own Luck?

2011-06-03T16:05:00.000-07:00

I recently came across Richard Wiseman's book, The Luck Factor.

Wiseman, a UK-based researcher, wanted to better understand why some people are lucky, while others appear to be doomed to poor luck and missteps.

The distribution of luck follows: 50% think they are lucky, 36% neither luck nor unlucky, and 14% self-proclaimed unlucky.

The book details the findings but here are a few concepts:

lucky people tend to be open to opportunities or insights that come along spontaneously
unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine, fixated on certain specific outcomes
lucky people are open to mingling at parties, while unlucky people tend to cluster with like-minded people
lucky people have open, inviting body language, smile twice as often as unlucky people, thus drawing other people and chance encounters (ie luck) to them
lucky people invest in a network of luck - lucky people are effective at building secure, long lasting attachments. They tend to be easy to know and easy to like and form close relationships based on trust. This network helps promote opportunity in their lives - ie luck

He concludes, "I discovered that being in the right place at the right time is actually all about being in the right state of mind."

If you consider chance a numbers game, he argues, then extroverted people simply have more chances to hit a winner.

Google's 11 Rules for Better Management

2011-06-02T15:03:00.000-07:00

Learning How to Sell - Premature Pitchalation and Other Sins

2011-06-01T14:28:00.000-07:00

In a prior post, I explored why so few MBA's go into sales. The ability to sell is a skill of the highest value. In start-ups, sales is key to finding product-market fit, raising venture money, recruiting the best, driving revenue, pitching the press....

After three years at Flite, I am acutely aware of how important it is to sell and how poorly prepared I was for the challenge. I recommend a great book on sales to anyone eager to learn more : The Sandler Rules: 49 Timeless Selling Principles and How to Apply Them.

The 49 rules provide a framework and approach for better understanding the sales dynamic, process, structure, and path to more systematic success.

Here are a few mistakes that I continue to make and how I am working to improve.

Rule 2: Don't Spill Your Candy in the Lobby
This rule is classic - "have you ever shared too much information, too soon?" In my rush to prove my credibility and the value of my product, I often jump right into an overview of what we do, why, how, who we do it for...all before we have even made it to the conference room. Another term: premature pitchalation - the prospect has no time to lay out their needs and asks and is bombarded by information overload independent of context. Needless to say, I am working hard to slow down and to let the prospect talk in order to allow for better fact-finding and qualification. Spilling your candy threatens to see you blabber on about features, functions, and issues of potentially no interest to the prospect.

Rule 14: A Prospect Who is Listening Is No Prospect At All
This one mirrors rule 2 , as Sandler asks, "are you selling or are you telling?" I pride myself on being articulate and able to explain a value statement well. To often, I believe that if I can lay out an axiomatically perfect argument, then the prospect, by dint of my logic and persuasion, will buy right away. While I believe strongly in being able to express myself well, I am working hard to listen, to ask questions, then more questions, and to make sure that the customer's problems and goals are well matched with our offering.

Rule 17: The Professional Does What He Did As a Dummy - on Purpose
Here Sandler encourages the professional sales executive to ask simple questions, embarrassingly simple, questions to tease out information and to make sure there is total clarity. Are you comfortable with asking simple questions and leaving long periods of awkward silence? I am not, and I am working hard to allow silence to fill the room and for the prospect to fill it with information rather than for me to fill it with nervous energy and output.

Rule 30: You Can't Lose Anything You Don't Have
I've been guilty of spending far too much time on accounts that are failing to close. Am I worried the customer will turn to another vendor, that the deal will eventually close if I just keep humping it...? Sandler advises that one either close the sale or close the file - I need to do that better.

Rule 32: Get an IOU for Everything You Do
Often in start-ups, we are missionary sales people. We feel a huge need to prove ourselves worthy in order to break into large accounts. Accordingly, in our early days, I found myself doing lots of "free work" on the come. Sandler recommends that sales, by definition, does too much free work. The professional makes sure that the customer realizes that you are providing free service and that the IOU helps win future business. One of Flite's major learnings is that we don't need to do as much free work as we thought, that asking for clear understanding that the customer will commit to buy if you we validate x, y, or z through a pilot works. If the answer is no deal no matter what you deliver, then why do it? Get an IOU and be sure that any work on the come is tied to clear commitments to buy.

I learn more every day as I sell and found Sandler's book a tremendous reference for putting into words and simple rules problems that I encounter every day along with useful solutions for how best to handle them.

Watching the Wheels - Texting, Surfing, Emailing While Driving

2011-04-22T11:20:00.000-07:00

In 2009, the NHTSA reported 5,474 deaths on the US streets and highways caused by distracted driving. An additional 448,000 motorists were injured by drivers who were using cellphones and texting.

For the record, I am guilty of distracted driving. Today, I read about Bob Okerblom, who lost his son, aged 19, to a texting driver. His son, Eric, was a molecular biology major at Cal, National Merit Scholar, and all round great kid.

There but for the grace of God go I...

What?

Having texted, emailed, and surfed the web at the wheel, it could easily of been me who struck Eric.

Erik's family started a foundation in his honor - http://www.eofoundation.net/. His Dad biked across America reminding us all of the risks and losses we face when we drive distracted.

Starting today, April 22nd, I pledge not to text, email, program Pandora...etc, while I am driving.

Join me, if you like, in avoiding future tragedies.

Unusually Excellent: Skills Required for Leadership

2011-03-29T14:55:00.001-07:00

Tony Zingale, CEO of Jive Software, recently sent me a copy of John Hamm's Unusually Excellent; The Necessary Nine Skills Required for the Practice of Great Leadership.

Hamm breaks the nine skills into three core segments:

Credibility, or a matter of character

Authentic
Trustworthy
Compelling

Competence, or a matter of skill

People
Strategy
Execution

Consequence, or a matter of values

Decision making
Communication
Impact

The book reminds me a great deal of Bill George's work. George is currently an HBS Professor and served as the long-time CEO of Medtronic. George wrote two wonderful books on leadership. You can follow Bill George on Twitter here.

George's central argument is that mission-driven, rather than profit-driven companies, generate greater shareholder returns. Moreover, mission-driven companies require leaders with a True North, ie a moral compass/center of gravity that anchors not only the leader, but also the company. Hamm extends that concept and underscores the value of authenticity to leadership.

The moral compass proves its value in times of stress and ambiguity - it is the spirit of the law, not the letter that governs leaders with a True North. As Hamm's model notes, competence is only 1/3 of the battle. Self-awareness, trust, a compass to navigate challenging decisions, the ability to share and empathize...are all EQ level traits. Pure competence, IQ, is not enough. Lehman, Enron, AIG....all companies full of high IQ people who lost their way and operated without a compass.

My favorite book that speaks to the power of self-awareness and authenticity is Thich Nhat Hanh's The Art of Power. Yes, a Buddhist monk wrote a book on business leadership! It is a brilliant read that reminds us not to let fear control us, not to focus on the wealth at the cost of well-being (golden handcuffs), and of the importance of living in the moment rather than in a guilt-addled past or a anxiety-laden imagined future.

The common abstraction of all these books is self-awareness. Who are you? What makes you authentically who you really are? Do you act out of fear? Do you act out of a desire to please others?

Why are you working where you work now? How did you end up here? What compromises have you made about who you really are? Are they worth it? What's stopping you from....?

The Journey is the Destination

2011-03-13T21:35:00.000-07:00

Three years ago today, I left my MD role at Hummer Winblad to join Widgetbox. While Widgetbox grew into Flite, the leader in cloud-based advertising , I too have grown in ways I could not imagine.

While a VC, I worked on a deal that focused on testing wafers. The state of the art was to test the circuitry of a quarter wafer. This new company offered the promise of a full-wafer test.

The metaphor is meaningful to me. The CEO role tests one's skills, leadership, tenacity, and self-awareness in ways not possible in other jobs. Through each test, each challenge...hidden parts of who you are, what you are made of...reveal themselves.

The last three years have tested me in ways I did not think possible. The journey of company building, restructuring, and scaling both deepen who you are, while simultaneously revealing how you react to challenge, how you exploit advantage and insight, how you handle the good, the bad, and the ambiguous.

Three amazing years. Three years of better learning who I am.

Widgetbox Raises $12m from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, and HWVP. Rebrands as Flite

2011-03-10T14:38:00.000-08:00

I am thrilled to announce the close of our $12m Series C. Neil Sequeira and General Catalyst led the round, with participation from our existing investors Sequoia Capital, Hummer Winblad, and NCD Investors. In addition to the funding, we also announced a new company name, Flite.

With the rebrand we have firmly positioned ourselves as the leader in cloud-based advertising. The Flite Platform allows advertisers, agencies, and publishers to create, serve, and measure ads that are as dynamic as the Web—delivering up to a 10X increase in ROI with ads developed in 1/10th the time.

The new company rebranding and platform-as-a service approach to advertising will empower advertisers to increase brand recall and purchase intent, while allowing our publisher partners to win more business and deliver more marketing value.

In addition to the rebranding and new company name, we have launched a new interactive site www.flite.com. Here we’ve highlighted our available services, solutions, and platform features. The new site also includes case studies, insights, and a new Ad Gallery that showcases how leading brands are using Flite to connect with consumers.

Finally, please find below coverage from of our funding and rebranding announcement.

TechCrunch
Sequoia-Backed Widgetbox Rebrands As Flite, Raises $12M For Rich Media Ad Serving Platform
by Leena Rao
http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/09/sequoia-backed-widgetbox-rebrands-as-flite-raises-12m-for-rich-media-ad-serving-platform/

VentureBeat
Widgetbox becomes “cloud” advertising company Flite, raises $12M
by Anthony Ha
http://venturebeat.com/2011/03/09/flite-widgetbox-funding/

Wall Street Journal Venture Capital Dispatch

The Daily Startup

http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2011/03/09/the-daily-start-up-incube-parts-ways-with-dfj-network/?mod=google_news_blog

Paid Content
Widgetbox Rebrands As Display Platform Flite, Raises $12 Million
by David Kaplan
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-widgetbox-rebrands-as-display-platform-flite-raises-12-million/

MediaPost
Widgetbox Rebrands As Flite, Lands $12 Million
by Mark Walsh
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=146312

Brand Spend On-line- A Secular Growth Trend Worth Betting Your Money and Career On

2011-02-25T16:55:00.000-08:00

When I graduated from Harvard, I went to see a series of successful people to ask them what do do with my life.

I sat down with corporate executives, investment bankers, entrepreneurs, teachers, hedge fund managers, etc. While few meetings remain with me years later, my meeting with John Tozzi, a leading hedge fund manager, still rings in my ears.

John asked me, "Will, when I started my fund, do you know where the Dow Jones Index stood?" I had no idea and told him so. "800," he answered. He then asked, "do you know where the Dow is today?" My answer, "8,000." He then noted, "what are the odds that you will experience a sustained, secular bull-market like the one I have enjoyed?" "My advice", he sighed, "is to find a 10x secular growth trend that you can bet your career on."

I have thought about that advice many times in my life. In many ways, I believe that the Internet sector of today is the same as Mr. Tozzi's Dow 800. Over the next 25-30 years, a massive long-term, secular growth trend will occur. Capital, demand, customers, companies....will all ride this shift in asset allocation.

Isn't this old news? Yeah, Will, note to self, this Internet will be big.

The graph below, however, highlights that we are in the first inning (from AdAge).

Brands in US spend $91 bn a year. The % on-line = 6%. 6 freaking percent.

How's this for a no-brainer - what will the # be next year, in five years, in fifteen years?

In a zero-sum world, flat growth, the market will grow from $6bn to $12bn to....yes, $60bn, the same 10x market growth that Mr. Tozzi enjoyed.

In 1982, being long equity turned into a 20+ year bull market run.

In 2011, being long technologies that help brands shift their spend on-line is bet well worth making Bet your money, career, and passions on riding that wave.

10x....find a 10x market and sink your teeth into it.

America Inc.

2011-02-24T15:38:00.000-08:00

If you read my blog, you know how passionate I am about our country's fiscal health and the threats we face from entitlement programs. The welfare state is no longer viable.

Mary Meeker's America Inc presentation below is an important contribution to educating all of us regarding the fiscal state of the union.

USA Inc. - A Basic Summary of America's Financial Statements

Running on Empty

2011-02-18T16:11:00.000-08:00

In 2005, I wrote the post below on the dangers of entitlement programs to our financial viability and national security. In the intervening six years, the challenges addressed in Pete Peterson's book are only larger and more frightening.

The battle lines drawn this week in Wisconsin mark only the start of a looming battle between public workers and private tax payers. California, Illinois, New York, and other states face a "Sophies'" choice - raise corporate and income tax rates, slash workers from government payrolls, or renegotiate union contracts. The future looks bleak, but I take comfort in one important fact. Our leaders will no longer be able to "kick the can" down the road. Moreover, as legislators seek to avoid cutting union benefits, they will be forced to slash discretionary funding for transportation, K12 education, higher education. Such cuts will inflame the voting public and driven an increase in political activity and voter participation.

The public will, ultimately, side with investments in the future rather than continuing to stomach public entitlements that are much more generous than private employer benefits. The net result for public employees will be higher retirement ages, the elimination of defined benefit programs, and increased medical premium co-pay rates. In many ways, a new class war is brewing - not, however, between rich and poor but between private sector employees and public sector employees.

It is time for our leaders to address the roots of our fiscal ills - military spending, social security, medicare...We deserve an honest accounting and an all programs need to be on the table.

2005

Several years ago, Pete Peterson, the founder of Blackstone and an ex-cabinet secretary, wrote an important and sobering book titled Running on Empty.

The book indicts both Republicans and Democrats for ignoring two troubling twin deficits - the the trade deficit and the budget deficit - which, he believes, may ultimately bankrupt the country. The hard-hitting book highlights the off-balance sheet, unfunded entitlement program liabilities that will fall due in the coming decades. With trillions of dollars in Medicaid, social security, and drug benefits promised to current and future retirees, he warns of some very hard choices that face the nation. For example, he estimates if Congress was forced to fund promised entitlement programs, we would face, "an immediate and permanent 60 percent hike in the federal income tax, or a 50 percent cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits."

