Category Archives: Business

Increasing Site and Social Engagement in Detail

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Over the last few years, social media has really become a popular buzzword. People talk about social networks and the importance of implementing them, as well as the drawbacks and potential dangers. Rather than talk about social media as a strategy, I wanted to point out some actual detail level things to try rather than stay at the 10,000 foot level of discussion. Based on working on social media projects over the last year, I have found the following techniques to be effective at creating and maintaining a vibrant social environment that produces results:
Voyeurism
Related to: Dating/Hooking Up, Expression (receiving end of)
People love to follow other people for a variety of reasons. From telescopes in apartments buildings to eavesdropping on a nearby conversation to hearing and passing on gossip, the lives of others around us seem infinitely more interesting than our own. We follow other people for many reasons: to keep up with what our friends are doing, to check out hot women, to see what trouble celebrities get into – we are always curious, sometimes to the point of obsession, about what other people do day to day. Successful social networks allow people to post and describe their daily lives so that others can take a look.
Communication
Related to: Dating/Hooking Up, Connecting with Context, Entertainment, Validation
It is human to want to contact someone else. We are social creatures and we want to talk to others. Providing a way for people to contact and maintain communication with others is crucial to the lifeblood of a good social network. Just as important is the ability to shut people out, and give people ways of *not* talking to everyone or only certain people (ie. annoying people, spam, ex-boyfriend).
Dating/Hooking Up
Related to: Voyeurism, Communication, Masquerade, Entertainment
Let’s face it. Lots of guys surf pictures just to check out hot women. But then sometimes you’ll want to make contact and see if you can get a date. Simply providing a means for surfing photos in profiles and a system for communication can enable this activity, but providing additional functionality to facilitate this activity can make the experience more enticing and fun. Think HotOrNot.com and the ability to rate people, and then pick out only the HOT rated people to contact, or show interest by sending someone a virtual flower. Or I’m In Like With You where auctions meets dating and you bid on the ability to meet someone.
Entertainment
Related to: Communication, Dating/Hooking Up, Competition, Fame
Having a good time on a site increases engagement. Providing ways of having fun keeps people coming back to have more fun. Games are the obvious one, and playing by yourself is good but playing against others is often better. Sometimes it’s the content posted by users, like funny videos of themselves posted on YouTube or pictures on Flickr to be watched on their Flickr streams. Or if a fun spin can be put on mundane activities, then the unique fun that activity brings will draw people in and keep them interested.
Fame
Related to: Competition, Expression, Entertainment, Showing Off/Vanity, Validation
It’s fun to do an activity and play a game, but enabling a way for people to get acknowledged and recognized for their skill rewards people by the notoriety they get for being good at something. Leaderboards on gaming sites allow users to show the world that they are #1 in a game, and they’ll screen shot that and put it on their blog. It also means that they’ll keep coming back to keep achieving or maintain their #1 position on the leaderboard for bragging rights.
Competition
Related to: Fame, Entertainment
There is something in the act of striving against other humans that people love. They want to test their ablities and measure themselves against others and be measured and will keep coming back to try. They like to see continual improvement and enjoy a rise in skill. There is also competition against themselves so it’s not always about other people. And, there is the ultimate prize of being number ONE. Perhaps we’ll never get there, but maybe we will. No matter what, we love the struggle and the journey to number ONE. In games and sports is where we most often see competition, but it can also be other things like getting the most views on posted content like a video. Great games and activities constantly provide the ability to raise the bar just a little more each time to keep people competing, but don’t raise the bar too high or else people will give up. Not raising the bar at all will cause people to achieve that level and then move on because it’s too easy. This bar can be set by other users, like when you’re competing against other players in a sports game, it can be set by a computer which auto-adjusts for your skill level.
Expression
Related to: Fame, Voyeurism (contributing to), Showing Off/Vanity, Validation
Constantly we are on stage. The world is a theater and we are its actors. From the clothes we wear to what we say or do, we are always showing the world who we are. Providing a means for people to express who they are means they will continually do it, especially if there is a mechanism for validation like commenting on photos in Facebook.
Showing Off/Vanity
Related to: Expression, Fame
The extreme form of expression is showing off and trying to show that we are special and unique. Showing our crazy stunt videos, or photos of us drinking a 3 foot tall beer, or next to a movie star all show the world that we are not boring people but that we have the biggest peacock feathers. Allowing people to show off and giving validation mechanisms like commenting on photos, or leaderboards, or graphical badges of honors on our profile pages reward us for posting and showing off, and encourages us to do more.
Validation
Related to: Communication, Fame, Expression
We always want to know that who we are is noticed and special by others. We like it when we get comments on our photos and videos from our friends. It makes us feel that others care and that we are not alone in the world. Implementing means of giving validation gives users that special feeling that others do notice them, and they’ll keep on posting to get more validation. The simplest form is commenting on photos and videos, but it can be focused by providing context like on Dailystrength.org where you can post an issue and get support from strangers and friends via the internet.
Masquerade
Related to: Communication, Community
Sometimes we’re boring. Our lives are so mundane that we get sick of it. Or maybe we’re not in the social mainstream. We feel shunned by the general masses and can’t seem to get in the flow of society. Or maybe we’re just tired of being ourselves and want to try being someone else. On the internet, the ability to be someone else is very easy. Simply creating a new screen name and building a personality underneath it has been done since the early days of the internet. People can pretend they are the opposite sex, older or younger, more fun, more engaging – whatever. It is something that is not easily achieved in the real world. Acting out the fantasy that they have either personality traits not in the real world or entirely someone else can be an activity that keeps people returning. The unfortunate thing is that people often masquerade for negative reasons like stalking children, and this needs to be guarded against.
Community
Related to: Masquerade, Connecting with Context, Communication
Humans want to belong. It’s often to easy to feel outcast in the real world. On the internet, communities can be more accepting of people than in the real world. If a site can create a means for people to be a part of something, they will want to come back and continue to participate to be part of that community. Think of the instant groups that Facebook has, based on tags created from your interests, or your hometown. These are ways for people to find commonalities on which to connect on, which foster communication and validation.
Connecting with Context
Related to: Community, Communication
In watching social networks over the years, I am a firm believer that social networking for social networking’s sake is a path to declining activity. It is much more engaging for users when you create a context for which socializing happens. MySpace’s usage came from the fact that they were always about promoting indie music. Yes, other things happened there, but you knew that you could always find indie music on MySpace. Facebook started out by being exclusive to colleges and there was no way to taint the population with random people who were not attending your university. Everyone you found there went to your college and you could relate easily. LinkedIn’s network is built on professional networking, another popular activity in business and its functionality is focused on making that activity easier. Contrast that with Friendster, who had a meteoric rise when it first came out and then usage tapered and dropped because people got bored there when applying this list of social techniques was not done well or not at all.
For all my projects, I try to think about applying some or all of these techniques in creative ways. I also think about the context since not all techniques are effective in every context. For example, dating could be a hard sell in a social stock picking application, but competition and fame would definitely work well. Some of it is experimental, as there could be unexpected results of applying something you thought wouldn’t work in a context. So let’s turn my example around. Suppose you did create a social stock picking site which had an underlying dating application underneath? Perhaps it could link up all the superficial, money hungry people by allowing you to find, meet, and date the richest, best stock pickers in the world…? Socially unacceptable? Perhaps. Successful? Who knows…

