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Year after year, the US spits out a few million college kids looking for jobs.  The whole recruiting process is built around the idea of matching--that there are enough openings to digest everyone into the workforce and its just a matter of matching the right people to the right positions.

Well, what if there are no openings come this May--literally none.  No job postings.  No on campus interviews.  No job fairs.  This isn't a fantasy.  It's happening right now.  Even the companies that are showing up to job fairs aren't hiring--they're just there for branding. Let's not even talk about the number of people getting laid off everyday.

You know what that makes all these students, and everyone else out there in the job market...

...besides screwed?

Entrepreneurs.

That's when you are when you have a product--yourself--that you are solely responsible for.  You have to discover, target, and pitch your prospects to survive.  It's like a new market where there aren't any established sales channels and you've got to convince your first customer that spending money with you will bear both immediate and future benefit.

This is something few have ever been taught how to do--how to get someone to fight for you in the budget because they really need you.  Anyone can get a job when there's an opening, but can you get a company to create a position for you after they just cut 15% of their staff?

Enter the era of sink or swim--with a newfound focus on taking personal responsibility for outcomes.  I'm seeing two types of people out on the job market right now.  Some people are sitting by the phone waiting for offers or even interviews and other people are getting out there doing the interviewing themselves--informational interviews--and trying to drum up a sale.  I suggested to a young professional last week that they get a blog with their own domain. Then I saw "learning about nameservers" (part of the technical process of getting a custom URL for your blog) in their Twitter account. That person doesn't have to do a lot to convince me that they will make an immediate and positive ROI impact at their next job--and that's the only thing that's going to matter in his economy.

"How are you going to help us make more money than we're spending on you?" is an interview question too few of us are prepping for.  It's not just a matter of having the right answer, but also having the skills to back it up.  Do you know exactly what skills you'd need to have to get fought for in a budget meeting while layoffs are going on? 

Its the same as a piece of advice that David Kidder gave a group of entrepreneurs from nextNY:

"Get in the jetstream of revenue in your space--find out where people are making real money and find a way to get a piece of that."

Thinking about yourself on those terms--how you're going to have a direct impact on your next company's bottom line as a revenue stream, not just a cost center is thinking like an entrepreneur. 

The other think I think jobseekers can borrow from entrepreneurial thinking is that entrepreneurs often form communities to help each other out.  Helping other people with their job searches can build up your social capital and karma (which can come back to help you later), get you thinking about your career in different ways, and also help get your name out there.   Plus, after a while, it can get really tiring doing your own job search and sometimes you need to pull away from the screen for a moment.  Grabbing coffee with a friend who is thinking about their own career is akin to something entrepreneurs do all the time to brainstorm--and can often give both people a host of new and useful ideas.

That's why one of the things we're working on at Path 101 is a career advice network--where people who have jobs and also those looking can reach out to targeted people and ask career questions.  There's really no substitute for the accrued wisdom of someone who has been there.  It's something I encourage my entrepreneurship students to do all the time--to reach out to other people to learn. 

Not to make this too much of a pitch, but creating a people resource that can provide career guidance is an important part of Path 101 and an exciting part of our original vision.  It's something I've strived to create over and over again, through various mentoring programs I started or ran, nextNY, etc.  If you have a moment, I'd love your participation.  You can register here and choose how often you're willing to receive targeted career questions.  The questions will be directed to a number of professionals in a particular industry--so no worries if you can't answer all of them.  You can even ask and answer anonymously if you'd like.  We're trying to build up the advisor base as large and diverse as possible, if you could pass it on to a few people, especially across other industries, that would be amazing. 

At the end of the day, 2009 is going to be a very difficult year for jobseekers and entrepreneurs alike, but it really comes down to two things--helping yourself first and then also making time to help those around you.  Sitting back and waiting for opportunities will leave you far behind.

My kinda player...

