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Path 101, the company I started with our CTO and Co-Founder, Alex Lines, is looking to hire a developer.

Over and above anything else, here's the kind of person we want:

• Someone with a sense of ownership and pride in their work.  We get that nothing can ever be perfect, but you need to constantly strive to make things better.  This means not only making stuff works, but that it's easy to use and makes sense--and that you try to make it easier to use and more interesting everyday.
• You see the bigger picture--you realize that there are really exciting things to work on and then there's bug fixing--but at the end of the day you're happy we're moving forward as a team, as a company, and as a product. 
• You really hate when stuff breaks or it sucks and it keeps you up at night.
• You're friendly and/or interesting and are just cool to hangout with--not too uptight to break for a snowball fight in the park or to randomly pass funny images to the rest of the team on chat.

As for the tech stuff, an intelligent, curious, ambitious person can learn anything, that's true, but ideally you'd be an intelligent, curious, ambitious person AND be as much of the following as possible:

• experienced web developer
• very strong understanding of python
• extensive experience with django - you know its strengths and
  weaknesses, its ecosystem of libraries and components, participate in
  django community <-- This is ideal, but if you're strong in python, let's chat.
• obsessed with performance
• you can talk for hours about caching <--Alex's criteria, not mine.  Don't talk to me about caching... ever.
• experience with mysql
• know how to properly normalize a data model as well as the costs and
  benefits of denormalization
• strong unix/linux background
• conversant in html/css/javascript
• familiarity with column-oriented / key-value stores is a plus

We'll accept a resume but prefer a link to your blog and linkedin profile.

Here are some things you might what to know about us:

• We're helping people figure out their careers.  While this might not be feeding the poor, helping someone figure out what they want to do that makes them happy can really make a significant impact in someone's life. 
• We're doing it in an innovative way--by crawling the web for resumes and laying on interesting user data, like personality, blogs, tags, anything you want to tell us about yourself--in order to figure out what everyone's really doing with their careers.  This way, we can help you put your career in a context and figure out what "people like me" do for a living.  There are around 10 million resumes out there and we're going to crawl every last one of them.
• We're funded by some seriously smart and successful angels like Roger Ehrenberg, Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham, Scott Heiferman, Jeff Jarvis, Hunter Walk, Jeff Stewart, Peter Hershberg, Joshua Stylman, Brian Harniman, Shripriya Mahesh, and others...
• We were the first company to ever get an investment by the recently launched NYC Seed fund. 
• We're really passionate and dedicated to what we're doing.
• Team:  Charlie (@ceonyc), Alex (@alexlines), and Hilary (@hmason), as well as some super awesome contract folks.

So, tweet @ us, e-mail us, or leave a comment.   But please, no recruiters.  We can't afford a recruiter, so there's really just no point to reaching out.  We're really serious.  Really.  Serious.

New York City based EnergyHub just received it's first round of venture financing, from Physic Ventures and .406 Ventures.   News on the financing from NYC journalists: conspicuously absent.  Wake up, folks!  It was on VentureBeat last night! 

That's exciting to me for a number of reasons.  First of all, what they do is very cool.  The company makes information systems that help you monitor your energy usage.   This way, instead of a bill with just the bottom line of how many Kilowatt hours you used last month, you can get an in-depth view of how you're using energy.  This is key to reducing peak consumption and lowering your costs.  It would certainly be nice to know how much money and power my computer is costing me each day.

What's very cool is that I got the opportunity to work with the founders, Seth and Tom, at ITAC's FastTrac class, where I am the Entrepreneur-in-Residence.  (In this case, EIR is a fancy way of saying that I'm the class instructor and good utility guy to have close by to help startups working with ITAC).  If you're interested in future FastTrac programs given by ITAC, you should contact Veronica Price at vprice@itac.org.  There are a lot of programs, consultants and advisors for startups in NYC--

They come out of Honeybee Robotics, a New York-based company that builds hardware for NASA’s Mars missions and the Department of Defense.  Who said everything in NYC was about finance, advertising and media?  They're really awesome guys and I'm glad to see them get their funding.  I can't wait to be able to buy an EnergyHub system for my apartment.

What's also great is that they got money from .406 Ventures--making this .406's 2nd investment in Brooklyn (they're also in Kaltura).  I had the opportunity to talk to Larry Begley in the fall and he was super smart and extremely approachable.  Hopefully, there will be more NYC-area based investing from .406 in the future. 

BTW...  Good thing Ted Williams choose to play that final day of the season.  .39955 Ventures just doesn't have the same ring to it.

"Your Google snits dont even address your far more profound problem: the vast majority of your potential audience who never come to your sites, the young people who will never read your newspapers. You all remember the quote from a college student in The New York Times a year ago, the one that has kept you up at night. Lets say it together: If the news is that important, it will find me. What are you doing to take your news to her? You still expect her to come to you - to your website or to the newsstand - just because of the magnetic pull of your old brand. But she wont, and you know it. You lost an entire generation. You lost the future of news. You blew it."

The speech the NAA should hear « BuzzMachine

Whenever I ask anyone for innovative ways to reach reporters, PR professionals point me to Peter Shankman's Help a Report Out (HARO) list. It comes out three times a day and gets sent to over 50,000 people. Reporters can post requests for everything from housewives who've discovered tantric sex to people who've turned down CEO positions (not *those* kinds of positions).

This is the bleeding edge of media relations, folks--a mailing list.

And thank God for this list--lest we all depend on these hand edited media databases selling for thousands of dollars. These sites make me feel like I'm searching Proquest back at my college library in 1999--cumbersome to search though and lacking the metadata I need to find what I'm looking for. 

At least HARO gives me a sense of what a journalist as actually looking for *today*.

Do you know why there are half a dozen of these things out there?  Most of the data is public!  Media winds up on the web, so all the data is already out there.  So far, I haven't seen anything that provides really specific insight into the current topics of interest of a reporter, nor any real analysis into how much traffic, buzz, and influence a journalist really has.  The blogger information is quite rough, too.

And @microPR?   I track it on Twitter... and it seems to be mostly people suggesting other people follow it for #followfriday or talking about its usefulness.  Fail.  

PR is a marketplace--an exchange of relevant, interesting information for attention and audience. So why doesn't it have the tools of a marketplace?  PR tools shouldn't look like databases... they should look like financial trading platforms, with asks and bids on a ticker--filtered for what I'm looking for or need.  This is trading: I give a reporter information (and an angle to work with) about my company and he gives me his audience's attention--at least to the extent he influences it. Real marketplaces have transparency, quantifiability, uniform elements of exchange, and the information systems that enable both sides to make informed decisions.

