Steve Blank Gigaom Interview
Key points: Entrepreneurs are artists. New bubble is good. Today, total available market is exponential. VC $$$ should be used for scaling and visibility. Entrepreneurs should study psychology.
Find out more by watching the whole video. It’s great.
We high five each other and claim “Rails Win!” when someone finds a gem that solves a really big problem in a few lines of code. In this post I’ll list a few interesting addons to the RoR Mongoid ORM that are slowly adding up to a feature-rich ecosystem of plug-and-play modules that work with Mongoid. This list should convince you that you should at least try MongoDB. You can get a ton of functionality “for free”.
Vinova is proud to be author of voteable_mongo gem and contributor of mongoid-slug gem.
At 37signals, however, we have a different position on ambition. We’re not big fans of what I consider “vertical” ambition—that is, the usual career-path trajectory, in which a newbie moves up the ladder from associate to manager to vice president over a number of years of service. On the other hand, we revere “horizontal” ambition—in which employees who love what they do are encouraged to dig deeper, expand their knowledge, and become better at it. We always try to hire people who yearn to be master craftspeople, that is, designers who want to be great designers, not managers of designers; developers who want to master the art of programming, not management.
At Vinova, we are doing the same by building a skillful, passionate and inter-dependent team. Team members wear many hats and work in harmony toward a common goal. Each member should be the boss of his own.
The challenge that many startups face today is: Are you really providing enough value? Will you get the TechCrunch bump, the tier-1 VC anointment, followed by great PR firm support and then the NY Times or WSJ story that follows? Will that be enough or will high churn rates creep in, new toys be introduced into the market, new time sucks pulling user attention away? This year’s Tamagotchi?
If you’re building a startup today I would encourage you to think harder about how you’re going to win the battle for share of mind. That’s much tougher than getting people to play with your hot product for 6 months. To do so you must truly provide value that changes the way that end-consumers do something in their lives that will persist.
- The LinkedIn IPO “absolutely” marks the beginning of a bubble — and he thinks it’s going to be great. He likens it to the Netscape IPO in August 1995 that kicked off four years of boom times, but notes that this time VCs actually know how to build real companies with real revenue and profit.
- Crazy investors — not geeks — are what makes Silicon Valley unique. Without the “crazy” financiers willing to take big risks in hopes of chasing “obscene” returns, the valley would just be “a bunch of smart scientists and entrepreneurs sitting in their labs and their garages.”
- Microsoft will start to fail within six quarters. Blank put a timeline on Microsoft suffering the kind of huge loss that drove IBM to restructure itself back in 1993: six quarters from now. He thinks Steve Ballmer is a “miserable failure” and that the board should be blamed for not replacing him. He also suggests that buying Nokia and installing Stephen Elop as CEO might be a solution.
- But Larry Page is doing the right thing at Google. By letting the geeks run the show, Page is following in the footsteps of one of the earliest Silicon Valley pioneers: Fairchild Semiconductor in the 1950s.
The most common mistake is to put profits first. That opens the door for bad things to happen. Numbers become all-important, and almost any behavior is justified in the name of profit. Cheating sets in.
Instead, a company’s priority should be to protect and enhance its reputation through ethical behavior. Within the confines of that behavior, its next most important goal should be to attract and keep customers. Third is figuring out how to make money.
It reminds me of http://www.itsnotwhatyousell.com/pdf/ch1-spence.pdf
Yay, new site launched! myAppalogues – App-based electronic catalogues. You can also find the iPhone/iPad app available on Apple Store too
myAppalogues - App-based catalogues
Every day we see merchants willing to spend thousands of dollars on tradeshows, magazine / print, and website campaigns. And then they end up selling at a discount anyway as it’s such a crowded market. We’re not telling merchants what to do, and there are some benefits to tradeshows obviously, but if the world is going to mobile (which it is) and you can easily afford to give it a try (which now you can) then we’re finding that people will do that.”
myApp4KIDS is free to download and use and costs a small monthly fee per advertisement. There are no commissions on sales. Merchants can register at www.myappalogues.com and use the Ad Wizard to easily create instant mobile promotions for their products.
A few screenshots of the app:
Discovering context is the end game of curation
The need to filter social networks to create value is a natural reaction to the raw value and size of the networks themselves.
I do think the rise of alternative notification channels; sms, mobile push notifications, direct messages on twitter, facebook messaging, etc are going to move some of this kind of thing off of email over time. But today, if you want to drive retention and repeat usage, there isn’t a better way to do it than email.
