I've been thinking a little bit lately about the NYT and the Kindle, and wondering why you can't just get the newspaper on this increasingly popular device.  Nicholas Carson wrote yesterday about how just giving everyone Kindles would be cheaper than printing and delivering the paper.  Then he wrote:

"Are we trying to say the the New York Times should force all its print subscribers onto the Kindle or else? No. That would kill ad revenues..."

That's when it hit me.  Why on earth doesn't the Kindle have an ad platform?

It's funny because an auther recently asked me about how she could make a little money from distribution of her e-book about careers online, and she said that she had seen some professional development books for students that had been sponsored by companies looking to recruit.   I told her about all the problems with print advertising--the fact that it wasn't measureable at all.

So, if print is going to die because you can't measure the ads and they're not compelling, then why is aren't electronic readers like the Kindle opening up ad platforms?

Imagine that every other NYT article on the Kindle comes with a targeted ad that you have to skip past to read.  That's not so bad... and if you really don't want to see the ads, you can become a subscriber.  The ads would be pretty targeted, because Kindle knows you who are, and knows what else you're reading.  In fact, Amazon knows quite a lot about you and an Amazon ad platform should have a lot of data about you to work with.  They could add the data from their payments system as well. 

This could make Amazon a serious player in the advertising market--a viable threat to Google's market share of ad spend.   Am I missing something here?

"If the intent is to help homeowners, then foreclosure is undoubtedly the best solution. Household balance sheets have been destroyed by taking on too much debt via the purchase of inflated assets. With so little savings, a household with negative equity almost implies negative net worth. Walking away from the mortgage immediately repairs the balance sheet. Credit may be damaged, but homeowners can rebuild it. And by renting something they can afford, instead of the McMansion they cannot, homeowners are most likely to have some money left over each month that they can save toward a down payment on a house they can eventually afford."

Why Be a Nation of Mortgage Slaves? - WSJ.com

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Link:  Can Music Sales Get Any Worse? Just Watch | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD

Let's see...

The music industry was 5 years late in giving consumers the ability to download music legally.

They spend more time suing people who want music than innovating around better delivery.

They shut down anyone who tries to innovate. 

I don't think it's really the economic slowdown that's the real issue here.

Besides, given that they're selling a digital asset, and that word of mouth has never ever been as fast and as cheap, shouldn't they still be making record profits despite 20% off the top?

I was at the GM pension plan when we took a piece of the Time Warner Music buyout.  In the first year, Thomas H. Lee Partners was able to take gobs and gobs of cash out of the business in pure overhead--consolidation of labels, cutting bloated marketing spend.

The music industry, like the auto industry, is going to have to learn to do more with less. 

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Let me make one thing clear.  No one, save for maybe violent criminals or fraudulent corporate CEOs, should ever be stalked or spit on.  That's wrong.

That being said, Mike Arrington's crybaby act is a joke.  

He said his job "isn't much fun anymore" so he's taking time off. 

Mike, I don't know if you realize, but a lot of people's jobs aren't fun at all.  (We're trying to change that with Path 101--sneak preview of new features here!) They work and keep their mouth shut because they feel lucky to have a job in the first place--because over 350,000 people have lost their jobs at Fortune 500 companies alone since November, not to mention the hundreds of thousands more at smaller companies.

Your job is hard because someone spit on you and now you need to take a month off?

Try teaching.  Between 1996 and 2000, 599,000 violent crimes against teachers at school were reported. On average, in each year from 1996 to 2000, about 28 out of every 1,000 teachers were the victims of violent crime at school, and 3 out of every 1,000 were victims of serious violent crime (i.e., rape, sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault).

Violent crime, not spit.

And most teachers don't drive Porsches either...

... or you could be a cop.  In 2008, 140 police officers were killed in the line of duty in the US... and that was way down from normal.

Hell, I mean... who cleans the bathroom at the Techcrunch office?  Whoever it is would no doubt trade their job and salary for yours, spit, death threats, and all--seeing as they probably live in a neighborhood where too many people own guns and carry them--and don't just call around and send letters, nor do their register their guns.