Imagine if you bought and sold stocks the same way PR works today.  You'd maybe list your name (or have someone else list you with questionable accuracy) in a database.   Instead of really detailed information related to your risk tolerance, prior stocks purchased, key financial criteria like cashflow, all people could see was a general description that you were interested in "Tech Stocks".  Nevermind that you're specifically interested in bigger name plays like MSFT, GOOG, and AMZN, you now get tons of requests for you to buy tiny little biotech companies with no profits that you've never heard of.  You get these requests in your inbox...and they just keep coming.  You don't have time to answer them and there's really no good way to inform the investor relations world about your interests.

PR,specifically pitching, is just like Wall St.--in the 1780's: Manual, opaque, and lacking the tools to create real actionable information flow and analysis. 

Getting PR is all about recreating the work that lots of other people have done to find good contact lists, which will always be incomplete and never really that accurate, crafting good pitch letters, which is totally not scalable, after hours schmoozing, and brokering exclusives in a world where information just wants to be free. This is why the startup geeks can't hack it and need to hire firms to do the social dirtywork.  They're too frustrated by the archaic process, lack of feedback and randomness of success to count on it as a good way to spend their time--especially when most media drives a seriously underwhelming amount of traffic.

Here's an idea for a better system--one that treats PR like the information marketplace that it really is:

First, index all of the reporters.  A good web crawler should be able to recreate the best online media databases in a very short amount of time. Match them up with feeds for their stories, twitter accounts, del.icio.us tags, etc., and analyze the topics and keywords they talk about in real time.  Also analyze the words that other people use when tagging, tweeting, and reblogging their stories.  I don't just want a list of career columnists who give resume tips. I want to know who is reviewing career websites and who isn't--and specifically ones focused on data and analytics or who have an interest in startups and innovation.  Computers can figure that out a lot faster than people can.

Media outlets need the same thing.  They need more information to sort through the pitches in their inbox.  Who are these people?  Are they backed by the right people?  If I were a reporter, I'd want to know that Path 101 is funded by folks like Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham, Scott Heiferman, Jeff Jarvis, etc., and has recently appeared in CNN/Money, VentureBeat, and Mashable.  Moreover, the fact that I was #61 on the SA 100, or that Hilary is a regular FooCamper might be of interest, too.   I'm not bragging...  I'm saying that if I was a journalist and thought of the PR process as an exchange, I would certainly equate some value the networks of the companies I choose to write about, all other things being equal.  I know I certainly go out of my way to try to connect up reporters who've helped me out with other people I know, like angels and VCs involved with us, their portfolio companies, etc.  If nothing else, reporters undoubtedly need some kind of filter, short of a background check, to figure out who's even legitimate.  I know I needed this when I was on the venture capital side getting inbound biz plan pitches.  Just because someone has the money to hire a PR firm doesn't necessarily make them the kind of people I might want to get involved with--but the interwebs can tell me a lot about "counterparty risk"--who I'm getting into this trade with?

Create a filterable, searchable open market for requests and pitches, with APIs, like Twitter, so I can have it on the web, desktop, e-mail, etc.  Mailing lists and Twitter accounts are archaic... and force people to sift through a whole bunch of irrelevant stuff.  When a reporter asks for new resources for career guidance, not only does that person get our Path 101 info, but so does anyone else writing something similar. Give reporters the analytics around how much coverage a company is getting, how recent, etc--make the whole process transparent.

With historical analytics, I should be able to go back in time and say "Show me all of the reporters that wrote about NotchUp and sort by rating and by most recent date of relevant stories."

At the same time, reporters should be able to create saved searches for "career resource", "career guidance", etc. so that they can see a running ticker of what's being pitched.  Why should they have to wait to be pitched?  When investors want companies that have Low P/E's, they can screen for that.  Why can't reporters screen the universe of pitches?

Allow for ratings on both sides. Some reporters write really thoughtful pieces, even when negative, and others are obviously mailing it in.  Let PR folks and companies rate the reporters. Undoubtedly, some startups are a total PITA.  If you get spammed by the same startup everyday, as a reporter you should be able to ding them.  It should be easy for a reporter to find out who is generally useful to talk about a particular topic regardless if they have something to pitch. Rating expertise on both sides would be great.

The other thing about ratings on pitches would be to allow specific feedback.  If I pitch a reporter, they should be able to easily click something to move on to the next one, but at the same time give me some feedback.   A stock set of responses to choose from would be great: 

"Interesting, but I have enough for this request already."

"My mandate has changed."

"Too early."

"Not relevant."

On top of that, they could suggest future contact with another click:

"Let's talk in the future."

"Please don't contact me anymore."

"Let's talk right now.  Call me."

Otherwise, your pitches will probably go into a black hole.  Who has time to respond to every single pitch they get by e-mail?

Also, let's come up with some objective ratings on traffic and influence. Did the story drive any traffic? How much? Was it reblogged, tweeted by others?   Did the users convert?  This is really what companies care about.  It's great that a site gets a ton of traffic, but if the users from that site never convert, what's the point?

What would this do to PR firms?  The general availability of great financial research tools to the public hasn't made the mutual fund and investment manager industry go away, has it?  No.  So there's no reason to think that PR firms need to go away.  Great tools should be able to cater to PR firms and individuals at companies who want to do their own PR alike, the same as in investing.  We're far from great tools at the moment and what's out there costs entirely too much for the amount of work it still leaves you with. 

I got an e-mail from Slideshare this morning:

Hi ceonyc,
We've noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job ... you must be doing something right. ;-)
Why don't you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.
Congratulations,
-SlideShare Team

I assumed it was because of my Educational Outcomes presentation... that maybe some group of educational administrators finally decided they wanted to know what happened to their students after they graduated and whether school was worth all that money.

I checked and suddenly it had over 100,000 views.  It was around 500 the last time I checked it.  Something was odd.  I went searching bit.ly, Google inbound links, Twitter search... couldn't figure out where the traffic was coming from and spent a fair bit of time trying to track it down.  Someone else asked on the nextNY list and then I realized it was a joke.

I responded "I think it's a joke" and the guy wrote back:

"If by "joke" you mean "obnoxious social media d-baggery joke of an effort at guerrilla marketing" then yes, I agree."

