When I worked in institutional asset management, my managing director was very much an academic, and influenced the way I think about the world significantly--particularly around the nature of risk, uncertainty, and attribution of success. He always tried to look at things as a set of bets. You never knew exactly how your investments were going to turn out, but if you had a clear idea of what your bets were, you could at least manage where you were taking your risks.

In my life, I have a very clear bet on relationships. I know that I am relying on the strength of the bonds I have made with people to get me to the next level. Relationship bets often feel a little bit like insider trading--because its information you alone have about your experiences and information that give you any kind of certainty. Its certainly not public information, and it often appears sketchy or risky to depend on a relationship to come through.

On the contrary, that's something I feel comes through more often than not. Surrounding myself with good people through strong relationships has paid off for me time and time again, and I think its the one aspect of creating a business that entrepreneurs neglect most.

"Who's going to come through for you?" is something I want to ask most newbie entrepreneurs I meet. "Who is your friend in PR who will help pitch your story? Are your angels there for you when the money runs dry?" You can't necessarily put this into a business plan, but its as sure of an inside tip if there ever was one.

On the heels of HP Labs' recent research into the data goldmine that is Twitter, the company has not announced plans for a seed fund similar to the fbFund, iPhone fund, and Salesforce fund, to spur the development of data related applications built on top of its API platform.

Yup... that's right.  They have not announced that.

I made it up.

But is it really that far fetched?  Summize search is and will be even more of a gamechanger for Twitter as they get it more integrated, making the whole application more valuable.  It was something that Twitter itself couldn't focus on without distracting its efforts just to run the rapidly growing service, so they just picked up Summize in an acquisition. 

Undoubtedly, there will be lots of opportunities for value creation that Twitter could go into, particularly around it's vast, growing, live pool of user data, but they would all be distractions--especially ones, like StockTwits, that are specific to an industry.  StockTwits leverages the community of people talking about stock symbols using the $ symbol before actual stock symbols, in order to create a rich content application--a market pulse.  Undoubtedly, they could mine that for not only news with a social filter on it, but also sentiment.

What has been built on top of Twitter so far has been, admittedly, lightweight--various interfaces, some light stats.  One notable exception, however, has been Mr. Tweet.  The recommendation service examines the people in your network, how often they tweet, whether they respond, etc. to give you a pretty thorough assessment of who you should be connecting to on Twitter.

I think the real value for building services on top of Twitter's data comes when you can leaverage a deep dive into Twitter's data to meet the needs of people in various industries.  How about marketing and branding?  If I was trying to promote some volleyball equipment, wouldn't it be good to know where the volleyballers were geographically, who were the most influential ones, and also what other kinds of brands, items, and events they talked about?  I think it would be a marketers dream for an app to ask what they wanted to market and for it to spit out the 50 people on Twitter that they absolutely needed to get this in front of, customized for the type of product.

It seems like Twitter is going to go the advertising model with it's business, leaving the data value potentially untapped.  I could see models around Twitter news, traffic, weather, product information, dating (why hasn't that one been done yet??), politics...   How about using twitter to actually power my newsreader, or go back the other way and use my RSS feeds to power Twitter user recommendations based on people who are tweeting the articles I read?

I think there's an interesting investment opportunity here--one that may be in the best interest in the company as well.  The more they support the ecology, the stronger they'll be in the center of it all.

People have been asking a lot about ways for us to continue the momentum of the Obama campaign. How do we make sure that the country doesn't snap back into apathy and how do we work together to identify and address our problems. Clearly, the internet is going to be a major organizing mechanism... but how? With which tools?

Here's an idea I've been toying around with:

Make local.change.gov into a directory of discoverable placenames... local.change.gov/11209 or local.change.gov/Bay_Ridge. On those pages, mashup and localize a few services that are meant to inform, encourage collaboration, provide feedback and ideas, etc. Here's what I would add:

Get Satisfaction: A place where people could not only complain, but provide ideas and solutions, too. Make sure my local elected representatives are on it, too, so they could be accountable when someone posts an issue and no one responds. I think local government (and education, too) are hugh opportunities for GS to seed pages for people to discover.

Meetup: They should create a placeholder Meetup for Change group in every zipcode, so that people aren't just adding their ideas to the cloud--they're getting out of the house and doing something about them. List other local Meetups, too, and make it easy to create new ones right from these pages.

Outside.in: What's the community talking about? What's going on around you? Seems fitting that hyperlocal news should be fed into this platform, not to mention the fact that Outside.in's local placename taxonomies are probably going to come in very handy in creating these pages in the first place.

Blogging: I don't really care what blogging platform gets used, but if we're going to be creating these local organizing places on the web, giving more people a voice seems appropriate.

Community event calendar: No brainer. Not only allow people to publish events to it one at a time, but allow groups and organization to publish calendar feeds to it as well.

Non profit opportunities database: Do you know many times people have asked me where they can go to find a good cause to get involved with? I have no idea where to send them. Seems like that's got to be out there somewhere, but if not, let's create it here and allow syndication of the data to everyone can have it and add to it.


Community Forum: Here's something I actually think it best to avoid. Forums always spiral into hate and troll behavior. Let's keep the discussions here to user publishing on their own blogs, syndicate it around, and also in the structure of GS idea and issue posts, or in a focused Meetup with an organizer.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Anyone want to just build this? (Or at least start wireframing.)

When Scott Heiferman announced his abdication from the NY Tech Meetup throne at the last Meetup, he said that he had asked himself the question of whether the Meetup could be more than just a once a month pitch meeting.

It's exactly the same question I asked three years ago when I started nextNY.  At the time, Meetup.com didn't have listservs, so it was much more of an event than it was any kind of community.  Twitter wasn't around, so even during the event itself, people seemed kind of disconnected from each other.  There were no afterparties either.  I actually wanted to meet the people at the event, particularly the up and comers who were in my peer group, so I asked Scott if it was ok to form another group and he was fully supportive.  Now, we're at 2,000 people and growing, and our @shakeshack event was the hot community event over the summer.

But nextNY didn't solve everyone's needs.  Some people wanted more of a direct connection to financing, and so David and Yao created a unique business opportunity for themselves by founding the Hatchery around that premise.  They throw pitch meetings and investor matchups--and that obviously wouldn't be relevant for all the members of the NY Tech Meetup.

