How many people did the following search for Obama's speech this morning?

Ariana got all the traffic and the rest of the big boys had nothing to show me.

Amanda hits this one right on the head:

"THE NOT-SO-GOOD - Where are the Developers?

There are few events that involve actually learning how to code and/or build stuff (exceptions here and here). From what I can tell, the best way to lock down job security if you work in print media/traditional advertising is to beef up your knowledge of the digital side. If you’re a content ninja, wouldn’t having a working knowledge of rails, php, python or even wordpress provide a huge advantage?"

It seems like the powers that be are making a bet... that the future of innovation around the web in NYC will be powered by advertising supported content--an economy run on digital pennies.  So much for NYC building the next Google.

There are exactly three entrepreneurs on the 45 person Internet Week Executive Council with companies whose current or future business models are not depending on ad supported content: Caterina Fake from Hunch (I imagine that's going to be a data biz of some kind, Scott from Meetup (subscription), and myself (Path 101 is working on candidate search and self promotion tools.)  In fact, the whole thing is co-sponsored by the Mayor's Office of "Film, Theatre and Broadcasting".  

Is this really where innovation is going to happen--by moving all the broadcast content to the web?   I agree with Amanda--we need more people building, and less people broadcasting.

I dated someone once who tried getting to know me better by going back and reading every single one of my blog posts from day one--back in February 2004.  Whenever she would confuse the events of the present time with something that she read about years ago, I'd say, "No, that was Paralell Charlie."  To her, the near-daily account of my thoughts was backstory--years of context to compliment her realtime experience of me.  Facebook photos work the same way--visual evidence of the rest of the life of this stranger you just shared dinner with.  What's more is that it's all content not curated to impress--at least less so than date banter.  It's the animal in its natural digital habitat--to the extent that their digital self represents their true nature. 

It's certainly better than nothing.  In fact, it's so much better than nothing that sometimes I wonder how anyone ever gets to know anyone who is basically off the grid.   It feels so forced and unnatural.   You have to ask someone about their day and what was on their mind--manually!--instead of just commenting on it directly.  To make plans to hangout, you have to call them.  How obnoxiously disruptive! 

Ever think about introducing yourself on the subway?  Ask them to unplug from their iPod to talk to a stranger in mid-sardine can transport with no ability to Ignore or Block?   Yeah, right.  How would they know who I was if they couldn't Google me?  BTW, exactly what day was it that it became creepier *not* to have a web presence?

The web is so much more casual.  It's timeless and asynchronous.  A real life first date can feel like a race against the clock.   Will you score enough points before to time runs out to stay alive or will you fail to reach the next round?  Maybe you didn't find that shared interest as you were blindly feeling around in the dark of uninformed, non-prestalked meatspace conversation. 

The idea of being judged based on dinner, drinks, or a single pithy pickup line feels almost unfair.  I have a whole body of work--over five years of blogging, two plus years of Tweeting and thousands of Flickr photos.  I'm a person, dammit... look at all these ones and zeros--I have proof!  See, published character depth! 

"How did you meet?"

Nowadays, it goes something like this, "Well, I found her after searching a keyword that I'm interested on Twitter.  I clicked around to her Facebook, saw that she was attractive, seemed to have a nice *normal* group of friends, no upside down keg photos.  I started following her blog and her Twitter.  Then, I waited until I had something genuinely useful and relevent to say--something I wanted to say not something I felt I had to say in the pressure of the moment.  That began a short, but interesting, online conversation and then we decided to take it into the real world.  We had real conversation, over a delicious meal, based on things we already knew about each other.  "

How did we ever meet anyone before the internet?

I had a fascinating conversation with an early/seed stage investor yesterday who basically described the market as follows...

He said that, over the course of all of their deals (over 50), they've done a very good job figuring out what a team will need to do to raise venture capital.  Their investments are basically meant to supply a team with about 9 months of capital to go out and build something and "jump 9 feet", because that's the milestone they see for VC--whatever 9 feet is for that particular comapny.