I can't say my own opinion is far off from that, which is a shame, because I really like Slideshare.  It's an awesome service that I recommend all the time. 

The problem with the joke is that they asked me to tweet the presentation out using their hashtag--which meant that all of the people who fell for the joke would be easily findable.  Not only that, but what they really wanted to see was for me to tweet out to my network that I thought my presentation got 100k views, only to have to retract it later and look like an idiot. 

The people who put things on Slideshare are professionals.  These aren't videos of two 14 year old girls lipdubbing Lady GaGa.  These are pretty serious presentations, often given at conferences, and those people who are using Slideshare are undoubted connected on Twitter to their professional networks.  To try to coax them into looking foolish in front of those people just isn't cool.

April Fool's Jokes are best done when everyone knows it's a joke, they're done a little tongue-in-cheek, and they poke people a little bit, but not at their own expense.  The Smellr site was hilarious...  and at worst, it may have bruised the egos of some already wildly successful people--not rank and file users who are actually trying to get their presentations seen and would be disappointed when the views turn out not to be real.  That's not who you should be picking on today.

In any given week, I meet with two or three entrepreneurs who want to talk with me about their business--just to get some feedback.  They know that I used to be on the venture capital side and vet business plans and ideas on a regular business.  I'm happy to do it when I take some interest in the idea, mostly when I feel like I can add some value.  Plus, I feel like it's actually useful for my own business--to see what technologies and processes other people are using and to help generate new ideas.  I've been very fortunate to learn from folks like the guys at Union Square Ventures, to see successful companies get launched and grown, and to have the opportunity to run a business on my own, so I do feel like I have something to add.  That's why I'm teaching entrepreneurship at Fordham University.

However, I'd imagine finding me as an up and coming entrepreneur must feel a little bit like finding the A-Team--especially if you weren't in established innovation networks.  You can't even go see Mr. Lee at the Chinese laundry first.  (If you don't get it, you didn't grow up in the 80's.)  I don't put myself out there as an expert for hire or have a fancy nickname for myself like Dr. Startup.  In fact, a lot of really good people in NYC to talk to about your startup idea are totally under the radar--just helping give feedback to whoever just happens to stumble into their network.

On the other hand, a lot of the people most above the radar on this kind of thing aren't exactly people I'd recommend to go see.  I have to assume every city has this, but I like to call them the "Venture Vultures"--various startup strategy folks with murky resumes who will promise to connect you to capital, technology help, strategy help who simply don't have a lot of there there.  In the Web 2.0 boom, tons of people hung up shingles offering to up startup businesses, and I'm hoping the recession will weed out most of these folks, because I think a lot of them do more harm than good.  When entrepreneurs with real potential run into these pseudo-virtual incubator strategy consulting types and get bad advice or no real results, and that's who they see trumpeting themselves in the community, it gives the community a bad name. 

The reason why these folks can self-promote their way to noteriety, however, is because of an educational vacuum for new businesses in NYC.  If you had an idea for a new business, or you had already built a product, service, or technology and you needed business strategy help, where would you go?  What about if you were a student?

If we really wanted to improve NYC's ability to support innovation, more so than money or space, I think putting more effort into educating students about entrepreneurship would be worthwhile.  The bottleneck for creating new companies in NYC isn't desks or angel capital--we have plenty of both--it's the fact that there just aren't enough entrepreneurs with good ideas who know how to execute on a business.  We need more students learning the technologies that allow innovation and more students taught how to turn their passions into ideas--and then into businesses (or just find their passions in the first place).

EDIT: Let's be clear on what I'm saying.  I think NYC is a great place to start a business--I just think that not enough of the best local minds are in the mindset that such an endeavor is possible or worthwhile.  On top of that, those that really want to learn need more access to the experienced people who can teach them best practices.  I actually think the infrastructure for a startup here in NYC is pretty good--we're just not getting enough new entrepreneurs at the top of the funnel.  New York City schools don't exactly pump out lots of students with the business or tech wherewithal (or interest) in starting a new company (athough perhaps that might change now that they can't just assume they'll get hired by big banks anymore).  NYC students are taught how to work for big companies, not to start small ones. 

I'm specificially interested in programs for students.  It's an entirely different thing to take someone who has already established themselves in a career and help them with a new business idea.  They at least have networks.  They know people in their industry and they have a sense of how to create value. 

I want to meet whoever is working with local students.   In fact, Fordham has generously donated space for about 100 people during the day from 9-5 at their Lincoln Center Campus on Tuesday, April 28th to bring everyone educating local students interested in entrepreneurship together.  I'd like to hold a small conference to share ideas, solutions, best practices, and step one is figuring out who is out there.

If you are involved with a university incubator, tech transfer office, entrepreneurship program, degree, or certificate, or if you just teach students in programs and subjects likely to create innovators, please get in touch with me.

I've created a form to gather all the interested parties.  Even if you can't make it on that day, please let me know who you are and what you do.

You can find the form by clicking this link.

The other day, I wrote about how something seemed, well, gray at SXSW--like something was missing. It had been kind of--meh.

I felt like there were too many panels that just went through the motions, and the parties were just kind of crowed and rather uninspired.  Throw in some nippy, cloudy, rainy weather on top of that and what it all was amounting to wasn't a heck of a lot.

Then, something happened on Sunday. 

The sun broke out in the afternoon and it got warmer.  Almost like magic, the buzz started to return.  People got excited.  More people piled out into the surrounding streets, filling Austin with geek chatter.  I had a fantastic sushi dinner (yes, sushi...  we had all had more than enough ribs over the course of the weekend) with the Angelsoft folks--we could have featured our discussion as a panel in itself, talking about what makes content inspiring both online and in person.  Around nine last night, I wandered over to the Tumblr party at the Cedar St. Courtyard. 

The line was pretty long, but luckily, we spotted David Karp and he slipped us in the upper patio door.  Two minutes later, he was bringing food to his guests--quite a number of platefuls at a time.  Perhaps he's done the busboy thing before. 

Cedar St. Courtyard is a fantastic open venue with neighborhoody/block party feel.  The crowd was really fantastic.  Everyone was in a good mood because of the weather.  I met John Malone for the first time and we had a really great conversation.  Apparently, he's been lurking around my blog for a while!  I also caught up with Richard Johnson again after seeing him earlier in the day.  Peter Kafka was there, too, and we were joking around about how much easier it was to catch up with NYC people while we were in Austin--no calendars, no conflicts.