There have also been more focused groups, like the Video 2.0 Meetup group, which itself supports almost 2500 people, and industry meetups like the Fashion 2.0 Meetup, where over 200 entrepreneurs at the crossroads of fashion and technology are gathered.

And, of course, for even longer, we've had tech user groups, like NYPHP and the Linux User Group, etc.  These organizations have been holding events and running online listservs for years, connecting the technologists of the Big Apple.

So, as the NY Tech Meetup scaled to 7500 people, it inspired people whose needs it wasn't fulfilling to go off and create their own groups--creating lots of new community leaders.  Seems to me that it's more than serving it's purpose.

Scott, however, positioned the NY Tech Meetup as falling short--so when he asked for new leadership, those who answered the call came new ideas ablazin', writing manifestos, blog posts, etc... and the theme was the same... more, bigger, structure. 

This is typical.  No one ever wins this type of thing by promising more of the same.  Change is sexy, as are big visions.  However, as we should know from the web, focus and reduction are more likely to improve the quality of a product than adding more features. 

And now, we're going to be forced to choose between these new visions, when the community never actually asked for any of them.  I mean, this whole time, any one of the people running for Meetup organizer could have proposed any of their suggested changes and ideas, and totally ran with them, and we could have seen whether or not they got any traction in the community.  That's the way nextNY works.  If someone wants to run an event, everyone is free to, and if only 10 people want to go, it's fine, those 10 people meet.  If 150 people want to go, it naturally gathers more momentum, focus, and effort.  That minimizes the amount of community distraction and misallocation of resources.

No one, except Scott, was asking for more overhead, a board, or more structure, because whatever they weren't getting out of the NY Tech Meetup, they were getting out of one of these other community organizations... and now we're going to put the weight of 7500 people and a board behind someone's agenda--an agenda that didn't earn that following in the first place.  I actually think this could be dangerous--because it has the potential to distract other resources and the community itself on issues and efforts that aren't really being driven by the community. 

For example, a lot of people have been saying that there needs to be more venture investment in NYC.  Whether or not that's the case, something like 2% of all startups are ever really appropriate for venture investment anyway.  Still, that's something that everyone will support, even though it really isn't relevant.  Need we waste the NY Tech Meetup's time and energy on trying to work to get more investment in NYC when it doesn't really apply to most of its members?

Plus, a lot of what bothers me about this "election" is that the people running so far have either never tried to show leadership in the community before, or whose leadership efforts haven't garnered anything close to the kind of success the current NY Tech Meetup has.  And now we're going to throw the weight of 7500 people behind them?  That's going to set off a legitimization of someone's ideas that never got traction otherwise.  That person will undoubtedly be looked to as representative of the community when they really aren't.  I might think differently if anyone gets a majority of the votes, but what are the chances of that happening?  I'll bet you that "turnout" isn't even 50%, not to mention the fact that all the people in NY Tech aren't in the Meetup group, obviously, so this person isn't really going to be very representative of very many people at all.  They'll likely be treated as such, though, because elections create that perception. 

Instead, why not keep things a liquid market of smaller, focused groups--representative of what the community actually needs.  This way, if there's a group that wants to get together around investments, like the Hatchery, they can, and they'll naturally rightsize themselves around that need.  Let's not forget that the 7500 people joined the meetup as designed--to meet once a month, check in with others in the community, and see some interesting new startups.  It was simple, and not surprisingly, simple got traction.  There was no groundswell of people saying "This sucks, we need to do more."  In fact, it was quite the contrary.  Tickets to the NY Tech Meetup sellout in minutes. 

Have we not learned anything from AOL and Yahoo?  Kludging disparate factions of a community together in an attempt to be its center never works.  In fact, it goes against the very essence of Meetup itself--a loose collection of groups centered around focused interests, with lots of cross pollination but no central hub.

So, after giving this a lot of thought, I think I really only support two options here.  Let's keep it exactly the same--because it works, and because anything different or with more structure isn't really what the community asked for or needs or can't be found in other groups.

Or, let's just disband the whole thing before it trips over its own structure and overhead and wastes a lot of effort and resources.  Yeah... that's right.  Let's stop the NY Tech Meetup and see how many new efforts pop up in its place and how many new leaders are created.  I would hope that it would create at least a few--because there were a few people running I had never seen or heard from before. 

Or how about just spinning out the monthly meetup and keeping that exactly the same--run by someone currently on the organizing staff--and have some side "ideas" group coming up with new things to try out and incubate within the community?

Do I actually think the NY Tech Meetup should be disbanded?  No, I don't.  But do I think we are in danger of forming the next NYNMA, which failed under its own overhead during a downturn?  Yes, I do.  (something that nextNY, for example, can't do, b/c it's just a group of people... no finances, no costs... as long as there are two nextNYers who want to meet and talk to each other, it will always be around).   I'm also looking at the NYSIA model, with a paid director that, while more focused on the enterprise side, really hasn't galvanized the community either--despite the good efforts of very qualified people. 

Meetup proved that the grassrootsy, low overhead model worked.  The NY Tech Meetup inspired a generation of new community leaders who have packed the Gary's Guide calendar full of tech community events.  I'd rather see it disappear than see a new vision haphazardly bolted on to a community that never asked for one.

I've been watching TeachStreet because I'm obviously interested in the education market, but they also participated in my Blogger's Challenge review thing, so their kind donation has bubbled my opinions up to the surface of my blog.  

Right now, TeachStreet has a little bit of a chicken and egg issue--not enough classes listed in every area and therefore not enough of a critical mass of students I'd imagine.  Part of the reason?  This is covered in their note to teachers who discover themselves on the site.

"Please know however that we searched for your information the "old-fashioned" way, with people-power, not with bots, spiders or by paying for your information off of a list."

Hmm...   I don't know about that.  I mean, I understand the intention there--quality control--but that's just the hurdle that being an aggregator entails.  At least with something like Indeed.com, you have a high confidence that if there's a job out there to be found, it's on Indeed.  That's a very powerful marketing message and it drives site traffic.  Just being "all the classes we found so far" isn't going to be enough to drive people away from industry specific sites, like Media Bistro, or people who have established reputations around online learning, like the Learning Annex or University of Phoenix. 

This got me thinking...  Is the current set of existing classes really all there is to the learning market?  For example, I currently teach entrerpreneurship for Fordham University as well as for ITAC's FastTrac.  I often meet up with other entreprenuers to go over their ideas, pitches, etc.  I don't currently do this for money, but I might do this for charity.  Either way, whether the money goes in my pocket or in someone else's, the point is that, under the right circumstances, everyone is an educational resource.  The question is how do you pull this people into the market and organize them? 

