Fame and Competition on the Net

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It started way back in the middle of the Internet boom years. I got onto eBay and started bidding on toasters (I collect antique toasters…!) As I bought and sold stuff, I collected positive ratings for my transaction behavior. As my positive ratings grew, I became more obsessed with responding quickly and often about my transactions. If I was buying, I would send payment as soon as possible or notify the seller that I had a delay. Likewise for selling, I would make sure I respond quickly and let the buyer know exactly when to expect the item. My rating was my reputation on eBay and it became one of the most important things I would build on the Internet, which was a trust rating that I cherished and allowed me to do things on eBay with other members that untrusted, poorly rated members would not.
Around the same time, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? became one of the hottest TV shows. But something that ABC did that not many knew about was the fact that you could play real time along with the show and compete against others also playing via the Internet. I also started playing along with the show and the designers of the Web game did some really great things like allow you to accumulate points upon answering questions successfully and in a timely fashion (more points for faster answering). Players with the most points were put up on a leaderboard which you strived for. It was amazing how many points some people had accumulated. It made you really try to get to the top of the leaderboard and feel….famous for being the best. And the world knew you were the best because the leaderboard was visible to all.
Fast forward to 2004 where I discovered that HotOrNot.com had put up the ability to send virtual flowers to people you liked and wanted to meet via its meeting service. But they did something clever. If you received virtual flowers, they would appear next to your picture. It gave you a sense of superiority; I’ve got 10 roses! How many do you have? It made you feel great about yourself and showed the world that others thought you were hot enough to send flowers to.
And now, as a frequent contributor to Yelp, I find myself racing to be the first reviewer of a restaurant. When you are, you get a little icon that states you are a first reviewer and then on your profile, it shows how many first reviews you’ve made. Then, I started writing witty reviews instead of boring ones. Because readers can rate reviews on the basis of Useful (big deal) or Cool (yeah!) or Funny (even better!). For some reason, I sought to write better reviews in an attempt to get more Cool and Funny ratings! It’s easy to write a Useful review, but not many can entertain or be noted for being “cool”.
Fame and competition go hand in hand on the Internet. It’s one of the best techniques for getting users continually engaged on your website. You hook them in by making them feel like they are the best at something, and let others know about it. If others can say your cool or the best, that’s even better because now you have validation from the crowd. How much validation do we get in real life, even from the people we know and love? Often times – ZIP. But on the Internet, the millions of surfers can come by and tag you as cool, or see that you’re the best at something.
Then since you know the crowd is watching, it makes you want to participate more, and it pushes you more to do better at whatever you’re participating in. It draws you in and the reward is fame and notoriety whereas in the real world you may not have that chance.
It’s easy to reward people with money. But it’s costly and you need money first before you can give it away. When the reward is not money, sometimes it’s more powerful at encouraging and reinforcing user engagement. I would argue that it is even more long lasting because if it’s some contest you’re in and you win, that’s where it usually ends. There is no more beyond that. With a well crafted fame and competition scheme, you can engage users for a much longer time and at much lower cost.
Working with my startups on developing fame and competition systems tailored for their services is something I think about all the time.

Starting Over Job Fatigue

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In the past few weeks, there have been a number of highly publicized and not-so-publicized upheavals at major companies. Some of my friends work at these places and I ask them how they are doing and whether they will leave.
One pattern that is starting to emerge for me, especially amongst the “job jumping” generation I’ve grown up in, is that people are getting tired. Tired of jumping to a new job and starting over. They’ve done it so many times that it is wearing them down and they don’t want to do it anymore.
As loyalty to a corporation has waned over these last few decades – and I support the selfish behavior of the “job jumping” generation because companies have reduced or removed the reasons why people should be loyal to a company – people have been switching jobs at a huge rate. At one time, it was not looked favorably upon that a resume had a number of companies on it; now it is the norm.
As people have jumped jobs often, they are realizing that starting over in a new job and new company is not easy. The cost of integrating yourself into a new organization and culture is high. You need to rebuild your reputation. You need to rebuild your internal networks and maintain them. You need to learn new ways of doing things. You need to adjust to new styles of working. And the list goes on.
It wears you down to start over again and again. The first few times it is exciting and new; after a while, you get tired of going through the same motions to reestablish yourself in a new place.
It is wearing enough that people are willing to stay in a dysfunctional, negative, or the wrong company when they really should move on.
This bears watching as time goes on.