The Three Faces of My Schizophrenia

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In working as advisor and angel investor to startups, I find that I can be schizophrenic at times. Three faces I wear, when dealing with entrepeneurs:
INVESTOR
Characterized by:
1. Paranoia about losing my money.
2. Saying “sell the company”; starts when my return crosses about 5x my investment, and becomes a yell when my investment hits 10x.
3. Motivated by what my terms say for Notes.
4. Recommending courses of action which generate a lot of cash for the company, which increases value of the company and thus my investment.
ADVISOR
Characterized by:
1. Recommending courses of action which build the company.
2. Seeking the best ways to create product and do business.
3. Balanced view towards generating revenue in the company versus building product, which can be at odds if, for example, we’re talking about advertising and internet users.
4. Might recommend against selling the company given what I have seen when bigger companies absorb smaller companies.
5. Seeks the best employees and resources to do the job. Pushes those resources to build the company bigger and faster to exclusion of other things like sleep.
DAVE SHEN HUMAN BEING
Characterized by:
1. Tends towards recommending humanistic approach to treating employees.
2. Wants to grow employees, sees them as learning over time, nuturing them to be better.
3. Coaches people to balance life, work, and family. Asks what makes people happy and what keeps them motivated, encourages people to find this in the company.
If you’ve been in the startup game for a while, you’ll know that these three faces I wear are often at odds with each other and conflict in goals. For example, how can I counsel people to balance work and life and go home at 5pm to make time for family when as advisor, I want these guys to work 24/7 because the startup needs it, and as investor, I want them to work so freakin’ hard so my money isn’t wasted?
When I start working with someone, one of the first things I tell people is that I can be schizophrenic. They always laugh and sometimes I can see that they don’t get what I mean; the more experienced ones snicker and thank me for being upfront!
It can disconcerting to have a guy like me advising you to do one thing and then tell you to do something else in opposition to what I just said a while ago. It’s because I do wear many different hats, and the forces within me struggle every day to push/pull me in several directions. It’s a challenge to find a balanced answer, and I like the challenge of finding a solution that satisfies all of my three “identities”. I just hope I do not drive any of my entrepreneurs nuts by my triple schizophrenic state…

