Dear assorted financial and professional services salespeople who have been contacted me since I announced the incorporation of Path 101,

    No matter how much you try, you all seem the same to me... and the same to every other entrepreneur and new business.  You're selling something and we don't have a lot of money to buy stuff.
    Our initial inclination is that what you're selling we can somehow get on our own--besides which, other than computers, most of us have never made purchases the size of your average bill...  particularly not for services that we imagine the web will outsource, open source, crowdsource, steal, hack, borrow, remix or simply disrupt.

    Let me tell you the story of how one business differentiated themselves in a world where everyone seemed the same, the prices were high, and entrepreneurs didn't quite understand what they were getting...

     When I started with Union Square Ventures, Fred and I were blogging on our personal blogs, and our website was some professionally designed but utterly useless brochureware.  We initially wanted to address the issue of how we prevent our personal blogs from being seen as the faces of the firm and so I made the suggestion that we just use a blog as our corporate home page. 

    It wasn't long before we fundamentally changed the nature of the relationship between venture capital firms and entrepreneurs.  We opened up our process, our thinking, and most of all, we wanted, and got, lots of feedback.  People thought of us differently than every venture firm out there who just had a form or info@ e-mail inbox to dump business plans in.  It became, and remains, a real sustainable advantage.  While other VCs have created their own blogs, to my knowledge, there aren't any firms that have gone the full monty and changed their official corporate presence into something so interactive and open.  It reflects the fact that while there are many individual VCs who think differently about VC relationships, there are few firms who make openness and communication part of the very core of their principles.

     Frankly, it was inspired by the very companies we want to interact with.  Nearly every single startup maintains and gets value out of a corporate blog.  It's how we do our PR, our marketing, our community feedback, and sometimes business development. 

     So, financial and professional services salespeople, why then do you insist on e-mailing us mailing list form letters, or sending us PDF attachments to propriety market research?   I can't reblog a PDF and all your form letters sent from Salesforce look the same.

     I'm busy right now.  Really busy.  I'm running a company that's trying to get product out the door.  You want me to make time for you, but what have you done for me?  Clearly, you're reading blogs enough to notice when people raise money, but you're not actually reading them for content.  You seem to have missed the new business model: provide as much value as possible and demand less.

    What do I mean by that?  How about, for starters, creating a company blog for your firm.  If you're a recruiting firm, start writing about how to negotiate offers.  Start releasing all the data you can on salaries you're seeing the market.  Weigh in on the "finding developers in NYC" debate.   Talk to us how we talk to our community... in an open and interactive way.  And how about throwing me a freebie?  What's the lifetime value of a recruiting client that runs a successful business?  What's your margins?  I'm surprised that recruiters don't ever offer heavily discounted or free referrals because if they found someone good for me, I'd be convinced of their value and probably use them again and again later on... and probably also make lots of referrals.  Right now, I'm still convinced I can find people on my own, so show me someone I would have never ever found.

     Real estate salespeople?   Tell us what the going rates are.  Tell us the pros and cons of sharing real estate with other companies.  Blog your best deals. 

     Insurance agents?  Well, insurance seems kind of important, but we don't really know.  What do we actually need?  What's a ripoff? You could get a lot of buzz by releasing some really good articles about what things to consider in the lifetime of a startup.

     I have a meeting with a young recruiter next week who's been really persistent and has engaged me in conversation about the market, but after that, I'm not making time for any salespeople who don't provide me and the rest of the community value first.  I want a link to your blog...  not a form letter.  Send me a "Hey check out our firm's article on the current state of the NYC real estate market."  That's all I need.   It's how we communicate with our market and its how you should, too.

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More than 1000 of you got fired today.  You should all come talk to me...   Why?

Well, certainly anyone already in or willing to work in NYC...  because:

1. I started a group of over 1400 up and coming NYC area tech and digital media folks called nextNY.  We're having our 2 year anniversary party.  Come and mingle, network, drink your sorrows away, etc.  In any case, because of my visibility in the group, people tend to come to be a lot looking for positions to fill, running their startup ideas by me, etc. 
   