As for the stalking incident that affected your family--that's really frightening, and awful. 

However, it has little to do with your job or the fact that you're a public persona.  According to the National Center For The Victims Of Crime, 1 out of every 12 women will be stalked during her lifetime.  1 out of 45 men will be stalked during his lifetime.  Over one million women, and nearly 380,000 men are stalked annually.   

I'm pretty sure most of these people aren't on the Technorati top bloggers list.  The fact of the matter is, stalkers typically don't go after public figures.  You just happen to be unfortunate enough to have won (or lost) the stalker lottery--but be thankful you have the clout and financial means to protect yourself.  Not everyone can afford $2000/day security.  This woman sure couldn't.

So, while the circumstances of his sabbatical are unfortunate, I'm glad to see him go, and so are a lot of other people. 

Why? 

Because he's an asshole--and everyone knows it.

You see, while the stalking incident is random and unfortunate, the fact that people don't like him--that's pretty much his own fault, not Kara's or Nick's. 

The guy is completely obnoxious and turns legitimate business stories into personal vendettas--whether it's against the tech team at Twitter (hmm...  business model questions aside, Twitter doesn't seem so "amateur" anymore now that they've turned the uptime corner, huh?), overzealous PR professionals, or competing tech conferences.   His professional behavior is that of a schoolyard bully, and funny enough, like most schoolyard bullies, his leave of absence proves one thing:

He can dish it, but he can't take it.

You can't have it both ways, Mike.  Your business *thrives* on controversy.  You've profited from the fame, and like a celebrity who pushes the camera paparazzi away, even though they always *amazingly* seem to know exactly where those celebrities will be, you want the upside but you don't want the risk.

But taking responsibility for downside risk has never been your forte, has it?  Anyone remember Edge.io?   In one year, the company he founded blew through $5 million "according to plan" without any significant traction whatsoever.  His Deadpool post almost made it seem like he was just an angel investor and not the key guy.  That's very different from how it seemed when I was on the receiving end of his pitch and demo back when I was at USV. 

Not surprisingly, it was one of the most kid gloved deadpool posts ever--almost as kidgloved as he treats Seesmic, one of his investments.  When a company with no business model and very little traction raises $12 million, this should be grade A Haterington fodder, but he totally let's them off easy.  "Le Meur says the company isn’t in dire financial trouble yet".  What?  No response to that, Mike?  I'm sorry, but just because you have two years of runway doesn't mean you're not in trouble if that runway ends off a cliff--it's just delaying the inevitable. 

Controversy, conflict, and a generally unprofessional attitude follows Arrington wherever he goes--as does an army of fanboys whose numbers are nothing more than a useless distraction to PR and startup folks alike.  I'm glad to see the distraction gone, hope he doesn't return, and that we can all get back to the business of trying to survive in these difficult times--trying to figure out how to build great things that paying customers, not fanboys, see value in.

In the meantime, if you'd like alternative reading to TechCrunch, I highly suggest checking out Mashable--if for no other reason than the way that Pete Cashmore runs his business.  I talked to Pete at SXSW last year about the culture of Mashable.  He makes sure his team tries to stay above the hate and the controversy, because that's just not the kind of business he wants to run.  Pete's a genuine guy, and while the camera follows him around because he's a helluva lot better looking than his TechCrunch counterpart, he also spends quite a fair bit of flying around making quiet visits to his real friends completely under the radar--something Arrington probably wouldn't understand.

And it's paying off.  You wouldn't know it by Mike's holier-than-thou attitude, but Mashable's traffic and growth is right up there with TechCrunch, despite the fact that it focuses on a narrower vertical.

So it's true...  You can actually be successful and not be an asshole.  How about that? 

So Bush is gone, Arrington is gone...   Maybe 2009 is going to be better than we think!

Incorrectly valuing assets--that's basically what this financial collapse comes down to. All the stuff we thought we had--our houses, mortgages, and all the wacky financial derivatives we layered on top of them--turned out to not be worth that much.