Recently, news of corporate pension plans failing reminded me of Peterson's important book. For example, Delphi's unfunded pension liabilities present a scary harbinger of what is to come in corporate and government pensions. Delphi, the world's largest auto parts maker, faces an $11bn shortfall in its obligation to retirees. Delphi management, unable to negotiate with the unions, may file for bankruptcy, which would transfer the pension liability to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp, a government agency that insures pension plans. Unfortunately, the PBGC is itself underfunded, with assets of $56bn and liabilities of $79.2bn. Total corporate pension plan unfunded liabilities are estimated to be $450bn, well beyond the financial resources of the PBGC. Ultimately, tax payers will be liable for the failings of management to properly fund future obligations.

Roger Lowenstein wrote a wonderful NY Times Magazine article, The End of Pensions, which provides scary and powerful insight into the failing of the defined benefit program and the massive state and local pension obligations that dwarf the corporate dilemma.

Why am I writing about this?

Economic growth is a function of investment. As entitlement spending drives deficits, we will need to finance them with either massive tax increases or massive borrowing to cover our shortfalls. As we borrow more, we will see a higher percentage of our tax base go to interest payments and the lions share of our local, state, and federal budgets go to entitlement spending that reward historical work rather than into investment programs that drive future growth. Both parties appear incapable of addressing this fundamental problem, and I hope that the writings of Peterson, Lowenstein, and others wake the electorate up to the scary prospects of a failing corporate and government pensions and the mortgaging of our future to fund entitlement programs.

Made to Stick, with hat tip to George Orwell

2011-02-17T15:38:00.000-08:00

Chip and Dan Health's book, Made to Stick, is a fun read. The sub-title is a good one; "Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die."

Chip and Dan created a mnemonic framework for evaluating ideas and ensuring their stickiness: SUCCES.

Simplicity
Unexpectedness
Concreteness
Credibility
Emotions
Stories

The Heaths contrast "sticky" language with the all too common, obtuse jargon many tech companies suffer from.

Orwell's great essay, "Politics and the English Language" is highly relevant to "sticky" positioning. His essay skewers political writing and the overly obtuse, self-important, self-referential writing common to academic publications.

His rules follow:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print
Never use a long word when a short word will do
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out
Never use the passive when you can use the active
Never use a foreign word, scientific phrase, or jargon work if you can think of an everday English equivalent

As we all work to bring technology ideas to market, it pays to think of how to make the ideas "stick." Far too many sites and PDFs sound like the passage below, selected by Orwell for ridicule and an example of what not to do!

"On the one side we have the free personality; by definition it is not

neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as

they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval

keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern

would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is

natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But ON THE OTHER SIDE, the

social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these

self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the

very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of

mirrors for either personality or fraternity?

Essay on psychology in POLITICS (New York) "

My Top 10 Reads of the Last Year

2011-02-12T16:29:00.000-08:00

I have a few friends who email me regularly for book recommendations. I write to share my top favorite books of the last year. All wonderful stories.

The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Potzsch
The Last Child by John Hart
The King of Lies by John Hart
Conn Ingulden's Genghis Series (4 books)
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Book of Saladin by Tariq Ali
Star Island by Carl Hiaasen
The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins
Getting Even by Woody Allen

Luck

2011-02-09T13:57:00.001-08:00

In August 1956, my maternal grandfather, Herbert Merrett, wrote the following poem.

For any athlete, entrepreneur, and pursuer of excellence, the words ring as true today as they did decades ago...

Luck

The luck that I believe in is the

luck which comes with work.

And no-one ever gets it who is

content to wish and shirk.

The men the World call lucky

will you tell you every one

That luck comes not by wishing

but by hard work, bravely done.

Good luck!

Why Display Ads are Cool Again

2011-01-26T15:30:00.000-08:00

Matt Marshall and the VentureBeat team graciously allowed me to write a guest post on display advertising.

Copied below is my post and the core reasons why I believe we will be a huge company.

Thank you, Matt and team.

Brand marketers spend $20 billion a year on display advertising. The goal? Drive brand recall and purchase intent. The medium? Pictures, text, and call-to-action buttons.

The first banner ad, for AT&T as seen below, hit the web in 1994:

The web has changed a lot since 1994, growing exponentially richer via broadband, APIs, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, but, in an odd disconnect, display ads stayed virtually unchanged over the years. Until recently, that is.

We’re now seeing brands, agencies, and technology vendors working hard to remedy the failings of the display industry, enabling advertisers to invest in ad units that result in deeper engagement experiences by embedding the Web’s richness and social interactivity within ads themselves.

Three specific developments are finally allowing brands to run ads that reflect the best of today’s web and the brand’s content investments:

1. The Real-Time Web: The rise of the real-time Webhas impacted our day-to-day lives as well as the way business is conducted. Because of these live conversations, companies are no longer investing in “snap shots” of their brand, but rather in two-way conversations with their target audience. This requires a shift in regarding creative as something that is fixed for a one-time campaign, to something that is fluid, real-time and responsive. This is achieved by embedding these social elements – videos, Twitter feeds, surveys, blog posts, games – directly in the ad itself.

2. The Dynamic Ad Experience: Each time an ad loads, it can be programmed and adjusted based on observed behavior over the life of a campaign and consumers’ interaction with the unit, information known about a consumer, and other variables. In this way, ads become a set of programmable, adjustable configuration options that marketers can adjust in real-time based on performance, retargeting and analytic optimizations.

3. New Means for Measurement: There is also a shift in the conversation around what determines the success of an ad or entire campaign. While click-through rates have been regarded as the Holy Grail in gauging the success of display ad campaigns, engagement levels and time spent interacting with an ad now promise metrics that are richer, deeper and far more tangible assessments.

With all this change occurring, the Web’s leading publishers and brands are racing to define new ad formats that combine the best of the brand, publisher, and social content. This means moving from selling media and audience to selling differentiated marketing solutions.

My own company, Widgetbox, recently partnered with tech publisher IDG, for example, to develop IDG’s Nanosite Ad Unit, which leverages existing content from IDG sites and social content from the Web to provide readers with a content-rich ad experience. The Nanosite allows readers to access additional information within the ad unit so that they never have to leave the webpage they are on. In this way, advertisers can provide interactive experiences for readers from the Nanosite through whitepapers, videos, real-time content updates, social media and lead-generation forms all within the unit.

Launched in September, AOL’s Project Devil is another example of the display ad evolution. This new format offers a large ad space segmented into interactive panels that include video, slideshows, quizzes, polls, text messaging and other options, allowing advertisers to customize different streams of functionality within one interactive interface. With launch partners including companies such as, Lexus, Spring, and Macy’s (pictured), it’s clear that AOL has tapped into an important market need. AOL recently acquired Pictela to scale the roll out of Project Devil.

On the technological innovation side, Spongecell is another company providing publishers and advertisers with the tools and strategy to reach customers on a deeper level (that Volvo ad up top is from Spongecell). Big believers in shifting the conversation from clicks to actual engagement, Spongecell is helping brandssuch as Office Depot, Whole Foods and Delta Airlines make this a reality.

These are just a few examples of the many ways publishers are getting creative when it comes to giving readers the content they want in new ways. And for advertisers, these formats enable deeper reader engagement with the ad itself, while giving readers an easy way to access and interact with additional content without navigating away from the current webpage. In acknowledging the shift from episodic to real-time banner ad marketing and the reality that a “perfect” creative is in fact evolutionary, we are learning to look beyond the traditional display ad and unlocking the value that today’s online experience can lend to ad campaigns.

Start-up Forecasting

2011-01-13T13:46:00.000-08:00

"Forecasting is difficult, especially if it's about the future."

Forecasting start-up revenue is not easy. I write with a few thoughts on how best to handle the need to present financial forecasts vs. the uncertainty inherent in any model.

In general, two forecasting methods exist. The first, tops down, seeks to identify an addressable market and revenue becomes a function of market share. The second, bottoms up, is often best captured by detailed assumptions regarding how to get to revenue. For example, I am partial to the productive sales rep model: W# of sales reps * X rep maturity ramp * Y quota per rep * Z productivity per rep.

In my experience, both models are straightforward to develop. The art lies, however, in the skillful blending of the two approaches to satisfy a board, prospective investor, sales team, etc.

Forecast errors compound across time. Therefore, it pays to focus on three to six month bottoms up plans. A near-term bottoms up plan requires thoughtful detail and projections based on specific variables - how many sales heads, quota, ASP, etc. Operating history then turns the assumed variables into actuals and the model begins to solidify.

Beyond six months, the bottoms up approach is simply an exercise in guess work. How then should a management team think about the long-term? I have found two useful models. The first is to examine historical comparables - for analog companies, what was the revenue ramp rate? A model can be focus on projections that assume either the average, median, or top decile growth rates for comprable companies. Ie - it happened before and history looked like $xm, $ym, and $zm over three years.

Another model is to set strategic market share goals. In essence, the long term plan focuses more on clearly defining an addressable market and a strategic goal of capturing x% of the market. Again, the art lies in defining the market, the market's growth rates, and a strategy for competing for 20-30% of the market at large.

It pays to invest in both near-term detail and longer term aspirations. The former assuages board members and investors and provides them confidence in your operating bona fides. The latter fires the imagination and helps paint the picture of how a very large, venture return company can be built.

The Power of Frameworks - Respect the Process

2011-01-05T17:19:00.000-08:00

After winning the Orange Bowl, Jim Harbaugh saluted his team for "respecting the process."

Stanford's Carol Dweck (must read book MindSet) argues that growth-mindset people focus on the "process and not the outcome."

With an outcome in their sights (lose weight, sell more, pick new year's resolutions, rebrand), most people jump right in.

However, outcomes are derivative of commitment to a sound process. Without a clear process, most people fail or practice random acts of violence that may or may not work.

Since becoming a CEO, I have come to appreciate the wisdom of frameworks and processes. Whenever I think about an outcome, I must catch my enthusiasm to reach it and instead, step back, and define a process for how to realize the goal. The universal application of "process vs outcomes" is very real. In fact, I find that any process is better than no process at all and the specific process matters far less than committing to one.

For example, how did you pick your New Year's Resolutions? How are you planning to lose weight? How will you develop a strategic development plan? Forecast sales....Develop software?

To take one example - New Year's Resolutions - the American Association of Happiness happens to have a very handy framework with which to develop a sound list. MAPS - pursue personal resolutions that will result in MEANING - AUTHENTICITY - PURPOSE - STRENGTHS.

I would argue that the power of frameworks compounds across the # of team members - ie the more people that you have working to a goal, the more value you will derive from a joint commitment to a process. Why? Frameworks provide a common mental model, semantics, structure that help overcome individual idiosyncrasies and biases. The shared model provides a vocabulary for common action, dialog, and progress. Without a framework, individual biases will make communication challenging - leading to frustration and failed missions.

Little in the world is truly new. For any particular goal - running a marathon, swimming a mile, to brand positioning - there are sound frameworks. The value of frameworks helps teams focus on the "upstream" work that will lead to the outcome rather than the outcome itself. Moreover, the value of a process compounds with the # of team members - the larger the team the greater the value.

Harnessing Entrepreneurial Manic-Depression: Making the Rollercoaster Work for You

2010-12-28T16:02:00.000-08:00

This post really captures what the ride and the graphic, pasted below, hit home.

The crisis of meaning does pass and then the stage of informed optimism begins!

How Does Happiness Co-vary with Age and Why 46 Is a Tough Year

2010-12-24T07:18:00.000-08:00

Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris are the creators of We Feel Fine. They have built a crawler that indexes the blogosphere to analyze occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling."

Every day, 15,000-20,000 blog posts are indexed and the system extracts, where possible, the authors' gender, age, country, state, and city. The net result is an incredible data set that helps understand the covariance between feelings and age, gender, weather, location, and season.

The analysis on age found the following "major emotional themes as we age.",

"We start simple (11-14), but soon fill up with angst (15-18) and feelings of confinement (19-22), until we leave those behind to go conquer the world (23-26), before gradually trading ambition for balance (27-30), developing an appreciation for our bodies (31-35) and our children (31-35), and evolving a sense of connectedness (36-40), for which we feel grateful (36-40), then happy (41-49), calm (41-49), and finally blessed (50+)."

Their analysis and amazingly cogent summary are truly fascinating. While the site is impressive, the authors also released a book, We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion.

The data is increasingly the study of economists, who are looking to move beyond GDP per capita to a more satisfactory measure of human well-being. The Economist recently published "The U-Bend of Life: Why, beyond middle age, people get happier as they get older."

The Economist study, noted in the graphic above, finds a different relationship between age and emotional well-being. For Arthur Stone, the nadir of life is 46 - this is a global average. A few explanations for the covariance between older people and happiness are listed in the article - the death of ambition, greater acceptance of oneself and setback, not being prone to anger, being more mindful of mortality and hence more present.

Between the two studies, we find that age materially impacts our well-being. While we are all unique, on average there are times in our life, or the lives of loved ones, when we must recognize larger forces at work on our psyche.

We are all familiar with teenage angst and the mid-life crisis, however, we can now see that all chapters in life come with a set of expected feelings and, thankfully, that as we age it will get better!!!

Ad Innovation and the Joy of Product Market Fit

2010-12-16T10:48:00.000-08:00

In June 2010, Eric Schmidt noted that future display ads "...would be mini-Web pages. That means they could allow users to watch a video, leave a comment and see real-time content updates..."

The article below highlights how we do exactly that.

