Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

Fred Wilson recently wrote about whether or not entrepreneurs need a college education.  He wrote, "Education is critically important. But you don't have to go to school to be educated and if being an entrepreneur is your goal in life, that's even more true."

The other day I was having a discussion with a friend of mine who works in the food business.  She runs a cafe in a high-end, high-visabilty retail store--the flagship location for a very successful business.  I assumed she had a degree, but it turns out that she didn't.  She simply started cooking--went to Rhode Island and studied by working with some of Nantucket's most successful chefs.  She learned how to run a food business firsthand. 

Still, those stories are the exception.  People in most industries expect you to have a degree, and the stats show that you're more successful with that piece of paper than without.

However, the question gets a little trickier when it comes to whether or not you need that piece of paper from an Ivy League school or whether your local state school will do just as well.  Do you need an expensive degree?

Given the rising cost of a college degree and the current economy, more and more students are thinking about what the ROI of their education will be.  Does it really pay up to go to a "better" school?  And what does it even mean for a school to be better? 

If you're going to school with the goal of getting a good job, that would imply that graduates from better schools get better jobs--whether that means more responsibility, more pay, faster progression, or even more happiness.

Unfortunately, no one really tracks this.

US News & World Report tracks statistics like the percentage of professors with terminal degrees and what percent of the alumni base give back.  Given that we know that not all PhDs make the best teachers, and the alumni giving rate is a function of salesmanship of your alumni relations office more than anything else (or performance of your school's basketball team) then can we really count on these kinds of surveys to accurately measure the best schools?  They certainly aren't taking outcome--what happens to someone 1, 5, 10, 20 years after they graduate--into account.

So who knows that?  Anyone with a critical mass of resumes who understands different industries, job titles, etc. would know part of it--but you would also want more information.  Imagine if, after analyzing resumes, you could survey your alumni and ask them if their degree led to their success? 

Imagine students had that information even before they chose their college!

These are the kinds of things we're thinking about at Path 101 and we're looking to work with schools who want to get at the hard facts.  We're building a database of over a million resumes and analyzing careers.  We have a number of schools that have over a few thousand resumes represented in our database already and the results of how those resumes compare to their peers in the same industry are fascinating.

If you work for an alumni organization and you'd like to work with us to understand whether or not you are producing successful alumni, especially relative to your peer institutions, please contact me at charlie@path101.com.

Check out our presentation on this topic:

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

My name is Charlie O'Donnell and I am the Co-Founder & CEO of Path 101, a site being built to help people figure out their careers.  We were recently selected to be the first company to receive money from NYC Seed--so, first off, thanks for your support of that initiative.

I am also the founder of nextNY, a community group of over 2100 local tech and digital media professionals as well as a former analyst at Union Square Ventures.  I also teach entrepreneurship at Fordham University.  In addition,  I am the EIR at ITAC, which has been running FastTrac in NYC for years (and was noticeably and unfortunately absent from recent PR about the city's 11 point plan). 

I've testified twice in front of the City Council in the last two years on how to support entrepreneurship and innovation in NYC.

In 2007, I said...

"If there was one thing I would want to leave off with for all of those who are interested in supporting the technology community in New York City, I'll tell you simply to join it...Come to the a nextNY gathering, join our listserv, or a New York Tech Meetup.  Start reading the blogs of local entrepreneurs and blogging yourselves.  Get off the email newsletters and get on RSS feeds.  Join LinkedIn.  If you don't use the same tools as the technology community and show up to our events (instead of just inviting us to yours), you are never going to be looked upon as a source of active support and your programs will fail to get traction. "

In 2008, I said...

"More than anything else, though, I think it's important that our local government--the individuals--lead by example and participate in the local technology community.  The local community is hyper connected through blogging, social networking sites, and a quirky but rapidly growing service called Twitter that ties people together one 140 character short form message at a time.  There are currently almost 2000 up and coming technology and digital media professionals on the nextNY listserv--are any of you on it?   Sure, it's kind of geeky in it's content, but you can set it to provide a daily digest.   If you're not on it, and can't spare the time to read the one daily digest e-mail of the group's activities, I'm not exactly sure how you're really going to be able to be supportive of the local tech community.  Communities are growing organically on these sites--like the 500+ people who have attached themselves to the Shake Shack Twitter account, mostly local tech folks, in order to navigate the long lines at our favorite local food establishment.   These communities are growing largely without the participation of local government leaders.  How many of you have a blog on your own websites that gets at least one posting a week, or a social networking profile that you yourself actually login to with similar frequency?   If you're not doing this, you're really not going to be in the flow of the needs of the local community."