By agreeing to a $1.255 million salary Tuesday, closer Heath Bell and the Padres avoided any chance of an arbitration hearing. Salary arbitration can be contentious because the hearing pits club against player, but for Bell it wasn't the anticipated dressing down as much as the dressing up that he wished to avoid. I don't want to go to arbitration because I hear you have to dress up, and I hate dressing up, Bell said before the deal got done. I don't want to wear a coat and tie. My agent wears a coat and tie, and I told him, 'I don't know how you do it. I'd hate to have to wear a coat and tie.'"

Bell, Padres avoid arbitration by agreeing on $1.255 million deal

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People keep talking about the decrease in venture investing, and how the VC financing model is out of whack:

"Because venture funds invest not just in all the wrong places, ignoring clear supply and demand signals - but, worse, in all the wrong and same places. Where one pioneer invests, a slew of imitators follow, and so tremendous amounts of cash are poured into the same business design or market space - ad exchanges, social networks, and blogging/vlogging platforms to name just a few recent fads. That striking homogeneity reflects an almost total lack of strategic imagination by venture players."

- Umair Haque via Kortina.

Umair wrote about this twice--here and here.  Umair's a smart guy, but, like a lot of other people, he keeps blaming this on VCs.  Is it me, or aren't the entrepreneurs the ones who are supposed to be innovating and creating markets, not VCs?  VCs don't innovate.  They fund the innovation of entrepreneurs.  When I hear "lack of innovation", I'd guess there's a problem with the source, not the source of funding.

He piles on with the VC finger pointing:

"Why does President-elect Obama have to invest a likely trillion dollars to renew... auto, energy, healthcare, education, finance, and agricultural industries... Because today's crop of apathetic, risk-averse venture investors didn't."

"How many new industries or markets have venture funds created in the last decade?"

"...tomorrow's sources of advantage remain largely unexplored - because venture investors have been systematically underinvesting in discovering them"

When I hear people complaining about VC's and the venture capital model, my first thought is, "Are there amazing, innovative companies not getting funded because there's something wrong with the VC model?  Is there a viable entrepreneur with a groundbreaking idea who can't get cash for it?  Who??"

Honestly, most people's ideas just aren't that good... and then even if you have a good idea, the chances the you have the means to turn it into a real business is pretty slim.  Frankly, I'm amazed that any profitible new and innovative companies *ever* get build--its not easy.  The idea, though, that such businesses exist, but outside of the scope of what "lemming" VCs tend to invest in is pretty ridiculous.

He keeps bringing up the auto industry, but aren't there a bunch of VCs in Tesla?  Is there reason why that's the only auto startup I know of a function of unwilling VCs or is it a lack of capable entrepreneurs willing, able or interested in starting a car company from scratch?

Umair has never sat on the other side of venture capital deal flow.  Trust me, it isn't pretty.  It's not the VCs that are myopic--it's us entrepreneurs.  We're the problem.  We're the ones coming up with the "me, too!" businesses, and before you say, "Well, that's because that's what is getting funded", if you're an entrepreneur who creates businesses based on what you think a VC will fund versus things like value creation, potential for distruption, your own passion, then I'm not really sure how successful an entrepreneur you're likely to be.

Just look at entrepreneurship education in this country.  We spend more time teaching entrepreneurs how to write business plans than we teach them about passion (or teach them how to fuel it) or about the underlying technologies they're supposed to innovate with in the first place.

When I look at stats that say that VC investment is down, I think first about how deal flow is probably down, too.  When the economy turns, the liklihood that someone with a good idea is going to take a risk and jump from their cushy job somewhere goes down, too--understandably so.  I see lots of people complaining about the lack of financing out there, but honestly, I haven't seen one single deal that cannot get financed because VC doors are shut, VCs are risk averse, VCs are stupid, etc.  There are some deals that got financed on previously screwy terms and entrepreneurs might not want to take a round that reflects current market conditions.  That's a different story.  But seriously, where are the amazing ideas that can't get money?

I've hardly seen any innovation in the education space.  This is not a VC problem.  Most of the education ideas I've seen are marketplaces for learning and the most innovation I've seen in learning recently is on YouTube and Slideshare.