If you're ever in the middle of an otherwise dull conference, do yourself a favor--find the New Yorkers.

Around midnight, Gary Vee tweeted:

"Going to my hotel room to pick up 6 cases of wine and bring it to the Tumblr party let's make it a 1230am thing .. I'll tweet when Rdy"

I don't have to tell you how much of a party it became after that.

Between the venue, David and John's hospitality, and Gary Vee going the extra mile, this was the embodiment of what SXSW was supposed to be--inspiring people gathered together in an inspiring place for a blending of the professional and the social.  Even people who weren't at the conference were tweeting that it was obvious that the Tumblr party really rocked.  So thanks to all involved... Spending my night at Cedar St. really turned the whole event around for me.

Now if only everyone else had dance moves like Crystal Beasley, then we really would have had something. 

I just had a guy stop me in the hall at SXSW.  We passed each other in the middle of a session block so it was obvious where I was coming from.

"Hey, did you just come from a panel that sucked?"

"Yeah."

"What was it?"

I think that's how a lot of people were feeling.  Except for Leah Buley's panel, I haven't seen very many "amazing" mentions in my SXSW Twitter stream.

There's definitely something in the air here this year that hasn't been here the last two--or something lacking, rather.  I feel like people are waiting for something--perhaps a little expectant--both the attendees and the panels.  The assumption that something amazing would happen simply by getting a critical mass of creative people in Austin for a few days... just... well.. hasn't really panned out before.

Maybe it's Twitter's fault.  People have been asking and wondering what the killer app of SXSW was going to be this year--as if what happened in 2007 with the Twitter explosion just happens every year.  The idea that the gods of SXSW just magically pick a startup to bless each year is kind of silly. 

Get over it: Twitter was *the* perfect app right at the right time at the ideal venue--stars aligned, lightning strike, never going to happen again.

And the panels...  Well, they just seem kind of... tired.  I've never been picked to be on a panel, but if I was, boy would I go out of my way to setup something exciting.  I'd be doing cartwheels on the panel...getting up from behind the panel and walking through the audience.  INTERACTING (since this is SXSWinteractive, right?)  I don't feel like many of the people I've seen have been particularly appreciative to get their spots.  A lot of people say that if you've been picked before, you've got a good chance to speak again.  Maybe that shouldn't be.  Maybe we should do a clean slate next year--all new, first time voices--unless you totally rocked your panel so much that no one said it was bad and people were talking about it for days--and maybe that's like 10 panels... tops.

The economy has forced people to rethink their businesses to focus on the bottom line.  How do we drive revenue, drive adoption, focus, focus, focus?  That is, except for companies that got a bailout. 

Perhaps SXSW is the victim of an emotional bailout--the carryover of buzz from the past, because I don't see it refocusing itself on the bottom line: amazingness.  People here seem to be waiting for a government bailout of a billion amazingness points instead of creating amazingness on their own. 

I'm going to be spending more time with the education track folks in the next day or so, because they're fighting a good fight and I think the kinds of teachers that are here are the really passionate ones... but if I run into another social media marketing expert looking for the next killer SXSW app, I'm going to throw up the ribs I ate for lunch the last two days.

Businesspeople ask me all the time how to find a technical partner for a startup.  When they ask, it often sounds like they're asking for a product off the shelf--like, "Where can I get some cheap folding chairs?"

Finding a technical partner is more akin to finding a life partner than anything else--the difference being that neither party has any intentions to stick around for fifty or sixty years.
Where to find one is kind of an interesting question, because, like single men and women, there are certainly places they are more likely to hangout--bars and listservs versus bars and clubs--but going to one of these places is no guarantee of meeting anyone.  The key is getting out there--finding as many ways as possible to meet with people and get involved in activities around your interests.

The truth of the matter is that, actually, it starts with you.  No one wants to feel like they're joining less than half a partnership, in either sense.  Don't forget that this person is adding you as a partner just as much as you're adding them, so look in the mirror and think about what you bring to the table.  Think about it this way, if you have an idea and you're willing to give up half of your company to get a technical partner, consider the CTO's side of it.

They're giving up 50% of a company to get you as a business partner, because they probably have ideas, too--ideas they could potentially own 100% of and maybe get built in their spare time.  So, what makes you worth 50%?  (Or 60,70, or 80% if you plan on giving out less...)

Let's start with finances.  The ideal partner is financially independent.  For a startup, if you are a businessperson, a) Do you already have money to start the businesses?  b) Do you already have great investor relationships who will pull the trigger on funding pending the addition of a technical partner or completion of a product?  c) Do you already have clients willing to pay upfront for your product to see it get built?   As the businessperson, financing is just one of the things you bring to the table.  If you're answer is no or maybe to the above, what value are you to the business?  What value you are you to a partner? 

If your product is technically feasible, everyone around the table should believe it can get built.  Then, there's no reason not to have people who say "If you build that, I'd be very likely to buy that/fund that."  That would be my due diligence on you if I was a technical partner--lot's of people saying yes.

If I was a technical person with a prototype, and I was going to give up half (or more) of my company to a businessperson, what would I want?  I'd want a rainmaker.  I'd want someone with a huge rolodex of people already dying to get a piece of the action of this person's next endeavor...someone with so social capital built up with key influencers, industry partners, and investors that they don't know what to do with it.

So rather than trying to make it a process of "finding" you need to think about it as "attracting".  How can you make yourself, as a businessperson, more attractive to a technical person capable, at least from a product standpoint, of executing their own ideas? 

Here are a few ways:

- Get clients and customers.  The more people signed up or at least saying they're willing to pay for something if you build it, the more attractive your business is.

- Generate a buzz with key influencers.  If smart people are talking about your idea, technical people will want to be a part of it.

- Understand the tech.  You don't have to know how to code, but if your ideas are technically unfeasible or product discussions are going to be remedial, a technical person will just move on to someone who gets it.

- Be a leader in your own field.  If you want to make it to the top of the startup/tech heap, jumping from the top of your own heap is much easier than climbing from the bottom.

- Raise money from people who know you best--even if it's just a little friends and family money, a technical person will not want to be the first risktaker in the pool.

And yes, that picture is of Alex Lines, my co-founder at Path 101, which officially launches on Tuesday... and that's how I found him when I walked in at 7:50AM this morning.

We have equal ownership in the company and I'm pretty sure he got the short end of that stick.  :)

This is one of the top stories of the day?