That had been going pretty well up until deals that were done in the first half of last year--right around the time that Path101.com got it's first angel financing.  Now their companies are coming back into the market, as planned, for financing.  They're reporting that instead of the 9 feet they were training for, they're now being asked to jump 15 feet by the VCs.  Somehow, companies are supposed to get straight from product to revenue--without iteration or even traction in between.

If you're an investor and you can get a Series B company--one with revenue traction--for Series A prices, why would you ever do a Series A?  It's not unfair--it's just good business.

Welcome to raising capital in 2009.  Go straight to Series B or do not pass go.

This investor was basically doubling the size of the rounds he was doing--splitting them with a partner fund--in order to give companies longer runways to actually make it to sustainability.  He described your angel/seed funding like a rocket ship.  You need to decide how big of a fuel tank you need to take you into orbit, because, these days, if you run out before you get there, there's no refueling mid-flight. 

We'll be talking to our board tomorrow and the theme of the conversation is more or less "If financing happens, great, but we're not going to wait around for it."  We're still in conversations with investors, but our product plan has prioritized immediately monetizable features.  We're shooting for 45 days, give or take a few bug fixes here and there, to launch both recruiter and candidate services we can sell.  We've cut our burn pretty low and we're working on some in person job search seminars to help extend the runway.  We're not going to disappear tomorrow, that's for sure--but we want to still be here six months from now and beyond.  That takes a solid plan and some rolled up sleeves.

What am I telling startups now?  Forget raising 250-500k.  If you can raise a million, do it--because the chances of you creating a break-even business on 250k-500k is pretty low.  If you can't raise a million, then only focus on building something that a customer is willing to pay for TODAY.  (That should focus your product roadmap just a bit.)  Anything in between will be a bridge to nowhere. 

UPDATE: Fred wrote this post yesterday about becoming the default behavior for your market--ahead of figuring out how to monetize it.  I think the problem with that thinking is that it basically only gives you one shot.  You're playing startup Russion Roulette when your goal is to become the default activity and you have no Plan B.  At least of you monetize in some way, if it takes you two or three tries to become the default, you have the runway to iterate.  We're all aiming to become the default activity for our consumer base and the service we provide--but it's not always clear how to do that.  Lots of people wanted to be the Google of events--it never happened, but not for lack of trying.  In new markets, it's not always clear what model wins out, and often times the last one standing wins.  It's hard to be the last one standing if you're not making money.  The key is to make money in a way that doesn't hinder your growth. 

In hindsight, I wonder if perhaps we at Union Square Ventures did the world a disservice back in 2005 when we started blogging as a fund--opening the kimono on the world of venture capital and making it seem like it was within arms reach.  Maybe the world was better off when businessplans@venturefund.com was the black hole where your ideas went.

We have a new black hole where all the ideas go today--but this time we call it the economy.

Before all the transparancy, those who really wanted to pursue their ideas, out of necessity, went and got paying customers for their business day one.  If you built a great business, the VCs would find you, but short of that, you didn't have all of these conferences, bootcamps, etc. making you feel like you're just an investor away from the next big thing.

People would tell me, "Oh, you're lucky that you used to work for a venture fund, because you understand what they want."  In hindsight, I don't know about that.  I might have been better off not knowing that venture capital existed, aiming for profits from the beginning--and then just being nicely surprised if some dude shows up at my door with a few million in cash asking to buy a minority stake in my business.

Venture capital is like winning the lottery.  Somebody wins, but statistically, it's not you.  Don't wait for an investor to go build the business.  We're not--not anymore, anyway.

"Facebook has almost finished raising $150 million in capital, in an extraordinary move by the company to buy out shares of hundreds of regular employees. Hundreds of the Palo Alto, Calif.s employees have now toiled at the company for more than two years, and many have worked three to five years. Increasingly, some have become restless, and would like to cash in on the huge value they've created."

Facebook raises $150 million more to cash out employees » VentureBeat

For more than TWO YEARS?!  TWO YEARS?!  TOILED? 

Restless?

Cry me a fucking river!  

Tell that to some family who ran their local Chevy dealer for the last 20 years who just got news this week that they're getting the ax. 