The key is allowing rich media to both morph into app-like ads, while allowing it to scale through a powerful platform.

http://emediavitals.com/content/who-needs-website-enter-nanosite-ad-unit?utm_source=Daily+Buzz&utm_campaign=773c229a16-_nl_DB_12_13_2010

Who needs a website? Enter the nanosite ad unit

Rich media ads continue to evolve, effectively becoming mini-websites in a box. Tech publisher IDG and developer Widgetbox have teamed to create a new “nanosite” ad unit that can include video, real-time content, social media and other interactive elements.
The Nanosite Ad Unit, announced today, basically turns an ad into a microsite, housing multiple, clickable assets. A sample unit that IDG and Widgetbox created (shown at right) includes a branded white paper, a video, case studies and editorial content from IDG publications such as CIO. In a press release, the companies claim the nanosite unit “can dramatically increase brand engagement, brand recall and purchase intent relative to traditional display advertising.”
The nanosite unit is the latest in a number of display advertising types that are adding more functionality and interactivity as advertisers seek better ways to engage website visitors and publishers look for ways to boost digital revenues.
Increasingly, these ads blur the lines between branded and editorial content. AOL’s Project Devil, for example, can include a mix of what AOL CEO Tim Armstrong calls “real content.”
For their nanosite offering, IDG and Widgetbox will collaborate on the creative direction for campaigns, design the ad, and provide the underlying technology and metrics for the campaigns, which IDG will sell across its brands, which include Computerworld, CIO and Network World.
“We are providing more value to marketers by delivering innovative ad concepts that provide highly engaging content choices for readers,” Jeremy Rueb, vice president of program development for IDG Strategic Marketing Services, said in a press release.
IDG has emerged as a pacesetter among B2B publishers expanding their custom publishing offerings into full-blown marketing services businesses, in an effort to drive more digital revenues as advertisers embrace “vendor as publisher” models. 

The US$/RMB: China's 16 year trade war and what we should do about it

2010-12-07T16:52:00.000-08:00

Ten Years Ago Paul Tudor Jones Had An Acute Case Of Plantar Fasciitis « Dealbreaker: A Wall Street Tabloid – Business News Headlines and Financial Gossip

This article fundamentally changed my view of US-Sino relations. We need to deal with China' currency, unilaterally if need be.

A 30% tax on Chinese imports is not the start of a trade war, but instead of awakening to the pernicious effects of China's currency manipulation on our manufacturing base, employment, and future.

Hear, here, Mr. Jones!

Jeff Immelt on Leadership

2010-12-06T15:15:00.000-08:00

The Sunday NY Times ran a very good piece on GE. The article centered on GE's strategy to focus future growth and profits on manufacturing vs. financial services. GE Capital used to deliver 50% of GE's profits, however, the recent financial crises led GE to return to its roots.

The barrier to entry - scale and capital - highlight the strategic value; "heavyweight products that take patience and piles of cash to develop, weigh tons and last for years — next-generation jet engines, power turbines, locomotives, nuclear plants, water-treatment systems, medical-imaging equipment, solar panels and windmills. Mr. Immelt notes, for example, that the cost of a good-sized solar-panel plant, about $70 million, is more than twice the total investment in Google in the six years before it went public in 2004."

The article also touched on his leadership style. I loved this quote. "Leadership by fiat when done in moderation, Mr. Immelt says, can drive change and set a course. “I think that if you run a big company, you’ve got to four or five times a year, just say, ‘Hey team, look, here’s where we’re going,’ ” he says. “If you do it 10 times, nobody wants to work for you. If you do it zero times, you have anarchy.”

We hear all the time about Steve Jobs, perhaps the ultimate rule by fiat leader. However, I personally believe that strong teams, decentralized decision making, and not top-down central planning lead to better companies and stronger results.

The genius CEO, Steve Jobs, is sui generis. Not a scaleable model to mirror one's company or leadership style after. There is only one Steve Jobs. However, all leaders can hire well, empower their teams, and set strategic direction, while avoiding the micro-management and rule by dictate.

Primal Instincts, How Body Language and Personality Dictate Success

2010-11-09T16:20:00.000-08:00

Want to be successful, well-liked, effective? Want to make more money, receive the lion's share of promotions? Want to raise money?

Well, according to Amy Cuddy of HBS, it is vital that you understand how our primal psyches process personality traits and non-verbal behavior.

The two most critical variables in how people perceive us are warmth and competence. These two traits account for up to 80% of our overall evaluation of people, "i.e., do you feel good or bad about this person."

The article notes, "warmth - does this person feel cold or warm to me? - is the first and most important interpersonal perception. The warm/cold assessment amounts to a reading of the other's intentions, positive or negative. Competence is assayed next: how capable is someone of carrying out those intentions."

We admire warm/competent people, we envy cold/competent people, while we pity warm/incompetent people, and exhibit contempt for cold/incompetent people.

Meanwhile, like dogs, non-verbal postures signal dominance and power, or, conversely, fear and meekness. Nonverbal postures impact our endocrine system and link stances, gestures, and hormone levels. The photos below illustrate "power" positions, while the following photos illustrate low-power positions. Hugging your arms close together is akin to the dog with its tail beneath its legs:)

"In all species, postures that are expansive, open, and take up more space are associated with dominance. Postures that are contractive - limbs touching torso, protecting the vital organs - are associated with low power, being at the bottom of the hierarchy."

Examples - she looks at her MBA students and finds, "classroom participation is 50% of the grade. There, women students have a harder time getting airtime, and speak more briefly when called. Women are also more likely to cross their legs and arms, or to lean in: low-power poses. While men raise their hands straight up, women tend to raise them with an elbow bent 90 degrees, commanding less space."

Another example comes from Laksmi Balachandra's research. He looked at 185 venture-capital pitches. His findings? "Changing one's mindset also changes the mindset, and neuroendocrine secretions, of others. The success of VC pitches turns on how comfortable and charismatic you are. The predictors of who actually got money are all about how you present yourself and nothing to do with content. Key variables include - calmness, passion, eye contact, and lack of awkwardness.

Back to warmth...Cuddy finds that we want to cooperate and help warm/competent people...we are rooting for them. However, we tend to resent, envy, and do not help cold/competent people. Envy drives ambivalence and ambivalence is clearly a hindrance to progress and support.

So - warmth, power postures, calmness, eye contact, passion.

Now you know:)

The 4-Hour Work Week and What I Took Away from Ferris' Book

2010-10-23T13:56:00.000-07:00

I recently attended a conference where I received Tim Ferris' book, the 4-Hour Work Week, as a gift. While much of the book is hyperbole, I found two enduring lessons in the book worth reflecting on further. The first takeaway is the importance and power of fear.

Perhaps, Mark Twain said it best, "I am an old man and have known many troubles, but most of them never happened."

What? My reading of the quote and Tim's points on fear is that we often let our brains beat us - fear of the unknown, fear of what might happen, fear of making mistakes, fear of change, fear to realize our dreams....fear is a self-defeating, calcifying presence in all of our lives. We all suffer from insecurities, self-doubt...however, we must recognize that most of the "bad things" that we fret about are figments of our imaginations/stories we tell ourselves. Overcoming fear and conquering self-defeating thoughts is vital to self-realization and achieving a life well-lived.

My other favorite quote regarding fear and overcoming it comes from Teddy R, "

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

The second key insight, for me, from the book is reflection and projection. Am I happy/excited about my current direction in life, my job, my current reality? If yes, then great. If not, then what must I do, what path must I follow, to align my life's work with my life's passions?

Projection? Tim writes about the importance of taking a good, hard look at your boss. Do you want his/her life? In 15 years, do you want to be the person, live the professional life that they are/do?

If not, change it.

In summary - the book is a shot across the bow. First, are you fears holding you back? What are you missing in life by letting fear trump growth, experiences, and discovery. Second, are you sufficiently reflective about the path your life is on? Are you projecting where that path will lead? Do you like what you see? If not, what are you going to do about it?

Widgetbox Mobile: A Bet on Mobile Web Apps

2010-10-20T15:26:00.000-07:00

Today, Widgetbox announced the launch of Widgetbox Mobile, a mobile app service that allows businesses of all sizes to easily make and distribute a feature-rich mobile app in minutes. In addition, we are pleased to announced that Ali Diab, former VP of Product Management at AdMob, joined our board of directors.

TechCrunch covered the story, click here for article.

Widgetbox Mobile: Build and Deploy Mobile Web Apps for iPhone and Android in Minutes

Widgetbox Mobile delivers the following to customers:

Mobile App Builder: make a mobile web app in minutes without writing any code; create a custom app for a fraction of the cost and time of traditional native apps.

Cross-Platform Functionality: create a mobile web app that works on both iPhone and Android devices.

Widespread Distribution: distribute the app through multiple channels including social media, email, text (SMS), quick response (QR) codes, and your own website. No need for complex and lengthy app store approvals—just quick and easy distribution on the customer's own terms.

Ripple Live Updates ™: edit an app anytime, any place and push live updates through the cloud-based online service.

Advanced, Detailed Analytics: detailed insight into how the app is performing to allow customers to continually optimize performance.

Why are we betting on the mobile web? It is our belief that open standards and browser-based solutions, over time, trump native, client-side applications. While today's mobile web is native-centric and app-centric, the promise of HTML5/web standard technology allows for businesses to development, distribute, and optimize highly engaging mobile apps via URLs, QR codes, and text messages.

Please try out the service and let me know what you think.

Why Don't More MBAs Go Into Sales?

2010-10-19T17:33:00.000-07:00

This post seeks to address an interesting conundrum.

The conundrum? Why do so few MBAs go into sales?

Sales is the lifeblood of any company. CEOs are often picked from the sales ranks (Chambers, Palmissano, Ballmer, Thompson, Morgridge, Apotheker). Scaling revenue helps drive enterprise value and exit outcomes. Sales management is a discipline that can easily be taught, like marketing, operations, finance. Sales is a career.

And yet, very few MBA programs offer a sales management track, let alone courses dedicated to sales forecasting, pipeline management, strategic selling best practices, quota and sales territory management, compensation best practices.

Why are MBA programs failing to teach the value of sales leadership and the role of sales as a worthy management discipline and career? At Kellogg, where I graduated in 1999, I cannot remember a single class dedicated to sales, and yet, we took cost accounting, operations, international finance, organizational behavior...

When alums visited Evanston, they always spoke of the value of organizational behavior to their careers. When I speak to MBAs, I plead with them to go into sales.

Perennially, MBAs go into consulting, investment banking, brand management, and, sadly, business development. The sales grads are often a null set.

As a CEO, I spend almost all my time selling. Selling my company to recruits, selling our product to customers, selling our equity to investors. The ability to manage a sales process - first meeting to order - and to understand account dynamics (decision makers, sponsors, technical buyers) - is vital.

Moreover, securing product-market fit, a hugely important milestone for any start-up, requires a passion for selling.

I'd love to see some comments that help answer the conundrum, let me start with a few ideas as to why sales falls lower than cost-accounting on the MBA curriculum and lower than investment banking as a career vocation:

MBAs are risk averse and don't like leveraged (quota) comp models
MBAs view sales pejoratively as many great sales people are not pedigreed
MBAs think sales is not strategic

Now, an indictment, why don't MBA programs lead the way here? Where are the courses, the research work, the career placement offices? Why don't business schools teach sales as a discipline?

Would love to hear your thoughts!

When to step on the gas and go for it?

2010-10-11T18:38:00.000-07:00

When should you grow the burn rate- add headcount, marketing spend, operating capacity? When should you "go for it?"

In order to answer the question, let's use the analogy of financial options. Start-ups are very much like financial options. The value of a financial option is a function of two variables, the duration (time to exercise) and the volatility of the underlying security (range of possible values). Start-ups, therefore, increase in value as a function of extending the time before the cash runs out and being able to define the range of possible outcomes.

An obvious insight is that any CEO would want to maximize the value of both variables. Cash is a finite amount - each dollar spent means you are a dollar closer to running out. Cash is time. Less cash, less time. Less time, less value. Lesson: spend very carefully.

However...the range of outcomes, volatility, requires an answer to the question, "can this be a big company?" Such an answer requires the characterization of market size, revenue potential, strategic value,... Lesson: spend resources to develop answers to customer demand, market size, financial model, etc.

The art is how much to spend on the latter without unwisely impacting the value of the former. The two variables - volatility and time - therefore can be at odds with each other. The key question is how to balance the two competing variables- preserving capital/cash while also characterizing the opportunity.

When I became CEO of Widgetbox, I was lucky to have significant cash reserves. We did not, however, have a well-understood set of market characteristics - TAM, SAM, financial forecasts, product-market fit, etc.

We decided that in the face of material uncertainty regarding the "range of possible outcomes" that we would maximize the value of time - ie cash. Widgetbox went through a series of painful headcount reductions. Why headcount? In virtually every start-up, operating expenses are ~70% people. To materially reduce expenses there is really only one lever that matters - you need to reduce heads.

Therefore, "going for it," or not, really means ramping headcount, or not. After we reduced headcount, we more than doubled the amount of time we had before the cash ran out. The extra time allowed us many cycles to iterate towards a well-defined business model, and, importantly, it also allowed for the serendipity required to get to the all important a-ha moments.

During our period of austerity - very low burn rates- I was often encouraged to increase spending - hire more people, invest more in the business. I was told, quite rightly, that you cannot save your way to a big company. One of my mentors insisted that I "find out quickly" if we had a business and that the "go slow" model would only lead to death by a thousand cuts. I fought that advice and deep down I knew that to spend money without a clear sense of return would be folly.

The serendipity moment came in July 2009. We were able to pivot our technology to meet the market's demand for display ad innovation. The pivot enabled us to define an addressable market - display ($8bn), a clear customer segment (tier one publishers), a business model (CPM), a go-to-market model (direct sales and service), and a product direction. The uncertainty peeled away to reveal a very well-characterized market. As we reached product-market fit the demand began to outstrip our modest headcount. Each day, a new deal demanded we work harder and we began to see clear bottlenecks emerge - in sales, service, product -that were limiting our ability to grow.

We were no longer projecting/testing a value prop onto a skeptical market, but rather the market began to pull us along.

Now, each dollar we did not invest was a lost dollar of business, or more. Now, "saving" money was costing us business. The team was buried - working ungodly hours - and customers wanted more from us.

We decided to "go for it" and have now grown headcount by ~50% in the last three months.

In summary - preserve cash and extend the duration of your company as the primary goal UNTIL a real product market reveals itself, customer demand spikes well beyond the capacity of the organization to serve it, and you know in your gut that it's time to go "all in."