A couple of weeks ago, you put out a press release about your 11 point plan to foster innovation in NYC.  Compared to the kind of community idea generation platform we saw with the Obama campaign and transition, the approach to this didn't seem too... well... innovative.  It certainly wasn't very participatory as only a few people knew it was coming, and honestly, most of the entrepreneurs in the community still don't know too much about it.  We tend not to read government press releases.  Seems only fair, as few people in government read our blogs.

The other day, I got an invite to a closed door meeting about building a centralized web presence to support entrepreneurship in NYC.  The invitation reminded me that I was not to discuss the contents of the meeting elsewhere--which, as a blogger, just makes me think of the word "muzzle".  For an entrepreneur whose pitch presentation is up on our site for everyone to see, and who fully believes transparency is the way to go, this seems archaic.  (I'm not the only one who believes in transparancy, btw...)

I can't make it, because I'll be at Union Square Ventures' Hacking Education conference, but what's really clear to me is this:

If you're really interested in getting the best possible feedback on what the NYC entrepreneurial community needs to grow, I'd highly suggest participating in the NYC entrepreneurial community... the way actual entrepreneurs do.

Every time I ever meet with city representatives, EDC folks, testify in front of the city counsel, etc... I invite the folks I meet to join the nextNY listserv, come to our events, or to a NY Tech Meetup--to participate in the very community you say you are trying to support.

To my knowledge, no one has ever accepted the invitation.

Don't get me wrong.  I know Mayor Bloomberg is never going to come and sit in on the Tech Meetup, even though he should.  However, there's no excuse for the junior folks in your organizations not to come mix with us.  That was part of my job at Union Square Ventures--to network with the innovation community wherever they were and whenever.  (So, yes, that includes "after work", which has no meaning to an entrepreneur.) 

This Monday is the NY Tech Meetup. There should be EDC, SBS, City Council reps there every month--500+ entrepreneurs meeting up to see innovative new companies. If you're not there, then how will you know how to help this community? If you're answer is "We don't really want to be a part of the community, we just want to ask a small handful of people that may or may not be representative of it" then your efforts are bound to fail.

As for the website, you're You're looking to build what you call "a key missing component to hold together the community in the City"--but the reality is, we've been holding together pretty well. You just don't see it because you're not in the same places, online and offline, as we are.

In the last couple of months, nextNY has had four events for startups--all free, including an event at Sun last week with about 90 people. Three years ago, I started nextNY and we now have 2100+ members, around two third of which work for startups of less than 10 people. We
average about an event a month and lately even more than that. Last week's topic: Understanding tech if you're a business person with a startup idea. We had two experienced startup CTOs, two CEOs and two tech consultants, as well as representatives from Sun.

NYC Entrepreneurs are regularly interacting in existing digital spaces--the nextNY listserv, Twitter, through blogging. That's how all these people found out about the event--and remember they weren't techies. These were business people looking to understand tech, and they still found it. I posted it to the NY Tech Meetup listerv, to nextNY, it was on Gary's Guide, and I tweeted it.

Did you know about it?

Are you participating in any of these tools?

If not, honestly, I don't see how you'll ever understand the technology needs of the entrepreneur community or how to even evaluate our feedback. By not using these tools, for all intents and purposes as far as the innovation community is concerned, you're not listening--because that's where we are talking.

How much do you think my interest in talking with people who are not listening is?

This meeting should be a *public* discussion. We should invite anyone and everyone who wants to participate--not to have 500 people each attempt to give separate pieces of advice... but to have a small group discussion that is open for others to watch, and then ask questions and
make suggestions during a certain set aside time.

Allow anyone to take video, blog it, tweet it, what have you... because here's what you'll get:

1) You'll build a brand in the community that shows you're interested in engaging, in touch, and forward thinking.