2. I started a company called Path 101 that helps people figure out what they want to do with their careers.  I've been running mentoring and internship programs for years and always seem to be the unofficial career counselor to everyone around me.  I suppose I can be somewhat thoughtful about career stuff so I'm just happy to chat and help out.
3. Did I mention that I started a company called Path 101 that helps people figure out what they want to do with their careers.  We just raised some angel money from a top tier group of people and we're looking to hire.  So, if you're a developer, designer, or even someone in business development, come chat.
4. My blog has 2400+ subscribers... so if I talk to you, we can't use you, and I post your resume, a fair number of people are going to see it.
5. I'm just a nice, friendly, approachable guy.

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On Friday, I hit four years of blogging.

To be honest, I'm not sure what to say about it. 

For the first time, I sort of feel like marking blogging anniversaries is like marking the day you first started talking to people.

Sure, it's a transformative and pivotal event in your life that changes the way you relate to other people--but imagine the alternative.

I used to say that blogging isn't for everyone.  Now, I think that blogging like I do isn't for everyone.  You don't have to talk about yourself, or blog everyday, or post pictures. 

But, to me, there are a few things about blogging that I just can't see people going without, because blogging is... 

...writing practice, and since most people can't write particularly well or just can always get better, is worth it to build that skill.

...a way for people who share interests to find you.

...a way for you to find others who share interests with you.

...a way to get feedback on your half-baked ideas.

...a way to differentiate yourself in a competitive job environment, because a resume sucks as a means of describing your depth of character, experience, and thoughtfulness.

...a way to sharpen your thinking by forcing yourself to make sense of streams of disconnected thoughts.

...a way to remember where you were and what you were thinking at any given time.

...a low maintenance way for acquaintances to keep up with what you're doing.

...an open, inviting way to communicate that says, "I want people to interact with and engage me."

...a way to contribute your best thinking at the time to the world, instead of keeping it all to yourself, or even worse, behind the locked doors of subscriptions, members only, or just hidden away in library stacks.

So, write about whatever's on your mind.  You shouldn't care about now many people read or how often you post, or even what your is called. 

Just whatever you do, don't stop communicating.  Here's to another four years of all this...

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A couple of months ago, I broke out of using Outlook on my desktop and killed off MS Exchange and I've been loving the results. I use a combo of GMail on the backend, Thunderbird+Lightning+Provider on my desktop, Plaxo (including Win Mobile software) for syncing contacts and GooSync for syncing calendars to my phone. It's all been working pretty well, except that GMail IMAP was losing message bodies left and right on my phone. It was a posted bug and now they seem to have fixed it. So, that leaves the fact that Lightning doesn't do offline calandering as the only buggy part of my experience. I didn't notice it for a while, because I'm pretty rarely offline, but its a real issue. It's also a slight performance issue, as it's always pulling calendars live... should def be caching for that reason if nothing else. If you switch windows, unplug, and then go back to Lightning, your calander will appear empty.

I'm sure that will get done soon enough, but all in all I've been really happy with my experience and have just cancelled my Exchange host.

Snow Park Under Construction at Union Square, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

I guess they're going to have some kind of snowboarding thing over the weekend.

I had a long conversation the other night with an entrepreneur about her product.  While sitting at a bar near the NY Tech Meetup, we brainstormed a slew of new features.

I confessed, though, that none of the ideas I gave her were original. I see as many new ideas and try as many sites as anyone and I'm really good at pattern matching. I can reappropriate useful tools from other sites for relevant situations pretty quickly, making me quite the snappy little regurgitator.

So, if you ever meet with me to talk product, this is what I'm going to suggest you build in: (I think they can almost universally apply to any site.)

1) Rotating cube landing pages - I've written about this before, but Baseball Reference is the most brilliant site on the web, right up there with IMDb.

It's a simple concept:

- Built up a database.

- Structure a limited amout of link dense template pages

- Make it all public.

