We might not score 30 runs, but at least we'll get in a few pitching position players. 

Come on up to Central Park's Hecksher Field #2, right by Columbus Circle at 6:15 today (Friday, August 24th).  We'll try and get the first pitch off at 6:30, but if we have some 1.0 guys, they might need a little more time to stretch.  :)

Feel free to pull friends and folks from your companies...   we have extra spots.

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Never cooked with the toaster oven before..., originally uploaded by ceonyc.

...just warmed stuff up.

Just threw some pork chops with salt, pepper, oregano and olive oil in. I cut the fat off, but left it to drip on top. Looks like its working so far.

• Paul Kedrosky: Announcing O'Reilly's Money:Tech Conference
  (tags: money technology conferences)

No more captchas...  wooo.   

Disqus is a perfect example of an opportunity to do exploit something small to a bigger player, like commenting, do it cross-platform, and create a lot more value to users than any one platform could do on their own. 

Now if there was some way to combine it with MyBlogLog, that would be something...   a suite of social tools around surfing and commenting with a single identify and tracking of participation.  A geek can dream...

Thanks Daniel and Jason!

Yesterday, my brain ceased to function for about 3 minutes.  It was scary stuff.

I was supposed to meet with a VC about Path101 (or is it Path 101?  Space or no space?) and they e-mailed me saying their flight was two hours late.  So, I figured that was the end of the meeting and replied that we could talk on the phone in the next few days.  I was at the Web 2.0 Meetup at Slate and I was starving.  So, I ordered myself a chicken panini with gouda. 

Fifteen minutes later, the VC calls while in a cab coming over from a meeting in Jersey City and asks if I'm available to meet for dinner.  He had dinner scheduled originally with someone else, but he was going to bail on it to meet with me.

Here's where the 3 minutes begins.

I told him that I had ordered a little while ago and suggested maybe we could meet up after our respective dinners.

When I got back to my conversion with Kristian, he said to me, "So a VC that you really want to work with offers to cancel his dinner to meet with you, and you pass because of a nine dollar panini?"

"Oh...  wait... . jeez...  That was really stupid wasn't it?"

"Yeah."

"Dammit... I gotta go call him back... what was I thinking?"

I'll tell you what I was thinking...  I didn't want to waste food.  Years of my mom scooping extra servings on my plate so that she didn't have to throw anything out just hardwired themselves into my brain, cementing a pattern that would be highly sub-optimal in this situation.

So I paid and bailed on the panini...  told the waitress to enjoy it... and left for dinner after calling him back to let him know I was totally free to meet up if it was still on the table.  Thank God it was.

"Yeah... I could have had a $500 million exit...   if it wasn't for that $9 ($12 with tax and tip) panini."

When I was eight, we got a computer.  An IBM PS/2 with an 8086 processor and a 20MB hard drive.  That was 1987—twenty years ago.  My only experience with coding, however, was the C-logo class I took in school that year.  Man, could I make that turtle rock and roll…  I was the C-logo master.  But, I never followed up on it at home, because our home computer wasn’t for hacking.  It was for my dad’s business.  Quite a few times, I got lectured for not reading the MS-DOS manual first before just playing around on it.  That was pretty much the end of my coding career, which means that, today, now that I want to build Path101, I need someone’s help. 

I can always go outsourced--to some team of Uzbekistanians (Uzbeks?), but I want to do more than just get something up.  I want to be able to break out of the echo chamber and work with a true partner—not someone who may be gone from this project in three months.  There’s no substitute for a real live human in the same room as you who has his or her own dry erase marker at the whiteboard.  Even virtual teams will tell you that the most productive sessions are the ones they have in person. 

So, in the spirit of uber anti-stealth, I’ll put my conceptual thinking for the build and the structure, as well as what I’m looking for in a partner relationship, in the hopes that there’s someone out there who not only sees the value, but has the same philsophy on how to create this. 

First of all, whoever takes this project on has to be a data jockey.  The real value of a Web 2.0 app is the leverage it can get out of its data—the data it pulls in, the data it pushes out and the mashup of data in the middle.  Every piece of data that comes in or out of this thing needs to get used 8 different ways if we’re really going to knock socks off.