2) You'll start a conversation... a trackable one where you'll get way more ideas afterwards in the blogs and discussion boards than you could ever get in one meeting.

3) We as the community will be able to see whether or not you're open to our ideas... because the public discourse will make you accountable to follow up on our suggestions or provide reasons why you are not. Otherwise, the only people who will know whether or not their ideas get ignored are the ones in the small group of invitees.

That's the kind of discussion I'd be really interested to participate in... not a closed door meeting where I can't blog about the ideas discussed.

Sincerely,

Charlie O'Donnell

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

Good idea:

"...welcome foreign innovators. Harvard research fellow Vivek Wadhwa reports that immigrants have founded more than half of all Silicon Valley start-ups in the past decade. These immigrant-led, American tech companies employed more than 450,000 workers and grossed $52 billion in 2005. For U.S. companies to employ a highly specialized foreign worker, the employee must hold an H-1B visa, but current law allows for the issuing of only 65,000 H-1B visas per year. The H-1B cap was established to prevent foreigners from taking American jobs, but, in fact, an education gap frequently leaves American candidates less qualified for these positions. Lawmakers could improve the situation all around by removing the cap on H-1B visas while imposing a 10 percent payroll tax above and beyond the benchmark salary for any position being filled by holders of such visas. The proceeds of the payroll tax could be channeled into U.S. reeducation programs. This compromise would bring the best innovators to work here while subsidizing the continued education of American talent."

Bad idea:

"...match funds for venture capital and angel investments. Venture firms and investors need financial incentives to invest in companies that create U.S. jobs. What if firms with credible histories could receive as much as $100 million in federal matching funds if their investments create jobs in the United States?"

Reid Hoffman - Let Start-Ups Bail Us Out - washingtonpost.com

moar funny pictures

Have you seen Skittles.com lately?  It's now an aggregation of Twitter search, Facebook, YouTube, etc...  Instead of pages on Skittles.com, you essentially get pages from other social network sites, about Skittles, but at the Skittles URL. 

Like the Matrix, you can't really be told.  You have to see it for yourself.

People are going to have two reactions to this.

Self proclaimed social media gurus and advertising wizards are having a field day with it.  They're tweeting and blogging about it left and right--causing it to shoot right to the top of the Twitter trending topics list...

...which of course means that, when I go to Skittles.com, I can go see a Twitter search page for Skittles, which is filled with links to Skittles.com... thus creating an infinite loop capable of tearing a hole in the space-time continuum, ending all life as we know it.

Way to go, Agency.com. 

On the other hand, anyone not familiar with Twitter, which is probably most of the 18,000 average monthly visitors that previously came to Skittles.com and who will come to Skittles.com in the future when they hopefully change it into something less half-assed, will be seriously effin' confused.  They will undoubtedly get annoyed, frustrated and leave.

The folks at Agency.com will probably get praised for being so cutting edge, even though the Skittles idea was pretty much a ripoff of the Modernista site.

Instead, they should be burned at the social media stake for promoting everything that's wrong with big companies engaging in social media.

Where do I begin?

1) Instead of reaching out into the community and showing up in our spaces, they took our spaces and brought them back to their site.  Instead of sending traffic to us, they took our stuff and made it all about them.

2) Now their site is all about people talking about their site--which is kind of like bragging, in a way.  How exactly does that make visiting their site a good experience?  I go to Skittles to see who's talking about Skittles?  Is that what I came for?  If I wanted that, it'd go to Twitter search--the version without all this floating Skittles crap on top of it.

3) They didn't make it easy for the mainstream to participate.  When you show up on Skittles.com, it's not obvious to the non-Twitterer WTF is going on and how you get your thoughts on the page at all.

You know what's a really great experience in comparison?  Jelly Belly.  Over 130k monthly vistors and the site has a ton of news, info, virtual tours.  No, it doesn't have a ton of social media juice, but in terms of effectiveness, it's got 10x the normal traffic as Skittles, and, OMG, people are still Twittering about Jelly Belly even without this silly social media publicity stunt of a website.  Best of all, it has tons of info about Jelly Belly, which is exactly what I expect and want when I go to the Jelly Belly corporate site.

Right now, Skittles.com isn't telling me much about the product--at least not anything more than Wikipedia was already telling me.

It isn't telling the stories of it's customers.