My point is, to set up a class in TeachStreet, I needed an established class.  That might seem obvious, but I also think it might be a missed opportunity.  What if I could just put myself in as an expert in some topic areas (maybe it could suck in my LinkedIn profile and provide some suggestions) and then have students indicate what they might like to learn from me.  (And what they might pay) With an easy plugin to a webinar or free conference call number, I might get roped into sharing my expertice at a regular time--i.e. teaching a class! 

This could really expand the market size, and create a much more fluid market for community learning. 

Otherwise, I think Dave and company are going to have to turn on those bots and spiders, because if you're not the place to find every single last class, and you're not where the classes are actually taking place (doesn't seem like they're hosting the content) then you're a marketplace... and marketplaces need lots of liquidity.  By helping knowledgeable people create classes, you'd be "securitizing" previously illiquid assets.

The other thing I think TeachStreet needs to focus on is who their customer is.  At Path 101, unlike Monster, we think of the job seeker as our main priority--although after a dozen or so years, apparently Monster is now thinking about them as well.  We're building our site on the idea that if we're a place for seekers to go, and we can learn about them, the recruiters will follow.

How does that work in the education market?  Something tells me its all about the teacher here--that these education sites need to be a no-brainer for every teacher to list on immediately.  Plus, it can't just be about traffic at first, because a new site won't have any.  I don't know exactly what it is--perhaps they should build some kind of a survey tool, where teachers--even ones who teach at the Learning Annex--can send their students to in order to give more in depth feedback.  If I kept my reputation here as an instructor, I might as well list all my classes here.  I, for one, would definitely send my students and my ITAC class to the site to look me up and rate me--if it was a lot more instructor-friendly than rate my prof sites. 

Anyway...  TeachStreet is certainly a good start--very cleanly designed and easy to navigate, but I really want to see what direction they're going to take this, because there's so much to be done here, but it is really going to take some disruptive ideas.

I used to have a page at AOL Hometown.  It was the first website I ever made.

It had imagemaps and everything.

It also had a long list of quotes... because who hasn't kept a quote book at one point or another. 

And now?  It's gone.

AOL scuttled it without any warning to its users.  At least, I don't think they attempted to warn me.  I logged back into my old AOL mail account.  I didn't see anything.  They could have mass IMed all their AIM users... "Hey, AOL is closing the following stuff down... if you have anything on it, back it up."

Instead, my first homepage is gone.

I mean, was it really costing them that much to keep up? 

It's amazing how far AOL has fallen.  What is it anymore?  The only think I use AOL for at this point is AIM... and even then I'm using Digsby anyway.

I've brought this up lots of times before, but AOL was Facebook before Friendster was Facebook.  Updating your text based AOL profile was a key aspect of online social networking from 1997-2001, the years I went to college.  They knew who everyone's friends were and where most people's gateway to the web. 

And it wasn't too late for them either.  Even just a couple of years ago, when they tried to build AIMpages, it wasn't that they had been beaten to the market--companies like Tumblr and Twitter have proven that little tweaks in the publishing model can create pretty large niches.  It was poor execution and itegration.  They just never came out with compelling products... and the interesting stuff that they did buy, they just never integrated well. 

I think, for some of us, we still wanted to use AOL's stuff...   at least give them a shot.  I have a certain nostalgia for AOL... and they lost their way.

What's interesting is that they were all about community and being a friendly place on the web long before other people created spaces that had a certain feel for them--at least they were one of the first to create a critical mass doing it.  Twitter is what AIM and AOL should have become--a place to find and connect and talk to people. 

What did AOL lack?  Visionary product folks?  Technologists?  Strategy? 

The Stocktwits guys are now using a plugin to autolink your stock terms to their site.

They're not the only ones trying to make your web experience smarter, as per Fred:

"Adaptive Blue recognizes pages about things (books, music, film, stocks, wine, people, etc). Outside.in recognizes posts and articles about places (neighborhoods, schools, parks, etc). And Zemanta recognizes concepts in blog posts and recommends content to add to your post."

But what about when you want these services talking to each other?  Why aren't Outside.in placelinks in Zemanta and Adaptive Blue?  How can we get Path 101 links to information about careers into Adoptive Blue, so anytime someone mentions an industry, we can give you some information on it?  I'm sure ESPN would like to be the player data plugin, and hopefully there's someone out there building the data plugin for political candidates.  Does everyone have to build their own plugin? 

What about open libraries for this?  A standard format whereby anyone who wants to add a database to one of these semantic tools can easily do so, without having to strike up an extensive business development relationship.

Seems to me like Adoptive Blue should become an open platform where anyone can add their taxonomies in.  This is the difference between crawling the open web and maintaining a curated list a la Yahoo 1996--otherwise you have people's ability to keep up with the explosion in content become the bottleneck.

I've said this before, but I'll be honest:  I never wanted to be an entrepreneur.

Well, I never wanted to be an entrepreneur when I knew what being an entrepreneur was.   Back when I was like 10, I wanted to have my own car company.  I used to draw cars and I'd make annual reports on our computer using Harvard Graphics.  I called it Impulse.  I liked naming the models. 

When I started working in private equity, it didn't seem nearly as appealing.  It seemed like a huge pain in the ass for not a lot of reward--on average.   Sure, I had done entrepreneurial things in college, like start a business newspaper, but I was never any good at delegating and so while I enjoyed my experience, it was kind of all for naught.  The paper died when I graduated, after two years.

What I didn't realize then, and what I'm realizing now, is how much I enjoy the challenge.

People ask me if I stress--if I stress about the fact that I know the very day we run out of cash.  Do I stress when investors turn us down or when we need to make difficult product decisions?  Do I stress when something on the site doesn't work as its supposed to?  Do I stress over the hours I put in?

Not in the least.

In fact, it's fantastic.  The challenge of it all has been enormously rewarding.  So as I sit here getting ready for a big investor meeting... a  "go/no go" final meeting... one where I'll be giving a pitch that could be worth nine more months of life for the company, for my partner, for my employees, for our investor's capital...  I'm really loving it. 

This is way better than the day that I was interning at a big company and I left for the afternoon after lunch and no one noticed that I was gone.

I live for this.

