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

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

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

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

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

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

I made it up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the worst thinking you can have is incremental thinking--where you go down one path, get stopped by something major, and then do some kind of hacky workaround to get to what you think is your end goal.  Often times, what you wind up with us half a plan or product, and half garbage.   If you don't use roadblocks as opportunities to reexamine the model and first principals from the beginning, then there's a good chance your'e going to wind up with a lot of wasted effort.

I've encountered that several times.  It's so tempting to not want to start from scratch--to see if you can try and mold what you have into the answer, even though you know what needs to be the solution.

Like a lot of other theories, it seems, you can find this in both relationships and technology.  How many times in a bad relationship do people just try and fix one superficial thing--the squeeky wheel as it were--when the extent of their problems start with the fact that they never should have went on date number two. 

It happens in technology all the time--especially when it comes to confusing design problems for technology problems.   When you hear someone say that they can't make a certain technology do something, it's just as often a design problem that started with the very first conception of the idea than it has anything to do that X technology can't scale or doesn't work with Y or whatever.

So, next time you're taking advice, and you're deciding between someone telling you, "We can fix that" versus "That's effed... you need to tear all that out and start from scratch", maybe you shouldn't dismiss the latter so quickly to save a buck or save your sunk cost.

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

more music charts

I've decided to do a triathelon. Training (swim practice, rather) will commence tomorrow apparently, as I seem to have signed up for a 5 mile run. Admittedly, I thought it was a 5k when I agreed to do it, but that's fine. I've done 6 before. Plus, since I'm running with a girl, you know I'll run until my kneecaps bleed.

I really need to clean my apartment.

Tomorrow night I'll look to continue my tradition of playing pool on Thanksgiving. We finish holidays pretty early in my house. One year I called my friend and we were both like, "Whatcha up to? Nothing." He asked if I wanted to do something...I wasn't entirely sure if that was actually allowed. Do people go out? On Thanksgiving...after famiily leaves? We went to the local pool hall and it was packed. Appparently we weren't the only ones with this idea.

Man that kid has a lot of metal in his mouth. His girl is pretty cute, though. I guess she's a value investor.

Kilsy on my iPod. I wish they toured more...or wrote more. I love this girl's voice.

I can't wait for Zog floor hockey. I never really skated well enough to play ice hockey, but I'm a pretty decent goalie on foot. I guess that's kind of lame.

Woman across from me dropped her scarf on the subway car floor. She shook it out as she picked it up...you know, as if crumbs were the only think contaminating that surface.

Links 1-2-3...

Someone sent me something recently. It was really fantastic. I like getting unexpected stuff.

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

It had imagemaps and everything.

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

And now?  It's gone.

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

Instead, my first homepage is gone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

Wasn't this guy in Men In Black?, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Even if he wasn't, I'm still pretty sure he's not from around here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you ever felt like you never realized how much you were capable of, because, simple as it may seem, no one told you along the way? Despite the fact that I went to a magnet school, I never strived to be a leader in high school or to discover the unique imprint I could leave on the world, mostly because I just didn't realize that I could be on the same level as the high achievers.

And yet, somehow we assume the US is going to retain a leadership position in the world over the decades to come, even though we really don't spend much effort at all on leadership training.

Sure, we have lots of leadership problems. The top of every class get special awards, plaques, and wind up on lists, but how many of those students are actually getting the leadership tools they need to impact cities, states, countries, even the whole world?

What's worse, how many are being told they can?

What passes for student leadership these days is often pretty lame. Lead a club that had been on campus for generations. Get elected to the student council and run a new program. This will put you in the top 10% of your school in terms of leadership, but that's a pretty low bar, since we all know most students don't try too hard to be leaders.

The difference between that and being one of the top 30 under 30 years of age in your profession is huge, and most people don't know how to teach or motivate for that. In fact, I'm not sure they even try, because much of that level of achievement involves reaching across institutions and changing the way things are done, something most schools aren't even good at themselves.

Imagine, for a moment, what the top 30 people in your profession under 30 years of age are probably doing. Or the 25 under 25. Maybe your industry actually has that list . Maybe you need to create it. Identifying standout performances could help motivate yourself and others by identifying just how high the bar really is.

Many people don't strive for leadership because they don't want the pressure and responsibility that leadership comes with. What they fail to realize is that it's actually much easier to be a leader than being the low person on the totem pole. Leadership brings with it the flexibiliity to do more on your own terms, and the support of others who follow you who can help lighten the load because they believe in your vision.

So if you're a college student or in your 20's, think about what you need to do to be recognized as one of the top people in your field at such a young age--part of a 30 under 30. If you don't know what that would entail, go ask anyone and everyone that you know who is involved in the industry what it would take.

Publish the answers, strive the the goal, make an impact, because who really wants to ride in the back seat for this lifetime?

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...at least the Giants won, too. Plus, I was due for a shave anyway.

2008-11-21_0057, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

See... even Google knows...

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

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

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

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

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

Not in the least.

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

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

I live for this.

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