Kerabu

The (Techdirt) Greenhouse Effect

One more thing became clear to me during Techdirt Greenhouse: There is perhaps no better way to find out how an entrepreneur thinks than to get them to talk about what they'd do with someone else's business. Anyone should be able to pitch and defend their own startup, but ask them to parse something they've spent five minutes getting to know, and you really do get a fair picture of how fair and nimble an entrepreneurial intelligence they possess.

In the bricks and mortar world, business people sort each other out by playing golf--I'm not making excuses for them; they really do deserve the write-off, because golf is a very, very difficult game to play, let alone be good at, and four hours on the links can tell you a lot about how a person will handle stress, embarrassment, failure and frustration.

The unexpected fun yesterday was to see how entrepreneurs performed when called upon to parse the complexities of other people's companies. It is one thing to listen to someone pitch you something they care about and have lived and breathed for months. It's another thing altogether to see how they field entrepreneurial challenges, well, in the field.

All entrepreneurs, and doubtless all investors, have had the experience of being very keen on someone they've vetted with duly and diligently, only to find that under pressure--sometimes just the pressure of day-to-day ops--there's no one home, or worse, Mr. Hyde answers the bell. Finding out how robust an intellect you're dealing with is really very difficult. But I had the spooky feeling, walking out of these forty minute sessions, that I'd met people I'd like to work with, and also people I'd probably have made the mistake of working with if I hadn't seen them in action.

The upshot: If I were a VC (or a founder looking for partners, or a startup looking for key staff), I'd be pretty excited about seeing Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike and Dennis turn this into a regular event, so that I could avail myself of this forum to gauge my potential investment's performance, not just in a pitch meeting or interview, but on the "green."

Tags: techdirt greenhouse, techdirtgreenhouse

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Yesterday at TechDirt

Jackie and I spent our Saturday at TechDirt Greenhouse in San Jose. The idea: early-stage entrepreneurs who ranged from venture-backed cos with a launched product to college kids with a fresh batch of home-cooked Ajax gave five minute presentations, followed by small group discussions aimed at generating constructive advice.

One of the groups I landed in was charged with discussing the "new" business model for 2006 (result: "organically grown"--ie., "97% investment dollar free!"). The group also disagreed with Andy Kessler's assertion that every business has to scalable to the moon and back--the web needs its mom and pop dry-cleaning shops, too.

Another session dissected topix.net, at which point I briefly (and annoyingly I'm sure) dragged out two of my rickety soapboxes: the one about how I don't think the news aggregator is the killer new media app everyone else thinks it is, and the one about "information overload" being a myth:  Analogy: Do you sit around fretting about the fact that there are six billion people in the world, and how will you ever sort through them? Of course not. Another analogy: Do you walk into Borders and suffer a panic attack over how many books there are? Of course not. So there are a lot of blogs now--you'll get used to it. More importantly, as Umair Haque said, if you're under 18, you're already used to it.

I was very curious to hear Umair keep making quietly prophetic references to MySpace. He thinks we're not talking about this consumer end of 2.0 enough--and I agree. I'd like to see Umair, who is the Robert Venturi of Web 2.0 architecture, to write a "Learning from MySpace" manifesto in the spirit of  Learning from Las Vegas (that's Venturi's 1972 book about the significance of architectural kitsch, not the movie about the drunk and the hooker).

Tags: techdirt greenhouse, techdirtgreenhouse

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Revenge of the Introverts

The Atlantic has an interview with Jonathan Rauch (linked via Tyler Cowen) revisiting his 2003 essay on what it's like to be an introvert in an extrovert's world (hint: introverts aren't "shy," we just find extraneous social interaction draining rather than stimulating). Rausch compares being an introvert to being gay, in terms of the level of social difficulty and the problem of contending with a perception of one's essential nature as being deviant from a norm (as opposed to being considered a minority, say). Then it gets even more interesting:

I do think that there's been, in the last ten years or so, a major economic resurgence for introversion—the "geek" economy. The prototypical geek is really good at thinking, has superb powers of concentration (which tends to be an introvert trait), and works very well independently. They're often pretty awesomely brilliant people, and they're fairly defiant about being geeks. They've turned this word "geek" into a term that's almost romantic in some ways, and through the Silicon economy, they've been massively innovative and economically important. A lot of them are running circles around the extroverts who are selling shoes. So I think part of what's happened lately is that the digital economy is giving introverts a new place in the sun.

Being an introvert myself, if not exactly qualified as a geek, I can only see this as a positive development. Though I do not, despite my thirst for a certain measure of revenge, want to see a culture that is introvert-dominant, either. What I think is best, economically, socially and otherwise, is a certain dynamic tension between introversion and extroversion--kind of like having a Republican legislature and a Democratic executive branch, or vise versa. The important thing I see coming out of this isn't about domination, it's about recognition that leadership and entrepreneurialism aren't personality types, but skill sets.

Tags: introversion, introvert, extroversion, extrovert, Rausch, Atlantic

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Pasadena Community Foundation

I recently had a wonderful lunch with Christle Balvin of the Pasadena Community Foundation, an organization that acts as a hub,  helping individuals who want to set up their own charitable funds to do so, and administering these mini-foundations.  Christle described several examples, including:

• A woman who makes t-shirts for dogs through a company called Chiwowow wanted to donate part of her proceeds to animal rescue orgs.  The Foundation set it up for her.
• A 13 year-old boy, taken aback by the ostentation of bar mitzvahs he'd attended, asked to arrange to donate all his own bar mitzvah gifts to charity.  The Foundation helped him set up a fund to do so.

Community foundations across the country do this kind of thing for lots and lots of folk, consolidating adiministrative costs. They are usually members of an organization called the Council of Foundations. 

The PCF is intriguing, but Christle herself is even more interesting.  It was one of those lunches where you instantly feel you're speaking in shorthand with someone.  I gave her the business plan, and she just emailed me back saying she's interested in helping out.

How to Succeed in Advertising...

We may not have interested parties yet, but we do have several interesting parties, and here is one of them.  I've been reading Ilya Vedrashko's MIT Advertising Lab blog, not because I'm a general reader of advertising blogs, but because it's full of the kinds of ideas I like.  So when he posted his resume (and offered to sell advertising space on it--hah!) I contacted him.  In discussing the possibility of being one of several disparate and far flung people working on the project this summer, he came up with several extremely novel ideas like this one: 

I guess a reasonable thing to do is to put together a list of first-priority tasks that need be done over summer together with time estimates, then have each participant pick what they can do best. Then we can test Kerabu in action :) -

What I particularly like about this idea is that it allows everyone who works on this project to be an entrepreneur (which makes me sort of a general contractor).  It also seems like a good way for us to test drive each other.  By the time the company is ready for full time engagement, we should know who will be an equity partner, who else will be an independent contractor, etc.  Paul Graham, one of my favorite writers, has said that he doesn't believe in employees anymore, only entrepreneurs.  I quite agree.