On BR, you find a baseball player, all the teams he's played on, the rosters for those teams, more players, more stats and teams... player, team, player, year, team, player... click click click... You can go sideways around that site forever. Same with IMDb... movie, actor, movie, director... click click click. So what does your database have? How few templates could you build to expose the whole thing? Sportsvite for example, helps you manage rec sports teams. They have fields, games, teams, players, sports. A public exposure of those templates could get them a lot of traffic, especially with fields. Ever try to Google for directions to a softball field? It's a nightmare. A Sportsvite page with that field, directions, schedule of games, teams that have played there, photos from games, and some hooks to sign up for Sportsvite would quickly rank pretty high. You could then click through to the sports played, the teams, even the localities.

2) The selfish data sucking helper tool - Hubspot created a brilliant lead gen tool for themselves and others with its Website Grader. You submit your website, it grades you on various SEO stats and requirements, and then gives you the option to save a report by giving your e-mail. Not only is it a pretty useful tool, but its going to be great leadgen for their sales team.

The key here is that if you want data, you need to provide something useful first...and for your first user if you're a social site, it's not going to be intros to relevent other users. That's why del.icio.us and Flickr worked so well. They both worked just fine as tools for yourself, so you didn't mind that you were also contributing tag data. So what kind of stats and info could you give to your first user that gets them to handover valuable data to you?  User #1 has to have something useful to do, and calculation/discovery tools that ask for a user's data are a great way to fill your empty database while still providing value.

3) Kiss the ring management tools for groups - Angelsoft is software that helps angel groups manage their deal flow.  The company could have just as easily published an open website whereby companies post their own financing needs and angels just go searching.  That would have eliminated the need for angel groups, many of which survive through paid membership. 

Why not do that? 

Well, first of all, creating direct to consumer businesses on the web are hard.  It's hard to generate traffic.  Plus, you'd piss off a lot of angel groups who would badmouth you by trying to get in on their gig.  But, if you can build something useful for existing powerholders in your space, people who already have traffic, it may be better off than going out on your own and everyone wins.  The key is if you can piggyback off groups like this and still somehow leverage your own business to be disruptive. 

I'm experiencing that in Path 101,  where rather than compete with career planning offices in colleges, we'll most likely build some tools for them to use to make their lives easier.  This way, they're more likely than not to promote us as well.  Still, I'm not depending on them either.

4) Crawled data - If you can find a way to gather data that's already out there to pre-populate your website, it's a highly cost-efficient way to build your business.  Otherwise, you often wind up building big empty databases. Google does it with local reviews.  I don't think very many people would care to put reviews into a Google database, but there's nothing stopping Google from just crawling reviews it finds on Citysearch and other similar sites 

This way, again, you have something to show user #1, instead of 100% relying on your users to build your business for you

5) Revolving e-mail door for data - Creating user generated content sites depends on the ease of being able to get content into the system.  One of my favorite ways of doing this is to rely on e-mail.  Contrary to narrowminded belief, e-mail is not dead. 

In fact, more and more people are getting smartphones so they can be connected to their e-mail 24/7.  Sites that take advantage of easy ways to add content via e-mail will benefit from this trend. Disqus, for example, now allows me to respond to comments posted on my blog, and post them up on the web, 100% over e-mail.  They've gotten past the need to force everyone to visit their posting page, because they realize that the value is in the data.  The more people comment the more useful the service gets for everyone, so allowing comments to get responded to more easily by just letting me post by e-mail is brilliant. 

6) People like me - People like me can be a simple feature or a hard one... it all depends on how many PhD you want working on it.  I'd be very interested in seeing people like me across many of the sites I visit, and I think last.fm does it best.  (Amazon shows me what people like me bought, but not who those people are.) 

I have friends on last.fm, but I don't get much value out of them because they don't listen to the same music that I do.  However, my "neighbors" are awesome.  It's a totally passive feature and I didn't have to do anything to get a list of people with similar music tastes for me to explore, friend if I want to... that's what social should be about. 

I want that on Twitter.  Do some text analysis.  Who twits about the same stuff that I do?   How about on Newsgator?  Who reads what I do?  Anytime you have a lot of data, you can instantly make a site more social, without all the fuss of "friending" by showing me people like me.