They're the ones who deserve to be a little restless.

I'm sorry, but this is exactly what's wrong with this country and why we got here in this economic mess--people looking for a handout before actually creating any real value.  Facebook has not made a single penny of actual profit.  It has no exit in sight.  They've capitalized themselves and grown to the point where no one is going to acquire them, and they can't go public without some actual cashflow. 

And yet, after just a few years, their employees need to cash out?  Really?

Did they not notice that not only is no one else hiring, but equity payouts are few and far between?  Sure, a few companies got picked up along the way in the Web 2.0 M&A window, but it's not like everyone else in the Valley got fat payouts and they're the only ones without a Porsche in the drive. 

And PS... Most startups don't even have an exit.  Equity is UPSIDE.  It's a risk you take, because you don't know if, when, and how much--and if you wanna see the payout, you stick around and see the company through to an exit.

This is like tips--where instead of tipping for good service, now you're just expected to lop 20% on top of your bill all the time and it's expected. 

It's not like these people have been working for peanuts this whole time either.  I'm sure Facebook is paying their people market rates, so the idea that they need to see their upside already--in this economy, and after just a few years--is astounding. 

Right now, I'm working hard to make sure our company, Path 101, survives past the summer.  My expectation is that it takes at least five if not seven or eight years to build a company.  If anything good happens before that, it's gravy, but I'm in this for the long haul.  If I can work at something I love doing for the next five or six years, I'd consider myself very lucky. 

Trust me, I won't be looking for a cashout after two, especially if we're not making any profit yet. 

And what does that investment memo look like?   I'd like to hear that partnership discussion at the VC firm...

"We're going to need $150 million more in Facebook?"

"For what?  To grow internationally?  To scale?  For bandwidth costs?"

"No... to keep these twentysomethings working for *two years straight* from whining."

And who are these Asian investors and where do I send my Powerpoint?

Recently, Alex and I had one of the best conversations about Path 101 that we've had with an investor so far.  We talked about what we've learned, the space, our approach, etc.  They were extremely thoughtful in terms of where the market is going and how to best take advantage of the opportunity.  We riffed for nearly two hours.

A day or two later, I was talking with a successful startup guy who was going to make a key introduction for us.  I had been nearly tripping over myself in terms of all the potential for value creation we had and the opportunities missed by others.  (I get pretty passionate about this stuff.)  I then asked him about how "pitchy" I should be when talking to this potential new investor.

"The last ten minutes of our conversation--that's what you need to have with him," he said.

That's when I realized how inauthentic and contrived the whole pitch process was.  You'd never find your soulmate, make a friend, or hire someone based on a Powerpoint--so why find someone to invest in your company that way?  Either show your product or just talk to the person--with the latter probably being much more effective in presenting a vision and as a way to get to know you as a person. 

The other thing about a "pitch" is that the tone of the conversation is negative.  Investors are looking for holes--reasons not to invest, because the default is a no.  Conversations don't have a default answer that you have to hurdle over, they're just an exchange.

I don't think enough entrepreneurs get out from behind their desks to talk to the market--to business development partners, to investors, to prospective employees...  to anyone who could give useful product feedback.  I can't tell you how many times I've talked to startups and said, "Oh, you know so and so, right?"  They rarely do... even when it's a no-brainer that they should be talking to a completely obvious partner or investor. 

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

Penelope Trunk is supposed to be some kind of expert on generations and the workplace, but I don't think she could get the following more wrong:

"Do you know who is using social media? Gen X. The average Twitter user is in their 30s. The median age of LinkedIn is 40. The majority of people who are joining Facebook right now are over 35. This is because Gen X wants to meet new people online and reconnect with all the friends they lost along the way. Gen X is using social media to network. "

Actually, the average age of internet users--and the US population in general, is around the mid 30's.  To say that Gen X is doing more networking, and disproportionately so, is just misleading--it's just flat out wrong.  Social networkers pretty much reflect the makeup of the US internet user audience.  Gen X isn't any more networking savvy than any other group.