The tendency to blame the people with the money in this country is rampant.  We blame the Wall St. collapse on "greedy CEOs" and "predetory lenders".  Seriously?  I don't recall any lenders physically threatening me to try and get me to take their balloon payment/ARM combo loan back in '05 when I bought my condo.  Silly me.  You know what I did?  I made myself a financial model to figure out what my payments would be and made sure I could afford my payments.

Even this Madoff mess.  The fact that people threw the bulk of their savings to one money manager, even though they couldn't explain how he was making money, is ridiculous. 

If anything is going to change in this country, it needs to start with personal responsibility.  Don't invest in things you don't understand.  Don't eat more calories than you can reasonably burn off.  Don't blame VCs for not backing you when your idea isn't particularly innovative or doesn't have potential. 

Umair's posts get quite a fair bit of traffic...  You'd think that he'd be seeing the occasional groundbreakingly innovative entrepreneur with a great idea and he'd post a few times and say, "Like this company... here's my example... great idea, but VC's are too stupid or risk averse to invest in it."

I think it's very telling that the people who complain that VCs don't invest in the right stuff can't put to exactly what ideas they should be investing in. 

"Detroit should take a page out of Pittsburgh's playbook. In the 1980s, the state used local universities to pour funds into technology research. What blossomed was a thriving entrepreneurial community. The largest industries? Computer software, biotechnology, education and health care, all of which have held up well of late.

To be sure, Pittsburgh reinvented itself during a run of prosperity. It didn't happen overnight and it didn't happen without a tremendous amount of federal, state and local support and vision. Skilled workers who couldn't make a living in Pittsburgh moved elsewhere, to thriving cities like Phoenix and Vegas."

L A Z E R O W . COM: Will you be Pittsburgh or will you be Detroit?

So I've been chatting with a lot of local city government folks about ensuring that NYC thrives as an innovation center--and I've yet to hear how any of these plans tie into education at all.  All the governmental types are worried about money and space, but if there are no brains to feed with the money and no brains to put in the spaces, what good will it all do?

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If there are any extremes about my personality, it's my lack of social tolerance.  I don't mean about people's backgrounds or lifestyle choices--I mean personalities and actions.  If I don't want to be somewhere or don't want to be around someone, I have less tolerance than anyone I know for putting up with people I don't particularly care for. 

And that often means I tend to make bigger deals over things that other people don't see the harm in--particularly in relation to the NY tech community.  I'll call out people that I think are self-interested and I don't feel the need to "network" with anyone because I think they can do something for me.  I just try to spend time with people that I actually like, respect, find interesting--which is why I'm never surprised when people compliment me on who I know.  I get a lot of "Hey, I met so and so... they're really great..."  

Yeah... um... that's why I'm friends with them--not because I think they can do something for me.

I'd rather spend the majority of my time with people who have the right motivations and intentions and that I just really really like.  Life's just too short and there's not enough time to feel overly socially obligated to be "friends" with everyone--even the people you feel so-so about.

Contrast my near unwillingness to bite the networking bullet with people I don't care for with my willingness to help--to bend over backwards for--the people I do care about, and you'll get what I imagine to be very contrasting opinions of me depending on who you ask.  Just about everyday, I get at least one instance of someone thanking me for my help or for being nice, and at least one instance of someone saying I'm being mean, grouchy, or unfriendly.  Time and time again, I've been willing to help out entrepreneurs who take the time to actually get to know me, build a relationship, or whose efforts I actually have some relevant knowledge about.

This is how I want it.  It's because I agree with Ayn Rand when she said, "[T]he person who loves everybody and feels at home everywhere is the true hater of mankind. He expects nothing of men, so no form of depravity can outrage him." 

I really love a good number of amazing people in my life, but love and admiration has no meaning if you really think everyone is great in their own way.  Sorry, some people are just taking up space--a net negative on their environment.  Some are dangerous, and others are just distractions and time sinks.  Because of this, I very actively seek out great people to spend my time with, and actively weed out, call out, and refuse to engage with those that add little, no, or negative value.