Seriously?

A company moves and one blog links to it.

TechMeme shark: jumped. 

I think I'll go write a blog post about Twitter now.

1. Be confident and realize that you are pitching at all times.  I can't tell you how many times I'm at a social event and someone tells me about their startup with the pitch equivilent of a "wet noodle" handshake.  Everytime you tell someone what you do, that's a pitch.  Knock it out of the park every time. 

2. Tell me something you learned about the market or your users--shows you are adaptable.  The worst thing an entrepreneur can do is be "strong and wrong".  The best ideas are iterated on constantly--and the last person an investor wants to talk with their company about is someone who can't take feedback.

3. Tell me who you can partner with and why this is a priority for them.  It is so incredibly difficult to build traffic or revenues from scratch.  Partnerships are often the key to your uptake--so help investors understand who else in the market would be willing to work with you.

4. Who currently supports what you're doing with real action?  Has anyone made a bet on you, or does the investor need to be the first one in the pool?  Employees working for sweat equity, customer committments, family and friends willing to break their piggybanks for you--anything to make it so that the person you're talking to doesn't feel like Will Ferrell--naked in the town square with no one running behind him.

5. Show investors that you understand how to get users economically in a way that supports the model.  For example, I can't tell you how many products I've seen that offer $10-50/month subscription fees and the company tells me about going the direct sales route.  That would only work if your salespeople are willing to eat bread and water... and not particularly often. 

6. Convince investors that you are obsessed with the problem you are solving.  This needs no explanation, but is often lacking.

7. What have you learned from your competitors--know them like the back of your hand.  If an investor asks you, "Do you know the folks doing "x"?" and "x" is anything having to do with your business whatsoever, the answer better be yes, and you better know how you're better than them, can learn from them, or can work with them... and preferably you already have spoken with them.

8. Know your realistic, addressable market.  If you're selling potato peelers and only 10 million people in the country eat potatos, don't say you're going to sell 8 million peelers in year one.

9. Appreciate the feedback.  If you tell someone about your business, expect a reaction.  You might not like the reaction, but all feedback is good.  Don't try to debate people--just respond cordially with facts or assumptions that answer their question.  If you don't have those, don't start shovelling and never, ever, dismiss anyone's feedback.

10. Come see David Rose at Fordham this Thursday, March 12, 2009:

On Thursday, New York's most active community participant from the investment side, David Rose, will be at Fordham talking about pitching and raising angel capital.   David is the founder of NY Angels and runs RoseTech Ventures.  RoseTech also operates an incubator on 23rd Street and is a renowned pitch coach as well.

We will also be letting 5 companies give their two minute elevator pitch (and we really mean two minutes) for David to critique.

Date:     Thursday, March 12
Time:     06:00 PM to 08:00 PM
Organizer:      Fordham TEC

Location:
Fordham University Graduate School of Business
   33 West 60th Street 12th Floor
   New York, NY - 10023, USA

RSVP here (req'd):  http://gbadirect.bnet.fordham.edu/vo/fbd1/cal/rsvp0.aspx?ID=3839

Fred Wilson recently wrote about whether or not entrepreneurs need a college education.  He wrote, "Education is critically important. But you don't have to go to school to be educated and if being an entrepreneur is your goal in life, that's even more true."

The other day I was having a discussion with a friend of mine who works in the food business.  She runs a cafe in a high-end, high-visabilty retail store--the flagship location for a very successful business.  I assumed she had a degree, but it turns out that she didn't.  She simply started cooking--went to Rhode Island and studied by working with some of Nantucket's most successful chefs.  She learned how to run a food business firsthand. 

Still, those stories are the exception.  People in most industries expect you to have a degree, and the stats show that you're more successful with that piece of paper than without.

However, the question gets a little trickier when it comes to whether or not you need that piece of paper from an Ivy League school or whether your local state school will do just as well.  Do you need an expensive degree?

Given the rising cost of a college degree and the current economy, more and more students are thinking about what the ROI of their education will be.  Does it really pay up to go to a "better" school?  And what does it even mean for a school to be better? 

If you're going to school with the goal of getting a good job, that would imply that graduates from better schools get better jobs--whether that means more responsibility, more pay, faster progression, or even more happiness.

Unfortunately, no one really tracks this.

US News & World Report tracks statistics like the percentage of professors with terminal degrees and what percent of the alumni base give back.  Given that we know that not all PhDs make the best teachers, and the alumni giving rate is a function of salesmanship of your alumni relations office more than anything else (or performance of your school's basketball team) then can we really count on these kinds of surveys to accurately measure the best schools?  They certainly aren't taking outcome--what happens to someone 1, 5, 10, 20 years after they graduate--into account.

So who knows that?  Anyone with a critical mass of resumes who understands different industries, job titles, etc. would know part of it--but you would also want more information.  Imagine if, after analyzing resumes, you could survey your alumni and ask them if their degree led to their success? 

Imagine students had that information even before they chose their college!

These are the kinds of things we're thinking about at Path 101 and we're looking to work with schools who want to get at the hard facts.  We're building a database of over a million resumes and analyzing careers.  We have a number of schools that have over a few thousand resumes represented in our database already and the results of how those resumes compare to their peers in the same industry are fascinating.

If you work for an alumni organization and you'd like to work with us to understand whether or not you are producing successful alumni, especially relative to your peer institutions, please contact me at charlie@path101.com.

Check out our presentation on this topic:

My name is Charlie O'Donnell and I am the Co-Founder & CEO of Path 101, a site being built to help people figure out their careers.  We were recently selected to be the first company to receive money from NYC Seed--so, first off, thanks for your support of that initiative.

I am also the founder of nextNY, a community group of over 2100 local tech and digital media professionals as well as a former analyst at Union Square Ventures.  I also teach entrepreneurship at Fordham University.  In addition,  I am the EIR at ITAC, which has been running FastTrac in NYC for years (and was noticeably and unfortunately absent from recent PR about the city's 11 point plan). 

I've testified twice in front of the City Council in the last two years on how to support entrepreneurship and innovation in NYC.

In 2007, I said...

"If there was one thing I would want to leave off with for all of those who are interested in supporting the technology community in New York City, I'll tell you simply to join it...Come to the a nextNY gathering, join our listserv, or a New York Tech Meetup.  Start reading the blogs of local entrepreneurs and blogging yourselves.  Get off the email newsletters and get on RSS feeds.  Join LinkedIn.  If you don't use the same tools as the technology community and show up to our events (instead of just inviting us to yours), you are never going to be looked upon as a source of active support and your programs will fail to get traction. "

In 2008, I said...