It isn't entertaining.  Did you watch the YouTube videos?  They're mind numbingly stupid.

What's the point, other than generating a lot of chatter about the campaign, rather than about the product?

Fail.

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

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

Andrew Chen is asking which startup's collapse will end the Web 2.0 Era?

End the Web 2.0 Era?  Wait... so are we going to ditch open source, go back to high burn rates, long and slow builds, and not focusing on data at all? 

How exciting for Microsoft!

Back in 2005, Tim O'Reilly attached the name "Web 2.0" to a set of emergent technology principals--guidelines for building "lightweight", data-focused, web services. Most of the services that inspired such categorization never consciously decided to be or aspired to be "Web 2.0 companies". That's usually the way evolution happens--natural selection and environmental adoption spits up a set of traits that get adopted through natural selection and some anthropologist comes along later and throws a taxonomy on it--drawing lines across the gray areas almost making them seem intentional.

I guess that's how the intelligent design theory got started.

These companies were simply pushing the edge of what we've come to know as best practices.  They aimed to solve particular sets of problems given current technology capability, cost and penetration. Stewart and Catarina weren't trying to build a Web 2.0 company at Flickr, nor was Joshua at del.icio.us.

In fact, I can't think of any startup where the intention was to "build something Web 2.0". Instead, the thinking was usually, "Wouldn't it be better if you could see the reviews of your friends?" or "Instead of making content, why don't we let our users share their own content" or "Let's just code this up in Rails, put out an alpha, and see what people think of it."

It all just seemed easier/quicker/more efficient to accomplish certain things using these Web 2.0 principals.  It was like that even before Web 2.0 had a name. You just had less people familiar enough with the technologies to apply them to real problems and build solutions until we popularized them with a monniker.

However, from a business perspective, grouping the set of companies whose products exposed these principals is a gross miscategorization.  Spread out across a myriad of uncorrelated industries, some were amazing ideas, many were not (as normally happens with innovation and entrepreneurship). Some had clear business models, others did not--and to confuse things, others had potential business models they chose to forgo to get scale or market share.

Andrew writes, "it turned out that most of these startups didn’t work out as real businesses."

Most startups don't work out as real businesses.  That's because creating something from nothing is hard.  It isn't because they're "Web 2.0" any more than it's because they were using open source technology.  You wouldn't turn around and say that most startups using open source fail and then blame open source, right?  Most startups ultimately don't make it anyway--and it usually has something to do with poor execution, bad management decisions, failure to solve a big enough problem or provide the right solution, etc.

Here's the truth: There never was a Web 2.0 any more than there ever really was a Yugoslavia. You just can't arbitrarily tie things that have very little to do with each other and slap a name on it--expecting it to be cohesive. If I use AJAX and Rails to build a group scheduling application for enterprises, it requires a completely different knowledge base and business accumen to make a Rails+AJAX real estate investment modeler--and no boom or bust in the Web 2.0 space will affect both equally.

At the end of the day, these companies will live and die because of their underlying sector and management execution more than whether "Web 2.0" falls out of favor. Indeed.com is much more correlated to recruiting than it is to Web 2.0.  Zoho needs to execute a good sales strategy for the SMB market rather than it needs to keep up with all the companies reviewed on TechCrunch. Muxtape didn't die because it was a Web 2.0 company. It died because it stepped in the mindfield we know as the music industry without a map.

Reporters and pundits will undoubtedly call the shakeout of companies started '04-'07 the end of Web 2.0, but the reality is that it's really just the end of a bunch of pretty unrelated businesses that had poor value propositions or business models--i.e. par for the course in Startupville. It's hard to be successful--even in good times. Most startups don't make it. 

In the beginning and in the good part of a cycle, the busts don't get the headlines. They're dwarfed by the launches and the fundings. With less fundings, and more companies with their heads down trying to build businesses than wasting their time pitching to TechCrunch, we were bound to hear more of Chicken Little. Since crashes gather more clicks than stories of unrelated individual companies running their course, that's what we have.

Silly bloggers. Web 2.0 can't die. It never existed in the first place.