"Gen Y doesn’t need to. They never lost their connections because they’ve been online since they were ten. They do not need to meet more people online to expand their network because they are native networkers – they have had the tools and the predisposition to use them since before Gen X even knew what Facebook was."

This is just utterly ridiculous.  Gen Y doesn't need to meet more people online to expand their network because they've been online since they were 10?  I don't know about you, but nobody I know basically made all the career connections they ever needed to make between the ages of 10 and 21.  If anything, Gen Y needs the most networking help because they grew up with "Stranger Danger."  They got taught that people they don't know are likely to try to hurt them, so they tend to connect online to people they already know.  Facebook reflects that and it's the reason why Gen Y is so much less likely to use LinkedIn.  On Facebook you connect to your friends, and on LinkedIn you build your professional network, often reaching out to new people.  Getting Gen Y to use LinkedIn is like pulling teeth.  Perhaps Penelope should teach a class of college students over a full semester like I do to get a better sense of how Gen Y really networks online.

"So while Gen X is busy using Twitter to let people know what they are up to and promote the hell out of whatever they are doing, Gen Y is using Twitter for tweetups – meetups set up via Twitter. Which is a way of making genuine friends offline."

So Gen Y does tweetups more than Gen X?  Most tweetups are tied around some kind of professional group--not likely to be attended by a majority of Gen Yers.  Disagree?  Flip through who is actually Tweeting Up right this minute.  On top of that, most people on Twitter aren't really promoting anything.  Sure, the "gurus" and social media mavens are, but by number, most people on Twitter just follow a handful of people they know and just Tweet about their life.

Sherry Mason from Bowdoin College wrote "College kids I work with need coaching on tone & style" and she's absolutely right.  Just because a Gen Yer may have 1000 Facebook friends doesn't make them an expert at networking any more than following 10,000+ people on Twitter does so they follow you back.  (I always thought networking involved listening... I'm sorry, but you can't listen to 10,000+ people at once, even if you're using Tweetdeck.)

Networking involves the following basics, none of which I've found Gen Y to be particularly good at:

• Self awareness: How are people perceiving you?  Gen Yers, because of their lack of experience, don't have a great sense of professionalism and professional appearence.
• Storytelling: How can you package up your experiences, interests, goals into something memorable that others take with them and remember.
• Listening: I don't think any generation is good at this, Gen Y included.
• Outreach: Reaching out to the right people to build relationships--this is where Gen Y majorly falls down because those kids aren't any good at going outside the comfort zone of their own network--unless their mom schedules a playdate for them. 

Gen Y sucks at networking.  Don't let their Facebook friend list fool you.

Someone sent a note to the nextNY list about how he was unemployed and looking to work for a startup--how it was really hard to find something.  He sent a link to a piece he wrote on a site about being unemployed.

This was my response:

"So the one link you send us is on a site about being unemployed?

Why on earth would you market yourself as an unemployed guy?  In your first instance of participation in this group, you cast yourself as laid off and desperate.  Who wants to hire an unemployed person?

No one.

If I showed up to a date and the girl introduces herself by saying, "I've just been going on nothing but first dates and they never work out...   I'm so desperate to find someone" I'd be looking for the door in a heartbeat.

We all want to hire someone who kicks ass at something.  If you do not kick ass at anything, you should at least be in the process of learning how to kick ass at something.  Startups, or frankly any company for that matter, cannot afford to hire a non-asskicking generalist.

Think of it this way...  If you know the media, perhaps you could have spent the last five months doing free PR and marketing for a handful of startups.  You weren't working anyway.  The goal would be to be so good at it that one of those companies can't help but hire you--or some other company would hire you because they noticed how good you were at it--or worst case you'd suck at it but you'd really learn something.

Forget pursuing.  Spend 110% of your time honing some kind of value proposition that you'd be a no-brainer hire for.

Forget the "I'm unemployed" shtick and work on the being awesome without advertising the fact that you are awesome to everyone.  If you do not know what awesomeness is, try and figure out who the top 30 most awesome people in the NY tech scene are and interview them.  Publish the interviews on your blog.  Make a list and publish it.  Here are my suggestions:  David Karp, Anthony Volodkin, Chris Hughes...