Social Networks: Recruiting and Reconnecting

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Recently there has been a bit of press regarding LinkedIn. Also, I’ve noticed that there has been an uptick in LinkedIn invites lately. A lot of that has happened when former colleagues at Yahoo! are thinking about leaving and they realize that they don’t want to lose their connection with previous colleagues, or they want to renew their connection with those who have left.
I too find LinkedIn to be quite useful in finding old colleagues. For David Shen Ventures, LLC, I am often recruiting for positions in my companies. And I have found that my social networking site memberships have been extremely useful in finding and contacting people. To date, I have used Friendster, Yahoo! 360, and LinkedIn the most in locating folks. Surprisingly, our Yahoo! alumni network Yahoo! Group doesn’t work so well. I think that Yahoo! Groups is probably the old generation social network and needs to be updated with today’s functionality. It is too limiting in its ability to let members communicate with one another. The membership is private and it only allows broadcast of messages out, which so far has proven to be not very helpful at all.
On LinkedIn and Yahoo! 360, I can contact people directly and a personal message has been much more effective at reestablishing someone whom I have not talked to in a long time.
Through my connections, I am tied to literally every Yahoo! that ever worked there. It is quite amazing. Of course, LinkedIn is much more informative from a recruiting standpoint since people post their company info there.
If you think about the way Web companies go through cycles of waxing/waning success and employees go through their own mini-cycles of entering/exiting companies, it seems that LinkedIn usage is tied to these cycles. It would be interesting to do some research into correlating industry and personal events to traffic and usage of LinkedIn and other social networks.

To WIFI or Not to WIFI: the Future of Hanging Out

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I was in NYC this week for a series of meetings. One of my meetings took place at this really nice cafe called Cafe Dante in Greenwich Village. Upon arriving at the front door, I was confronted by this sign:

How unusual to see this in today’s world of coffee houses and letting people hang out all day surfing the Web! I surmised that this cafe had ulterior motives:
An attempt to preserve the traditional reason for going to a coffee house which is to talk to someone?
Annoyed at those who stay all day surfing and eating/ordering practically nothing?
Abused as a child by their parents hitting them over the head with a laptop?
I contrast this to what I encountered later that day. I met up with some entrepreneurs who were hanging out at a bar/restaurant called Ditch Plains in the West Village. While the bar was getting crowded and drinks were flowing, you’d expect that we’d be just talking and laughing away; instead, I walked up to two people chatting occasionally but mostly looking down at their laptops and surfing away. I joined in the intermittent chatter and whipped out my Treo and surfed and sent email as much as they did. In the middle the surfing, we’d order more bottles of wine, more food, dessert, and surf some more. It was probably my first experience with the combo drinking/surfing/talking thing.
A world torn between the old and new? To surf or not to surf? That is the question.

Should you be an Angel Investor…or a Venture Capitalist?