Project Devil: Affirmation of Our Vision

2010-09-27T16:57:00.000-07:00

Today, AOL announced Project Devil. Project Devil is AOL's effort to redefine display advertising and to enable a creative canvas that both leverages the richness of today's real time web and drives material increases in end-user engagement.

AOL's new ads are more like applications that support live updates from Twitter and Facebook, video, photo galleries, store finders, and other app like functions that help move the industry beyond old, boring banners.

At Widgetbox, we could not be more excited to see and read about AOL's new plans. One year ago last week, we signed LinkedIn as our first ClickTurn customer. ClickTurn's vision is to transform display ads into live apps programmed by the best of today's real time and interactive web. For example, below is an Halo ad that includes video, real time content updates, and delivers on the very vision promised by AOL's Project Devil and AppAds.

The news is fabulous for several key reasons. First, it affirms our vision that display advertising is moving from static flash files to living apps programmed by APIs, data, and multi-media assets. Second, it underscores a critical shift in the value chain. Publishers are no longer content to simply sell audiences and to flight standard IAB ads against said audience. No, today publishers must differentiate by productizing ad innovation and finding ways to integrate the best of advertiser, publisher, and social content and functions. Advertisers, in turn, in their search for higher engagement and banner ad dollar ROI, are willing to work directly with large publishers on custom size units.

ClickTurn proudly partners with the web's best publishers to realize both goals - new ad formats that drive 10x improvements in engagement and new business models that allow publishers to win more business by delivering more value.

As Google says, watch this space. An $8bn market is up for grabs!

Company Clock Speed

2010-09-21T15:24:00.000-07:00

I am a strong believer in customer-driven company development. The need to establish product-market fit via an iterative set of engagements. Each engagement helps to both understand the market need, while providing valuable input into the product development process.

One major issue, however, is that the cycle time for customer responses is 7-10x faster than the product release cycle time. As a young company, it really pays to be highly responsive, but it does not pay to whip-saw the product team for one-off features. While the features may eventually help you win, the changing requirements and fire-drill time lines do not support quality software development.

Many start-ups end up with bad blood between development and sales - whereby sales keeps saying yes irrespective of the pain and timelines such promises will bear on the company at large. And, they need to say yes to help win, validate the product, etc.

As ClickTurn took off, the two timelines and clock speeds became an issue.

Specifically, we release software every Tuesday, while customer requests require intra or over night turn around.

To address the need to be customer and market driven, while protecting the engineering process, we developed an internal services team. The services team and the engineering team defined an extensibility model that allowed us to address the vast majority of custom deliverables via an API. The API, and its iterations, allowed two teams to operate at different clock speeds - each focused on hitting their goals; for engineering, 70+ weekly on-time releases, for services, extremely high client satisfaction and customer success.

Moreover, the extensions ultimately improved the quality of the platform and the robustness of the API.

A social contract based on allowing each team to finds its optimal rhythm via APIs or extensibility models helped us reach our customer-driven development goals while keeping (largely) sane and both teams highly productive.

How to Create an Enemy by Sam Keen

2010-09-08T07:34:00.000-07:00

Truth in every word - dehumanizing the enemy is a very dangerous game.

Start with an empty canvas

Sketch in broad outline the forms of

men, women, and children.

Dip into the unconsciousness well of your own

disowned darkness

with a wide brush and

strain the strangers with the sinister hue

of the shadow.

Trace onto the face of the enemy the greed,

hatred, carelessness you dare not claim as

your own.

Obscure the sweet individuality of each face.

Erase all hints of the myriad loves, hopes,

fears that play through the kaleidoscope of

every infinite heart.

Twist the smile until it forms the downward

arc of cruelty.

Strip flesh from bone until only the

abstract skeleton of death remains.

Exaggerate each feature until man is

metamorphasized into beast, vermin, insect.

Fill in the background with malignant

figures from ancient nightmares – devils,

demons, myrmidons of evil.

When your icon of the enemy is complete

you will be able to kill without guilt,

slaughter without shame.

The thing you destroy will have become

merely an enemy of God, an impediment

to the sacred dialectic of history.

How Will You Measure Your Life?

2010-07-16T16:48:00.000-07:00

Clayton Christensen's essay How Will Your Measure Your Life? is a must read. The essay provides a framework for living a life of purpose rather than regret, for investing in what matters versus what's topical.

Please read the full essay - note, the essay is for business school students about to graduate but has broader relevance and resonance. In brief, he writes that everyone must think through the answer to three fundamental questions:

How can I be sure that I'll be happy in my career?
How can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and family become an enduring source of happiness?
How can I sure that I'll stay out of jail?

The article goes on to define:

How to Create a Strategy for Your Life
How to Allocate Your Resources
How to Create a Personal and Family Culture
How to Avoid the "Marginal Costs" Mistake - aka "Just This One Time"
How to Remember the Importace of Humility
How to Choose the Right Yardstick

Rethinking Display

2010-07-14T12:45:00.000-07:00

Jessica Vascellero's recent article in the WSJ, "Tech Firms Tout New On-line Ad Formats" is a wonderful read. The article, written from Allen & Company's Sun Valley "mogul" retreat explores the future direction of the display market.

The US display ad market is worth ~$8 bn. Display ads today, however, are virtually identical to the very first display ads of fifteen years ago - static pictures of products that increasingly fail to capture the interests of consumers and the nature of today's web- video, Twitter, real-time content, etc. Given the lack of innovation, ROI is suffering and both publishers and advertisers are exploring new alternatives.

Google is making display innovation a priority and the article quotes Eric Schmidt as saying that he "championed "interactive video ads," which he said are on the way. Such ads, which could appear anywhere on a Web page, not just inside a video, would be like mini-Web pages. That means they could allow Web users to watch a video, leave a comment and see real-time updates within the ads that are more customized to their interests."

I very much enjoyed reading that paragraph. Why?

Widgetbox's ClickTurn ad platform already delivers on the vision outlined by Mr. Schmidt - ClickTurn ads transform display ads into nanosites programmed by best of today's real-time and interactive web. For example, here is an ad for Halo that includes video, real-time content updates, and delivers, via an ad unit, the very "mini-Web page" that Google's CEO promises is coming.

ClickTurn now powers dynamic display solutions for many of the web's top publishers. Working with our publisher partners, we are working to redefine display ads and to deliver ROI - through detailed interaction metrics - that will help the display market deliver greater value.

Solitude and Leadership

2010-07-07T15:23:00.000-07:00

Solitude and Leadership, by William Deresiewicz, is an essay based on a lecture on leadership that he delivered to last year's West Point plebe class.

The essay argues that elite educations today produce people who are expert at excelling in systems and bureaucracies and not people who will excel as leaders. Leadership for WD is not about "jumping through hoops" to progress up the "system" but rather leadership is best exemplified by those who are self-aware, deeply thoughtful, and able to think creatively and independently.

Elite education, he argues, conditions people via a system of rewards and progression to excel in systems rather than forge independent and risky paths. He writes,

"Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it’s time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why they’re done. Just keeping the routine going."

In many companies, the incentive for creativity, for challenging the normal, for innovating processes is close to nil. Too often, the lack of senior support and the inertia of big companies "break the spirit" of those who have vision to see a new way forward. Rather than reward creativity and iteration, the system throws roadblocks in the way that eventually wear the innovator down.

Big companies are often hollowed out - ie the best and brightest are driven out by those content to manage the system rather than to challenge it. What's left is deadening - both to those who work in the system and, ultimately, to the system itself.

What's fascinating is his argument regarding the pernicious effects of today's elite educational systems - arguing, convincingly, that leadership is not learnt by excelling in educational system - doing what is required to advance to the next level - but rather through introspection, self-awareness, and the ability to concentrate on what matters rather than what is rewarded.

A great read.

England

2010-06-28T18:48:00.000-07:00

I lived for in England from 1982-1989. Formative years, where I fell in love with English football, the teams, tradition, and national team.

My boys - 10 and 8 - wear EPL jerseys most days to school and Sunday nights are reserved for the EPL game of the week and top highlights. The backyard holds two goals and a daily game where the boys pretend to be Rooney, Lampard, or Gerrard.

Imagine then the shock and confusion when their EPL idols went out not like the 3 Lions but rather like the 3 lambs.

Tears were spilled as they processed the 4-1 pasting by the Germans and the humiliation that was England's World Cup.

All sports fans live vicariously through their teams, but this World Cup is allowing me to see the depth to which children believe in their idols and the real pain the children feel when their heroes fail to live up to expectations.

Twitter - pricew

2010-06-28T18:36:00.000-07:00

If you read this blog - please do add me on Twitter - http://twitter.com/pricew

Good luck with the end of Q2!

Instructions for Life from the Dalai Lama

2010-06-17T20:02:00.000-07:00

I found this list today in my office - no idea where it came from, but I like it.

Take into account that great love and achievements involve great risk
When you lose, don't lose the lesson
Follow the three R's

Respect for self
Respect for others
Responsibility for all your actions

Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly
Don't let a little dispute injure a great relationship
When you realize you have made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it
Spend some time alone every day
Open arms to change, but do not let go of your values
Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer
Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you will be able to enjoy it a second time
A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life
In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Do not bring up the past
Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality
Be gentle with the Earth
Once a year, go someplace you have never been before
Remember that the best relationship is the one with yourself
Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it
Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon

Iteration and the Start-up Path

2010-06-11T17:23:00.000-07:00

Mark Gainey, the founder of KANA, once told me that the hardest part of the entrepreneurial journey is the first step. But that once begun, the journey takes on a life of its own.

The journey opens up into an endless series of forks in the road, where each fork taken provides new context, learnings, and guidance. Each fork provides both a new direction and momentum with which to carry the company and team on wards. If you listen to experience start-up people, they emit a wisdom and authenticity that comes from that journey - for it is a humbling one full of challenge and challenges overcome by tenacity, hard work, and a healthy dose of luck.

Since, I have been at Widgetbox, we have evolved into a market focus and set of product offerings that I could have never predicted on my first day on the job. What began as a widget platform, is now powering ad units for the world's largest brands and publishers. In addition, HTML5 has opened up an entirely new market opportunity for our widgetserver runtime and platform. The ability to pivot, to make decisions based on the market's guidance, and the insights that come from iteration are fundamental.

Great ideas are a function of context - white boards do not allow for great ideas, rather great ideas and insights require a gestation period of months and develop over a series of small moments - rejection, minor tweaks, and finally clarity and insight emerge as the product evolves to fit the market need. Importantly, the particular nature of a start-ups journey makes it hard for others to follow and gives rise to the myth of overnight success when all of a sudden the company meets the market need far ahead of the competition.

While a certain direction needs to be set a priori - the strawman is simply that - an early hypothesis that brings resources together - both human and financial capital. Then the market takes over and the process of learning begins.

My journey required an ability, uncomfortable for me, to live with ambiguity - to trust in the team to walk the journey together - not always certain of the final destination but confident that we had the flexibility and determination to orient to a good place over time - one step at a time.

Moreover, the early uncertainty fades as the market opportunity is better characterized and understood and the early conviction becomes steeled by a certainty that the company is right and onto something great!

Comments on Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

2010-06-01T15:10:00.000-07:00

This animated video of Dan Plink's RSA talk is extremely interesting.

Key argument: after a certain level of income, we are no longer motivated by purely financial gain. He argues that financial incentives work best for piece meal work - ie bonus tied to how many widgets are made per time period.

But for knowledge workers, science shows that financial incentives alone do not lead to higher performance.

What does?

Autonomy - self directed work
Mastery - challenge and the desire to master a domain
Purpose - making a contribution to a transcendant goal

Fascinating food for thought and given that the tech industry is comprised of knowledge workers - very instructive with respect to organizational behavior.

AAPL vs MSFT -what happened to best-of-breed?

2010-05-26T16:18:00.000-07:00

During my time at the Kellogg School, I took a class on competitive strategy. One of the quintessential strategy cases explored the battle between Apple and Microsoft for the computer market. At the time, Apple had less then 3% of the market and the company was heading for obscurity, or worse.

Today, Apple's market cap passed that of its long time rival. Twelve years ago the conventional wisdom held that the PC OEM model and the Wintel (Windows/Intel) platform allowed for a greater rate of innovation and a cost curve that Apple could never match. In hindsight, this argument seems farcical.

At that time, strategy orthodoxy encouraged companies to specialize at the component level - chips, operating systems, applications, assembly - and that specialized best-of-breed vendors would outperform vertically integrated companies. In fact, the idea of a company that produced both hardware and software was laughable and a strategy destined for a stale product line, bloated costs, and market share losses.

What happened and why was conventional wisdom so wrong? The world of best-of-breed has been replaced by a world of vertical integration, whereby the frictions of assembling best-of-breed components are driving people to buy pre-integrated systems. Oracle's acquisition of Sun is based on Jobs' vision of system level selling - hardware, software, peripherals. Ellison argued that customers want to buy a a solution - not a set of components that are integrated by systems integrators to deliver value. He argues, why not sell an pre-integrated solution, whereby each layer of the solution is designed to work best with the layer below and above it?

iPod/iTunes - software, computer, device, peripheral

iPad- App Store

Perhaps the insight is that as systems and "solutions" grew more complex - the incremental value of driving down marginal costs on a per component basis was overshadowed by the increase in marginal costs of assembling the components to solve the intended problem - ie listen to music, watch a movie, use an application.

Apple moved from competing on abstract utilities and generic cost per cpu to competing on systems designed to satisfy higher level consumer needs - consume media, produce media, share, network.... Integrated value not only supports much higher prices - compare a Dell laptop to a MacBook Pro - but also much higher level of consumer satisfaction.

Best of breed is dead - long live systems.

The Welfare State Killed Itself

2010-05-24T10:53:00.000-07:00

A narrative is emerging across the developed world - General Motors, Greece, Spain, the United Kingdom, federal, state, and municipal pensions....Put simply, the welfare state is no longer able to fund itself.

Defined-benefit pension plans and cradle to grave social systems- that are funded by subsequent generations - are driving massive deficits. Moreover, investors are refusing to finance deficits, forcing gut-wrenching but necessary cuts to the welfare state.