Great comment on Andrew's post:

"An interesting difference between this wave and the experience we went through in 99-01 is that most of them will not collapse in big ways. Think about watching a 2 story building versus a collapsing old Vegas casino.
1. They are smaller, and even ones that are bigger can operate very small. I wonder what a 200 person Facebook looks like financially.
2. The ad revenue is alot of the time being done with ad networks that did not exist in 99, including Google so there is less fixed costs.
3. I don't know anyone who has bought an EMC box in this wave, infrastructure is much less of a fixed cost
4. Not alot of Oracle licenses that have to be paid up each year anymore either.
5. And most importantly, I think we all learned something last time and things just did not get as crazy in the start up world.
So maybe just like there weren't any big exits, there might not be any massive failures. But I guess we all know there will be some. Who will be the pets.com of Web 2.0 ?"

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

Back in November, NBC Digital head George Kliavkoff left the company, but not without sending out a message to the troops.  In it, he cited that "NBCU has made significant strides in digital" and that he had done his job well enough that there really wasn't a need for him anymore.

After NBC (EDIT: and Fox--bad to assume both owners aren't at fault here) just forced Hulu to yank its content from Boxee--a browser built for TV that sent them 100,000 streams just last week--it reminds me of another "Mission Accomplished" speech. 

Check out the excerpts:

"I believe in my heart that this is a best time to start, run or invest in digital companies..."

Unless of course those digital companies need any content whatsoever.  Then, the practice of sacrificing virgins to the content-owning overlords may prove too costly for startups located in NYC or LA--given the rarity of chaste women in those cities.  I'm enthusiastic, however, about the potential of some Utah-based companies...

"I want it to be clear that my group does not take credit for any of these other than having helped set a tone..."

Don't blame me if this shit didn't stick. 

"...and create a culture where hopefully there was a new focus on, and understanding of, digital."

They totally understand digital.  In fact, some of them can even use it in a sentence. 

"NBCU successfully worked with ISPs and content aggregation partners..."

And by "content aggregation partners", we mean sites we own and not necessarily sites or services we plan to kick squarely in the nuts.

"These accomplishments, and many others, too numerous to mention, are an indication that a digital mindset has in fact taken hold throughout NBCU, in every business unit."

And by "digital mindset", I mean that NBCU employees have all been replaced by soulless robots programmed to do one thing... 

Help aliens destroy the world.

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

I don't code. 

Well, check that...I can muck up the HTML and CSS on my own blog, and I did cut and paste some PHP once, but for all intents and purposes, I don't code.

More importantly, though, is that I don't pretend to know how to code.  I know what I'm capable of and what I am not.

So when I see the pitchdecks and biz dev presentations that techie entrepreneurs send me, or when I ask someone to tell me about their company, I have to smile.  I smile the same way my CTO Alex smiles and shakes his head when someone who has never built anything advocates buzzwords like cloud computing or Ruby on Rails for every project.

Creating a sales plan, a marketing pitch, or PR for brand awareness is like building a service, and tech people are going to be no more successful at it than a business person will be trying to manage a technology build themselves or hacking something together on their own.  Sure, you get the occasional lightning strike exception, like Craig building the original version of Craigslist, but for the most part, every espect of a business requires focus and expertise to do it right.

For some reason though, tech people never seem to admit that they need a businessperson.  I see businesspeople ask for tech all the time to build a great idea but where are the tech people clamoring for a businessperson to market and sell a great product?

Some people think a great product doesn't need to be sold or marketed.  Sure, some things take off in a small community at first, but haven't we learned our Slanket/Snuggie/Freedom Blanket lesson yet?  Same product, but one of those products is making money hand over fist because of savvy marketing.

Crossing the chasm into the mainstream--really hitting that tipping point on usage or revenues or what have you--will be a function of a well thought out and well executed sales and marketing plan.  It's something that a lot of startups don't take seriously enough--until they're scrambling for users before their money runs out.  If you're asking the intern or the entry level marketing associate to drive your business forward, it's too late.

If you're in NYC this Thursday night, you should definitely check out Mark LaRosa and Jeff Stewart's nextNY presentation on Jumpstarting Sales at a Startup.  They're two sales experts and have helped a number of startups.  If you've got something to sell or are already selling something, this is a must-attend!