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Sometimes I get asked what it takes to be an angel investor. It also leads to insight into whether or not being a venture capitalist is the right career. While I am not an expert at either, I do have some observations from the many months I spent trying to raise a venture fund and now ending up as an angel investor. These observations are by no means complete or exhaustive, but for now I think they serve as one man’s look into the world of investing in startups. These are the results of conversations, feedback, and personal thinking and experiences:
What Does it Take to be a Venture Capitalist?
Beyond that magical ability to pick companies/businesses/the next Youtube, there are a number of things to be aware of.
Investors need to trust you. They are handing you their millions of dollars and want to have maximal assurance that you’ll not run away with it, make stupid or poor investment decisions, keep to discipline (which is what you sold them on investing in your fund), and want you to do better than the next guy.
If you’ve created companies and built them to success, that’s a plus. But it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Building a great company doesn’t mean you can go and pick other companies that will win. Investors like to see that you have engaged in activities that show you can pick successful companies AND make lots of money from it. The ‘AND’ is important; just saying “I knew Youtube was going to be big” isn’t the same as saying “I bet on Youtube when they are two guys in a garage, put my money in it, helped them with XYZ when they needed it, and saw the potential and put my own money where my mouth was, and made 10X on my investment.”
How to develop a track record? Angel investing helps, as does working in investment banking or some other similar investment outfit. If you’ve worked with other prominent investors like in an angel network, that’s great too. People who have invested alongside you and made money off your introduction of a company to them is a great trust builder. Experience as an entrepreneur also helps but not as much as (successful) investing experience. (Working in a previous venture fund helps a lot, but hey this paragraph is about whether or not you should be a VC in the first place.)
If you are thinking of joining a venture fund, they need to also trust you, see your commitment, and they have to like you and be able to work with you.
Joining a venture fund is not like taking a job at any other company. With a regular company, you can quit at any time and go to a new company. The commitment is typically 5 years, with potential to extend to 10 years if you still have companies in your portfolio that you have not exitted out of. This is spelled out in the Private Placement Memorandum (PPM) and is a condition for investors to commit. If you decide to leave the fund before the 5-10 years are up, this can, at a minimum, cause uncomfortable questions in investors minds as to the viability of the team they put their money in. It can, at a maximum, cause all the investors to bolt and your fund is left with nothing.
Therefore, venture fund partners want to know that you’re in it for the long haul no matter what. It’s pretty tough; 5 years is a really long time to commit. You’d really have to want to do it that long and the moment a partner smells wavering commitment, they’ll back off you.
Since you’re in it for a long time, you want to know that you can all work together and also must like each other. Again, 5 years is a long time to be hanging out with someone. You’d better all be drinking buddies as well as love working with each other to stand each other’s company. That is why a lot of venture funds are made up of partners who have known each other for a long time and have worked with each other in the past. Investors like this also; they want to have assurance that the team can function together well and prevent an unrecoverable implosion of the team at some point in the future. They want to know that the team will exist long enough to make them money for the period of time they commit.
Lastly, almost all venture funds require the partners to put up their own capital. I’ve heard 1% is the norm, but I’ve also heard it can be higher as well. Doing some quick math – if your fund is $100 MM, you would need to put up 1% of $100MM which is $1 MM of your own cash. It doesn’t have to come all at once; venture funds do capital calls when an investment is imminent. So the cash would come in portions as you went out and found companies to invest in. But over 5 years, you’d have to find $1MM to invest. All is not lost; a venture fund has many partners, so the 1% is spread out amongst all the partners. Still, it could mean many 100s of thousands of personal money to commit to the fund, in order to gain trust of the investors. How many people have that kind of cash lying around?
So after reading this, does the above apply to you in the positive sense, if you aspire to be a venture capitalist?
What Does it Take to Be an Angel Investor?
Simply put, being angel investor requires nothing more than cash. I don’t think there is any other requirement than that. Of course, if you want to be GOOD at it, you’ll need more than that. Read on..!
Things That Apply Both to Angel Investing and Venture Capitalists
Beyond those mentioned above, you will need to be able to pick companies well. The topic of picking companies is beyond the scope of this post, but no matter whether you’re an angel or a VC, you have to do this well. You’ll probably want to have some expertise in the area that you are picking companies in, like for me I work on Internet companies because that’s what I know most about.