“The Business Opportunity” and the Epiphany

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I was just recommended this excellent book called The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steven Blank. It describes a particular problem I’ve encountered with some of the startups I’ve met with.
Some of the entrepreneurs I’ve met with lead with the business opportunity. They say that the market is this big. They have charts and research to back that up. They show millions upon millions, if not billions of dollars spent in this market alone.
Then they present this product that fits into this market. They go on to say that we can attack this market opportunity by building a product to gather all these eyeballs, users, consumers, whatever and then sell this market to advertisers and marketers.
It always worries me when they lead with business opportunity.
Most likely what I discover after is:
1. The entrepreneur is not a model customer of this market. They have come upon this opportunity through research.
2. The entrepreneur has researched business opportunity but has not researched what customers want. While it may be true that marketers spend millions and billions of dollars trying to reach these consumers, the entrepreneur has not asked consumers whether they want the product he is building.
3. I often get a defensive response when I tell them this is an issue.
Which brings me back to The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Author, Steve Blank describes the Customer Development Model, which is an iterative method of figuring out what customers actually want, versus driving a business with financial projections and product development and assumptions that the product will be accepted by consumers. He argues that every successful startup runs by this model, and that running it by traditional product development models brings a huge amount of risk into whether the business will be successful or not.
Reading about the Customer Development Model brought me back to those meetings with entrepreneurs who are trying to build companies using traditional methods. Those meetings left me feeling uncomfortable and ultimately, following my instinct on these matters, I would often let the opportunity go. I am glad to be reading this book, because now it frames my uncomfortable feelings into a way of articulating them better.
As an angel investor, I want to reduce risk whenever possible. I find that when entrepreneurs resonate with the market and are building a product that they are target markets for, then it minimizes risk. This also means that you get extra passion for the product because the entrepreneur wants the product for himself, and you may reduce the need for external research to figure out what customers want, which reduces cost and time which could be used in building the product.
That’s not to say that someone couldn’t be successful if they don’t fully or completely resonate with the product and are the target market. Success is a probability game and when entrepreneurs are themselves the target market and they resonate with the customers, then you stack the odds in your favor by a great deal.