7) Temporary accounts - Path 101 had a great meeting with David from Tumblr about integration.  It was pretty obvious that he's had this in his mind for a while--how can he make his site friendly for partnering?   

People who have intense registration processes often find it difficult to create partnerships.  Who owns this data?  Will you pass it to me?  Is a partner account a real account?  Whose logo will they see?  It's completely stupid because no one really "owns" the user anyway.  You want to own data, not users. 

As long as you get data back, you should do all the white label partnerships you can (unless perhaps you're building a network tool that just would splinter an audience and degrade a product).  In order to do that, you need to develop a way for your system to work without a full registration. 

What's the least amount of data you need to run an account for someone?  Answer: a single unique identifier and a way for a partner to authenticate their sign-in.  That's it... no name, age, birthday, zip, etc...    If you can get those from a partner, great... if not, now you have more users and more behavioral data (plus all the content) and you should be able to monetize that.    

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Entrepreneur 2's company got bought by a big Bay Area tech company a few years ago:

Entrepreneur 1: So, how long you in for?
Entrepreneur 2: Two years, two months, three days...
Entrepreneur 1: Ummm... I meant in New York...at the conferece. How long are you here in New York for?
Entrepreneur 2: Oh...leaving Sunday.

Rock the vote, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Final tally... One Republican (does Mayor Mike even count?) one conservative and three Democrats.

If you can code your way out of a hat, you have a job right now.  You're also probably getting lots of offers from completely random startups and people you've never heard of--people just randomly searching LinkedIn for "PHP", "AJAX", or "ninja".

Some are offering just equity.

Some are willing to pay a little.

Some are willing to pay a lot.

Some are offering their sister who is "number four prostitute in all of Kazakhstan".  Very nice!

Clearly, you've got your pick.  So how do you choose?  I mean, you're not an idiot.  You know that the advertising sponsored lolcat CRM Facebook app doesn't have legs, but there are a couple of things that sound like they could work. Still, you're not a marketing expert or finance major, so, even if you just cut the list down to "interesting technical challenges and things I'd like to work on", you've still got a bunch left.  How are you supposed to figure out what might still be around in a year?

I get sent business plans and ideas left and right--sometimes to evaluate because I worked at a venture capital firm, other times because people hope I'll send it on to said venture capital firm.  I also had to to evaluate a lot of companies when I left my last job, before I started Path 101, because I had a lot of great offers.  So, I came up with a short list of criteria for choosing my next company that I think would be helpful to developers who have their choice of startup opportunity.

First, is this a viable concern?  In other words, is this company going to be around in a year?  As cool an idea as something may seem, if there isn't some kind of money coming into this business, how long are they going to stay alive?

"Build and raise money" right?

Raising money isn't easy.  VCs and even angels see thousands of deals a year.  The chances of getting a company funded are very slim, and just because an investor says "they're interested" that doesn't mean anything.  In fact, I'd be willing to make the argument that since it's relatively easy to get a demo product out, that a REALLY interested investor who believes in the team should be willing to fund a company even before the alpha version of the product is out.  It's going to change over time anyway and you need to bet on the team's ability to iterate, so if there isn't SOME money in the company, either from the founders or angels or somebody, I'd steer clear.

What are they willing to give you?  One of my BIGGEST pet peeves are businesspeople who overestimate their value to a company.  Look, I had the idea for Path 101.  We raised 350k basically based off my relationships.  I'm the one with the experience in our niche.  And what are we worth without Alex, the CTO?

Jack Squat. 

That's why we're equal partners.  So if you've got a team of four businesspeople who are hogging up all the equity and they want to give you only a crumb, steer clear.  You're building the site...  creating the experience.  Where would they be without you?

ON THE OTHER HAND, don't underestimate the value of relevant experience either.  I see a lot of two developer teams that have zero industry experience whatsoever.  That's great if you want to flip to a big competitor for beer money, but if you want to be a part of a company that makes a huge dent in a market and changes the way people conduct business, then you need someone with experience and connections to make it happen.  How are you getting into your best business development relationships?  LinkedIn or are you actually getting real recommendations from people who know the team well?  It's too easy to just build something and think you have a business.  A business fits in within an industry--it isn't just technology.  It creates value for stakeholders--enough value for the right stakeholders.  Take the music industry.  Just because you can do something nifty with MP3 playlists doesn't necessarily mean you have a viable business, especially since big lables can be a minefield.  Step too far to the left and, as John Madden says, "Boom!"