If you didn't happen to catch the live show, here's my interview yesterday with Sumaya Kazi of Socially Speaking on BlogTalkRadio.  We talked about social media, startups, and even the New York technology scene.

I'll be speaking on Blog Talk Radio's Socially Speaking with Sumaya Kazi tomorrow at 4PM ET on the topic of social networking and startups.  Check out the link here.

I'll be talking about how startups can use social media for hiring, funding, feedback, etc. and how we use it at Path 101.

This week, NY Tech Meetup organizer and Meetup.com CEO Scott Heiferman outlined a vision  for the future of the group that included a board and community elected organizer.  He talked about the meetup becoming more than what it is.

The idea that the NY Tech Meetup could be more than just a monthly meeting with a few presentations is what led me to create nextNY in the first place.  Rather than go with more structure, we've gone with less.  nextNY has no official organizer and everyone is free to run an event and add to our site--which is in itself a combo of a wiki, blog, job board and other stuff that members just put up themselves.  I think it has become the goto place for a real sense of community in NYC tech.

So that leaves open the question of where the NY Tech Meetup fits.  Should it become more like a professional society?  I don't think so.  We've seen two industry professional organizations develop here--the New York New Media Association (NYNMA) and the New York Software Industry Association (NYSIA) and neither proved to be the community unifier that's needed here.  Organic groups have flourished--a testiment to Meetup.com's own philosophy--which makes it somewhat ironic that Scott should look to build more structure on grass roots.

In a city of lots of structure and money, at least on the outside, it seems to me that structure and money isn't often what gets communities moving together--and often times, it can be an impediment.  Not only that, there's no shortage of structure and resources already in place and our biggest challenge is tapping that and making what we have better.

One thing that Scott is right about is that more could be done for the NY tech community.  I'm just not sure that the NY Tech Meetup is the right vehicle for it, but I'm also not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.  You see, a couple of weeks ago, David Rose and I, at a NYC Council hearing, seperately called for the creation of a single position whose role would be to bring together all of the disparate pieces of the NYC innovation community--a community manager if you will.  More than space or money, if NYC is to take avantage of what it already has, it needs a focal point and a conduit for communication.  In a sea of offices, committees, groups, task forces, meetups, unconferences, and incubators, a single human with an email address, phone number, blog, and a Twitter account could accomplish a ton. 

Such a person would go university to university, community group to community group, to all the government offices, VC funds, angels, etc...  and start off with an assessment.  What do we have?  In the process, that person would become a connector.  A person who could put like minded people together two at a time as often as they put 500 people in the same room.

So, its rather fortuitous that one of the largest groups of tech professionals in the city is in the market for a mission statement and an organizer to carry it out.  I think this is the perfect opportunity to put forward a single person whose job it will be to reach out to the various parts of the NYC tech community and inspire them to work together for a common purpose. 

In my opinion, Nate Westheimer is the most appropriate person for that position.

Keep in mind I said appropriate.  He's not the most experienced--there are other folks who have managed larger communities before or who have been involved in the NY scene for 10, 15, or 20 years.  And, he's not a 5 time repeat entrepreneur or successful VC.  

However, I don't think experience is really what's critical here.  Experience, in this case, presents two problems. 

First, experience gives you a view--you form an opinion and perspective as to what the problems and solutions are related to this community.  That's a problem because the person who can bring the community together can't be someone putting forward their own agenda.  Their agenda must be a synthesis of the community's agenda.  They must be an agnostic aggregator. 

The other thing a lot of experience gives you is the perception, and maybe reality, that you already know most of the people you need to know.  The person who would make the best Community Organizer is not the person that everyone already knows--its the person who will strive to expand and diversify their network.  While Nate knows a lot of the up and comer crowd, there are lots of people in "industry" and the academic world as well that don't know him, and I think he knows that.  

What also makes Nate qualified is that his current job as an EIR at RoseTech Ventures should be 100% synergystic with being the NY Tech Meetup Organizer.  The more that Nate reaches out to the tech community, the more he'll learn about different opportunities and the more people will reach out to him for advice, and perhaps financing.  It's also great that he's not working for a VC, so you can be assured that if he does discover investment opportunities in his job, RoseTech and David will likely seek to syndicate the deal like you'd expect an angel to do.  You wouldn't have to worry about RoseTech getting an unfair "first look" at everything because angels don't hoard their deals--they need other angels or funds to get deals done.

The other thing that makes Nate naturally qualified for this job is that it is inherently social and Nate's a very social guy.  To leverage the NY Tech Meetup as a platform for bringing the community together, he'd really have to reach out and participate in the community the way more experienced people who have kids and families generally won't.  I say that having been the junior guy at a VC firm where the partners, at the end of the day, weren't realistically going to spend three or for nights out at various tech events--but that's where community happens--so it was part of my job to participate in that scene.  That means going to the nextNY events, the Media Meshings, hanging out with the NYC Resistor crew, and even travelling--representing NYC out at Web 2.0 Expo in SF and in other places.  Is it possible for someone else with more life responsibilities to take this on?  Sure...  but more often than not, life just puts on you certain logistical limitations that Nate has proven he can work around when he's passionate about something--he just spent nearly a month campaigning for the Obama campaign in Ohio.  It's this kind of on the ground, door to door effort that the NY Tech Meetup needs--more of a servant of the community than a lead. 

Plus, I'm sure he'll have help.  I don't know what the board will look like, but ultimately, I'm sure that folks like myself, Scott, Dawn Barber, etc. will support his efforts along the way.

As to who else might run?

Well, first off, I'm definitely not running.  I have more than enough to do and my priority is Path 101.

The subject of conflicts is important here, and I want to take a second to address that.  There are people here in the city who are making very successful businesses out of creating communities around them.  That includes Mashable, the Hatchery, SobelMedia, BDI and others.  Those are great business models and their efforts are an integral part of the ecology of the tech community.   However, their mission conflicts with the idea of having the NY Tech Meetup be the center of the NY tech community in a way that just running another non for profit meetup doesn't.  They have a direct business incentive to build community around them and so I wouldn't support the candidacy of any owner of those businesses, despite the fact that they are a group of very savvy and sophisticated people who contribute a lot to the community.  I would not support their candidacy or participation on the board.  The board should, however, make room for NYC government folks and venture capital firms.

And, I'll say it, and I'm not trying to be mean...   but Richie Hecker isn't the guy either.  Richie, you mean well, but I think you have a lot to learn about how to contribute to the community rather than distract it by promoting your own efforts.  I don't want to be negative, but I know Richie will probably run and get a bunch of friends to vote for him, so I just want to cut that off before it gets out of hand.  Again, not a bad guy, but not the right guy for the job.