You Asked Me About Yahoo!…

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In the last few weeks, I’ve been asked what I think of the recent events at Yahoo!. As an once insider, people think I’ve got some inside knowledge and insight into whether the changes are good or not. To be honest, I do still have some connections with Yahoos, but they get more tenuous each passing day. Still, it’s been interesting polling both insiders and outsiders about Yahoo! and its future.
Since the announcement of Jerry Yang becoming CEO (and Sue Decker becoming President) and Terry Semel leaving, I have thought a lot about what this means for Yahoo!. I also went around and talked to ex-Yahoos and current Yahoos about what they think. It’s been an interesting experience hearing what they’ve had to say.
I have found an amazingly wide range of opinions but there seem to be some trends:
1. Those who just joined Yahoo seem more optimistic than those that have been there for a while. Some guesses as to why this is so:
a. They joined at the current state of affairs, so they must be bullish on the company or else why would they have joined up?
b. They must be bullish or else they would quit. This could be real or self-delusional. Who knows. But they must make themselves bullish or else they would lose all psych in their job, which they arrived at not too long ago.
2. Veterans seem to have mixed opinions. Why:
a. They have more experience in the company and know what works and what doesn’t. They’ve been through change before at Yahoo and can be both optimistic and pessimistic.
b. It seems that this is highly dependent on position and location in the company (see next item).
3. Higher level employees unanimously are bullish on the company. This is not strange; they have signed on to be an exec in the new regime and have to like it. Otherwise, they would leave. And politically they can’t express any fears; it would scare the troops. So it’s been hard to pin down what they REALLY think about the new Yahoo.
4. Pockets of bliss exist. In many small, local areas, people are doing really great work and getting lots done. The opposite is also true, that there are also many areas of despair as well. These folks cite all the typical stuff, like growing politics, impossible to get stuff done, no direction from leadership, etc. etc.
What do I think about Jerry being CEO?
I totally think he should have been CEO a long time ago.
I think that in order for someone to run a company effectively, you must have instinctual knowledge about the industry. We would not put a DOW chemical exec in charge of GM. Likewise, for someone to run an Internet company, you must have some great resonance with the Internet and are in tune with what people want and like.
Who out there could qualify for this? Larry and Sergei are two. Filo and Jerry are another two. I actually think Dan Rosensweig could have done it. He used to run ZDNet and thus had a lot of knowledge about the Internet as well as executive experience. Well, we’re not going to get Larry or Sergei, and Dave Filo is still working on engineering issues. So who is left. Jerry Yang.
Can he turn the ship around?
While I think Jerry is the right person, I also think he has an enormous task before him. Think of trying to turn the TItanic by pushing on it with your hands. In certain crazy and inventive situations, I bet you could actually turn the Titanic that way, ie. if you were Superman, you could do it – this is sort of like answering one of those famous interview questions in a Microsoft interview. So I believe that turning the Yahoo ship can be done, but it remains to be seen whether or not there is so much inertia and momentum that it resists turning fast enough.
One possible consequence of turning the Yahoo ship will be some down revenue quarters over the next year, potentially two years, as restructuring plans take hold, removal of waste, taking down sites that shouldn’t be worked on, etc. etc. However, it will be amazing if revenue can be kept growing in the midst of such change.
Only time will tell. My money is definitely on Jerry Yang to bring Yahoo into its next stage of evolution.

Why and How Do Startups Move So Fast?

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The question of how do startups move so fast comes up surprisingly often. I finally gave it some thought, after the question came up again in a recent meeting with one of my companies. Over the last year or so of working with startups, I came up with some observations:
1. Small teams, 1-3 people. Makes sense right? Less time lost, less arguing, etc. Less meetings.
2. Everybody resonates with the idea and generally agrees with direction. Since everyone is either a participant or expert in the field in which the site is created for, then everyone does not need to learn but knows instinctively what to do. Nobody is working on a product that they do not use themselves. It’s a great way to find people like yourselves, when you recruit from the level of common interest in a certain product area.
NOTE: It’s really hard sometimes to get someone to resonate with your idea. You may hire them for their intrinsic talent, but it may be really difficult to get them to feel the instinctive bond with your product area.
Sometimes it’s impossible. Doesn’t mean that great work can’t get done, but it does mean a level of independence can’t be achieved, as non-resonating employees need more directional advice than those who do resonate.
3. Along with 1, the teams usually only consist of engineers cranking away. Most of them are multi-talented to a point, so they play multiple roles of programmer, GUI, html/css, product manager, product visionary.
4. Strangely enough, I have not found location to be a common factor for moving fast. Certainly it enhances the process, but a lot of teams are working with people remotely, since engrs are so hard to find and many just don’t want to move. Somehow, they have found ways of working together and can still make progress. Lots of travel involved and constant communication are two of many key points in making it work. If I get a chance, I’ll dig into it more with some of the startups I work with as to how it’s working and how it’s not. In my startups, 6 out of the 8 companies have resources external to their main location, mostly engineers who are working in remote locations. I have not seen any dramatic slowdowns with their teams.
5. People are generally just cranking. They see something needs to get done and then they just do it. There is less the asking for permission. Everybody needs to get on the same page and just keep moving forward in a very independent way. Early on at Yahoo!, many of our engineers would just do stuff and we would rarely ask them to do some particular thing. The product would constantly evolve while we worried about other stuff. Although when we asked them to actually do something and if they did not agree, it never got done which was frustrating from another viewpoint. So it worked until they got to a point when their initial sensibilities finally turned out to be wrong. Sometimes they could be convinced that they were wrong, but sometimes not…
While speed may be intuitive to some, I think it’s harder to achieve than you think, unless you have the right people with the right sensibilities and right alignment in thinking.
One of the hardest things I’ve seen is when a non-engineer comes up with an idea and tries to get it done. Because they can’t write code themselves, they need to find someone who can. But more often than not, they find only someone who can code but not become resonant with the idea to just work on it and take vague direction and execute on it.
It’s the magic bullet that everyone searches for:
“Dang it, I just want to describe my idea to someone and that someone just deals with the details and makes it happen!”
Unfortunately, it’s the details that often count…you want something done right, you better sweat the details!