Having an extensive business network really helps. Connecting your entrepreneurs with the right folks will help from a company building standpoint, and even potentially on generating an exit at some point in the future. When you are calling on your friends or previous business associates, it works much better than going in cold. They already know you and there is a level of trust built already.
You also can’t be risk averse. You need to be more of a risk taker and be able to get behind an entrepreneur, even when there seems to be no intellectual proof that it will be successful. Startup investing is not for the conservative soul; you’ll drive yourself crazy if you are conservative by nature.
The Money Aspect
Here is where it differs slightly between venture capitalists and angel investors. When you are a VC, you are playing with other peoples’ money; when you’re an angel, you’re playing with your own money. I say ‘slightly’ because in the case where you have to put up your money into the fund, then you’ll also be playing with your own money as you invest the fund’s money.
But with a fund, the bulk of the money you’re investing is not yours. So if this is true, you need to feel some kind of fiscal responsibility to that money, and not feel that you can just take unnecessary risks with it. After all, these people entrusted you with their money on the assumption that you wouldn’t just piss it away on stupid investments.
When it’s your own money, other things come into play. I’ll throw some out there which I think are important.
Most financial planners say that you shouldn’t put more than 2-3% of your assets into any one investment. This ensures diversification minimizes the impact of any one investment in case of a downturn in that investment. In either case of whether you’re committing money into a fund or designating it for angel investing, is that amount larger than 2-3% of your total assets? If it is, you are potentially taking too high a risk with your assets. Investing into these types of companies is not a sure thing. The potential is greater than zero that you could lose it all.
Still, it has been shown that statistically speaking, if you put money in 10 investments, about 6 will tank, 3 will break even or make back a little, and the last one makes back everything you lost on the previous 9 and then some.
Let’s do some math: say you put $50K into 10 companies because you want to employ this diversification concept to maximize your chances of making money. That means you need $500K to do this. If we say that we don’t want to commit more than 2% of our total assets, then our assets must be $25MM total.
Certainly this can be modified by many factors like are you a risk taker or not. Maybe then 2% isn’t the right number but maybe 4 or 5% or maybe more. It definitely bears some thought into what kind of person you really are, and the comfort level you need with respect to your assets.
I think also that you need to be able to let go of that money. You need to be able to say that you will be OK if you never see that money again and just move on. If you cannot let go of the cash emotionally and intellectually, you’ll be in a really poor mental state when your investments aren’t doing well. Remember, that even if you employ the diversified/statistical method of investing, something like 6 of those companies will fail completely. I would not recommend you get into venture or angel investing if you’re going to collapse mentally every time one of your portfolio companies dies. You’ll go nuts and probably drive everyone else nuts around you. Because it WILL HAPPEN and you need to be able to deal with it.
You also need to have a healthy attitude towards money. Some people just can’t. They assign way too much importance to cash in their lives. They can’t let go of it, and they may do a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde thing on you. I’ve already experienced this once already in my life, and I have heard stories about many more. Friends, family all turning from loving people to the nightmares of your life. They will do things like hate you for losing their money, and never let you forget it. They will lie, cheat, steal – literally money does bring out the worst in people. Are you a closet Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde with respect to money? If you are or even think you are, stay away from startup investing!
What’s Your Real Motivation?
I am big on getting real insight into why I do anything. I want to really understand my motivations and feelings on it. So I think it is worthwhile asking yourself why you REALLY want to do this. If after all your inward analysis you still want to do this, then by all means go for it assuming the other stuff we talked about applies positively to you.
One big thing is to not delude oneself about the glamorous life of a startup investor. It ain’t glamorous all the time and it takes a lot of work to do it well. And as much as you may say you want to build great companies, you won’t be able to ignore the monetary aspect of it and how you’re going to get your money out of the deal. Sometimes the two don’t sync up exactly and you need to be ready to make a decision contrary to what you really want. You need to prepare yourself on the realities of what is going on here. Can you take your blinders off and really see what it takes realistically?
The Last Word
The last thing I’ll say about whether you can be successful at this is: Are you a lucky person? By fate, or by creating your own luck (which I am big into – creating opportunities rather than just sitting back and hoping it will happen), I think luck plays a bigger role than people think. It is that slight edge you get by the will of the gods that will enable your video company to succeed, whereas the other 99 will not…
Really the Last Word
Don’t create the 100th video company when there are 99 out there. But if your video company makes it big; then I would say you are lucky. Go invest more and call me to bring me into your next deal (haha).