And God help you if I see your blog and it's yourname.blogspot.com.  To be awesome, you must splurge for the $13 domain name."

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

"I dont want to be part of some game to become more popular. Im on here to share my views and opinions and discoveries and learn about other peoples fascinating finds. Some of my favorite tumblrs probably have a very low score because they dont kowtow to the lowest common denominator, but instead are frank, intelligent, funny and incredibly unique. They are niche blogs, providing me with insight that I cant find anywhere else on the web, which is THE ONLY REASON IM ON HERE. That, and for my friends and family around the world to keep updated on my life. If you post valuable insight about interesting topics that not EVERYONE cares about, your blog is more valuable to me than the shit people throw up on dashboards hoping something sticks."

The Upsider - Tumblarity goes against the whole reason I started blogging.

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

I was thinking about this after the Fordham lecture and came to the disappointing realization that even though I had tons of experience in the quant modeling/risk analysis space, there isn't any traceable evidence of it on a mass scale. Sure I have clients and colleagues which know this, but that is an incredible small sample. One thing that I realized was that I didn't push very hard to get my name out there mainly because no one put a value to how important it is. Conveying the importance of perceived value would be a good start in any business school program.

I went to a very selective high school--Regis High School in New York City--and from very early on I was intimidated by my peers.  Our class was made up of the top 130 or so students out of nearly 1000 boys who took the test to get in.   I felt like I was #130, particularly at the speech and debate tryouts, where the guys waiting next to me were debating some political topic I wasn't even aware of.  For four years, I basically tried to hangout somewhere in the middle--and the top of the class both in terms of leadership and academics seemed unattainable to me. 

Fast forward four years and after an amazing internship, I felt ready to take on the world.  My time at Fordham was all about leadership.  I started a newspaper, ran clubs, interned, etc.  At the end of my time there, I was selected to be one of the top seven student leaders in my year.

So what changed?

It was a few things for me.  First, I didn't think I was capable of leadership--so why try if you're pretty sure you're going to fail, right?  Second, I never really saw a path to leadership.  I didn't really know where there were opportunities for leadership.  It was only when I got to college that I realized the third point--that you can create your own opportunities for leadership.  I had an idea for a newspaper about business in college and so I just went after it.  I did the research, figured out what I needed to do, and it was easier than I thought.

I'm curious about other people, though. 

If I said that the top people in your field, at your experience level, are active participants professional societies, write popular blogs about your industry, get asked to write articles for magazines and regularly speak on conference panels, that's probably a reasonable estimation of what it means to be on top, right? 

One would assume that such a person in a visible leadership position would basically be able to call their own shots in terms of the direction of their career, right?  If nothing else, they'd certainly be less likely to be laid off.

So, my question is why wouldn't everyone be setting that as a goal?  Of course 99% of people don't take a
look at their own industry and say "I'm want to be the most highly sought after person in this field... be recognized as an expert, and call my own shots."

But why don't they--specifically?

Is it because...

a) It seems like a big risk, because if you try and put yourself out there, you could fall on your face.

b) It seems like an awful lot of work and you don't have a ton of extra time.

c) You feel ok about your career and you don't really see the value in being one of those top people.

d) That seems like a good path, but you really don't know how or where you'd really start on a path like that.

e) Some other reason.

I'm curious...   Ask your friends that you think highly of, but who don't strive for leadership.  Ask yourself.  I really want to identify the causes.  I suspicion is that it's more of an information problem (what to do, where to do it, perception vs reality of taking career risks).

Ask the average venture investor how excited they are about the recruiting space--you'd get more enthusiasm in the waiting room of a dentist's office.  I don't blame them.  There are a million "Me, too!" companies and the space is nearly devoid of innovation. 

How many ways can you smuch a resume against a job post?  Turns out... tons... or really just one, dressed up as tons.  On top of that, there is a severe lack of focus on behalf of the job seeker--and if you're not helping people with their career, just what are you doing? 