Example:  Imagine a student is using a resume building tool.  You shouldn’t have to create a resume for paper and a resume for LinkedIn and a resume for Facebook.  Using standards like hResume, they should be able to use the resume wizard once, then populate a LinkedIn profile with the same structured information that we popped out a fancy PDF version to send out by e-mail.  But let’s go a step further...  Let’s say that a student participated in a special summer program related to their major at a local college—a two week immersion course on financial modeling, for example.  The enter it in the resume wizard.  However, our structure means that we know the dates, we know the location, and we can ask what this thing was—a course?  A scholarship program?  An internship?   We should allow the student to be able to publish that information to other students with similar interests.  That’s how I found out about the mentoring program at my local financial professional society.  Someone a year ahead of me went through it the previous summer and suggested I participate.  The information about that course was on her resume, but for it to get into my head, she had to bump into me randomly in the cafeteria—a lucky break for me.  Efficient use of data structures and matching would have put that program and the 8 other summer programs just like it in front of me when I was thinking about my summer. 

You might ask why would students allow that to happen?  Aren’t they competing with me for the same jobs?  Not if they’re a year ahead of me in a different recruiting class.  Plus, perhaps they understand (or we can teach them) the value that sharing a summer program with me this year means that I might send a job opportunity their way at my company next year. 
     Just as an aside, one thing that also seperates Path101 as a business from what’s out there is our philosophy of giving as much value back to the students as possible.   Think about that aggregated dataset—all those college resumes with all those positions.  Monster has them.  They know where almost every college student interned last summer.  That’s about as close to the total universe of available opportunities as you can get, but do they expose it to students?  No.  They show those resumes to recruiters who pay for the access to the students and they show you the jobs that people pay to list, leaving the larger universe of opportunities to rot.  That’s their business.  All those random little companies that you’ve never heard of that provided some really interesting internship opportunities—ones that never get posted at $250 a pop because the company can’t afford it—are being wasted by Monster and not shown to students in order to protect their own bottom line.  Millions of students worked their butt off to research and network their way to internships they couldn’t find on Monster, especially in the non-business areas.  Monster sits on that useful data, leaving next year’s students on their own to recreate that whole research process all over again.  No wonder it’s so hard to find a great internship.  That’s not the way Path101 is going to create value for students.
     In addition to trying to get the maximum value creating leverage for every piece of data, whoever works on this build needs to believe in portabilty of the application.  Its not just about Facebook either, which obviously a student needs to be able to access all of our services on.  One day, before they buy us, Monster may want our whole application to appear on the Monster site, or the NYTimes, or the PR Society of America.  Schools may want this to appear on their sites and we can’t afford extensive enterprise integrations with every school.  Integration needs to be a matter of skinning, cutting and pasting iFrames and code, and incredibly robust APIs—caveman style easy…but I’ve been beating that horse to a pulp lately.   
     Also of major importance to me, and maybe this is most important, is the platform this is being build on.  No, its not Java or LAMP or Ruby on Rails—it’s TRUST and RESPECT.  I need to be able to trust and respect the insights of someone who has built a scalable application before and that person needs to trust me that I’ve actually been in the classroom with college students, mentored them,  and talked to them about their career aspirations.  But it goes deeper than that, right?  It goes far beyond the 1’s and the 0’s.  I had a VC ask me what I would do if Facebook offered me $10 million for this site in a year once its up in 25 schools and growing.  As a co-founder, perhaps that nets me $2-3 million after tax—not too shabby for a year’s work.  You know what, though?  That doesn’t really change my life much.  Plus, I honestly don’t consider myself a serial entrepreneur.  This is my idea.  Will I have another one?  Maybe.  Maybe not, and if I don’t, $2 million basically gets me a nice apartment in the city.  I’m not really about to trade in my big idea for a nicer apartment—that’s not enough for me.  What I really want to do is to be able to tour the country talking to college students because I’m the guy who started the service they use day in and day out to pursue their passions.  I want to hear about the paths they uncovered and the people they met.  I want to get a letter from some successful entrepreneur ten years from now who tells me that they didn’t even know what entrepreneurship was until they logged on to Path101 and started exploring.  That’s what value is to me.  If I was just in this for as quick money, I would have spent the first two years of my career burning myself out as an investment banker. 
So, in a since, what I’m building… well…  This is going to be BIG.  At least I want it to be anyway…and perhaps one day we’ll capture the even larger opportunity of career changers, moms returning to work, people laid off at 50…  even goals that aren’t necessarily about career stuff. 
Whoever joins will be a signficant equity partner, be able to get his hands dirty in the build and also manage a tech team.  I’ll be honest—there’s been some strong angel/VC interest in this (over and above folks you might guess on your own) and so it seems likely the team will be able to be focused and fulltime for six to nine months. 
So that’s me and that’s a little bit about what Path101 is looking for.  Maybe you’re sitting in a big media company twiddling your thumbs itching to get back in the startup game.  Maybe you just had a successful exit or a big blowup and you’re looking for the next thing.  Maybe you’re at an early Web 2.0 startup and the writing’s on the wall that it isn’t going to wind up inside Google anytime soon.  Let’s talk.   