Importantly, the culpability of these cuts lies not with international investors, the IMF...but rather with the politicians, both Republican and Democrat, that ignored years of warnings and continued to enact welfare programs and pensions obligations that were impossible to deliver. The villains are politicians who insisted it was a "right" to receive benefits that are simply impossible to pay for.

The private sector went through a painful, but necessary migration from defined-benefit to defined-contribution pension plans over the last thirty years. Moreover, in the US, flexible labor laws allowed companies to restructure and eliminate tens of thousands of jobs that were no longer viable or necessary.

The public sector, however, has simply refused to confront the hard facts that laws and programs enacted for the "public good" - life time teacher tenure, full pensions for public workers, job guarantees - were in fact creating a fiscal monster that is eating an increasingly larger share of government budgets.

The system is killing itself and its proponents need to move from defending existing programs to taking a vested interest in making changes, as soon as possible, that will make changes, while painful, not disastrously so.

How Creative is Changing and Why the Real-time Web and Analytics Force a Change in How we Think About Creative

2010-05-17T11:23:00.000-07:00

Since Widgetbox launched ClickTurn last year, I have become a student and participant of the online ad industry. This post marks the first in a series, where I plan to share my learnings to date. This post deals with how technology is impacting the very nature of banner ad creative and why that harbors big changes for the industry.

Over the last fifteen+ years, the banner ad markets has grown into a $20bn global industry. Despite the industry's scale and size, the nature of today's banner ads remains very unchanged from the very first internet ads - static pictures of products that increasingly fail to capture the interest of consumers nor the nature of today's web.

Banner ads are akin to highway billboards - static combinations of text and images - seeking to encourage the driver/consumer to take the next exit and visit the advertiser's location. The creative process, therefore, focused on building the "perfect" creative - one that best captured the product, the call to action, and the brand's goals. Given, that ads were developed for a seasonal or temporal campaign, the creative process sought to build the best possible set of assets and to then pass them onto media planners for distribution to relevant sites and media properties.

Two big changes make the concept of "finished" creative a relic. The first is the rise of the real-time web - Twitter, Facebook YouTube, blog posts, etc. Brands are no longer investing in "snap shots" of their brand, but rather in conversations with their target audience, whereby the "creative" is the dialog. The real-time web requires a shift in perspective regarding creative from something that is fixed to something that is programmed by ongoing marketing initiatives. The brand does not seek solely to craft a static campaign that will live through the season, but rather it is also investing in daily, even hourly, updates that build on the brand experience. Creative, therefore, needs to reflect this change in frequency of message and provide a way to reflect the real-time brand in the creative being trafficked. Creative also needs to reflect the two-way nature of conversations and the ability of the web to amplify said conversations through social sharing.

Since these changes occur each and every day - the traditional and serial process of locking down creative no longer makes sense. And since these changes are real-time, the creative must become a living asset that can be programmed by the brand's marketing channels. This is a huge change and means that traditional creative will not work.

The second key change is analytics and retargeting. Rather than design the "optimal" creative - brands are leveraging dynamic creative solutions that seek to personalize ads based on retargeting and analytic optimizations. Again, the traditional creative shop is no longer a credible provider of the solution. Each ad load can be programmed and "designed" based on observed behavior to date over the life of a campaign, information known about a given web surfer, and other variables. Ads, therefore, become a set of programmable config options - with the final config of a given ad impression occurring at run-time.

ClickTurn is working to leverage both trends - the shift from episodic to real-time banner ad marketing and the reality that "perfect" creative is evolutionary and will be a combination of a series of defaults combined with a series of variables that the web at large will program. The real-time nature of such changes means that traditional "locked down" creative will slowly fade away.

Negotiating Via Docs vs Over Coffee

2010-05-13T21:44:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine is square in the middle of a financing. His company is raising money and a prospective new investor is looking to join an existing syndicate.

Today, he called to update me on the process and to run some key issues and terms passed me. In listening to the process to date, one key issue stood out. The current and future board members had yet to talk, either by phone or, better yet, in person. The negotiation, moreover, is taking place via redline markups sent over email.

In our email culture, it is increasingly common to see vast amounts of communication take place electronically - emails, texts, IMs....In many cases, electronic communication is a huge productivity boost and an enabler of commerce and progress.

In getting to a good deal, however, I find it can be problematic. Rather than send email - which is a terrible medium for conveying intent, logic, context, tone - I highly recommend talking in person. The social connections built from human contact and dialogue provide the context, trust, body language, tone, and other important "social greases" that foster understanding, collaboration, and common ground.

In summary, important business relations benefit hugely from in-person interaction. Second, deals feel "better" when the key issues are reviewed over coffee rather than over a redlined document delivered by an email server.

What We Can Learn from the UK

2010-05-12T11:22:00.000-07:00

The United Kingdom is facing dire financial and structural problems.

Deficit spending as a percentage of GDP is over 10% and forecast to increase. The future requires cuts to treasured social programs and a need to increase taxes.

Moreover, the electorate is split - leaving no party the clear winner in elections. Sound familiar.

However, the British are now forming the first coalition government in over 65 years. The Conservatives and Liberal Dems formed a power sharing agreement and argued that the crises afflicting that nation calls for collaboration not confrontation, for a focus on national priorities rather than factional differences.

Wow!

I used to believe that democracies are at their best in times of crisis - hard decisions are made and the differences that define us all are put aside to face existential challenges that threaten our way of life and security.

Today, we are facing such crises and existential threats - notably a looming fiscal crisis that makes us look worse than Greece. And yet, our political leaders are incapable of finding common ground, of meeting in the middle to drive consensus, of putting the national good ahead of politics. It is a sickening indictment on our political system and makes one incredible fearful for our future.

California is nearly bankrupt - and yet, due to gerrymandering and permanently safe seats our elected leaders are incapable of collaborating and instead rely on petty confrontations that may make partisans feel a brief sense of "victory," but the victories are truly Pyrrhic.

The US is fast approaching "Greek" level debt issues. Debt is projected to equal 140% of GDP within two decades, while Greece is suffering with debt levels at 110% of GDP.

With respect to Greece...today's NYTimes noted, "Both countries have a bigger government than they’re paying for. And politicians, spendthrift as some may be, are not the main source of the problem. We, the people, are. We have not figured out the kind of government we want. We’re in favor of Medicare, Social Security, good schools, wide highways, a strong military — and low taxes. Dealing with this disconnect will be the central economic issue of the next decade, in Europe, Japan and this country."

At some point the problems will be so acute that financial markets will force our hand, as they did in Greece. Investors will demand a "risk premium" to finance our deficit budgets and we will pay the piper.

Wouldn't it be wonderful, though, if our leaders took note of the British model of coalition government and left behind the rigid strutures of two party government and formed, what Abe Lincoln so famously did, a Team of Rivals!!!!

The False Comfort of Regulation

2010-05-10T12:13:00.000-07:00

The US Government's typical response to man-made and natural disasters is to leap into a frenzy of creating new regulations. The idea is that with stronger regulation, future disasters will be prevented and the nation as a whole will be made sounder. The logic makes perfect sense - let's close loopholes, oversights, systemic problems that create pain and suffering.

Unfortunately, we need to only look at how current regulators are performing in order to understand the efficiency and efficacy of future regulations. Let's start with Bernie Madoff - under the nose of the regulatory body designed to protect investors, the SEC, Bernie Madoff staged a $50 billion fraud. The SEC received frequent warnings regarding the implausibility of his returns, however, Madoff was not caught until his own sons turned him in.

Regulations create codes of conduct that are supervised by a regulatory body charged with ensuring compliance. The regulations are only as sound and as effective as the regulators themselves - regulators, moreover, are often ideology aligned with the very people they are tasked with regulating. They are very poorly compensated relative to the businesses they regulate. Finally, they do not attract the same caliber of talent.

The myopia of regulators can be seen in dramatic fashion looking back at what they missed, however, it is not surprising that brilliant people can cheat the system in ways impossible to police or prevent.

What's the point - the point is that we should all recognize the fallibility of regulation to protect us. There is a huge amount of legislative effort invested in creating regulations that will almost certainly fail to prevent future disaster.

We can, however, think through incentives. The cost of moral hazard is very real - if banks, oil companies, car companies, Madoff's investors, can expect the Federal government to backstop their losses then the potential "costs" of their decisions do not factor in their calculations. I understand that after the Exxon Valdez spill, Congress passed a law limiting future oil-spill related losses to $75m. This paltry "cost" of a spill creates a huge lack of incentive for oil companies to prevent spills. Similarly, large companies in the US today know that the Federal government is much more likely to bail them out than to let them fail.

Allowing companies to bear the true costs of their actions is most likely a more effective measure to prevent future pain. We need to create incentives such that malfeasance and misfeasance is borne by the shareholders of companies responsible.

Simply passing laws does not make it so.

Google, AdMob, and the FTC

2010-05-07T17:49:00.000-07:00

The FTC is now considering moving to block the Google-AdMob deal. The post below lays out my logic on why this is an insane position to even consider and further evidence of government run amok.

As I noted in an earlier blog post, free markets are the most efficient and equitable organizing principle for economic activity. Moreover, government monopolies, command and control resource allocation, and top-down/centralized decision making limit our freedom and destroy value in society.

Silicon Valley is perhaps the best example of free markets in this country - groups of individuals, free of any government subsidies, direction, or policy, are able to come together, free of labor laws that limit hiring or firing, and pursue their individual utility. The ideas and the allocation of resources are highly decentralized and the net result is an incredible wealth and productivity machine. No one orders that we invest in search engines, new chemical entities, iPhone apps - and yet the market somehow magically delivers innovation and value year after year.

I believe that it is better for a million people to make one decision than for one person to make a million decisions - the logic of such a premise is undeniable and yet we routinely expect government decision makers to solve complex issues fairly and optimally. Markets move so quickly - think mobile over the last 24 months - that it is insane to think that the government can truly understand the issues and make a sound decision. Think APPL vs Flash, HTML5, iAd, iPad, Android - the market is moving a billion miles an hour and yet government bureaucrats are expected to understand the pace of change, market dynamics, and decide who can buy whom.

The recent news that the FTC is considering blocking Google's acquisition of AdMob is a powerful example of government regulation run amok. Let's consider the premise of the FTC's position - because Google is THE player in paid-search, the government is considering blocking their acquisition of AdMob, a leading player in mobile advertising. This "concern" flies in the face of logic - for one, Apple not Google dominates the mobile Internet, Apple not Google runs a closed system, Apple not Google decides what content can execute on the market leading devices, Apple not Google is working to kill Flash, 3rd party analytics services, non-iAd ad units....

When we consider health care reform, financial industry reform, merger activity - it behooves us to remember that regulators cannot possibly understand - no one can - the complexities at work.

Market competition is the best remedy - think MSFT over the last five years - Apple is kicking their butts....

All of us in Silicon Valley should be ALARMED at the value destroying role government plays when they step into the legislate or litigate in hopes of preserving competition, fairness, or some other impossible to define and measure goal.

We are all the beneficiaries of free markets - let's remember that when we vote and let's all let the government know they should not play God in markets that move at a speed and complexity that no one person, let alone a group of smart people, can fathom, understand, or benignly influence!

Mentors

2010-05-05T14:51:00.000-07:00

One of life's pleasant surprises is how we continue to keep learning as we age. I am sure my kids think that I know everything and have all the answers.

Each year, I realize how little I do in fact know and how much there is to learn. We grow via experiences or people who stretch us and help us better understand ourselves, the world at large, and what really matters.

As an executive, I am constantly looking to learn and to expand my understanding of best practices, problem solving, leadership styles, etc.

Earlier in my career, I could look within my employer's organization to find mentor, role models, and people who could help me improve, stretch, learn.

Now as a start- up CEO, it is harder to rely on internal resources to keep the learning curve steep.

Recently, I asked a long-time CEO and very successful software entrepreneur to serve as a mentor to me. We meet once every 6-8 weeks and spend time talking about the market, life, in addition to focused conversations around areas of personal growth or challenge. It is well-known that the world's top athletes use coaches to improve, stretch, and develop. It is not as common, however, for business people to invest the time and energy in improving through outside mentoring and coaching.

I am very glad that my mentor agreed to spend time with me - it is a gift I plan to repay in years to come both to my mentor and to those who are like me now - self-aware enough to ask for help and hungry enough to use it to improve their game.

Fear and Mindfulness

2010-05-03T18:28:00.000-07:00

Omar Hamoui, AdMob's CEO, is featured in this week's Sunday NY Times' Corner Office Segment.

The Corner Office is a weekly segment that interviews CEOs on management techniques, lessons learned, and pearls of wisdom borne from the pressures, trials, and triumphs of CEO-dom.

Omar, in explaining his leadership philosophy and lessons learned, notes

" One was that insecurity is incredibly damaging in a corporate environment. You end up making really poor decisions, a lot of things you do are based on fear, and eventually it will fail. When people are playing defense and they’re primarily focused on their own jobs, it ultimately ends up being a sort of losing strategy....Don’t be afraid. What I mean by that is lots and lots of decisions are made by fear and they’re made by people who think they have more to lose than they actually have to lose."

To Omar, fear is a great inhibitor of potential, leads to poor decision making, and is in some sense self-fulfilling.

When we are scared, we are overly cautious, tense, defensive, paranoid... the list goes on. Athletes talk about "playing tight" or "hearing footsteps." When we are afraid, we begin to doubt ourselves and the stories going on in our head, which are in no way true, become true as our inhibiting behavior and actions prevent us from reaching our goals.

"Manny being Manny" is a pejorative joke, however, it is precisely because Manny Ramirez plays without fear and a seeming indifference to the world that he is so clutch.

There have been many times at Widgetbox when I have been afraid - afraid of not knowing where we were going, how we were going to build a great business, how the board would react to this or that piece of news, how my team was doing, what our competition was doing....I have learned that fear, doubt, and worry are incredibly corrosive to one's self, the harmony of a team, and the energy force that is necessary to achieve.

I have worked very hard to realize that too often I let environmental factors impact by sense of self, mood, energy, etc. For example, think how you react when someone who you don't know smiles at you....ok, now think how you feel when a stranger frowns at you or worse yells at you. Tiny examples of how we are literally programmed by external and environmental inputs. Now imagine the market frowning our your product, the board dumping on your product strategy...a bad traffic jam or a delayed flight.