Early in 2008, my partner Alex Lines and I finished raising a small angel round and got to work on building a company called Path101.com.  We're a small team working on an innovate approach to career guidance--and we're getting closer and closer to meeting our potential each day, but we're still not there yet. 

The career space still haven't solved really basic problems of helping people find jobs and careers--and each year the potential of the technology pushes forward, the industry falls further and further behind.  The future is coming much faster than the current players are preparing for it. 

It's clear that five to ten years from now--everyone is findable on the web.  Every job is nearly already findable through aggregators like Indeed.com and Simply Hired.  Just like the market specialists on Wall Street who disappeared when electronic trading came into maturity, many of the players adding friction in the middle of this marketplace will go away.  We're seeing this happen on college campuses, where employers are connecting directly with students and visits to career centers are way down.  Sure, there may be some people still finding niches to connect people--but surely a lot less in a hyperconnected, seemless world. 

What we're heading to, like it or not, is a form of electronic trading markets for people--where exactly who you are and what you can do can get instantly mapped to exactly the company and role that makes the most sense for you and your interests.  Unfortunately for most of the existing players--a resume and a job post not the kinds of data infrastructure that will get us there.  A resume doesn't tell you nearly enough about who I am and what I can do, and job post doesn't tell me anything about the path that post leads to or what my experience is likely to be in that position.  That's why all these "eHarmony for jobs" companies are failing to get the job done.  Trying to get everyone in the right place seemlessly with such poor data building blocks would be like trying to run a stock market ticker with refrigerator magnets.

There are all sorts of incentive issues and missteps in the job space.  Here are just a few, as I see them, from both sides.

First, here are five ways job sites fail the job seeker:

1) The job boards like Monster, Careerbuilder, and Hotjobs fail to give job seekers the data they need to make adjustments and navigate opportunities.  How many people already applied to this job?  How does my resume compare to the other applicants?  What were people search for when they found my resume?  How many views did my resume get?  Did anyone even look at it after I sent it in?

2) LinkedIn is masterful at making you think you should be on there, giving you the impression that you'll be networking, and then having you scratch your head as to what the point is.  The problem is that Linkedin has the incentive to get you on, but not have you actually do anything.  Don't take my for it... these people were pretty easy to find on Twitter:

I personally use it a ton, but if everyone used it the way I do, it would be a noisy mess.  Since they broker access to your profile information, the fact that everyone's on it, without really using it, means maximum profits for the company.  Sure, they have a section about using it somewhere on the site, but if they really wanted you to get the most out of it, they'd take you right into, "Ok, so let's start contacting some people."  Instead, they leave you off right after, "Ok, so let's start adding some people."

3)  Got your resume on VisualCV or Emurse?  These resume on the web sites are supposed to help you stand out and get noticed.  Sure, they come up high when you Google your own name--but if someone's searching for your name (most likely you), then they already know you and most likely have your resume.  What about using these sites you actually get found and contacted?

Meet Carol Anderson.  She has her resume on VisualCV--it won an award as one of the best ones out there.  She's a Heathcare Consultant in Fredericksburg, VA.  It says so right on her VisualCV.  Try Googling for "Heathcare Consultant  Fredericksburg, VA".  She doesn't come anywhere.  In fact, you can't even find her until Page 3 of Google search results for Carol Anderson!  Sure, it's a pretty common name, but isn't the point of using one of these profile sites to rise above the rest?  You're certainly not going to rise above the rest on Google--VisualCV only has 9,000 pages on it's site exposed to the search engine.  Either only 9,000 people have created VisualCVs, or the site is keeping all of the people who joined under wraps--certainly not what people who wanted to "STAND OUT!" and get noticed probably want.

Emurse is a bit better, exposing nearly 200,000 profiles to Google.  However, they're not optimized to get you found for much more than searches for your name.  Brian Robertson sure wants you to hire him as a freelance web developer, but good luck finding his Emurse resume in Google searches for "freelance web developer st. charles, missouri" on the first page.  How many could there be? 