• Communication Nation: Specialist or generalist?
  (tags: specialization visual mapping careers)

Jason Calcanis "grew up in the famously gritty Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, where violence was as ubiquitous as graffiti", according to Fast Company.

Bay Ridge?

This Bay Ridge? 

So, um... I guess if the violence is as ubiquitous as the graffiti, then there's... um.... no violence.

We do have tornadoes, though.

The guy who just walked into the car has personal space issues...as in...he's in mine.  Push off a little, buddy.  Plenty of room in this car.  Ah, nice.  Today's the first day of normal express trains in Brooklyn.  If Chris Angel, Mindfreak, was Mexican, he'd be the guy behind me.  N train arriving.  Time to switch.  I'm not really into sitting on the train in.  I'll be sitting all day.  I don't need to be sedentary for another 45 minutes.  We havent left the station yet.  The train is silent.  No a/c, no motor noises.  No announcements.  Just the deep voice of the conductor, not over the PA system, but outside  the doors on the platform talking to a customor.  Its the last two weeks in August and the trains are showing it.  Pretty empty.  I could still sit if I wanted to.  I need to break today up into bite sized chunks, so I can be really efficient.  I have a Facebook app to finish the spec for (consulting project) and I need to finish up the syllabus for my class, which starts two weeks from Thursday actually.  I need to move to another car...or I'll be soaked by the time I get to work.  Perhaps that's why this car is so empty.  I wonder if it is every car. Yup. Every car.  Dammit.  What are Windorphins?  I guess this is effective advertising, because now I'm curious and I want to go to their site. Ok, I felt a little bead of sweat roll down my back.  Its hot in here. Its official.  There's now a guy lying down asleep on the floor of the car at the end.  I dont think he was there when I walked in.  No one around him seems the least bit troubled by it.  Some guy went over to him and nudged him.  He's awake.  This little girl sitting by me has an old school baby doll with a plastic head.  Someone has played tic tac toe on the baby's head in blue ball point pen, several times.  Man its hot in here.  When I commutted to high school, you could open up window vents on the B trains. This baby has a thumb sucking feature and eyes that roll back.  The kid has just discovered a hole in the back of the baby's pink onesie, which she conveys to her mom in spanish. Ah...there is a window vent.  I didnt notice that before.  I just went over to open it.  Funny enough, it requires two people to open it because of where the latches are.  This guy next to it was all to happy to oblidge, as if he'd been scoping aid for the last few minutes himself.  Finally,the car just got noticeably cooler.  Did I do that with the window?  If we elected a mayor of this car, I'm sure I'd win. Me and my Passenger of Action campaign would handily defeat the dude who kicked the sleeper.

• blog.pmarca.com: Luck and the entrepreneur, part 1: The four kinds of luck
  (tags: entrepreneurship)

Are you serious?

Yes, I'm beating this point to death, I know.

THE WHOLE POINT OF GETTING THE APP ON FACEBOOK IS SO I DON'T NEED OR WANT TO HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH GOING.COM!!!

If you can't figure out how to get me to use your service without having my e-mail address... or at least convincing me that giving you my data is useful by providing value first, don't expect to see me using your Facebook service anytime soon.  Uninstalled.  (Do not want!!)

What's the bigger problem?

Not all having all the professional contacts you know on LinkedIn or LinkedIn not providing enough utility?

Not having all you friends on Facebook or Facebook apps in general being pretty lame?

Do you wish all 150 of your Facebook friends or 800 of your MySpace friends used Twitter?  I don't.

How much time in a day to you spend actively managing, syncing, adding to your online friend networks?  Not much?  Yeah, me either.  I spent more time trying to get two calendars to sync to my phone... porting the contacts themselves around has been pretty painless.

What I'm getting at is that Brad Fitzpatrick's call for innovation around the social graph is a solution for something that isn't really a problem. 

I have disconnected, partially overlapping social networks both online and off.  Some of my friends use Twitter, some don't.  Most of them are on Facebook, but some aren't... and a lot of people I connect with professionally are at least on LinkedIn, regardless of whether or not they actually use it.

Here's the thing... I can't really think of any application whose main barrier to being incredibly useful is the lack of connectedness of my social networks or people on the web.  Typical barriers include people's issues with privacy, or the ease of use of the app, etc.  Would I like to be able to see where my friends are actually eating via their credit card data?  Sure... but that's not a social connectivity issue... its a business issue/risk for the credit card issuer and a privacy issue for my friends.  Solve both of those problems in a really compelling way and that problem will definitely go away.