What mindfulness allows is the cognitive ability to intercept external inputs, to consider them, and to avoid the unconscious triggering of each input into a hard wired reaction. Frown = sense of concern. Smile = feeling friendly to someone.

I am working to build a buffer between the environmental inputs I receive all day long and how I react to them - an ability to recognize them for what they are...random inputs that should in no way dominate my reactions to events, people, meetings, etc. Rather, by building a sense of mindfulness and awareness, the events can be processed for what they are and I can choose how to react to them, how to learn from them, and maintain an ability to project myself to the world at large rather than simply react to the world and let it dictate how I feel.

As Omar notes, fear is an inhibitor - both personally and institutionally. Tennis players, golfers, CEOs...all share this common view that staying present is vital to success - anxiety related to past mistakes or fear about an imagined future derived from past mistakes can dominate the mind and cripple performance.

Omar's comments spoke to me and the journey I have walked in trying to be mindful, to stay present, and to not let fear and inputs program my outputs.

This I Believe: Part 1

2010-04-29T18:24:00.000-07:00

This post is the first in a series where I try to lay out what I believe and why.

The project, This I Believe, inspired me as did the really complex issues being debated today. What do I believe? And why?

The This I Believe project collects essays that capture the core beliefs that guide peoples' daily lives. As an earlier post noted, writing allows one to step back, consider the world at large, and formally draft a position that captures what we believe and why.

"Faulkner said, "I don't know what I think until I read what I said." That's not just a joke. You learn what you think by codifying your thinking in some way. Codifying one's thinking is an important step in inventing oneself. The most difficult way to do it is by thinking about thinking - it helps to speak or write your thoughts. Writing is the most profound way of codifying your thoughts, the best way of learning from yourself who you are and what you believe."

Given the highly divisive nature of today's political environment and the big issues facing the country, our state (CA), and our communities, I wanted to take some time to think through what I believe to be true and to develop a set of first principles that can help navigate "big" decisions.

What do I think of the government's healthcare plan, the financial regulation bill, deficit spending? How should I think about these issues and what first principles may help to develop a position? Too often it seems that peoples' positions are driven more by their party affiliation and the personalities of the politicians involved than by the merits of a given bill or policy.

I hope that this post will be the first in a series of posts that lay out my thoughts.

This I Believe, free markets are the most efficient and equitable organizing principle for economic activity. Moreover, government monopolies, command and control resource allocation, and top-down/centralized decision making limit our freedom and destroy value in society. I believe that pro-business policies -subsidies, quotas, bailouts, no bid contracts - are equally damning and increase costs for the many to the benefit of the few. I believe that each major party suffers from a related flaw - the Democratic party believes that government can allocate resources more effectively than the people who fund it, while the Republican party protects specific businesses and industries at the cost of the consumer, think of sugar quotas/farm subsidies.

To help me develop a position, I am rereading Milton Friedman's Free to Choose, a book that he co-wrote with his wife, Rose, and a project that explores the relationship between economic freedom and personal freedom.

The central tenet of his book is that political freedom is only possible with economic freedom. People must be free to choose to pursue where they work, for what wages, what they buy....independent of coercion - he argues that free markets provide a mechanism for voluntary cooperation amongst people. The freedom to exchange goods and services is the most efficient system for exchange we know and is vital to maintain political freedom. For when people are not able to act in their own interests they must be commanded to - we will only do what is not in our interests, and only we can know what are interests are, if we are forced to do so.

This can be subtle - does the CA state government know how best to spend our tax payer money as it relates to education, for example? If we let schools compete for the dollars per student our government spends we would receive far better value. We are not free to choose how we invest our tax dollars in our the education of our children - rather we live subject to a state monopoly and we can only choose alternative education choices if we wish to forgo the tax dollars we have already contributed to education.

Friedman writes, "In addition to what government spends directly, it exercises extensive control over the deals that people can make in the private market. It prevents you from buying sugar in the cheapest market; it forces you to pay twice the world price for sugar. It forces enterprises to meet all sorts of requirements about wages, hours, antipollution standards, and so on and on. Many of these may be good, but they are government dictation of how the resources shall be used."

If we believe that individuals are best able to define what they want, where they are willing to work, what they want to do - then it then follows that government policies that limit such freedom are sub-optimal and will stifle individual freedom.

Government policies suffer from the good intentions and yet have unforeseen consequences that are frightening - for example, using tax payer money to guarantee mortgages and to extend credit made it possible and profitable for banks to underwrite mortgages and then offload the risk to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. A great idea, everyone should own a house, became the root of mis-priced financial risk. It must be better to let markets compete to supply credit and to price risk based on a voluntary exchange between lender and creditor.

Silicon Valley is perhaps the best example of free markets in this country - groups of individuals, free of any government subsidies, direction, or policy, are able to come together, free of labor laws that limit hiring or firing, and pursue their individual utility. The ideas and the allocation of resources are highly decentralized and the net result is an incredible wealth and productivity machine. No one orders that we invest in search engines, new chemical entities, iPhone apps - and yet the market somehow magically delivers innovation and value year after year. And yet, on many other "needs" we believe that centralized planners can choose on our behalf what we need and how to deliver it to us - postal service, schools, health care, who we can hire, who we cannot hire...

Decentralized decision making must then trump centralized decision making - complex allocation decisions need to be left to markets where individuals are free to choose. The role of the policy maker then must be to design markets that maximize decentralized allocation and to work hard to limit any interference, be it government or business, that limits such freedom and decentralization. Quotas, subsidies, mandates, protected markets, monopolies etc. distort the markets and serve to cheat us all to the benefit of a few. While it is tempting to believe that a group of smart people can design complex systems that will be optimal - history suggests that is not possible.

As residents of Silicon Valley - we are beneficiaries of the freedom to choose in action.

We need to urge all political actors to recognize their limitations in making decisions that we should make for ourselves and to open competition in all economic activities to drive the most equitable allocation of our resources.

As much as I admire Barack Obama - I fear the unintended consequences of good intentions whereby a small group of people seek to allocate resources and solve complex issues on our behalf.

Twitter Handle: pricew

2010-04-29T16:23:00.000-07:00

For anyone who subscribes to this feed - my twitter handle is pricew.

Thanks for following.

Supply Side Exchanges - They Are Coming

2010-03-26T15:46:00.000-07:00

The venture community is very excited about the promise of demand-side exchanges - markets whereby advertisers can buy audience independent of publisher.

To date, advertisers have bought "audience" via publishers who provide demographically/topically relevant audience. If you want to buy sports enthusiasts, ESPN is a good buy. If you want to buy car lovers, Edmunds is your ticket.

Demand side exchanges theoretically allows advertisers to buy audience anywhere on the web and rely on various targeting technologies to match ads to audience - you can now buy a sports enthusiast across the web at large and not just via sports sites.

The net effect of ad networks and demand side exchanges is to put tremendous pressure on tier one publisher CPM rate cards - why spend $15 CPMs on ESPN when you buy the "same" audience for $3 CPMs through an ad network or exchange.

Publishers are being force to do two very important things:

pull inventory off exchanges and ad networks to maintain their pricing
break the fungibility argument by delivering more custom, more rich, more engaging ads than those available through a network or an exchange

In my meetings with publishers, it is clear that they are moving to pull their content off the exchanges and our working quickly and thoughtfully to develop custom ad products that outperform display and serve to add value to the advertiser beyond audience alone.

The next logical development, in order to raise net fill rates, will be to develop supply side exchanges - whereby tier one publishers pool unsold inventory and offer it on their terms for premium prices.

Demand side exchanges will be left with remnant crap inventory, and the tier one publishers will work to add value via direct sales, pooled inventory, and through in-house product teams that deliver high-value ad experiences.

I am not bullish on demand side exchanges and feel they will be left holding the bag as the premier sites build a supply side exchange and refuse to allow networks or exchanges access to their premium content.

DEMO 2010

2010-03-23T19:30:00.000-07:00

I am sitting at the Palm Springs Airport after three very successful days at DEMO.

Giles Goodwin and I presented the ClickTurn Ad Builder - a self-service platform for building rich media ads and HTML 5 mobile sites.

ClickTurn is a self-service platform for building rich media ad units and HTML 5 mobile web sites. In minutes, publishers and advertisers are able to build rich media ads and mobile sites that leverage the richness of the real-time web.

The ad and mobile site builder support YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Blog and other content sources, while also providing templates for polls, lead gen forms, and other forms of engagement.

ClickTurn is currently working with LinkedIn, CBSi, IDG, Forbes, FedEx, Cisco, Sprint, Qwest, Panasonic, Gap, HSBC, the Gap, etc to deliver ads that are realizing ~.8% CTRs and ~15% engagement rates.

The Protocol Society

2010-01-12T14:41:00.000-08:00

When Alabama and Nick Sabean won the BCS National Championship, ESPN called the win the revenge of the grinder. The recap story noted that Nick Sabean focuses on process and the "Alabama system."

That is not to say that winning is not important, but rather that Sabean knows that successfully defining and repeating processes is the key to predictable outcomes versus random acts of athleticism. Moreover, the better the system is codified, the more sustainable the athletic advantage

The logic is that by building discipline around core processes and protocols - how to block, how to run, how to tackle - victories will derive from that discipline.

David Brooks, my favorite NY Times columnist, made a similar point in his brilliant editorial - The Protocol Society.

He writes,

"In the 19th and 20th centuries we made stuff: corn and steel and trucks. Now, we make protocols: sets of instructions. A software program is a protocol for organizing information. A new drug is a protocol for organizing chemicals. Wal-Mart produces protocols for moving and marketing consumer goods. Even when you are buying a car, you are mostly paying for the knowledge embedded in its design, not the metal and glass.

Kling and Schulz start off entertainingly by describing a food court. There are protocols everywhere, not only for how to make the food, but how to greet the customers, how to share common equipment like trays and tables, how to settle disputes between the stalls and enforce contracts with the management.

The success of an economy depends on its ability to invent and embrace new protocols. Kling and Schulz use North’s phrase “adaptive efficiency,” but they are really talking about how quickly a society can be infected by new ideas."

In my time as a CEO of a start-up, I have come to appreciate the wisdom of a commitment to process and the incredible momentum that comes from clearly defined models of operation that are well understood, repeatable, and embraced by the team.

Competitive advantage can be found in operational excellence, customer intimacy, technology innovation....however, one way to measure and predict a company's future ability to compete and succeed is to understand how their "protocol capital" as much as their technology.

Good protocols - systems - make for consistent winners. While some may feel process inhibits innovation, the rise of scrum and agile development speaks to the ability to innovate via light-weight processes that turn commitment to protocol into championships.

2009 Redux

2009-12-30T11:36:00.000-08:00

Year-end is a natural time for reflection on events of the past year and a time to plan goals for the year to come.

As I think back on 2009, I am struck by a few observations.

The year began with the macro overhang of the economy and the recent failings of the US financial markets. The world lost its orientation and no one knew if we would continue to free fall or if we had hit bottom and that a recovery was the next natural phase. The ability to navigate is premised on the ability to orient - to know where one is in relation to one's destination. In a global panic, bearings are not possible and decision makers went into paralysis and they scrambled to reorient themselves and to know which was up and which way was down.

Start-ups depend on future growth for their success - investors, customers, management, and employees must believe in a future world where demand remains robust and where future profitability validates today's investment decisions. In a world with an uncertain future, projections that demand future growth become at best optimistic and at worst insane. Accordingly, the land of start-ups began 2009 with no sense of future direction and free from data points to help suggest a rosy tomorrow would dawn.

With the worst economic conditions since the 1930's as the backdrop, the new year began with tremendous uncertainty, and even worse, an overhang of pessimism in a world (start-ups) that demands optimism.

While the macro picture loomed, the micro conditions for me and Widgetbox were important to revisit. No one can control the economy, but each executive is able to control and influence their own companies - burn rates, employee morale, company direction, strategy, etc.

At Widgetbox, we made some hard but important decisions with respect to how to navigate the "fog." First, if we use financial option value as a framework...the value of an option is a function of volatility and time. The more time and the more volatility, the higher the value of the option. If we think of every start-up as a financial call option, we then can maximize value by extending the duration of the option, while the volatility is self-evident. As such, we made difficult decisions to reduce headcount and to extend the life of our company and it's option on the future. We let go most of our business people and kept the engineering team largely whole with a skeletal layer of business folks.

Second, we focused on process optimization. Why process? Many start-ups work on the random acts of heroism theory, whereby people work extreme hours to achieve productivity and innovation. As a three-year old company, we needed to find a way to drive innovation and productivity with both a reduced head-count and the need to preserve goodwill and morale. As such, we moved to a formal scrum process, weekly sprints, and a social contract. The contract stated that we would release every Tuesday and that the sprint would be locked down and no new stories would be added to the sprint without the CTO or CEO's approval. The process investment supported a huge increase in reliability, innovation, and morale and we avoided the burnout that comes from constant changes to development priorities and schedules. We shipped every week of the year and built a product organization that became incredibly nimble and productive.

Third, we focused on monetization. While perhaps an obvious focus area, we were born in an era where platform investments were tied to non-revenue metrics and the basis for value was in uniques, impressions, and other non-financial benchmarks. We knew that to survive we would need to turn our sights on aligning our product investments, features, and users with a viable commercial model capable of delivering venture returns. From a modest run rate in January, we began to grow our revenues steadily month over month and we set a collective goal to 10x the business by year-end. The whole team's mindset shifted to embrace the goal and every employee began to add ideas, suggestions, and value vis a vis how to best monetize the business. Over the year, we added a billing system, tiered our products and services, became adept at funnel optimization, conversion analysis, data-driven management, and how to work on making our business predictable and scaleable.

Fourth, we matured our thinking on strategy from one in which we would speculatively project "good" ways to grow revenue to pull-based strategy analysis in which our customers - now over 14,000+ - provided us the ideas, feedback, and inspiration with which to invest in products, features, and markets. While the world was disoriented, we grew in confidence with respect to our direction and how we would navigate our growth and future direction.