Avoiding Blur

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I was just talking to a startup about their website and we were strategizing what it could become. We noodled, talked, brainstormed, argued, and finally agreed for over 5 hours and developed a sense for what we want the future site would be like.
At the end of the session, I was still feeling uneasy about what we came up with. The main reason was that it was merely a combination of what other sites were doing in part. One site would have this feature, but not the main direction for the site. Another site had people doing the activity, but in a different way. Some of the bigger sites out there also had the ability to do what we were doing, but of course their missions were much more broader and not focused like ours. Could we do better by simply having a niche, focused mission but having many of the same tools as other sites, and also competing against the fact that users were already using our competitors for that same mission we wanted them to focus on with our site?
This was the source of my unease. If there are competitors or near competitors, or even non-competitors, who allow users to accomplish the same thing on their sites, whether it is their main mission or not, AND these competitors exist already, this is a danger point. I call it “blur”.
The blur occurs in users minds when they hear about what you want them to do, but can’t figure out where to do it. They may already be doing it on some other site, by either using some existing functionality, or jacking some other functionality to get the job done.
Blur is heavily related to product differentiation. You want something to cut through the blur. When they think of something they want or need to do, you want them to think of you. Whatever functions you have must be cool, creative, and original enough to attract them to you despite being in a similar place with other existing sites.
Here is an example. Suppose you want to build a site to allow users to connect with friends. Let’s say your main interface is email, as a possible differentiator. However, as a user who hears about your offering, “connect with friends via this new way, but with email”, they’ll think all sorts of things like:
Hmm I’m already on Facebook and that works for me.
I have my address book on Outlook and email people just fine.
All my friends are on MySpace. Why switch?
I don’t have time to try something new, let alone learning it and THEN getting all my friends on it.
The problem here is that when you express your mission to users, they get caught in the blur of other competitors being able to do pretty much the same thing and you don’t have something to justify the switching cost of going to your service to do something they can do already somewhere else.
You need to find that one (or more) things that people can do on your site that no one else offers, AND is cool enough to get them to come over and learn something new.
It’s always a danger point for me when I hear of entrepreneurs who design something supposedly really cool but then I point out that people are already doing these things on other sites. I ALWAYS get pushback because they think their creation is the best out there, and nobody has mashed up the functions in such a focused manner.
It might actually be great. I’m just talking about risk here and the realities of getting users attention in a crowded space. You might actually have something that is a ton better at doing something, than for them to do it on some existing site.
I’m into risk reduction. Why try to fight with through user blur with something that isn’t shouting “Come here and try me because I’m different” loud enough? You could run out of resources and funding trying to bulldoze your way into users’ attentions. If you had several million dollars in the bank, yeah potentially you could market your way to success in a certain category.
Or you could spend a little more creative time and figure out something to build that is actually cooler and hasn’t done before, and that users will want to spend time with. Enough to get past the switching cost and try your service.
WIth that previous startup I mentioned, after 5 hours of discussion, we spent another 20 minutes talking about something that wasn’t mentioned and was something very unique in their offering. I think that 20 minutes is going to turn out to be most valuable part of that day. Because I think we added back something that would cut through the blur and thus reduce our potential risk in attracting users to our site, to do something that they could do somewhere else in general, but being able to do that one thing that they CAN’T anywhere else.
We could have gone home after 5 hours. But spending that little bit of extra time and effort to find something to avoid the blur was worthwhile and I believe, critical for the success of the company.