Thanks for reading this whole post.  I know it was long.

There.  I said it.  More often than not, when you "employ" students as unpaid interns, you and the school facilitating this practice by offering credit are giving students the short end of the stick.

Companies say the students are picking up valuable experience, but how many unpaid internships are really worth a damn?  Maybe if they were learning transferable, in high demand/short supply skills, but filing, photocopying, cold calling, getting coffee, answering client gopher requests, and answering phones do not fit into that category.  Those are the things your well paid executive assistant would rather not do and so they get passed off to the free slave...er...student labor.

If you're going to help a student hone their PHP coding skills, then I'd have a different opinion--but funny enough, internships in computer science, where real skills are used and developed, are paid!  It often seems to be the least interesting, most commoditized work that is most often unpaid.

The "getting free experience" argument doesn't hold water. It isn't free for the student when they have to use college credits to justify the fact that they weren't being paid. They're paying thousands of dollars for those college credits. The system that demands that they receive credit if they're working for free, designed to prevent actual slave labor, actually hurts the student. If the experience itself was actually worth it for its own sake, a student would be better off just getting the job on their resume and not having to pay all that money for the credit. In fact, if I were the student, it would be a better economic deal for me to offer to write a check to the company for my own minimum wage salary, because it will probably be cheaper than paying the school for the credit.

The bottom line is that if someone is work of any value to you, you should compensate them for it, even if its just minimum wage. If your organization can't afford the hundred bucks or so a week for 15-20 hours of work because it isn't worth it, then how good is this experience that the student gets?  Plus, if your company can't afford $6 an hour labor, perhaps your business isn't economically viable--and that goes for startups, too.  If it isn't a no-brainer to get that work done for six bucks an hour, I find it hard to believe that work will impress anyone when it's on a resume. 

Companies make out like bandits with this practice. Not only do they get free labor, but they have no incentive to invest in the education of the student. If they don't stick around or don't like the work, who cares? Doesn't cost them anything! Give them an incentive to make sure the student is doing meaningful work.

You know who benefits pretty well from this practice, too? The school! Imagine if for every degree earned with 120 credits, 3 of those credits were earned by completing an internship. That represents a 2.5% reduction in the cost of faculty normally paid to teach them something useful in exchange for those 3 credits. Schools that allow 2 "for credit" internships are cutting their faculty overhead by 5%!

Two of the most common unpaid internships are in private client/high net worth asset management, and marketing/pr. Here are some alternatives for students to getting ripped off at unpaid internships in these fields:

Private client/high net worth asset management:

Lots of folks make a lot of money being entrusted to individuals' savings. Those people bring big trusted networks and financial expertice to the table--two things students completely lack and will lack for quite a while. A great marketing intern could have a big impact on a marketing campaign, but a private client intern isn't going anywhere near portfolios, so they basically get relegated to cold calling and "interacting with clients" (answering phones and being a gopher). Try getting a big investment banking internship with this on your resume.

Instead, open up a fake portfolio on Yahoo! Finance Or Google Finance, or a trading game site like UpDown. If you don't know what stocks to pick, just pick things you either know or that you might be interested in following (food companies, fashion, autos, Apple). Track the hell out of it. Download your daily gains and losses per stock to Excel. Enter the performance for the indexes--the S&P 500, the Dow, etc. Crunch the numbers. Open up a blog on blogspot or similar service with a fun domain name like TickerU or BullMarketMajor or something and write about your portfolio and the market EVERY DAY. Read and comment on the blogs of experienced investors like TraderMike, Howard Lindzon, and Information Arbitrage. Interview your favorite stock bloggers on your blog, even by email. If you do this a whole semester, you will not have wasted paying for the credits to be at a crappy internship. Instead, you could have taken another accounting, financial modeling, stats, or programming class and gained a lot better experience watching and interacting with the market everyday. Plus, you will have put your name out there as an innovative, ambitious self starter, making it much more likely you'll get hired for a better internship.

Marketing/PR:

If you're going to volunteer to market anything, market yourself. Actually you're already an expert on a certain kind of marketing and you may not realize it. Youth marketing, both offline and online (especially on social networks), is a huge lucrative business. Brands and agencies are always looking for people who are up on the latest trends and who have keen insight into what works and what doesn't.

Every single student who has an interest in marketing and public relations should be blogging about how they get approached by marketing campaigns, brands they love, and trends they see.  How about taking a poll at your school to find out what the top brands are and what people's associations with those brands are.  You should use Twitter, too...   You can use it to update your Facebook status messages, but moreover, you can use it to follow the updates of very high level marketing and PR folks. 

If I was hiring someone to help create a digital presence and brand for myself, I'd want to see them be able to do it for themselves first.  Learning how to do that by attending conferences (you can often go free as a student by volunteering), workshops, informational interviews could be a better learning experience than an unpaid internship.

If you're a college student (or anyone else) and you're worried about what you're going to do with your career, you should check out the site my company is working on, Path 101.  Sign up for our e-mail list and we'll keep you posted on what we're doing to help you figure all this career stuff out.

I get sent an invite to SocialMinder.  The idea is something I've been wanting LinkedIn to do for ages... Let me set how often I want to speak to someone.  So, they grab my LinkedIn contacts, look for them on e-mail and tell me how long since we've spoke--nominating people for me to reach out to.  It even suggests articles for me to send them, based on company name or industry. 

It's neat, but I have a few issues:

One, this has to be on LinkedIn's near term development list.  In fact, they have this feature, to some extent, in their Outlook toolbar.

Two, the algorithm is too simplistic.  It seems to have just gone through people I talked to a bunch and then haven't talk to in a while.  There are probably reasons for that.  Most of the people if found for me left NYC or switched industries (or we broke up). 

Three, I don't like the way the trail is setup.  It gives me ten people to stay in touch with, but if I want to keep up with anyone else, I have to upgrade.  Upgrading means I have to send it to 15 people.  Instead of making my spam my friends, how about just building an AWESOME product and making it easy for me to share with my friends if I think it's any good.

Anyway... nice attempt, but just not enough there there, and they seem more concerned with spreading the word than anything else.