Now that prices have fallen off a cliff, investors are out searching for undervalued assets. There's one asset out there that few people are talking about that is severely undervalued in a bad economy--and its the one thing that has the most potential to get you through 2009 in one piece.

Your body.

It's actually the only asset we ever truly own. Our ownership of most of our other stuff is pretty tenuous--and often highly leveraged, making it a missed payment away from being taken away. Your body, on the other hand, is always yours. In fact, the government even prevents you from selling it.

It is the physical instrument by which we carry out everything that flows through our various digital lifestreams--it is the source of the lifestreams.

This really hit home for me when I found out that a friend of mine and fellow entrepreneur, Tim Marman, told me that he has cancer--fortunately a highly curable form, but still... It made me realize how much I have invested in and depend on my body to carry me through the day--and how much my employees and investors are riding on it, too.

That's why, if there's any one thing I think we need to focus more on over the next year--it's taking care of our physical selves. We're going to need those few extra minutes of lucid thinking a day and that extra spring in our step when we're trying to make a flight to a customer. We can't afford extra sick days, financially and just in terms of meeting ever increasing professional expectations.

Does that mean we all need to run a five minute mile? No, but how about trying to break a 10 minute mile...or just get out and walk a mile?  Unplug and treat your lungs to some fresh air--and maybe have a new idea or two while you're away from the screen.

Additionally, I'm stunned to see anyone--let alone relatively smart people who should know better--smoke nowadays.  To me, taking investor money from people who invested in you and smoking is like taking their money to buy a server and just kicking it once a day...maybe after lunch.  You are an asset just as much as the machines are--and there are much more effective ways of destressing that don't make you smell like you've been eating matches all day. 

For those of you who think that self abuse is part of the deal--no sleep and Ramen make startup happy--start reassessing not only whether or not this is truly sustainable--but how, in ways you might not realize, you're actually doing more harm to your startup than good.  Fuzzy thinking, bad first impressions, missed appointments--when you act like you are duct taped together, then your company appears duct taped together and, not surprisingly, duct tape will be the only think you can afford.

So before you get freaked out over competitor on TechCrunch or writing a marketing plan for the first time in your life, start with priority one--your physical self... and move outward from there.  Look at yourself in the mirror.  Forget about whether your nose is too big or you're losing your hair--just assess whether or not you look well taken care of.  Are you putting as much care into yourself as you are into server optimization?  Sleep well, eat right, exercise, and then try to change the world with AJAX and APIs--don't put the cart before the horse.  

What's one thing that you can do over the next year to optimize your own physical self?

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From the comments section:

middledigit.net | jonathan hopkins » Blog Archive » Snuggie - the blanket with sleeves!

One Response to Snuggie - the blanket with sleeves!

1. January 1st, 2009 at 2:33 am Jennifer Says: Both the SLANKET and the SNUGGIE are guilty of stealing this idea from the owners and original inventors of the FREEDOM BLANKET, Sean & Jennifer Iannuzzi. The FREEDOM BLANKET was out long before these two companies! The Slanket actually purchased a FREEDOM BLANKET months before they started up their business. AND the Snuggie is an EXACT copy of a FREEDOM BLANKET! Now, my question is&Is it fair these two companies are making millions off of someone elses idea that they STOLE?

2. January 27th, 2009 at 5:05 pm Charlie Says: @jennifer The answer is, if they didnt patent it, then yes. Even with a patent, w/o good marketing execution and branding, an idea is nothing. Do you think the Iannuzzis are the first one to sit under a blanket and wish they could stick there hands out? No way. Im sure there are lots of people who have cut holes in their blankets, too. The Snuggie wasnt the first one out, and I guess neither was the Slanket, but they deserve their millions for awesome marketing. I googled Freedom Blanket& first link was a complaint that the Freedom Blanket never arrived. IMO, Sean and Jennifer dont deserve a dime b/c they clearly have no idea how to run a business.

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Looks pretty sah-weet.  Seems like the soundtrack might be pretty good, too.

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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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