The Chaos of Orgs and How it Hurts Employees: Management by Influence Hurts When Clarity is Absent

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Two weeks ago I met with someone who just left Yahoo!. We commiserated about our experiences at Yahoo! and I asked about this person’s experiences and why they left the company.
It was a familiar tale from many of those recently leaving Yahoo!, and also one that was just beginning to manifest itself when I left in 2004.
As Yahoo! attempts to reinvent itself, a lot of chaos and reorganization is happening under the hood. This person related to me how they had, over a period of only a year, several managers and being passed around to many groups. As this person attempted to do their job, direction was confused in the parties this person supported. As these parties’s ALSO underwent many reorgs and change in management, it caused confusion and a lack of ability to approve anything or willing to make a decision, or even figure out who it was who could really authorize a decision.
That doesn’t mean nothing gets done at Yahoo!. In fact there is (was?) a huge cadre of people who, having grown up with the organization, knew exactly how to get something done. This was accomplished through personal relationships, keeping up with who really supported what technology, and what levers to push in the organization. I call this “management by influence”. The problem is that a huge percentage of the old timers at Yahoo! have or are leaving the company. This leaves a huge void in the company.
So as the people who can really get things done leave, people find it harder to get things done outside their own sphere of knowledge and influence. Add that to a org who may give firm responsibility to people AND announce that publicly and thoroughly enough so that everyone knows who to go to for what they have to get done, and confusion and chaos grow. The funny thing about this is, if you ask any upper level manager if there is clarity in the org, I bet they will say there is total clarity. The problem is that they announce something, but the message nevers get into the lower orgs, or is detailed enough to be clear as to exactly who they should go to for what. Now let’s add communication problems issues to an org too busy to formalize communication. More chaos ensues.
The scorecard now is:
+ Reorganization causes chaos. Too many managers has a negative impact on the employees.
+ Management by influence works for the old timers but they’re all leaving. New timers used to go to the old timers/management by influence experts but now they’re all gone.
+ Communication problems exacerbate the problem.
Employees need stability to perform the best job. They need clarity in their jobs and know that they have a stable manager who cares about them and can direct them effectively. Part of this is because of the dependence on what I call management by influence versus clarity which I argue has obscured the lack of clarity of the organization. By clarity, I mean there is a person you go to for this and everyone knows this. This division does this and does not do that. And on and on.
In small orgs, this is easily achievable. You know someone does something and it easily fits into your mental map of how things work in that company. In large orgs, you have to institutionalize communication and clearly delineate lines of responsibility to the entire company. If you’ve ever worked at IBM, there are huge documents, memos, and directories which document these lines of responsibility. Is it heavy and unwieldy? Yes, probably. But it is definitely clear and removes the need for management by influence alone. People can remove themselves from the org but the position is always there, even if the person is not.
The other part of creating a stable environment for employees is to stop shuffling them around like chess pieces. They are not pawns; they are humans. They need to stop dealing with the chaos and turn that energy on what they got hired for. Those of us in upper management would do well to create these stable environments where employees can flourish, feel needed and valued, and are clear on who to go to to get something done. If you don’t, you’ll get the exodus which ultimately drove this person, and tons of others, to leave.

Corporate DoubleSpeak is Alive and Well

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Thanks to IBM, corporate doublespeak is alive and well. In fact, they are so good at all those corporate buzzword techniques that they put it all in an ad at JFK Airport:

I suppose if you want to help at getting better at whatever these buzzwords actually mean, you should hire IBM and they’ll “chain optimize” the hell out of those buzzwords into your psyche so that you’ll “process transform” your business for the better.
I once tried to learn corporate doublespeak. At one point, I thought it would make me more successful. But then I read Dilbert. And it was all over.
Corporate buzzword books plague the bookshelves and make you want to buy that book out of sheer curiosity of wanting to find out what the hell that term means. Thankfully, I’ve “re-engineered” my tendency to buy these types of books and now avoid them by at least “six sigma” distance.