"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 140 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."

A couple of weeks ago, you put out a press release about your 11 point plan to foster innovation in NYC.  Compared to the kind of community idea generation platform we saw with the Obama campaign and transition, the approach to this didn't seem too... well... innovative.  It certainly wasn't very participatory as only a few people knew it was coming, and honestly, most of the entrepreneurs in the community still don't know too much about it.  We tend not to read government press releases.  Seems only fair, as few people in government read our blogs.

The other day, I got an invite to a closed door meeting about building a centralized web presence to support entrepreneurship in NYC.  The invitation reminded me that I was not to discuss the contents of the meeting elsewhere--which, as a blogger, just makes me think of the word "muzzle".  For an entrepreneur whose pitch presentation is up on our site for everyone to see, and who fully believes transparency is the way to go, this seems archaic.  (I'm not the only one who believes in transparancy, btw...)

I can't make it, because I'll be at Union Square Ventures' Hacking Education conference, but what's really clear to me is this:

If you're really interested in getting the best possible feedback on what the NYC entrepreneurial community needs to grow, I'd highly suggest participating in the NYC entrepreneurial community... the way actual entrepreneurs do.

Every time I ever meet with city representatives, EDC folks, testify in front of the city counsel, etc... I invite the folks I meet to join the nextNY listserv, come to our events, or to a NY Tech Meetup--to participate in the very community you say you are trying to support.

To my knowledge, no one has ever accepted the invitation.

Don't get me wrong.  I know Mayor Bloomberg is never going to come and sit in on the Tech Meetup, even though he should.  However, there's no excuse for the junior folks in your organizations not to come mix with us.  That was part of my job at Union Square Ventures--to network with the innovation community wherever they were and whenever.  (So, yes, that includes "after work", which has no meaning to an entrepreneur.) 

This Monday is the NY Tech Meetup. There should be EDC, SBS, City Council reps there every month--500+ entrepreneurs meeting up to see innovative new companies. If you're not there, then how will you know how to help this community? If you're answer is "We don't really want to be a part of the community, we just want to ask a small handful of people that may or may not be representative of it" then your efforts are bound to fail.

As for the website, you're You're looking to build what you call "a key missing component to hold together the community in the City"--but the reality is, we've been holding together pretty well. You just don't see it because you're not in the same places, online and offline, as we are.

In the last couple of months, nextNY has had four events for startups--all free, including an event at Sun last week with about 90 people. Three years ago, I started nextNY and we now have 2100+ members, around two third of which work for startups of less than 10 people. We
average about an event a month and lately even more than that. Last week's topic: Understanding tech if you're a business person with a startup idea. We had two experienced startup CTOs, two CEOs and two tech consultants, as well as representatives from Sun.

NYC Entrepreneurs are regularly interacting in existing digital spaces--the nextNY listserv, Twitter, through blogging. That's how all these people found out about the event--and remember they weren't techies. These were business people looking to understand tech, and they still found it. I posted it to the NY Tech Meetup listerv, to nextNY, it was on Gary's Guide, and I tweeted it.

Did you know about it?

Are you participating in any of these tools?

If not, honestly, I don't see how you'll ever understand the technology needs of the entrepreneur community or how to even evaluate our feedback. By not using these tools, for all intents and purposes as far as the innovation community is concerned, you're not listening--because that's where we are talking.

How much do you think my interest in talking with people who are not listening is?

This meeting should be a *public* discussion. We should invite anyone and everyone who wants to participate--not to have 500 people each attempt to give separate pieces of advice... but to have a small group discussion that is open for others to watch, and then ask questions and
make suggestions during a certain set aside time.

Allow anyone to take video, blog it, tweet it, what have you... because here's what you'll get:

1) You'll build a brand in the community that shows you're interested in engaging, in touch, and forward thinking.

2) You'll start a conversation... a trackable one where you'll get way more ideas afterwards in the blogs and discussion boards than you could ever get in one meeting.

3) We as the community will be able to see whether or not you're open to our ideas... because the public discourse will make you accountable to follow up on our suggestions or provide reasons why you are not. Otherwise, the only people who will know whether or not their ideas get ignored are the ones in the small group of invitees.

That's the kind of discussion I'd be really interested to participate in... not a closed door meeting where I can't blog about the ideas discussed.

Sincerely,

Charlie O'Donnell

Good idea:

"...welcome foreign innovators. Harvard research fellow Vivek Wadhwa reports that immigrants have founded more than half of all Silicon Valley start-ups in the past decade. These immigrant-led, American tech companies employed more than 450,000 workers and grossed $52 billion in 2005. For U.S. companies to employ a highly specialized foreign worker, the employee must hold an H-1B visa, but current law allows for the issuing of only 65,000 H-1B visas per year. The H-1B cap was established to prevent foreigners from taking American jobs, but, in fact, an education gap frequently leaves American candidates less qualified for these positions. Lawmakers could improve the situation all around by removing the cap on H-1B visas while imposing a 10 percent payroll tax above and beyond the benchmark salary for any position being filled by holders of such visas. The proceeds of the payroll tax could be channeled into U.S. reeducation programs. This compromise would bring the best innovators to work here while subsidizing the continued education of American talent."

Bad idea:

"...match funds for venture capital and angel investments. Venture firms and investors need financial incentives to invest in companies that create U.S. jobs. What if firms with credible histories could receive as much as $100 million in federal matching funds if their investments create jobs in the United States?"

Reid Hoffman - Let Start-Ups Bail Us Out - washingtonpost.com

moar funny pictures

Have you seen Skittles.com lately?  It's now an aggregation of Twitter search, Facebook, YouTube, etc...  Instead of pages on Skittles.com, you essentially get pages from other social network sites, about Skittles, but at the Skittles URL. 

Like the Matrix, you can't really be told.  You have to see it for yourself.

People are going to have two reactions to this.

Self proclaimed social media gurus and advertising wizards are having a field day with it.  They're tweeting and blogging about it left and right--causing it to shoot right to the top of the Twitter trending topics list...

...which of course means that, when I go to Skittles.com, I can go see a Twitter search page for Skittles, which is filled with links to Skittles.com... thus creating an infinite loop capable of tearing a hole in the space-time continuum, ending all life as we know it.