It's like the a long/short hedge fund.  If you really want to go long on some people--build relationships, engage, spend more time on--then why won't people go short, and cut people off.

Too many of my friends get caught up with people they'd rather avoid, but don't want to make waves or cause trouble.  We're so obsessed with trying not to hurt people's feelings that we're willing to spend disproportionate amounts of time on people that drag us down or just sideways, but definitely not boost us up.  This happens in relationships all the time...and we think there's no cost, until we realize all of the other people, like family, and activities, that we could have otherwise spent time on instead of someone that doesn't make your life more fantastic with every second you spend with them.  It's like TechCrunch.  How many people feel like they have to read it, even though they don't have the least bit of respect for the behavior of the guy behind it? 

Social media magnifies the cumulative effect of this exponentially.  If you're following over 500 people on Twitter, how many amazing people are you not paying enough attention too?  The incremental effort it takes to pay attention to the least additive 20% of your network could add up to a weekly or monthly extra phonecall or personal email to the most amazing people in your life--and that could make a huge difference in your most important relationships. 

If you're running groups and communities, focusing on aggregate numbers versus quality, signal to noise, or engagement can bring down the whole network.  You don't need 100 people to show up to your Meetup--20 fantastic and extremely relevant people will do.  Part of the equation here that makes this work is that word of mouth has never been so fast and so cheap, so what you really want is a strong initial signal, because it will indeed get magnified, and received by right folks in a hyperconnected world. 

2009 is going to need to be a year of focus for people--to spend their limited resources on the things that matter most of them.  I hope that people realize that their time and emotions are some of the most precious resources they have, and that they become a little more discerning about how they spend them.

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"Heart disease, diabetes, prostate cancer, breast cancer and obesity account for 75% of health-care costs, and yet these are largely preventable and even reversible by changing diet and lifestyle."

Deepak Chopra et. al.: 'Alternative' Medicine Is Mainstream - WSJ.com

IMG_2359, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

How do you submit to Cute Overload?

How many of you live in fear of the day when your favorite media sharing service, be it a blog or a photo or video site, sends out the dreaded "Download your crap before Tuesday because  we're shutting down" message?

With monetization of many sites proving somewhat difficult, its only a matter of time before more of them go belly up.

Or what if it's not a belly up--but just a fuckup.  You think your photos are safe at Yahoo?  Given all the upheaval and turnover at Yahoo!, Flickr is nothing short of a PR nightmare waiting to happen. 

"All your photos are gone.  Ooops!"

I feel the same way about Typepad.  It's pretty hard to replace nearly five years of blogposts, and I'm sure there's probably some way I can export them every so often, but that's a pain.

The major flaw is built into the hosted web services model--the hosting is always tied into the service.  I recently rediscovered the awesome editing ability of the Motionbox service--but do I trust they'll be around forever and be a safe place to keep my stuff?  Not so much--and that's the hurdle that a lot of these startups face.  People aren't willing to trust their valuable bits to an unprofitable startup.  Enterprise startups face the same issue, with corporate CIO's telling companies "Sure I'd like to roll you out across the company, but what happens if you guys don't make it."

I'd like to see more companies start reselling me storage at Amazon.  I trust that Amazon, tied to a boring old e-commerce cash cow, will be around.  I'd be more willing to try new media sharing services if I knew that they were all just a layer on top of my existing choice of cloud storage.

As an alternative, how about a service that backs up all of my online media to Amazon automatically.  We already have Mozy for desktop docs, but more and more of our lives are going online.

As it turns out, my friend Rob May is building just that--Lifestream Backup.  The service isn't live yet, but it will be soon.  So if you're concerned about your Flickr photos, Facebook shots, videos, blogposts, etc... Check out their quick survey and sign up to get notified when they're live. 

I want my face on my next cake, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

At my friends' kid's 1st bday party.

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

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