The Curse of Legalese

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Upon creating David Shen Ventures, LLC, one of my first tasks was to create a standard advisor agreement. My lawyer and I worked on it for a while, and when it came back it was very much written in standard lawyer legalese. I had to spend time to go through each line item and figure out what it meant, as it was written using vocabulary that I almost never use. And certainly in my career, I am not used to reading that style of writing; I had never done contracts before and so I spent time with my lawyer to go through everything so that I could understand it and articulate it to others.
As I sent this document out, I started discovering many things.
The world of entrepreneurs is filled with people not accustomed to reading documents written in legalese style. That meant more explaining on my side as well as meetings with lawyers on their side, equating to more time spent and legal fees incurred. Incurring more legal fees for entrepreneurs is definitely not a good thing. They need to conserve cash and don’t want to spend several thousand dollars negotiating an advisor agreement.
The length of my document, covering every little point in excruciating legalese detail is daunting to others. I have encountered many times already where the sheer length and size of the document has caused people to back away from working with me, or to question what I was trying to do. The issue of trust has come up many times, as I suspect they thought I was trying to slip something in there by them that would ultimately screw them in the end.
I also encountered some simply worded docs, which seemed perfectly acceptable as well from a legal standpoint. How could this be? Up this point, I had thought that all docs needed to be written in official legalese. But my thinking was dashed. My belief is that over the years, legalese has evolved from the language of lawyers for a variety of reasons. However, since the simply worded docs were also acceptable, I was determined to create something much simpler to read and understand, and get through the advisor signup process quicker.
I went back to my lawyer and we developed a much simpler advisor agreement. We tossed out a whole bunch of extra stuff that didn’t need for an advisor agreement. We reworded the whole document to be more easily understood, and removed extra text which confounds the reading process.
It was an amazing change. Since the document was changed, in EVERY instance, the sign up process was quick and clean. There were questions about a point here and there, but in general it was accepted very fast. I attribute this to instant understandability by the entrepreneur and the raising of the entrepreneur’s comfort level that I wasn’t trying to turn this into a legalese nightmare. Both of us saved many legal dollars by not creating extra billable hours going back and forth between us and our lawyers to figure out what the agreement was trying to say and whether it was acceptable or not.
It is now my aspiration that all documents I prepare will be more simple than not, and minimal or not in legalese. But I know this is just a dream; too many lawyers exist out there and not enough people are demanding their documents be written in simpler form. I know that at some point, I will need to get used to reading documents in legalese, and surely I must treat this as a new language to learn.

Online Anywhere with Verizon!

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Today, I’m sitting on a train to Delaware from NYC and decided to blog a bit, as well as try out my new Verizon broadband wireless card in a very tough environment; that of a moving commuter train racing at high speed from one major metro to another.
I figured that Verizon might actually setup service along the train route, but I am always doubtful that service will be continuous or of good quality.
I was definitely pleasantly surprised. I suppose the sheer number of business folks with wireless broadband cards must be substantial, as service was very continuous and at least 2 bars the whole way. WOW! An online junkie like me who can be online the whole way on Amtrak from NYC to Delware! Amazing!
I love it when I see big corporations actually being successful with this kind of technology. It’s nice to not be disappointed every once in a while.
Get your Verizon Wireless Broadband card today!