A couple of years ago, Meetup announced that it was going to start charging for its group organizing services. Almost instantly, they lost half their groups. Once the fallout passed, however, something amazing happened: More and more groups started paying. Soon they had more Meetup groups than when the site was free, which actually improved the overall service. Now, when you find a Meetup group, you know that it's at least active enough that someone is paying 18 bucks a month for it.

Having come from a venture capital firm, it turns out that I have a previously undiscovered bias towards cutting edge, sexy business models--which Meetup is not.

I'm a revenue snob.

Google has a sexy business model. People search, others advertise against those searches...very slick. Sermo's business model is ridiculously hot. Doctors come together in a community and pharma and Wall St. pay to watch. That's almost porn-worthy it's so sexy.

So when someone like Zoominfo comes along and charges for access to its people search--you know Zoominfo, that half wrong profile of you that confuses you with that media sales guy from Kalamazoo--I had to admit I turned up my nose...

...until I saw that they were making 15 million in sales. Yes, that's right. Zoominfo is doing 15 million in sales selling $349 annual subscriptions to its database. It's easy to dismiss a company like that, because the data quality is so poor, and if you're a VC trained data snob. If you understood anything about recruiting, which is essentially a lead gen business, you'll realize that a lead doesn't have to be 100% perfect to have some value--especially if the payout is a big recruiting bounty.

It really hit home when I was talking to an investor yesterday about Path 101's Resume Genome Project. I was talking all about how having this rich database of data will enable next gen recommendations and encourage users to contribute more data, and the investor simply asked, "What about searching the 8 million resumes you'll have in your database day one...isn't that a business?"

Yeah, actually, it is. It's not super sexy, and other people could do it, but the market is so fragmented that anyone with some scale of profiles has a business. It's the same in the jobs business. Name a company that only wanted to be and only tried to be a job board that couldn't generate revenues. It's the companies that tried to be some kind of fancy matching thing first, like ItzBig, without solving employers and job seekers immediate problems first, that went under. It's what David Kidder recently referred to at a nextNY event as "getting in the jetstream of revenue"--finding out what people are paying for right now and making that part of your business plan.

So perhaps before you try to be better than your competitor as a startup, you might try being just as good--because just as good can mean revenues and next gen can sometimes mean too early. What you'll likely find is that a focused startup's attempt to be just as good actually results in a much better product that people might even be willing to pay for.

You know who should think about bringing their noses back down to earth? Facebook. Does anyone not think that there could be some kind of premium feature set that a quarter of the population would pay five bucks a month for? I'd pay to see who viewed my profile for sure... or certainly for stats on views....or for no ads and application notifications.

So before you go for the wacky virtual click per social micropayment model, perhaps "I make a product, you buy it" should at least be thought about.

I was recently interviewed by Mary Flynn of The Deal and profiled in the magazine as well.  It's going to be awesome press for us, so we're really excited, but I did want to add one thing to the article. 

Andrea Orr wrote:

"Path 101 doesn't operate in Silicon Valley, where even in today's tough funding climate, there's a strong fellowship in the startup community that provides at least some moral support when no financial backing is forthcoming."

Oh Andrea...Why the New York community knock?  Actually, we're glad we don't operate in Silicon Valley!  Instead, we're operating right where every startup should be in a difficult environment--right in the middle of where our existing network is, surrounded by supportive people who know us well.

Just the other day, we had an investor meeting with the New York based folks who have supported us from the beginning and I said to Alex, "Jeez, can you imagine if we didn't have the investors that we did.  How tough would that be to just have some random angels that don't know you very well?" 

If anything, there's a stronger fellowship in the New York community, because we constantly get dinged by mainstream media as a "sad assed backwater" of a tech community.  We feel like we're all in it together--NYC tech against the world!

Need more proof? 

nextNY is almost at 2,000 members!

A new co-working space, New Work City, just opened.

Our NY Tech Meetups are filled to the brim and sellout in minutes.

NY's own Fred Wilson won the Donor's Choose Blogger Challenge, beating out Valley competition from TechCrunch, AllThingsD

LinkedIn showed its hand yesterday with the release of its application platform, InApps.  If there was any doubt as to the direction of the company, between this and the company's recent investment from SAP, it should be clear now: LinkedIn is for business professionals.  This is a work product, not a Facebook killer. 

Just look at the applications added to the opening mix--sharing presentations, organizing travel info, storing files--it's pretty clear that these are business tools.  You might of thought given last year's interface revamp, complete with photos and a newsfeed, that LinkedIn was going after Facebook.  Given that Facebook might have a profitable businessmodel in three years, and that LinkedIn is doing about 100 million in revs, you'd have to wonder why they'd even want to be Facebook.

By building tools meant for the bleeding edge of serious business users and taking money from a huge CRM company, LinkedIn is clearly making a statement that their future is getting deeper into the workflow of their professional users, not in getting a wider userbase and being the place where everyone gathers.  Sure, they continue to grow, but what wasn't released yesterday was a resume builder wizard, significant improvement to Groups (which still lags significantly behind Meetup) or a tutorial on how to get the most out of the site.  These would have been tools that would have introduced more people to the site or driven more engagement for the masses of people with profiles who barely use the site.  Clearly, my dad the web unsavvy accountant who runs a small practice out of his house isn't the intended audience here, it's the VP of Regional Sales for Cisco who wants to eventually plug LinkedIn to the rest of his CRM driven process.  

In fact, you could have made a case that if they wanted that wide Facebook-like userbase and a less intimidating onramp for gathering likeminded people who share interests, they should have bought Meetup.  Instead, by opening up the platform to Slideshare and other similar apps, it looks they're signalling that stay at home moms and German speakers in Sioux City aren't the people you're likely to want to make professional connections with. 

In my opinion, that means that a huge segment of the population is going to be left behind by LinkedIn's value proposition.  The more LinkedIn networking feels like work, the less mainstream the usage will be, but also the more actual work will get done.  Given that actual work seems very monetizable, I have no doubt that LinkedIn and its business platform will generate significant revenues, but also leave a gaping hole in the market for more casual networkers--ie the 99 percent of the rest of us.

A short time ago, I got invited to testify in front of the NYC Council. The hearing is supposed to:

"...focus on improving the city’s technology small business sector. The hearing will examine the state of a business sector that NY has traditionally lagged behind in, specifically the recently created NYC Seed program, which will provide up to $200,000 (per company) of investment into New York-based technology start-ups. The hearing will also examine what steps can be taken to better fund (i.e. venture capitalism) the growth of startup technological companies in order to make NYC more competitive with other cities when it comes to the technology sector."