In summary, we extended our runway by reducing burnrate (adding 18 months), we invested in process to support scaleable execution and progress, we committed to monetization and made it a company-wide mandate, and finally, and thankfully, customers were able to provide us the direction we once looked to the whiteboard to provide.

As the macro world improved, we are well positioned - as a company and culture - to leverage that the returning sense of optimism. Customers have helped us identify a new line of business - rich media advertising - that is perfectly suited to our technology. ClickTurn.com is our latest product initiative and one in which I hope to tell you much more about as 2010 begins.

While the world started 2009 in a daze, we were very lucky to have committed employees, patient investors, and customers that helped us maintain our confidence in a better tomorrow. It was by no means an easy year, but one in which the entrepreneurial maxim regarding the need for perseverance and luck hit home.

Why Blog?

2009-10-26T19:57:00.000-07:00

I am reading Warren Bennis' seminal work on leadership, On Becoming a Leader.

The book profiles scores of business leaders and seeks to identify common abstractions that help reveal "truths" about leadership.

Early in the book, I came across the following passage, which perfectly describes why I blog and the benefits of structuring your thoughts via a post:

"Faulker said, "I don't know what I think until I read what I said." That's not just a joke. You learn what you think by codifying your thinking in some way. Codifying one's thinking is an important step in inventing oneself. The most difficult way to do it is by thinking about thinking - it helps to speak or write your thoughts. Writing is the most profound way of codifying your thoughts, the best way of learning from yourself who you are and what you believe."

I imagine that the paragraph above hits bloggers like a visceral truth - thinking, writing, and editing, all the while mindful that others will critique your thinking, helps to codify and transcend your thoughts from loose collections of ideas into an integrated world view that helps you reveal to yourself what you think and why.

Scott Cook - Wisdom

2009-10-07T11:01:00.000-07:00

On Monday, Widgetbox and I were invited to attend and present at Intuit's inaugural entrepreneurship day. Intuit's founder, CEO, CTO, and senior management hosted twenty plus companies to share ideas on innovation and to explore avenues of partnership.

For me, the highlight proved to be an impromptu talk by Scott Cook on lessons learned from 28 years with Intuit.

He boiled down this advice to the following observations:

The Power of Word-of-Mouth

81% of Intuit's customers are driven by WOM
WOM remains the #1 driver of customer acquisition

Be Where the Customers Are

Understand where customers buy and make sure your product is readily available
Retail traditionally drove the majority of Intuit's sales --> therefore, retail expertise and management were vital to competition
Today, the web is replacing retail and again the company is moving quickly to driven on-demand transactions

How Do you Create WOM?

focus on what you choose to do?

The goal is to identify the #1 problem in the customer's life and to build products that demonstrably solve the #1 problem
Why is it a problem? How does it manifest itself? What would be the benefit? How can the benefit be measured?
If you solve people's #1 problem - they will tell everyone they know about it and the WOM magic starts to happen

be thoughtful on how you choose do to it?

How? Intuit's focus is on customer driven innovation (CDI) - CDI is an immersive and holistic approach to product development. Immersive in that Intuit looks to "live" with its customers to identify the tacit and overt problems facing customers. He talked of the need to observe customers in action and to trust what you see not what they can articulate or verbalize.
Holistic in that the entire team lives with the customer - eng, prod, mkting - and the cross-functional fluency with the prospect's problem allows for products that are "designed to delight"

Hiring

Be very selective
Identify 3 most important traits for hire in question
Example - Apple retail hires for the trait "deeply caring about others"
Interview to diligence and prove the candidate has a proven history of the traits in question

Common sense - for sure - but like many best practices they are harder to implement and manage than they are to understand.

Last Child in the Woods

2009-09-28T17:32:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, my wife and I went to see Richard Louv speak. Richard is the author of Last Child in the Woods, Saving Our Children From Nature Deficit Disorder.

His book and talk center on a series of alarming developments in the lives of America's children:

increasing divide between the young and the natural world
loss of freedom and time alone for children to explore the woods, local creek, etc.
growth in structured "play dates" and the decline of time to create play, particularly play outside
fear of traffic and strangers that keeps kids inside rather than outside running around and exploring

The talk mirrored an article I read about a study in the UK. A few stats follow to set the tone:

Less than 10% play of children play in natural settings compared to 40% of adults when they were young.
Three quarters of adults claimed to have had a patch of nature near their homes and over half went there at least once or twice a week. 64% of children reckon they have a patch of nature near their homes but less than a quarter go there once or twice a week.

What are the costs of the children losing access to time in nature?

Louv notes research that links nature deficiency disorder with very real mental health challenges (ADD, ADHD) and physical fitness ailments (childhood obesity, diabetes).

For many, time in nature is therapeutic and calming. For parents and adults, it is important that we are aware the growing loss of access to the outdoors that many children face and that we work to lead or sponsor day hikes, fishing trips, camping outings, and other means that allow children the joy that comes from freedom to play, catch frogs, get muddy...in the great outdoors.

Living History: Larry Ellison

2009-09-22T14:00:00.000-07:00

Last night, Ed Zander (ex-CEO of Motorola) interviewed Larry Ellison at the Churchill Club.

The interview proved to be fascinating, with Ed Zander a perfect choice to push and prod Ellison on topics ranging from ORCL's early years, his motivations for buying Sun, to politics, sailing, and the prospects for the US economy.

The title of the post "living history" hit home last night. We are fortunate to not only live in a place where monster companies are born and scale, but also to work in an industry where many of the pioneers remain active - Ellison, Jobs, Ballmer, Dell....

While the story behind ORCL is well-known, Ellison made a few very interesting comments worth sharing.

First, he argued that the reason behind the Sun acquisition is to move into the systems business. He believes that the tech industry treats customers like "computer hobbyists." Customers are forced to buy components - servers, storage, switches, databases, app servers, applications....- from a long list of vendor and to then spend vast sums integrating systems to address a given application. His goal is to leverage Sun to create systems - billing systems, airline reservations systems....where engineers optimize the integration not customers and service providers. He envisions building the successor to Tom Watson Jr's IBM, which he views as the most successful enterprise company of all time.

The systems vision is an interesting one and one that flies in the face of conventional wisdom - ie that the industry and customers are best served via a focus on horizontal specialization. Components rather than systems, the industry long argued, delivered the greatest innovation at the lowest total price. His systems vision challenges orthodoxy that specialization trumps integration.

Interestingly, Steve Jobs is also driving a systems based approach. Rather than follow the PC model of separation between hardware, software, peripherals, applications...., Apple provides integrated solutions - systems - that despite the significant price premiums are trumping the PC approach to consumer marketing and strategy. The integration of software, hardware, applications, and services (iTunes) provides greater consumer utility than the "computer hobbyist" the PC industry espouses. The Mac vs PC ads hit this point time and time again.

Second, Larry Ellison is bearish on the US economy. Rather than seeing a W, V, or U shaped recovery, he humorously called for an L-shaped recovery - ie a decline to a new equilibrium from which we will not see any meaningful recovery for at least five years. His logic - 70% of the US economy is premised on consumer spending and US consumers are so overwhelmed by debt that they will be forced to save, not spend, to service massive debt obligations.

Finally, he reeks of competition. He cannot go five minutes without commenting on IBM or SAP. He clearly takes tremendous energy from focusing on an competitor and on rallying the company to take share, to win accounts, and to out market the competitor in question. He made one comment that really struck home - "pick your competitors carefully for you will quickly come to resemble the companies you compete with."

Thanks to the Churchill Club for a great event.

Now

2009-09-18T14:54:00.000-07:00

There is a real challenge in being present - that is enjoying right now, this moment. Modern technology and life makes it very easy to be distracted and the stress and pressure of Silicon Valley provide ample opportunity to ponder the past or project the future.

The problem is that such ponderings and projection limit the ability to enjoy right now and sap your energy and effectiveness.

Books on wisdom share a common refrain - the past is the past, the future is uncertain and a projection of anxiety or fantasy, and the only sure thing is right now. Too often people live in their heads - thinking about lost opportunities in the past or making up stories - both good and bad - about the future.

The lack of being present exhibits itself in many ways - chronic BlackBerry checking, the inability to listen, eyes that wander or a blank look that lets you know the mind is somewhere else, conference calls or meetings where it is clear half the attendees are 20% "there" at best.

In many ways, I am far from immune from the risk of living in a fog of yesterday/tomorrow, rather than the very real moment of the now. It is very hard not to be seduced by distraction or to walk around in a fog of thoughts that make it hard to focus or be truly with other people - actively listening and engaged.

When I get home, I try to clear my head and really be home. When I sit in a meeting, I try to clear my head and be there for that meeting. Over a coffee, talking to your wife, your colleague, focusing on the present is laughably hard to do.

But when you can - the ability to enjoy becomes so much greater.

My friend Paul Levine told me that the best you can do is wake up every day and focus on that day - not the day before, the month before, or two weeks from now. But rather, today.

As a CEO, I have found that advice to be very empowering and a great way to handle the ambiguity of tomorrows to come and the anxiety that comes from worrying about missteps in the past.

The Healing of America

2009-09-08T13:46:00.000-07:00

T.R. Reid's book, The Healing of American: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care, is an important read.

Reid, a Washington Post correspondent, explores health-care systems around the world and asks and works to answer the following questions:

why is American the only developed economy that does not provide health care to all its citizens?
why does American spend 2x per capita on health care while leaving 45m uninsured?
should health care be considered a right or a privilege?
why are administrative costs 4% of spend in France and 20% of spend in the US?
why is the US 23rd out of 23rd in life expectancy over 60 amongst developed nations?
hows does health care work in Germany, France, Spain, the UK, Japan....?

Health care reform is a very complex issue, and the cacophony of sound bites from both parties only serves to raise, not answer questions. In my effort to come to a personal, informed decision on the issue, I turned to Reid's book after hearing him interviewed on Newshour.

The transcript of his interview with Betty Bowser can be found here.

How Long Does It Take to Hit $50m in Revenue

2009-08-27T16:19:00.001-07:00

Very interesting analysis from Tableau Software regarding how long it takes a software company to hit $50m in revenue..

See my post on "When it Goes Right, What Does it Cost to Build a Great Software Company?" for more analysis on time to profitability, time to IPO, median capital raised, etc.

The New Normal

2009-08-26T13:15:00.001-07:00

Bill Gross of PIMCO is one of the nation's sages. His monthly Investment Outlooks marry wit, wisdom, and market insights to great effect.

His August Outlook, Investment Potions, looks at the implication of the "new normal" GDP outlook on jobs, income growth, and return on assets.

His core point is that the current economy is premised on 5% GDP growth - ie factories, retail stores, job levels, asset allocations, forecast pension returns...all presume that the economy will continue to grow at 5% year after year. We geared our companies and economy to a fixed level of expected economic growth.

Now, we are in the Great Recession and facing high unemployment, lower consumer spending, etc., accordingly, PIMCO forecasts GDP growth closer to 3% than 5%. The implication is that we have massive overcapacity built into the system and we will simply not need all the retail space, cars, jobs, houses, etc that we have built when it appeared all but a certainty that GDP growth was a fixed variable set at 5%. Moreover, pension funds, endowments, and private investors will need to readjust their return on capital expectations to match the long-term reduction in GDP growth.

He writes:

A 3% nominal GDP “new normal” means lower profit growth, permanently higher unemployment, capped consumer spending growth rates and an increasing involvement of the government sector, which substantially changes the character of the American capitalistic model. High risk bonds, commercial real estate, and even lower quality municipal bonds may suffer more than cyclical defaults if not government supported. Stock P/Es will rest at lower historical norms, and higher stock prices will ultimately depend on tangible earnings growth in the form of increased dividends, not green shoots hope. An investor should remember that a journey to 3% nominal GDP means default/haircuts for assets on the upper end of the risk spectrum, as well as extremely low yielding returns for government and government-guaranteed assets at the bottom end.

While the stock market continues to perform, analysts like Gross and structural deficits make a recovery back to the 1990's "normal" hard to imagine. Rather, the economy will need to restructure and shed capacity in order to arrive at a new equilibrium.

Rather than build out our economy to support growth - think of the wave CSCO rode in the 1990s - we may see people unwinding capacity. Spending related to growth - networks, factories, private infrastructure - will need to slow/decline.

Technology - a bell weather of growth - will be a challenged market place.

Perhaps the best play will be to buy assets as the market sheds them....ie, there may well value found in buying hard assets at firesale prices rather than investing in high-growth models that are predicated on new market development and spending.

Not a bullish view, I know, but one that may prove to be the reality.

End of Summer Reading

2009-08-24T11:39:00.001-07:00

Quick post: I am in the middle of an historical novel binge and strongly recommend the following.

Genghis: Birth of an Empire
Genghis: Lords of the Bow
Genghis: Bones of the Hills

Terrific stuff and if you want a great biography on Khan, read Genghis Khan, The Making of the Modern World

Finally - Agincourt, the tale of Henry V's epic battle as told by an English bowman.

The Rise of Consumer SaaS

2009-07-06T17:31:00.000-07:00

In the past six months, consumer subscription services have exploded across the web.

Until September of last year, the tried and true revenue model for consumer Internet services was on-line advertising. The model - page views, unqiues, and CPMs - is well understood and sites looked to use direct sales and ad-networks (read Google) to monetize traffic and impressions.

The cooling of the on-line ad market, flight to quality for advertisers (ESPN, etc), and the realization that ad revenue may not scale forced many consumer services to consider charging their users for access to functionality and value.

While SaaS is a well-defined success story in the enterprise space, it was considered a virtual truth that on-line users would not pay for on-line services. Why? - free substitutes, ad-funded business models, and a general end-user belief the web should be free, etc.

Today, "freemium" is on the rise and there are great teams across the valley working to monetize via micro-payments and subscriptions.

LogMeIn's IPO provides insight into the power of direct-to-consumer subscription services, as have traditional success stories such as anti-virus (SYMC, MFE).