Drinking the Kool-Aid Ain’t So Good

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When I worked at frogdesign, I remember our team going to a PC client and getting reprimanded for not using their company’s PCs If we were going to work for them, then shouldn’t we be using their products and getting to know how “great” their products were by living with them day to day?
The same thing happened at Yahoo!. I remember a sales rep who had a major PC manufacturer as a client and he immediately went out and bought a laptop made by that company to show solidarity and support for the client. I don’t know if he used it when he got back to the office, but definitely he brought it with him to client meetings. He even switched his cellphone to that company’s brand (maybe you can figure out who this company was now heh). It was all to show that he was in full support of the manufacturer as client and supported them so much that he lived and breathed their products, as much as what he did with them at Yahoo!.
I drank the Kool-Aid too. When we worked on Yahoo! products, we were told to always use them. It kind of made sense at the time. If you lived and breathed the products, you could make them better. You could spot problems, make suggestions, and overall show the world that a company who uses its own products must obviously have the highest confidence in them to do so.
After observing and experiencing this behavior for many years, I’m going to take the contrarian view. I am going to suggest that using solely your company’s products is not so good as people claim.
I reached this conclusion just now, almost 3 years out of Yahoo! and have been out there using whatever it was that made my life easier, instead of just using Yahoo! products only. I found that there were a huge number of products out there that were really great, and often much better than what Yahoo! could offer. I even took Yahoo.com off my home page button, which had occupied that button since 1995. Drinking too much Kool-Aid too long made me miss out.
If you are constantly using your own products, I would put forth that it’s the best way to put blinders on. Sure, your company’s products may be the best there is when they come out, but they may not be at some time in the future. With Web development happening so fast, it could happen sooner than you think.
In today’s Web, things move so fast. People come up with stuff that you personally would not have dreamed of. The more you focus on your own products, the more the likelihood that you fall into that comfortable place where you don’t need to change, you don’t look for something better, and you just don’t feel like learning something new. You get complacent and feel that what you have is good enough, or you think it’s world class because you worked on it and people have told you so. How can it not be? You take pride in what you’ve done and nobody can knock you off the mountain. Everyone tells you to research and look at competitors’ products, but yet nobody finds the time to do so. It is a small number of people who actually have their own personal curiosity to go out and try somebody elses products. It’s too freakin’ busy to go and do this in your spare time!
I would put forth that the blindness that happens with being comfortable and focusing on yourself and your own company is precisely the way you get blindsided by some fast moving kids out of college developing something that is so cool and compelling and you see them gaining traction only after you’ve fallen behind.
What’s the best way to combat this?
USE THE BEST PRODUCT OUT THERE FOR WHATEVER IT IS YOU DO.
Force yourself to always try new things, even when your boss is telling you to use the company’s products. Fake using Gmail when you go to a client meeting, but return back to what you think is the best product for email when you’re out of that meeting. Use the best cellphone for you, but when you go back to work carry your Sony-Ericsson.
You can’t learn about a product by just trying it; you really need to live with it and become a real user of that product and internalize why it is great.
Always ask your friends what they use. Read magazines and blogs about what they recommend. Collect your insight and feed it back to your own development process for your own products.
Don’t get complacent about your own products by missing what’s happening in the greater world. This is more than just being “innovative”. It is experiencing and acknowledging the world is a bigger place than just you, your product and your company. Broaden your horizons and you’ll be a superior product person for it. Truly in today’s Web, the best product does win.
POSTSCRIPT:
When you realize that you are practically using none of your company’s products because your competitors’ products are so much better, and you can’t get your company to realize this, I think it’s time to leave.
POSTSCRIPT Part II:
If you’re a boss, don’t be an ass and make everyone on your team use your own products, if they aren’t as good as your competitors’. That should be motivation enough to make your own stuff better.