4) TheLadders has a great business model...for TheLadders.  You pay monthly to see jobs paying over $100,000.  It doesn't take a genius to figure out what their incentive is--to keep you on the site as long as possible.  If you get hired, you leave and TheLadders loses out on it's revenue.  That's not really the kind of model that makes me feel like a site is trying really hard to get me a job.

5) Jobfox tries to be a lot smarter about matching you to the right opening, but unfortunately they suffer from a classic chicken & egg problem.  The only jobs you can be matched for with Jobfox's highly scientific approach are openings on Jobfox.  In the current economy, those are some pretty slim pickins.  It would be better if candidates could see what positions they would be best for even if there weren't positions open in those areas right away.  At least they'd have a clue where to look--on other sites.  

...and here are five ways job sites fail the recruiter:

1) No site actually understands the full picture of the candidate that the web has to offer versus just aggregating it.  Zoominfo just aggregates everything it thinks it found about you (and some stuff it finds about other people) all in one place.  LinkedIn doesn't understand that even when you don't write "Python" on your profile, someone with a link to their "py.hack" blog and who tags things python in del.icio.us should come up in a search for Python developers. 

2) Search is horrific...everywhere.  Try to find the resume of someone with two years of sales experience with a Chemistry major who worked for a large company in a certain geographic area who can speak Spanish.  This should be a lot easier--and it's why you tend to get spam from recruiters on job boards.  It's not that they want to spam you--they just can't target *and* scale at the same time.

3) No reptuations:  A spammy, underhanded recruiter looks the same as a recruiter who takes the time to get to know candidates and send them relevent stuff.  In nearly every other kind of marketplace, both buyers and sellers have reputations.  Why not in recruiting?  (And no, a few "thumbs up" notes in LinkedIn doesn't count--I'm talking something that says 78% of candidates feel that this recruiters offers are relevent).   

4) We all know that someone updating their LinkedIn profile and adding people is an extremely strong signal that they're packing up to leave their job.  Why not expose this data and let recruiters search on it--maybe even pay a little extra to get out in front of the pack with exclusive access?  Recruiting is falling behind in "real time search" and the "now web".  The whole thing is based not on the blog post that a social media marketer posted just a few minutes ago, but what someone listed on their resume as their job six years ago--and that needs to change.

5) No "soft" data: We search resumes as if candidates like everything they did in the past and want to do it again---even though we know that isn't even close to being accurate, maybe not even half the time.  Doing something simple like asking people if they liked their job would be a huge leap in helping recruiters find people enthusiastic for their offering--not to mention collecting more descreet data about the types of situations they find more satisfying.  Now start laying on things like work values, personality, etc., and for a lot of jobs, you might not even care to see a resume.

Have we solved all of those problems at Path101.com?  Not yet--but we have key data infrastructure in place.  The very philosophy on which we are building out our product and laying out our roadmap is fundamentally about this data-driven, candidate centric future marketplace.

That's one thing that we believe strongly--that unless every single line of code, every business decision, every design choice is made with the jobseeker and their data in mind, you're going to get left far behind.  Imagine creating a "green" car company from scratch versus thinking you can make GM green tomorrow.  It's probably already too late for the existing players, but this market represents a huge business opportunity for anyone that understands that the candidate comes first and depth of data is your business--and the only way you get there is by getting the candidate to want to give it to you because they're getting something useful back.  

What's the last time you got something useful back after submitting your data to Monster.com? 

Exactly. 

How long do you think that lasts?

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

"The Birds and Bees Text Line offers one-on-one exchanges that are private, personal and anonymous. And they can be conducted free of parental scrutiny. That lack of oversight is what galls Bill Brooks, president of the North Carolina Family Policy Council.

"If I couldnt control access to this information, Id turn off the texting service," he said. "When it comes to the Internet, parents are advised to put blockers on their computer and keep it in a central place in the home. But kids can have access to this on their cellphones when theyre away from parental influence and it cant be controlled.""

Teenagers Get Sex Education Via Cellphone - NYTimes.com

IMG_2422, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

75th and Ridge... an ill-advised left turn.