Seemed appropriate somehow.
Today I’m thrilled to say I’m joining the team at Spark, making the switch from entrepreneur to investor. I’ve known the guys at Spark for years and have admired the unique approach, and the unqualified success they have had. This is a big switch for me, but made easier by working with close friends that I respect.
As you could imagine I thought about this decision rather carefully. I’ve been an entrepreneur as long as I’ve been anything, and I still have boundless energy to work in startups. For me it felt like time to see if I could shift my focus from building a single company to impacting the broader ecosystem.
Anyone who knows me knows I’m a deep believer in startup culture. Not the “startup scene” - who cares about that really - but the engine of learning, risk, and ownership culture that draws so many of us in. Thankfully that ecosystem feels really healthy right now, with more companies starting, and more angels supporting them, in those early days.
As more startups are getting started, the friction has shifted up a level. We need for entrepreneurs to be able to stick with a startup, become CEOs, figure out how their product development scales, and get past the “initial traction” phase. Its a difficult transition, one that I struggled with in my twenties at internetsoccer/Teamtalk, as the company grew from 6 to 300 in a little over a year. More recently for a little under two years at Zynga this same question of how to scale while still being able to maintain an entrepreneurial culture was a constant focus.
Becoming an investor for me feels like allowing myself to work full time on the things I’m already obsessed with. Getting to partner with great entrepreneurs, work with a great team, and making startup growth my field of study.
Stuck Like Glue: Zynga Accounts for 12 Percent of Facebook Revenue in 2011 -
Facebook said social games are currently responsible for “substantially all of our revenue” when it comes from payments.
In December, Zynga went public, raising $1 billion, and is obviously one of the companies most reliant on the social network. But now with Facebook’s financials also public, we can see that the two companies are actually interdependent.
One of the really hard things to do as an entrepreneur is to not try and solve for too many problems at once. I’ve found it is one of the first things I end up talking to early stage entrepreneurs about (twice today, actually). And something I struggle with myself.
We like to think strategically: “what if we had that many customers?” “how is this going to scale?” “how would we deal with that competitor if they did this?” This is exacerbated because we spend more time thinking about our business than anyone else. This is made worse because every time we talk to some investor or entrepreneur they ask MORE questions.
We end up playing out options like a chess game and try to optimize for the whole. This, inevitably, means you psych yourself out and get defocused.
At Conduit Labs, we were so obsessed about whether Facebook would own our customer, or control of our experience down the road that it took us forever to move to Facebook. We were thinking strategically, trying to stay two steps ahead, when the #1 question to answer was, “how will you grow users.” The answer, unequivocally, was Facebook and everything else was just over thinking the problem.
You can’t answer all your questions simultaneously, as satisfying as it can be to try and let your brain do it. In early stage startups there is simply too much optionality.
How can you help control this?
Start by trying to list out all the questions your business is trying to answer right now. ie “Will people want to keep using my service?” “Do they want green or blue on the homepage?” “Will they pay?” “How do we protect if google/microsoft/zynga/facebook come at us?” It’s fine to have a really long list, it could take you years to get to all of them.
Then, the key thing is to get ruthless about which of these questions you are trying to answer now, and which you are pushing off.
If done well, you’ll find your team suddenly knows what to do (“I don’t care about CPA optimization right now, just get me a small enough sample of users to prove if it works!”) and it’s a great way to focus the board as well (“Very good point, we’ll solve for that after we’ve finished answering how to make curation better.”).
Try picking just one thing. Try making sure you will knock out of the park in the next 1, 2, or 3 months. It’s incredibly hard. But I think we all intuitively know it virtually never “all comes together” — it happens by simply, clearly, solving things one move at a time.
“Never underestimate the power of nostalgia. Timehop is awesome.” —
(via rickwebb)
(via rickwebb)
Great day for the company, the industry, and all the great folks who helped build it. (Taken with instagram)
I’m definitely going to do this just for the hell of it.
Also, Ian, this would seem to imply a loose association. Whereas you would have thought that more restaurants = less groceries this implies something even more interesting. That some months you feel like spending more on everything and some months you feel cheap.
I wonder what the secondary correlation is — if you time-slice it is does it go up over time? Is this about you simply getting richer (secondary Dropbox share selling?). Or perhaps in months you worked really fucking hard you just didn’t spend as much on anything?
Ahhh.. data.
I expected some kind of more obvious relationship between restaurants and groceries. This is absolute $ spent on each in a given month, as a scatter plot. This is for a family of four living in San Mateo in the Bay Area. Are your results any different?
Pro tip: you can export all your transactions from mint, making it a unified way to get all your banking information. I used to do my own manual categorization. The categorization at Mint is junk because it isn’t 100% and the interface isn’t good for editing like a spreadsheet it. So now the process is mint export CSV -> python script -> csv -> google spreadsheets. I should probably just skip the last step, but it is a good way to do manual editing which seems to always be necessary. For example, checks that I didn’t label in Bank of America’s interface (for non trivial amounts to preschools) show up as uncategorized if the amount varies from the recurring amount.
Side note: I wish google spreadsheets could do a directed scatter plot with a line connecting the dots chronologically. Alternatively, labels on each point would be nice.
24 hours in with the Kindle Fire and I feel like I’m coming to the same emotional place as I did with the Droid. The first 10 minutes were “wow, I think this might actually make it!” — but it buckled under extended use from lack of polish.
The good.
Hardware: A better form factor for media consumption than the iPad. ”woah it looks tiny!” were my first thoughts on unboxing. But after a day of use I actually really like the dimensions. Making a tablet able to be held in one hand makes it feel more portable, usable. Ultimately because I have a Macbook Air, I often stare at the iPad when I’m putting things in a bag and think they are just too close to each other to bring both. The Kindle Fire feels like what it should be, a media consumption device somewhere between a phone and a laptop. It makes the iPad feel a little like an underpowered laptop in comparison.
The build quality is pretty good as well, it feels solid in the hand. But you can tell it has cut corners to hit a price point - from the spray-grip rubber backing to the lack of volume buttons. It has the feel that it could have been produced by anyone, not uniquely Amazon.
The Bad
Software: Wonderful home screen and browser, weak app selection. I disagree with Marco on the homescreen here, it is far superior for a media consumption device than iPad. It presents me with the right information (do you want a book? video?) and I get the things I was doing recently in my face instead of a double-tap away. It’s a cleaner way to start a session, and an interesting place where Amazon picked the constraining but simplified interface, while Apple’s is more free form but more confusing.
But the software selection is just too weak once you get past the Amazon apps. A thin selection of games that won’t run, and I just couldn’t find apps I’m starting to rely on (Spotify, Sonos). And why Amazon decided to exclude the core Google Apps (mail, maps, etc) is beyond me — they are the only apps for Android that are actually superior to their iPad counterparts and it is a ridiculous omission.
The Ugly
The UI: If you can’t trust it, it won’t get used.
Basically, it feels like the v1 of a typical product (not a typically Apple product). There are enough positives to make it better in some areas, but it’s nowhere near an iPad and the underpowered hardware makes responsiveness destroy the experience.
I love that Android and Amazon are knocking on the door, they are making Apple better (notification tray anyone?) and I’m just waiting for a device that finally turns the corner. Perhaps the new Galaxy Nexus?
[video]
Entrepreneurship is taking the things we have taken for granted as being broken and fixing them. Like the thermostat. (PS - I assume someone at Nest may have seen Ambient Devices in their past :)