Long eyelashes and a long thin smile...pointed nose just like the guy she's with. He's in a dusty Yankee cap. They are both too casually dressed to still be single. I can't see her hand but they must be married. My view is blocked by the baby carriage turned towards them, awning and plastic weatherproofing raised to expose the baby in pink. It belongs to the woman next to them.

They are making funny faces at the baby. I can only see an arm poking out the side--tiny fingers pointing. Mom was a tattoo on her hand and a ring under her bottom lip--just a stud. She has big star earrings. The couple is chatting between themselves now. She has pulled down the hood of her coat. She has a single blonde streak across her otherwise brunette hair. They're nuzzling and he's kissing the top of her head as she buries it in his chest.

She's back to the baby now...and back to him. She makes a comment and he responds with a kiss. I can't hear because Alphaville is playing Forever Young in my ears.

Mom is tired. She yawns. She has a small piece of rolling luggage with her next to the carriage. The baby has thrown something on the floor. She pushes the carriage back to find it, exposing yellow leather boots.

The woman in the couple next to them is tapping the Yankee cap with her arm outstretched behind her against the subway car window. Her nail polish is very dark--almost black but not quite. Her nails are short.

The baby has an Elmo. I yawn myself and my eyes tear up as they always do when I yawn. The couple exits at Pacific Street. Elmo is dancing now--in rhythm with mom's arm. I can see the baby in the reflection of the subway door window. I didn't realize that before. Mom leans back. She seems a bit pregnant actually, but it could be her coat. Oh. Definitely not her coat.

Google reads your e-mail, you know. 

And Tacoda was tracking you based on your cookies.

And the government can wiretap your phone if they think you're a bad guy.

Remember when Facebook told everyone what I bought?

I hate to break it to most of you...  but 99.999% of the people in the world really don't care about this stuff. 

I mean, sure if you ask them in a survey, they'll care--but realistically, we have bigger things to worry about.  When Facebook shot themselves in the face with Beacon, most of the students taking my college business class hadn't even heard about it.

Facebook recently updated its TOS to give it the rights to stuff you upload, even after you leave, and people started flipping out.  

Someone wrote on Twitter that they were concerned that Facebook could relicense photos of their kids.  Really?  And why on earth would Facebook do that?  Is there a big potential revenue stream there for them?  I have a feeling there isn't much of a market for photos of your kids if you're not Brangelina.

So... Where's that rank on your concern scale relative to... um... let's say...  how you're going to pay for that kid's college tuition when the cost of education in this country outpaces inflation by 2:1?  Hell, I'm worried about that, and I don't even have kids.

Let's view all this stuff under the microscope of, "What can actually hurt me?"

In terms of consumer privacy, where's the relative concern over the credit report industry?  Whether I get an auto loan or a mortgage is based on information I can't check on everyday without paying for it that I also have little to no control over.  Nor can I add anything positive about myself, like references.  *That's* concerning. 

Facebook photos?  Like most people with half a brain, I don't post photos that I really care about that much on Facebook.  Any photo of me on the web could turn up on the front page of the NYT and I wouldn't really be that concerned about it--they're not worse than anyone else's photos.  And also like most people, I don't plan on eliminating my Facebook profile.  Hell, we forget, but most of us in our late 20's still have Friendster profiles!  Friendster!

As time marches on, having a presence on the web is becoming more the norm--as is having a mildly embarrassing photo or two around.  It's not the end of the world.  It won't get you fired.  You've still got a lot better chance of getting fired for what you say on the phone to clients, or just flat out underperforming at your job than based on what you post on the web.

And as for what Facebook's going to do with all your stuff--probably nothing.  I highly doubt, if I delete my Facebook account, I'm suddenly going to see all my photos being sold on some stock photo site somewhere--or some remnant version of my account that I can't get rid of.  The fact of the matter is, companies don't really fare well when they do things that piss off a bunch of people--so don't expect much abhorrent behavior from Big Brother if for no other reason than it just don't make a lot of business sense.

Now, if you're an artist and content creation is the way your feed yourself, then perhaps you need to worry about this, but for most of us, I highly doubt our day to day lives will be impacted at all--save for the fact that we'll have to read all our favorite echo chamber tech bloggers debate about it until Apple makes a new product announcement or Arrington returns from walking the earth like Caine in Kung Fu.