And frankly, the gaps in connection serve purposes.  I like the fact that there's some barrier to discovery and usage for services like Twitter.  It allows communities to develop norms of behavior--atmospheres.  Frankly, it bothers me that all of these people are just barging right into Facebook--my Facebook world--and expecting me to connect with them. 

100% seemless connection to everyone...  and the ability to see how everyone is connected to everyone else...  that's a wall I'm not sure should come down.  I like the fact that the barrier to finding me means that you have to be aware of the blog world or nextNY or be on LinkedIn or whatever... its a nice filter.  On top of that, its the gaps and hurdles that allow me to be successful--it gives my network an advantage because not everyone is tapped into the same people that I am.

And, no, I don't particularly care that Facebook is a walled garden... because it's open enough.  They built enough of the right hooks in such a way that was far beyond what anyone else had put out there.  Would a completely "open" world be better?  I dunno... what would it give me that Facebook isn't giving me now?  Am I worried that they'll steal all my data?  What data?  I'm not banking through it, or paying my taxes.  And frankly, my friends are my friends regardless if Facebook knows about them or maintains that data or not.  I'm not worried about losing them.

I guess I just don't see what the big glitch is.  Social is not the bottleneck.  It's utility.  Build something easy and useful that plugs into what's out there and people will use it... and if the masses demand that it work with some other app, it will happen.   The world is too competitive for it not to.

DSCN2663, originally uploaded by ptrain.

...which, according to our screwy rules (2nd person back wins), means I lost. I was going to slow down and try to push Tim into the dock, but then I realized I'd have to make next year's trophy. So, after two consecutive 3rd place finishes, I was happy to take bragging rights instead of the title.

Tweety's Revenge, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

I tawt I put a cap in da puddy tat's dome.. I did I did put a cap in da puddy tat's dome.

Wallstripped!, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

I just totally randomly bumped into Lindsay from Wallstrip outside the Met. (I was looking to see if there was wifi in the park, because I have a softball game on the Upper East Side later.) She asked me about Blue Nile and so we talked wedding rings. :)

• This is going to be BIG! - Fuck Facebook Conversion: Be platform agnostic and use your own APIs.
  (tags: facebook api bizdev2.0)

Mere's birthday is over, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

...and yes, number candles are disproportionate to cupcake.  When you're not as smart, you go for cute.

Sorry for the foul language, but I don't think the message I tried to convey in my other post about building Facebook apps really came through strong enough.

I just heard an entrepreneur tell me that his problem with Facebook is that it would give him zero conversion to his main site.

So what?

The whole idea that you have a "main site" is dead.  Stick a fork in it.

And while you're at it, stick a fork in the widgets, too--at least the way we're been creating them.  Right now, most of the widgets that are out there are an attempt to squeeze the elements of a service into a neat little sidebar rectangle--a bottleneck created by one-way APIs, limited space, and underwhelming goals.

What you need is a site that is completely agnostic as to where it lives--at your branded dot com address, in Facebook, on the iPhone, or as a "powered by" section of the biggest media site you could possibly ever think of partnering with.

And you shouldn't have to spend 50 man-months customizing your site to fit in all these random places, reworking the architecture to get your square pegs in your business partner's round holes.  (That sounded dirty, didn't it?  So this is a PG-13 post.  So what?)

True "BizDev 2.0" only comes when you start eating your own dog food--when you develop your site's infrastructure so that you actually use all of your own APIs and portable modules to construct your site.  So, if you're a video sharing site, you have the upload widget that could be embedded anywhere and the API calls to display videos, links, ratings, plays, etc. in as many sort orders as you can imagine.  It should be a matter of cutting and pasting, with perhaps an additional PHP page generation scripts as the glue, to completely recreate your service in another place on another platform.  The iphone.yourstartup.com should do all of the same things as yourstartup.com and the Yourstartup Facebook app, not to mention the version of yourstartup that is going to appear as a channel in AOL's site.  And they should all have self-contained revenue models... Facebook ad networks in Facebook, appropriate banners for the iPhone, and whatever networks net you the most cash on the dot com. 

And you shouldn't need to "convert" any user of one place to a user of another place.  Sure there are issues of universal sign-ins, unique identifiers, etc...  but your account management system should be smart enough to handle registered users, partially registered users, unique Facebook IDs, phone numbers off the WAP site and allow you to tie as much or as little of them together and expose that user's history and unique data to them across all the instances of their site.

So, at the end of the day, you shouldn't care where the user winds up... everyone can access your content or your service in a form native to the platform that its on, but will the full functionality of whatever you're up to. 

Until that happens, we're going to have dinky widgets and namby pamby Facebook apps.