Way to go, Agency.com. 

On the other hand, anyone not familiar with Twitter, which is probably most of the 18,000 average monthly visitors that previously came to Skittles.com and who will come to Skittles.com in the future when they hopefully change it into something less half-assed, will be seriously effin' confused.  They will undoubtedly get annoyed, frustrated and leave.

The folks at Agency.com will probably get praised for being so cutting edge, even though the Skittles idea was pretty much a ripoff of the Modernista site.

Instead, they should be burned at the social media stake for promoting everything that's wrong with big companies engaging in social media.

Where do I begin?

1) Instead of reaching out into the community and showing up in our spaces, they took our spaces and brought them back to their site.  Instead of sending traffic to us, they took our stuff and made it all about them.

2) Now their site is all about people talking about their site--which is kind of like bragging, in a way.  How exactly does that make visiting their site a good experience?  I go to Skittles to see who's talking about Skittles?  Is that what I came for?  If I wanted that, it'd go to Twitter search--the version without all this floating Skittles crap on top of it.

3) They didn't make it easy for the mainstream to participate.  When you show up on Skittles.com, it's not obvious to the non-Twitterer WTF is going on and how you get your thoughts on the page at all.

You know what's a really great experience in comparison?  Jelly Belly.  Over 130k monthly vistors and the site has a ton of news, info, virtual tours.  No, it doesn't have a ton of social media juice, but in terms of effectiveness, it's got 10x the normal traffic as Skittles, and, OMG, people are still Twittering about Jelly Belly even without this silly social media publicity stunt of a website.  Best of all, it has tons of info about Jelly Belly, which is exactly what I expect and want when I go to the Jelly Belly corporate site.

Right now, Skittles.com isn't telling me much about the product--at least not anything more than Wikipedia was already telling me.

It isn't telling the stories of it's customers.

It isn't entertaining.  Did you watch the YouTube videos?  They're mind numbingly stupid.

What's the point, other than generating a lot of chatter about the campaign, rather than about the product?

Fail.

Andrew Chen is asking which startup's collapse will end the Web 2.0 Era?

End the Web 2.0 Era?  Wait... so are we going to ditch open source, go back to high burn rates, long and slow builds, and not focusing on data at all? 

How exciting for Microsoft!

Back in 2005, Tim O'Reilly attached the name "Web 2.0" to a set of emergent technology principals--guidelines for building "lightweight", data-focused, web services. Most of the services that inspired such categorization never consciously decided to be or aspired to be "Web 2.0 companies". That's usually the way evolution happens--natural selection and environmental adoption spits up a set of traits that get adopted through natural selection and some anthropologist comes along later and throws a taxonomy on it--drawing lines across the gray areas almost making them seem intentional.

I guess that's how the intelligent design theory got started.

These companies were simply pushing the edge of what we've come to know as best practices.  They aimed to solve particular sets of problems given current technology capability, cost and penetration. Stewart and Catarina weren't trying to build a Web 2.0 company at Flickr, nor was Joshua at del.icio.us.

In fact, I can't think of any startup where the intention was to "build something Web 2.0". Instead, the thinking was usually, "Wouldn't it be better if you could see the reviews of your friends?" or "Instead of making content, why don't we let our users share their own content" or "Let's just code this up in Rails, put out an alpha, and see what people think of it."

It all just seemed easier/quicker/more efficient to accomplish certain things using these Web 2.0 principals.  It was like that even before Web 2.0 had a name. You just had less people familiar enough with the technologies to apply them to real problems and build solutions until we popularized them with a monniker.

However, from a business perspective, grouping the set of companies whose products exposed these principals is a gross miscategorization.  Spread out across a myriad of uncorrelated industries, some were amazing ideas, many were not (as normally happens with innovation and entrepreneurship). Some had clear business models, others did not--and to confuse things, others had potential business models they chose to forgo to get scale or market share.

Andrew writes, "it turned out that most of these startups didn’t work out as real businesses."

Most startups don't work out as real businesses.  That's because creating something from nothing is hard.  It isn't because they're "Web 2.0" any more than it's because they were using open source technology.  You wouldn't turn around and say that most startups using open source fail and then blame open source, right?  Most startups ultimately don't make it anyway--and it usually has something to do with poor execution, bad management decisions, failure to solve a big enough problem or provide the right solution, etc.

Here's the truth: There never was a Web 2.0 any more than there ever really was a Yugoslavia. You just can't arbitrarily tie things that have very little to do with each other and slap a name on it--expecting it to be cohesive. If I use AJAX and Rails to build a group scheduling application for enterprises, it requires a completely different knowledge base and business accumen to make a Rails+AJAX real estate investment modeler--and no boom or bust in the Web 2.0 space will affect both equally.

At the end of the day, these companies will live and die because of their underlying sector and management execution more than whether "Web 2.0" falls out of favor. Indeed.com is much more correlated to recruiting than it is to Web 2.0.  Zoho needs to execute a good sales strategy for the SMB market rather than it needs to keep up with all the companies reviewed on TechCrunch. Muxtape didn't die because it was a Web 2.0 company. It died because it stepped in the mindfield we know as the music industry without a map.

Reporters and pundits will undoubtedly call the shakeout of companies started '04-'07 the end of Web 2.0, but the reality is that it's really just the end of a bunch of pretty unrelated businesses that had poor value propositions or business models--i.e. par for the course in Startupville. It's hard to be successful--even in good times. Most startups don't make it. 

In the beginning and in the good part of a cycle, the busts don't get the headlines. They're dwarfed by the launches and the fundings. With less fundings, and more companies with their heads down trying to build businesses than wasting their time pitching to TechCrunch, we were bound to hear more of Chicken Little. Since crashes gather more clicks than stories of unrelated individual companies running their course, that's what we have.

Silly bloggers. Web 2.0 can't die. It never existed in the first place.

Great comment on Andrew's post:

"An interesting difference between this wave and the experience we went through in 99-01 is that most of them will not collapse in big ways. Think about watching a 2 story building versus a collapsing old Vegas casino.
1. They are smaller, and even ones that are bigger can operate very small. I wonder what a 200 person Facebook looks like financially.
2. The ad revenue is alot of the time being done with ad networks that did not exist in 99, including Google so there is less fixed costs.
3. I don't know anyone who has bought an EMC box in this wave, infrastructure is much less of a fixed cost
4. Not alot of Oracle licenses that have to be paid up each year anymore either.
5. And most importantly, I think we all learned something last time and things just did not get as crazy in the start up world.
So maybe just like there weren't any big exits, there might not be any massive failures. But I guess we all know there will be some. Who will be the pets.com of Web 2.0 ?"