Angel Investing from a Disadvantaged Position

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I’ve learned a huge amount about angel investing over the last few months. It started with me sitting down with my lawyer and getting a brain dump of terms, term sheets, provisions of all sorts, talking about notes and preferred series: the list goes on and on. But it’s all theory until you get out there and try to invest in something yourself.
I told myself I would try to be a sophisticated investor, meaning that I would spend the time (and money) to get every deal reviewed by my lawyer and I would make best efforts to read everything. It was the only way I could understand everything, which was to experience it in real time.
When I started looking at deals, many things emerged. Here are some of them:
It’s the Wild West
There is no such thing as standard. All term sheets have similarities, but everything is different, sometimes subtly different. Every law firm has its own style and favored terms to present, and modify that by the entrepreneur or the venture fund and you get every kind of combination of terms you can think of. All I can say is that I’m glad to have my lawyer around to look at terms with an experienced eye, and I can only hope that over months (years?) I too can gain enough experience at looking at terms and their ramifications.
Law Firms Protect Their Clients
And that’s a good thing. The law firms that startups hire will produce documentation that is always company friendly. Which usually means that it’s not very friendly for the investor. The terms will inevitably have provisions that don’t protect the investor at all. This confounds the process because sophisticated investors will always push back and alter the terms. If there is pushback, then legal fees will mount, as the process of negotiation goes back and forth on the terms.
The downside is that entrepreneurs are typically new to the financing aspect. They don’t know enough to ask for more balanced terms when developing term sheets. They just take whatever the lawyer gives them.
I always push for balanced terms that favor neither investor nor company. In my limited experience, it has resulted in the fastest way docments get approved and signed with minimal fuss and cost.
Money Gives You the Lead Position
One thing I found out was that at the amounts I’m angel investing ($25K – $100K per investment), I am typically not the lead investor. That unfortunately means that I have little leverage to modify the terms; if I had put in more money, the entrepreneur is incentivized to negotiate with me and keep me happy in order to get my cash. If I am only putting in a small amount relative to others, or as a percentage of the total raise, then it is up to me to do my best in gracefully pushing for better terms.
Sophistication or Attention to Detail is Severely Lacking in Angel Rounds
During angel rounds, it is often the case that the entrepreneur went to their friends and family to get much of the money. These folks have cash, but almost always have no experience with terms and what is good and what is not. They rely solely on trust of their family/friend to not screw them when it comes to protecting their investment. When I arrive on the scene, it is often the case that a lot of the money has already been raised, and now we have a whole crew of people who have accepted the terms, albeit not fully understanding them, and now I have little leverage to ask for different terms because the entrepreneur would now have to go back to each investor and approve and sign off on changes. This will incur extra costs and perhaps even uncomfortable dialog between the entpreneur and family and friends (ie. you asking for my approval for better terms now…? why weren’t they in there when I signed the documents in the first place…?).
Big Experienced Angels Mess Up the Process for us Little Guys
Another issue I have encountered is the prevalence of angels in Silicon Valley with large sums of money. Throwing $50K, $100K, even $1MM into a startup during an angel round is done without attention to terms. How do I know they aren’t reading the terms? Because they invested in a company with investor un-friendly terms! And with the amount they put in, they could have easily negotiated changes in the terms.
Now that the entrepreneur has a big investor signed up, I show up with my investment and again I don’t have leverage to change terms, even if they favor the big investor, because the entrepreneur doesn’t want to go back and re-approve terms.
I asked around as to what these guys were doing. I found out that many have 40+ investments. With that many investments, it is impossible to keep their attention on any of them. And some of them are not experienced enough to know if a given company is good or not. Remember, this does not mean that they aren’t smart; it just means that sometimes you’re putting money in an industry that you may not have deep experience in. So they spread out their investments as much as possible in order to employ what I call the “Random Method of Investing”. Basically, this means you employ the theory that has been proven time and time again by venture funds, which is that for every 10 companies you invest in, about 6 will tank, 3 will do about even, and the last 1 will make back all that you lost and then some. Now you can see the reason for 40+ investments. It’s very much a passive investing operation.
My bet with David Shen Ventures, LLC is that I will improve that success ratio by being smart about the busineses I involve myself with, and I get involved with them to give them the benefit of my knowledge and experience. I am betting on an active investing operation and I hope to prove that this will be more lucrative than the passive route, as well as more fun.
Timing is Everything, But Not the Last Word
So far, in every investment I’ve done where I came in middle or towards the end of the round period, I generally have found that I lose leverage to change the terms. But I ask anyways. And it looks like dependent on the entrepreneur; often they will make best efforts to make changes or even make the change.
When I am at the beginning, I find that I can negotiate much better, even with my small amount going in. Over time, I hope to generate proof that going for funding with balanced terms results in lesser negotiation, less cost, and faster fund raising.
What’s the Future?
I think the route that others have taken may be the best. And that is to employ enough capital to be the lead investor in the round, angel or otherwise, and to be able to effect change in the terms because you are bringing so much cash to the table. Definitely, I am not there yet; my hope that is David Shen Ventures, LLC will be successful over time to be able to make succeedingly larger investments to the point where I can manipulate terms to the benefit of both investor and company.

Google Maps on Mobile

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Everyone was super impressed when Google Maps came out, all decked out with Ajax and an API for others to hack into. Their maps heralded an age of mashups and rushed copycats from competitors like Yahoo!.
The other day a buddy of mine shows me Google Maps on his Treo. I go “WHOA”. It’s got the same type of AJAX-like interaction as the web site! You can drag it around and when you go off map, it automatically connects to the Internet and grabs new images. You can also put it in satellite mode and surf around locations while looking at real buildings!
The real kicker is this. You can look up businesses on the map and get directions. What a godsend. Up to now, yellow page applications have all sucked on mobile phones. Now Google Maps Mobile makes it all worthwhile. You look up a business, little pins denote business matches, you click on one to get more info, and you can get directions to go there.
And thank god for the Google war chest to fund dedicated apps for a whole suite of mobile phones! I also downloaded Google Maps onto my Motorola SLVR and it works a little bit hokey in the sense that it keeps asking me for permission to connect to the internet, but it also performs wonderfully.
Find this and more great Google Mobile apps at http://www.google.com/mobile/. The Google Maps Mobile app is available at http://www.google.com/gmm/. Now I must try out Gmail for Mobile phones….