Here's the testimony that I'll give today:

Charlie O'Donnell (charlie@path101.com)

Co-founder & CEO of Path 101 (www.path101.com), Founder, nextNY (www.nextNY.org),  Blogger (www.thisisgoingtobebig.com), #71 on 2007 Silicon Alley Insider Influentials list, Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship - Fordham University, Instructor - ITAC FastTrac

First, I'd like to say thank you to the Council members who continue to have a strong interest in the NYC technology community.   Having a critical mass of influential people committed to maintaining and improving New York City as a place for innovation is half the battle.

Unfortunately for an organization as large as the New York City government, the other half of this battle is a ground war.  The ideas that will have the most impact on the local technology community are those that go house to house, school to school, wifi node to wifi node.  The stumbling blocks to improving our area's ability to promote innovation aren't simple--they're nounced. 

Take, for example, the NYC Seed program.  There has never ever been a lack of capital in New York City--for any kind of investment.  Many startups have been funded by people in the financial or real estate industries, when they're not funded by traditional venture capital firms.   No, money is not the issue, as I have written about before.  The issue is that there are not enough dedicated institutions who are economically incentivized to build community and business infrastructure here.  Owen Davis, at the end of the day, is one guy with $2 million who will get the chance to help 10 companies over the next year.  That's fantastic, but what if policy changes lead to the abandoning of this program.  Other than those 10 companies, which early stage statistics assume that at least half probably won't make it anyway, what will be the permanent impact of his work? 

If he had, let's say, a four year window, as most venture capital firms do, he'd have the time to build the necessarily relationships with all of the places where innovation comes from here in the city.  If he had a staff member or two, he'd be able to spend time not just investing, but working to create permanent channels to schools, businesses, professional groups, and technology centers--and he'd have the time horizon to accept longer term return on investment from building these relationships.  Institutional investors give their VCs a four year mandate to make investments across economic cycles--there's no reason why NYC Seed shouldn't have the same runway.  

At the end of the day, longer committments and more people on the ground are needed because innovation comes not from technology, but from people--and New York City technology has a people problem.  Local schools, with few exceptions, are not consistantly developing students focused on creating value through entrepreneurship and technological innovation.  You can build all the incubators you want--unless you're seeding students as early as high school or junior high with the idea that they could build the next Google here in New York, and giving them the learning tools to accomplish that, it's never going to happen.  

Here are two suggestions I'd make for New York City to make a bigger people impact:

First, I'd create the position of a technology community manager.  Large websites have community managers to make sure that they're aware what's going on in their communities, and that their communities are aware of all of the site's resources.  I'm as involved in the local community as any entrepreneur, and I still can't tell you the difference between what the NYC Council's mandate is related to technology and how that differs from the EDC, the Department of Small Business Services, how they relate to NYSTAR, etc.   A community manager would be a single point of contact whose mandate would be to familiarize themselves with all city services, local university programs, community groups, large businesses interested in working with the local tech community and other initiatives.  For example, nextNY is looking to run an event on business development best practices for startup companies.  We're looking for some space to run the event for between 50-100 people.  We have no budget.  I know there's probably some big company with a sizable conference room who'd love to have a bunch of startups come in and talk about business development one night.   I just don't know who that is and how to contact them.   A tech community manager could do that--and significantly help with these types of issues that involved local entrepreneurs try to solve on their own all the time in addition to their dayjobs.  

The second thing I would do would be to refocus on technology education in not only the public school system but also work with private schools and universities as well.  It needs to start early, too.  We can't have all our creative and talented youth thinking that their only opportunity for success in NYC is to work for a Fortune 500 company, because small business and entrepreneurship is what drives the growth in our economy.  How about a charter school built around information technology entrepreneurship--one that works with the best local computer science programs to provide scholarships to students trying to create their own businesses?   We need better answers to the question, "Where do world class developers come from in NYC?"   Right now, the school system isn't the answer to that question.

More than anything else, though, I think it's important that our local government--the individuals--lead by example and participate in the local technology community.  The local community is hyper connected through blogging, social networking sites, and a quirky but rapidly growing service called Twitter that ties people together one 160 character short form message at a time.  There are currently almost 2000 up and coming technology and digital media professionals on the nextNY listserv--are any of you on it?   Sure, it's kind of geeky in it's content, but you can set it to provide a daily digest.   If you're not on it, and can't spare the time to read the one daily digest e-mail of the group's activities, I'm not exactly sure how you're really going to be able to be supportive of the local tech community.  Communities are growing organically on these sites--like the 500+ people who have attached themselves to the Shake Shack Twitter account, mostly local tech folks, in order to navigate the long lines at our favorite local food establishment.   These communities are growing largely without the participation of local government leaders.  How many of you have a blog on your own websites that gets at least one posting a week, or a social networking profile that you yourself actually login to with similar frequency?   If you're not doing this, you're really not going to be in the flow of the needs of the local community.

Last week, Sam Lessin of Drop.io hosted a talk on the future of venture capital.  A question was asked as to weather or not there will be a need for venture capital as it becomes cheaper and cheaper to build a company.

I have to be honest...This cheap to build a company thing is one of the biggest steaming heaps of sheep poo I've ever heard.  I keep waiting for some TV voice to say, "You, too, can have a Web 2.0 company of your very own for 3 easy payments of $19.95!"

Yes, it is orders of magnitude cheaper to build an internet web service that hundreds of thousands of people use, but that doesn't make it a company.  Without a business model or significant revenues, you do not have a company.  In fact, you do not even have a product, because, last time I checked, products have the potential to generate revenue. 

Web services with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of users--those are products.  They can start generating revenues because their "product" is access to a community and they sell that to advertisers.  Without a large community, what you have is a prototype--an experience even.  I don't care how many people were in the beta.  I smile when VCs look for "early traction", since I'm not even sure that 100k users is proof of much of anything that seriously de-risks the business.  Yes, you built something, but that doesn't mean it scales, crosses the mainstream chasm, or that it can be a business.  Of course, you'd rather have those people than not, but success is still very much an uphill climb from there. 

To generate significant, sustainable revenues, you have to have sales people, support people, management, marketing people--and last I checked, salaries have gone up in the last x years.  All they do is go up.  So, while you're not paying Microsoft for server software, you're still paying for great marketing people and probably more than you used to.  Real companies have real expenses, like people, rent.  Technology overhead, while dramatically lower, shouldn't be your number one cost once you reach a certain scale--unless you're crawling the web or streaming video, and funny enough, those costs can still pile up.   I don't see YouTube paying their bandwidth bill on spare change yet.