Is the market big enough?  Do you have to bet on lots of people doing things they've never done before for this to be successful?  Do you know anyone without a computer science degree that would even understand this thing?  Go ask 10 of your non-tech friends and see what they think of it.

And finally... how dedicated is the team to this idea?   Do they live it?  Is this just a neat idea they came up with while they were bored one day or has everything they've done in their career and their life led up to this moment of creating a business?  Do they embody this business?  This might sound like overkill and a little hokey, but trust me, when you're still months away from a big turning point, and you're out of money, and its going to take some sleeping on couches and dipping into 401k plans to keeps something alive, you better hope that the founding team thinks its more than just a good idea...

....it better be THE idea.

Any other tests for programmers to find the right startup?

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All I know is, when I saw this catch, I thought of one thing: Endy Chavez.

Back in the World Series, the Mets' Endy Chavez made one of the most unbelievable gamesaving catches I've ever seen.  It was the kind of catch that was supposed to be a sign that things were going there way, only it never happend.

When David Tyree made this catch...  squeezing the ball against his helmet and then holding on behind his head as he fell to the crowd, I just thought of Chavez.

This was the catch that meant the Giants were going to score...  I just hoped the Giants were going to be able to follow through on what was clearly a little help from points unknown.

All I know is, the Giants are Super Bowl champs, and Eli Manning led them there.

When I was 11, I watched Scott Norwood miss a field goal.  Coulda.  Shoulda.  Last night, the Patriots had plenty of opportunities.  Coulda.  Shoulda.

Only one thing matters now.

The Giants were the last team standing and the Patriots had a very fine year at 18-1.

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@jack, @biz I'm not going anywhere... at least not for a long time.  So, don't consider this a threat to go over to Pownce or anything. 

In fact, anyone who threatens to move isn't really thinking properly, because if we all moved to a different service at once, I'm sure we'd experience the same issues. 

But, posting blog posts titled "Happy Happy Joyant" when you've had so many outages lately and your user base has little confidence that you're going to scale for the Superbowl and no confidence that you'll make it through SXSW without a hitch...  its just not the right sentiment.

You guys built a fantastic service and we all love it, but we've all seen how scale problems can take down a business.  (Friendster) And while the service is popular, it's not THAT popular.  Most of your userbase is still pretty technical and it wouldn't really take much more of this before people started leaving en masse.  It's exactly because they're pretty tech savvy that you have a unique opportunity to open up a discussion about your recent problems and engage your userbase.

Let's start a discussion about whether Ruby scales or how you diligence a host.  Is it a matter of just throwing more hardware at the problem or are database and architecture redesigns in order.  If I were Lee Mighdoll, I'd make it a point to blog almost everyday, even a short one, about the problems I'm facing and steps I'm taking to address the issues, so at least people feel like something's getting done.

Take a cue from Six Apart, who experienced serious uptime issues in the past and seems to have gotten over them.  If nothing else, their tone during and immediately after their problems was the right way to go.

The Twitter blog hardly ever provides any information and there's yet to be a discussion of what the scaling issues are or timely accoutns of them.

Here's another post where they Six Apart recapped exactly what happened with one of their outages:

Then they go into a pretty lengthy blow by blow account of what was going on.  People want to know that because they want to feel like something's being done. 

You guys should know that from dealing with your cable or phone companies as a regular consumer.  Waiting in silence for somebody to fix something sucks.  And it sucks even more when the service doesn't level with you about the fact that their are issues. 

"Happy Happy Joyant" just feels like mocking, to be honest, and doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. 

Here's your opportunity to be an "us" company or a "them" company with regards to this issue.  It's a critical point in the life of your young company. 

I'm rooting for you guys to approach it the right way.    

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