Stemming the Introductions Frenzy

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Definitely connections is one of the most important parts of my involvement with startups. I introduce them to people I know in other companies for potential partnerships, I help them hire people (although I have to admit my record here is abysmal), and I try to meet more new people in case they may present opportunities for investment, partnership, or acquisitions later.
So I try to meet as many people as possible. But I’ve learned a lot about this introduction and meeting thing. Some thoughts about it:
1. In general, I try to meet as many people as possible, and as many as will meet with me.
2. I have discovered that it is impossible to meet everyone that you want to meet. It sucks but it’s true. More on why in a sec.
3. Time is a so precious. Filling up your day with meet and greets is tough and it doesn’t give you time to get your other work done. So I have to limit these kinds of meetings as much as possible.
4. Filtering becomes super important. As you can imagine, those with immediate purpose and importance come first.
5. Making introductions is also an important skill. Here is my process and thoughts:
a. I identify a possible introduction that should be made. In general, I try not to do more social type meets but want them to have at least a purpose. Think of it as a courtesy on peoples’ time demands and not wasting them, and also it gives them something to talk about which will reduce awkwardness.
b. I hold my contacts close and don’t frivolously make introductions. I am keenly aware of not creating an image where Dave Shen sends frivolous introductions around. That would reduce the possibility of someone responding to an introduction. My goal is to have a 100% response and connection rate, so I think deeply about whether to make the introduction or not.
c. Timing on the introduction has come up often. When to make it is important as you don’t want to intro too early and want to do it when both parties are ready.
For example, if a startup is working very hard and if I judge their resources to be strained too far, I won’t make another business development intro until they get more resources or some brain space frees up. The worst thing is you send them the intro and then nothing happens until much later. Or if the startup has nothing to show yet, then I don’t want the intro-ed party to feel like it was a wasted meeting because it was too early to talk about their product since there was no demo.
d. While I do not bill myself as a fund raiser, the few investor contacts I do have are important to me. Asking for money raises the stakes of an introduction. Thus I will not make an introduction to an investor until I feel the company is at a place to put a really good foot forward. I do not want to make it unless they will look good at the meeting. If they look bad, then I will look bad for sending an unprepared company to that investor contact. I also won’t make an introduction unless I have put my own money in. I feel it is the ultimate vote of confidence for a company when you have your own skin in the game. I do not want to come off as sending what may be perceived as random companies to them. There are plenty of people who are professional fund raisers who do this and do not have any skin in the game. I want to operate with bit more confidence than these guys.
e. I try not to deluge someone with introductions. For example, at a recent meeting with a media company executive, we discussed many of my startups who may be potential partners of theirs. He got excited about all of them. But I did not want to throw all the introductions at him at once for fear that he may not get to them, or they may get lost in email, etc. So as a courtesy to both introducees (is that a word?), I think about the tide of introductions racing at them and try not to overdo it, and space them out.
f. I always try to follow up on introductions. I want to see how they went, and pass feedback back to either or both parties. I also want to double check my introduction methods and make sure I am hitting as close to 100% response and connection rate as possible. I also want to address potential problems on the rare occasion that they occur.
6. Getting deluged myself with introductions is bad. If I meet someone who can intro me to several people, I tell them to slow it down a bit. I do not want to drop one or two because they get lost in email or from my brain. Sometimes, I am scheduling out many months and my calendar is super-important to me. As a personal goal, I try to get to 99% of my emails and always try to get back to those whom I say I will meet up with. I like saying I’ll do something, and then actually do it. I don’t like it when someone says they’ll meet up with me but don’t mean it. I intend to be as clear as possible, which unfortunately is really hard. Better to head it off with the introducer and be clear with them before they send the introduction email.
7. I have found there are many who are not what I would call socializers, which enjoy meeting for the sake of meeting with no particular goal for the meeting other than to connect. There are those who don’t seem to meet anyone who does not have a particular purpose for them. Whether this is good or bad I cannot be the judge, as everybody has their own way of working and time demands.
8. I always confirm a meeting the day before. You never know when someone else may drop you off their calendar. It’s always good to remind them that you’re meeting with them, again as a courtesy and also it’s a good time to remind them of why you’re meeting.
9. By the way, I always space travel time between meetings. I try not to pack them so closely together time-wise. This also goes for how many of these types of meetings I can do in one day. Generally, I try to space them out across days as well. Going through a whole day of meetings with people you haven’t met before is tough for a guy like me (call me an introvert with extroverted tendencies!).
10. Some people network solely for work purposes. There is almost no notion of personal relationship they build. You can tell by what they ask you about, what the conversation is about, and reasons for contacting you later. You never go out for a coffee with these people, or grab a brew. It’s kind of cold, sometimes empty. It creates this feeling that you are only useful to them for one thing, which is business. I prefer to look for opportunities to create a relationship that goes beyond that of business only. I think this creates a richer relationship than just for work alone. If they know and feel you are a good person and you connect with each other at that level, I think you’ll find that the relationship tends to work better and have more opportunities than less. Who wants to work with someone who isn’t cool to hang out with?
Bottom line: introductions, connecting, and meeting are important parts of my work. I do my best to try and not waste the relationships I have built with these people, and create value with each relationship I have.