Even if you're PlentyofFish, overhead makes a company.  Despite the revenues, I'm not sure that a company has been built there.  It's certainly not one I'd want to buy, because there's no institutional knowledge, no brand work, etc.  What do you have if you buy it and Markus gets hit buy a bus?  You have someone else's keyword click generator without the instruction manual.  It's certainly not the kind of thing that lasts past the founder, which makes it a really awesome lifestyle business, but not really a company.  In that case, cheap to build has been swaped out for sustainability.

Its not even true that you're getting to market that much faster either.  If you were building a semiconductor company ten years ago, sure it took you two years to complete a chip, but the day it was done, you signed your first million dollar order or someone bought you.  How long is it taking Web 2.0 companies to generate that much in revs?  On average, just as long if not longer.  If your goal is 25 mil in revs and 50-100 people to support that effort, then its really not so cheap to build a company.  Cheaper than it was perhaps, but not discovery of electricity cheaper.  Oh, and whatever magnitude cheaper you're building companies at now is also the magnitude of price degradation in the market.  There's more competition for that discretionary dollar and higher expectation on behalf of the consumer.  If you can build cheap, than someone else can, and then prices go down... so cheap to build doesn't mean sustainable margin expansion.

What about Craigslist?  Twenty something employees driving teens to twenty in revs in 300 cities. 

What about it? 

JK Rowling prints that in a week and she probably has a support team of about that size, too.  She's basically a company. Her licensing deals are just printing money for her at ridiculous margins.  It's a media model, and Craigslist is basically a media company.  

Also keep in mind that, by dollar, web services only represent a tiny percentage of what VCs invest in.  Many VCs are investing in chips, routers, devices, pharma, materials...even retail... Still putting 10-20 million dollars to work in a deal.  None of these companies have been built on Web 2.0 capex models.  They require people, hardware, buildings, tangible products.

So, to think that there's no need for VC anymore because a small percentage of the market needs less money seems a bit silly.

I'm really surprised at Dave Winer. 

He just compared Twitter to Netscape and proposed that the microblogging company may get left in the dust if it doesn't work to "open up".  He then outlined all the mistakes that Netscape made when it lost the "browser war" to Microsoft.

Only...  he didn't even get close to half right in his assessment of why Netscape failed and the lesson that Twitter should learn from it.  I would think with his experience, he'd know better.

His first point:

"Netscape had left their Mac browser to languish while they focused on Windows. Microsoft, realizing that most web developers used Macs, produced an excellent Mac browser first, and worked closely with Mac developers to make sure their browser worked with the Mac software web developers used."

Actually, Microsoft signed an agreement with Apple to be their default browser for 5 years starting in 1997.   When you're the default browser on operating systems that operate 90%+ of all computers, then of course you're going to have dominant market share.  When you're talking mainstream usage, people will click on whatever browser brings them to the internet for the most part, not whatever the web developer using a Mac told them to use.

Did Dave forget that Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior around the browser cost it nearly a billion dollars in fines?  Seriously, when's the last time someone ever accused Microsoft of winning market share by building a superior product?   It was Microsoft's ruthless business practices that won them share, not quality of product or developer outreach. 

When the agreement expired, and Apple switched to Safari as their default, IE for Mac share went down the tubes.  So much for the superior product and developer relationships. 

Lesson for Twitter here?  None.

Second point:

"Netscape let anyone download their browser for free, but charged corporate users for the software. Microsoft's browser was totally free for everyone."

True, but again... what's the Twitter lesson here?  Twitter is free and they're not even charging for use of their API, no matter how much people pound it.  If anything, there have been developers who have called for Twitter to start charging for a better level of API service.

Third point:

"Microsoft fixed bugs, enhanced performance, listened to market and responded, did all the things a mature company that remembered its entrepreneurial roots could do. Netscape, being a disorganized, chaotic Valley wunderkind, did none of this."

Obviously, Dave hasn't used Twitter in the last six months, because Twitter, if anything, has done a seriously commendable job hearing the performance issues and systematically solving them.  The Fail Whale is nearly extinct and anyone who uses Twitter really can't argue with the amazing turnaround in the performance of the service. 

Microsoft fixing bugs?  Really...    Again, here's Dave accusing MSFT of winning through product quality.  Bizarre.

Dave goes on to put Twitter in the same boat as IBM, who tried to shut down the clonemakers and lost the PC Software market.   Twitter isn't trying to do that.  Frankly, they're not paying much attention to the clones mostly because their users aren't.  People like Twitter.  Users have an emotional attachment to the service that is actually very reminiscent of how people feel about Apple.  The mass migrations to Pownce, Jaiku, Indenti.ca, and Friendfeed never happened.  

I forget who said it, but Dave's post reminds me of when someone in the tech blogs said that "Open means 'gimme' ".   People who want "open" are the have nots, and for the most part, most users are pretty satisfied with closed when there's a good quality product.  Apple is a shining example of that.  People want good and simple more than they want open. 

That's not to say that Twitter doesn't have a monetization challenge ahead of it.  It also needs to do a better job of explaining it's value proposition to mainstream users and signing up group of people at a time.  If anything kills it, it's not going to be the fact that the service isn't open enough. 

Last Monday night, we had a board call and Hunter (Walk....Our 3rd board member) said to us, "If you need me to be the asshole, I will. Here's the plan I want to see and the questions I want to see answered by the next time we talk."

The next day, Alex and I had one of the best product discussions we've had since we first started building. We agreed upon a clear set of priorities and next steps. It touched off a week of great product planning and iteration. Having a bit of pressure from a demanding outsider asking tough questions--the right questions--really kicked us into gear. With the distraction of fundraising, we hadn't reengaged on our product thinking and the roadmap clearly needed a bit of repaving.

It's not surprising, either--because it's often the role I play when startups come to me seeking product feedback. With a singular focus on user value and a disregard for maintaining the pleasentries of day to day coworker repore, I can play the asshole role for a company clearly needing focus and product direction. It's just a matter of being direct, being constructively critical, and leaving nothing as too sacred to question.

It's difficult for the person driving the product vision to be its most demanding critic, so having a dedicated outsider can be more than good housekeeping. It can be a mission critical discipline.