Back in November, NBC Digital head George Kliavkoff left the company, but not without sending out a message to the troops.  In it, he cited that "NBCU has made significant strides in digital" and that he had done his job well enough that there really wasn't a need for him anymore.

After NBC (EDIT: and Fox--bad to assume both owners aren't at fault here) just forced Hulu to yank its content from Boxee--a browser built for TV that sent them 100,000 streams just last week--it reminds me of another "Mission Accomplished" speech. 

Check out the excerpts:

"I believe in my heart that this is a best time to start, run or invest in digital companies..."

Unless of course those digital companies need any content whatsoever.  Then, the practice of sacrificing virgins to the content-owning overlords may prove too costly for startups located in NYC or LA--given the rarity of chaste women in those cities.  I'm enthusiastic, however, about the potential of some Utah-based companies...

"I want it to be clear that my group does not take credit for any of these other than having helped set a tone..."

Don't blame me if this shit didn't stick. 

"...and create a culture where hopefully there was a new focus on, and understanding of, digital."

They totally understand digital.  In fact, some of them can even use it in a sentence. 

"NBCU successfully worked with ISPs and content aggregation partners..."

And by "content aggregation partners", we mean sites we own and not necessarily sites or services we plan to kick squarely in the nuts.

"These accomplishments, and many others, too numerous to mention, are an indication that a digital mindset has in fact taken hold throughout NBCU, in every business unit."

And by "digital mindset", I mean that NBCU employees have all been replaced by soulless robots programmed to do one thing... 

Help aliens destroy the world.

I don't code. 

Well, check that...I can muck up the HTML and CSS on my own blog, and I did cut and paste some PHP once, but for all intents and purposes, I don't code.

More importantly, though, is that I don't pretend to know how to code.  I know what I'm capable of and what I am not.

So when I see the pitchdecks and biz dev presentations that techie entrepreneurs send me, or when I ask someone to tell me about their company, I have to smile.  I smile the same way my CTO Alex smiles and shakes his head when someone who has never built anything advocates buzzwords like cloud computing or Ruby on Rails for every project.

Creating a sales plan, a marketing pitch, or PR for brand awareness is like building a service, and tech people are going to be no more successful at it than a business person will be trying to manage a technology build themselves or hacking something together on their own.  Sure, you get the occasional lightning strike exception, like Craig building the original version of Craigslist, but for the most part, every espect of a business requires focus and expertise to do it right.

For some reason though, tech people never seem to admit that they need a businessperson.  I see businesspeople ask for tech all the time to build a great idea but where are the tech people clamoring for a businessperson to market and sell a great product?

Some people think a great product doesn't need to be sold or marketed.  Sure, some things take off in a small community at first, but haven't we learned our Slanket/Snuggie/Freedom Blanket lesson yet?  Same product, but one of those products is making money hand over fist because of savvy marketing.

Crossing the chasm into the mainstream--really hitting that tipping point on usage or revenues or what have you--will be a function of a well thought out and well executed sales and marketing plan.  It's something that a lot of startups don't take seriously enough--until they're scrambling for users before their money runs out.  If you're asking the intern or the entry level marketing associate to drive your business forward, it's too late.

If you're in NYC this Thursday night, you should definitely check out Mark LaRosa and Jeff Stewart's nextNY presentation on Jumpstarting Sales at a Startup.  They're two sales experts and have helped a number of startups.  If you've got something to sell or are already selling something, this is a must-attend!

Google reads your e-mail, you know. 

And Tacoda was tracking you based on your cookies.

And the government can wiretap your phone if they think you're a bad guy.

Remember when Facebook told everyone what I bought?

I hate to break it to most of you...  but 99.999% of the people in the world really don't care about this stuff. 

I mean, sure if you ask them in a survey, they'll care--but realistically, we have bigger things to worry about.  When Facebook shot themselves in the face with Beacon, most of the students taking my college business class hadn't even heard about it.

Facebook recently updated its TOS to give it the rights to stuff you upload, even after you leave, and people started flipping out.  

Someone wrote on Twitter that they were concerned that Facebook could relicense photos of their kids.  Really?  And why on earth would Facebook do that?  Is there a big potential revenue stream there for them?  I have a feeling there isn't much of a market for photos of your kids if you're not Brangelina.

So... Where's that rank on your concern scale relative to... um... let's say...  how you're going to pay for that kid's college tuition when the cost of education in this country outpaces inflation by 2:1?  Hell, I'm worried about that, and I don't even have kids.

Let's view all this stuff under the microscope of, "What can actually hurt me?"

In terms of consumer privacy, where's the relative concern over the credit report industry?  Whether I get an auto loan or a mortgage is based on information I can't check on everyday without paying for it that I also have little to no control over.  Nor can I add anything positive about myself, like references.  *That's* concerning. 

Facebook photos?  Like most people with half a brain, I don't post photos that I really care about that much on Facebook.  Any photo of me on the web could turn up on the front page of the NYT and I wouldn't really be that concerned about it--they're not worse than anyone else's photos.  And also like most people, I don't plan on eliminating my Facebook profile.  Hell, we forget, but most of us in our late 20's still have Friendster profiles!  Friendster!

As time marches on, having a presence on the web is becoming more the norm--as is having a mildly embarrassing photo or two around.  It's not the end of the world.  It won't get you fired.  You've still got a lot better chance of getting fired for what you say on the phone to clients, or just flat out underperforming at your job than based on what you post on the web.

And as for what Facebook's going to do with all your stuff--probably nothing.  I highly doubt, if I delete my Facebook account, I'm suddenly going to see all my photos being sold on some stock photo site somewhere--or some remnant version of my account that I can't get rid of.  The fact of the matter is, companies don't really fare well when they do things that piss off a bunch of people--so don't expect much abhorrent behavior from Big Brother if for no other reason than it just don't make a lot of business sense.

Now, if you're an artist and content creation is the way your feed yourself, then perhaps you need to worry about this, but for most of us, I highly doubt our day to day lives will be impacted at all--save for the fact that we'll have to read all our favorite echo chamber tech bloggers debate about it until Apple makes a new product announcement or Arrington returns from walking the earth like Caine in Kung Fu.