However, there are many good examples of the consumer SaaS trend

Vimeo
Dropbox
Flickr
Wordpress
Widgetbox

These teams are working on using price, features, and value to tier users into free and paid product buckets. Furthermore, good work is being done in optimizing user registration, user conversion, affiliate models, A/B testing product and purchase pages, tracking churn, etc.

I expect to see more services looking to move to charging users and to significant innovation in optimizing subscription revenue.

Here at Widgetbox, we use a AAA model to manage the business:

Acquisition - driving new registered users
Activity - driving activity, conversions, and value per user
Ads - monetizing "free usage"

The model and focus on transactions is allowing for tremendous progress in understanding our users, while using the ultimate test - will they pay you for the service - to gauge our value and utility.

Widgetbox Hits 100m Uniques

2009-06-22T08:28:00.001-07:00

Widgetbox recently hit an important milestone - 100m monthly uniques as measured by Quantcast.

To put 100m into perspective, Widgetbox is now the web's 19th largest network.

It is tremendously rewarding to work on a technology platform that touches tens of millions of people a month, and Widgetbox's continued growth is huge validation that the atomization of the web and the rise of widgets as a valuable medium for content syndication, web page construction, and personalization continues apace.

In addition, Widgetbox's focus on self-service solutions and the freemium model is driving tremendous growth in customer acquisition as customers - prosumer, SMB, and enterprise - use the Widgetbox platform to widgetize, distribute, and measure their content.

The Education of an American Dreamer

2009-06-16T17:10:00.000-07:00

In 2005, I wrote about Pete Peterson's wonderful book, Running on Empt y. I just finished is autobiography, The Education of An American Dreamer and highly recommend it.

Running on Empty indicts both Republicans and Democrats for ignoring two troubling twin deficits - the the trade deficit and the budget deficit - which, he believes, may ultimately bankrupt the country. The hard-hitting book highlights the off-balance sheet, unfunded entitlement program liabilities that will fall due in the coming decades. With trillions of dollars in Medicaid, social security, and drug benefits promised to current and future retirees, he warns of some very hard choices that face the nation. For example, he estimates if Congress was forced to fund promised entitlement programs, we would face, "an immediate and permanent 60 percent hike in the federal income tax, or a 50 percent cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits."

His recent book walks the reader through his quite amazing career. Quick CV

Northwestern BA
Chicago MBA
Marketfacts (research analyst)
McCann-Erickson (head of chicago office)
Bell & Howell (CEO at 36 of Fortune 300 company)
Chair, Council on International Economic Policy
Secretary of Commerce
Lehman Brothers (CEO)
Blackstone Group (Founder and Chairman)
Concord Coalition (Founding President)
Fed Reserve Bank of NY (Chairman)

What strikes me is the many various industries in which he excelled - research, advertising, manufacturing, government, investment banking, merchant banking, public policy.

Each very successful person is somewhat sui generis, however, one can always learn from those who have accomplished so much for so long.

There's No Need to Bat .900

2009-04-06T11:29:00.000-07:00

This Sunday's NYT included an interview with John Donahoe, eBay's CEO.

When asked how his management style has evolved, he pointed to a lesson from an early mentor.

"Another part of my management style I learned from Kent Thiry, who was another one of my early bosses, and is now CEO of DaVita. I did not know it at the time, but I was suffering from a real fear of failure. Kent said, "you know John, your challenge is that you're trying to bat .900." And he said: "when you were in college, you got a lot of As. You could get 90 to 95 percent. When you took your first job as analyst, you were really successful and felt like you were batting .900." But, he said, "now you are playing in the major leagues, and if you expet to bat .900, eithr you come up to bat and freeze because you're afraid of swinging and missing, or you're a little afraid to step into the batter's box." He said,"remember, the best hitters in MLB can strike out 6 times out of 10 ands till be among the greatest of all time hitters."

And he said,"that's my philosophy - the key is to get up in the that batter's box and take a swing. And all you have to do is hit one single, a couple of doubles, and an occasional homerun out of every 10 at-bats and you're going to be the best hitter or best leader around."

The interview really resonated with me. The best performers understand that failure is part of the game, that one should focus less on discrete events (single at-bats) and more on the process of performance (practice and routines), and that fear of failure can be paralyzing and self-fulfilling.

In this marcro environment, strike out rates are going up, and it is even more important that leaders focus on singles, doubles, the occasional home run, and mind set that helps to get in the box and take a swing.

Widgetbox Turns 3

2009-04-01T14:01:00.001-07:00

Today, Widgetbox turns three.

On April 1, 2006, Ed Anuff, Dean Moses, and Giles Goodwin formally started Widgetbox.

Here is a copy, thanks to archive.org, of the first front door.

The site promised to "change how the world thinks about syndicating functionality on the web."

And so it has!

Since launch, Widgetbox has helped tens of thousands of publishers syndicate their content, service, and applications via widget technology. The company continues to ride the web widget syndication wave and we just finished our most successful month ever - serving over 740m widgets to over 89 million uniques.

Importantly, in addition to traffic, Widgetbox just reached an impressive customer milestone with over 400 paying customers.

Happy Birthday Widgetbox.

Widgetbox Update

2009-03-26T14:34:00.000-07:00

On Jan 22nd, Widgetbox launched its first subscription service, Blidget Pro.

Since launch, CBS, eBay/Kijji, the Golden State Warriors, LA Lakers, the Michigan Times, Lockheed Martin, Steve Spangler Science, and hundreds of other content providers and marketers have become Widgetbox customers.

THE OFFICIAL SITE OF THE GOLDEN STATE WARRIORSgreat free widgetsWidgetbox

Lakers.com RSSgreat free widgetsWidgetbox

While the widgets are all unique, some important commonalities exist. Content providers, e-commerce companies, and brands all recognize that widgets represent a powerful medium for reaching new users, driving traffic, syndicating content, and improving natural search performance. While the recognized need is universal, the implementation details continue to be a major friction limiting adoption.

Prior to the Blidget Pro, a widget strategy required material expesnive custom development, one-off anlytics and tracking, custom creative, questions regarding distribution, and a host of complications that frustrated the ability to levearge the opportunity.

The Blidget Pro is based on several important concepts that help explain its success:

configuration vs customization - no coding required
leverages existing content - syndicates existing video, image, post, and twitter content
custom branding and linkouts - maintains brand promise and drive traffic
leverages Widgetbox's platform - syndication, installation, and analytics included

Importantly, Blidget Pro is another example of a freemium model in action. Every month, thousands of content owners use Widgetbox's free servcies to widgetize and distribute their content. By providing value-added features to paying subscribers, Widgetbox is building important customer relationships with companies looking for a set of premium features that help them better meet their widget goals.

Another important element of our strategy is self-service. In a challenged economy and in an emerging technology category, it is vital that prospects are able to self-discover, self-qualify, self-provision, and self-deploy. All day long, customers discover Widgetbox, purchase a subscription, and deploy their widget without ever talking to one of our employees. As with all new markets, expensive technology that requires a push-based selling model will limit adoption.

All of us at Widgetbox are excited by the uptake in customers and in the success of the self-serve model. We are busy working on even better features and premium offerings and will keep our focus on simple, self-service tools that differentiate based on ease of use, ease of adoption, and rapid time-to-value.

Blidget Pro

2009-02-27T15:25:00.000-08:00

Widgetbox just launched an embeddable widget creator.

Simply enter your blog feed, youtube, twitter, hulu, flickr, or vimeo user id into the the widget below and build a branded, tabbed widget that aggregates all your content, like the BBC widget in the side bar, in seconds.

Widgetbox Blidget Pro Affiliate Widgetgreat free widgetsWidgetbox

The Sweet Remains

2009-02-27T08:40:00.001-08:00

As some of you know, my brother, Rich Price, is an rising star in the singer-song writer world.

He recently formed a new band, The Sweet Remains, with Greg Naughton and Brian Chartrand.

Their new album, Laurel and Sunset, is now available on iTunes.

Definitely worth listening to!

Order it here.

Wolf Wanderings

2009-02-26T09:00:00.000-08:00

My cousin is a wildlife biologist at the University of Montana. He just sent me an email from one of his colleagues about the wanderings of a wolf they had collared.

The email follows, but is an amazing reminder of the huge range predators require. Cool story.

and so it begins... :) One of my gps collared wolves is now famous! For those of you that don't know, this 1 1/2 year old female wolf was trapped/collared by a FWP wolf specialist for my project at the beginning of July. She was trapped in Paradise Valley outside of Gardiner, Montana. At the end of September she dispersed and over the following 5 months managed to travel all throughout the western half of Wyoming, through the SE corner of Idaho, NW Utah, and as of Saturday was located just outside of Vail, Colorado. I roughly connected her GPS locations and she has travelled over 1,000 miles as the crow flies!! Her data doesn't do much for my project (since I am using the collars to get accurate estimates of territory size), but it sure is incredibly interesting.

A Colorado news story on the wolve can be found here.

Interview with MIS Financial Review

2009-02-26T08:34:00.000-08:00

During my time in Sydney, I spent some time with Julian Bajkowski, a reporter with MIS Financial Review, which covers the Australian IT market.

The article he wrote on our talk and Widgetbox can be found here.

Thanks to Julian.

Widgetbox and Atlassian

2009-02-23T12:51:00.000-08:00

Widgetbox and Atlassian just announced an integration that allows Confluence users to add Widgetbox widgets - over 120,000 - to their wiki.

Venturebeat covered the story here.

Atlassian is one of enterprise software's real success stories with over 14,000 customers in 109 countries. Confluence is their flagship wiki product and the following video illustrates how Confluence users can add relevant widgets to their project pages. Other Atlassian products include Jira, Fisheye, Bamboo, and Clover.

Founder Dilution Survey

2009-02-22T17:39:00.001-08:00

Sim over at Polaris Ventures is looking for founders to help him quantify dilution over the life of a company (financings, stock option refreshes, etc) and the impact of fund raising on the ultimate stakes founders enjoy in their companies.

He will be sharing his findings on his blog.

Take the survey here.

Branded Widgets

2009-02-22T12:26:00.001-08:00

Quick post to highlight two widgets currently featured on Widgetbox.

The first is from Pampers, one of P&G's crown jewels. The widget, seen below, is a pregnancy calendar that provides week-by-week updates on fetal development. The user is able to configure the title, birth month, day, and year.

Pamper's widget provides dynamic, relevant, and personal information to the user. By using configuration parameters - such as the birth date - Pampers allows each user to make the widget their own. Rather than simply serve an ad, Pampers is providing contextually relevant information to its target audience and inviting them to embed the widget on blogs, start pages, and social networks.

Week-to-Week Pregnancy Calendar By Pampers.comgreat free widgetsWidgetbox

The second is from the CBS show, The Insider. Built by CBS using Widgetbox's Blidget Pro solution, the widget includes three tabs - Insider.com news feeds, video clips, and twitter posts - as well as custom branding. The Insider widget is a wonderful example of how Widgetbox can help content owners quickly and easily turn their content into attractive widgets that get installed across the web.

The Insider on CBSgreat free widgetsWidgetbox

Media09

2009-02-15T19:09:00.000-08:00

Last week, I was fortunate to spend three days in Sydney as a guest of Fairfax Digital, one of Australia's leading media companies. Fairfax's assets include the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Domain, and RSVP, Australia's leading dating site.

Fairfax Digital and XMedia Labs organized a one-day digital summit, Media09, that included speakers from around the world. Speakers included, among others, media executives from the BBC, Guardian, Washington Post, Wikia, Blue State Digital, and Widgetbox.

Ben Self, from Blue State Digital and the Tech Director for the DNC, provided a fascinating synopsis of the Obama's use of the Internet to manage online fundraising, constituency- building, issue advocacy, and on-line social networking; see Obama Case Study for more details.

I really enjoyed my time in Australia - the city spectacular, the people welcoming, and the conference a terrific overview of the media strategies of some of the world's leading media companies.

My talk centered on the lessons of Ray Oldenburg's classic book, the Great Good Place, which introduced us to the framework of the Third Place. My talk is embedded below.

Thank you to XMedia Labs and Fairfax for a wonderful trip and a super day.

The Third Place

View more presentations from pricew. (tags: widgetbox media09)

The widget below is one I made for Fairfax to demonstrate the power of aggregating content via Widgetbox's widget platform in order to better reach the Internet users aggregating in today's on-line 3rd places.

Sydney Morning Herald - Business News, World Newsgreat free widgetsWidgetbox

Introducing Blidget Pro

2009-01-27T10:40:00.000-08:00

Widgetbox just released Blidget Pro: the next generation of our successful Blidget tool and our first subscription-based service.

The Blidget Pro is a far more powerful version of the Blidget - a tool that has converted nearly 100,000 blogs into widgets and served 2.3 billion impressions since its initial launch in 2007.

The Blidget Pro represents a major innovation and is the easiest, fastest way to turn all your feed-based content (videos, images, tweets, posts...) into dynamic, branded widgets.

Since launch, Widgetbox has served over 6.5 billion widgets and widgets are proving to be a very valuable way for publishers and developers to to reach new users across the web. However, to date, many publishers and developers have found the high cost of custom creative a friction in leveraging widgets. Priced at $3.99 per month, Blidget Pro is designed to be the self-service, no coding required solution of choice for those looking to widgetize their content assets.

The best way to appreciate the product is to see a few in action - all made using the solution.

Simpsons on Hulu - media company example with in-widget video playback
AMZN Top Sellers - e-commerce example
NextTag Affiliate Example - using widgets to sell phones and phone accessories
Mahalo Widget - publisher example with multiple tabs
Company Example - how to aggregate training videos, RSS feeds, etc
Blogger Example

Family Guy Episodes from Hulugreat free widgetsWidgetbox

Features:
- Easily create viral, branded widgets without any code
- Custom header, footer and/or body assets (jpg, gif, swf, png)
- Tab integration for multiple feeds and formats
- In-widget video integration for YouTube, Hulu and Vimeo (more coming soon)
- New visual layouts (slideshow, brick-mode, headlines with images)
- Custom widget linking (header, footer and/or body)
- Premium promotion on Widgetbox.com

Sonatype Bloggreat free widgetsWidgetbox

To give the system a try, please visit the site.

Best and please let us know your feedback!