alan wells

“Building a new technology company is really, really hard. In order to do it successfully, you have to sweat the details, worry about all the things that might go wrong, and suffer more than a few sleepless nights (either from working through the night or just worrying through the night). All of those things that you go through—a boiling stomach, lack of sleep, waves of paranoia, and vivid visions of your own demise—turn out to be good things.” – Ben Horowitz

It’s hard to do, but if you get it right, the payoff can be huge. If I were on the team at Apple that designed the iPad, I would consider this post from Fred Wilson to be one of the highest compliments I could receive. Fred’s initial reaction to the iPad was lukewarm at best. After spending some time with it and seeing how the device fit into his home, he said this:

“I like how I feel when I am using the thing.”

Those of us who are early adopters, technology-savvy, or otherwise head of the curve often for get that it’s not about the walled garden but still abundant app ecosystem, the conflict between Apple and Adobe, or the presence or lack of multitasking. It’s about how it makes you feel. And in that respect, it seems as though the iPad is a resounding success. Or at least 2 million people seem to think so.

Fred’s post reminded me of Simon Sinek’s TEDTalk, where he talks about great companies (like Apple) that build brands around meaning:

Just finished reading Tribes, by Seth Godin. Highly reccomended, and certainly provided me with some food for thought.

On imagination:

“Albert Einstein said, ‘Imagination is more important that knowledge.’ Leaders create things that didn’t exist before. They do this by giving the tribe a vison of something that could happen, but hasn’t (yet). You can’t manage without knowledge. You can’t lead without imagination.”

I recently finished reading Geoffrey Moore’s tech marketing classic Crossing the Chasm. After finishing it, I can see why this was such a popular book when it came out in 1991. Coming from a design and ecology background devoid of marketing experience, I appreciated the easy-to-read primer for marketing disruptive technologies. Because of the stage I’m at with the ideas I’m thinking about lately, one of the most helpful sections was The Claim: Passing the Elevator Test. A few notes:

The elevator test: “Can you explain your product in the time it takes to ride up in  an elevator?”

Why it’s a bad sign if you can’t pass the elevator test (pg 152-153):

• Whatever your claim is, it cannot be transmitted by word of mouth.
• Your marketing communications will be all over the map.
• Your R&D will be all over the map.
• You won’t be able to recruit partners and allies.
• You are not likely to get financing from anybody with experience.

• For (target customers – beachhead segment only)
• Who are dissatisfied with (the current market offering)
• Our product is a (new product category)
• That provides (key problem-solving capability)
• Unlike (the product alternative)
• We have assembled (key whole product features for your specific application)

A high concept pitch distills a startup’s vision into a single sentence

…people should already understand the building blocks of the pitch: buses, bombs, Jaws, space, the seven deadly sins, Flickr, Firefox, MMOGs, et cetera. The pitch combines the building blocks by using analogy, synthesis, juxtaposition, combination, whatever; e.g. “Jaws in space.”

“Taking actions to create, grow, maintain or defend markets.”

“Winning at marketing more often than not means being the biggest fish in the pond. If we are very small, then we must search out a very small pond indeed.”

“Cross the chasm by targeting a very specific niche market where you can dominate from the outset, force your competitors out of that market niche, and then use it as a base for broader operations.”

“… because, confronted with the immensity of opportunity represented by a mainstream market, they lose their focus, chasing every opportunity that presents itself, but finding themselves unable to deliver a salable proposition to any true pragmatist buyer.”

“A vertical market with a broken mission-critical process creates an attractive beachhead opportunity… The more serious the problem, the faster the target niche will pull you out of the chasm.”

“Success through subtraction is the key lesson here. And that subtraction was made possible by a vote of confidence in design esthetics and in target marketing. By contrast, the companies who failed had over-designed for their target market because they were hedging their bets.”

“You need to understand that informed intuition, rather than analytical reason, is the most trustworthy decision-making tool to use.”

“Expect that the best scenarios will be ‘whole product challenged’ – if it were easy, someone else would have done it. Indeed, the fact that it is hard will create a barrier to entry in your favor once you have stepped up to the solution.”

“The best sub-segmentation is based on special interest groups within the general community. These typically are very tightly networked and normally form because they have very special problems to solve.”

“…your market alternative helps people identify your target customer (what you have in common) and your compelling reason to buy (where you differentiate). Similarly, your product alternative helps people appreciate your technology leverage (what you have in common) and your niche commitment (where you differentiate). Thus you create the two beacons that triangulate to teach the market your positioning.”

“…market alternatives call out the budget and thus the market category, and product alternatives call out the differentiation.”

“Time to establish a sustainable market position, and not cost or breadth of sales is your critical success factor. You simply cannot afford to lose one day of opportunity, and the only channel that would ever be that responsive to your needs is your own.”

Yesterday I gave a brief talk about web design at the Pixel graphic design club Alumni Day at UC Davis. Here are some of the notes I wrote down when I was thinking about the talk. The slides for the talk are included below, but probably aren’t as meaningful without the verbal component.

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The complexity and reach of the projects I’m working on has increased exponentially since I graduated. But the questions and process to solve the problems are fundamentally the same. Design provides a framework that is rarely taught in schools: a method for creating intelligent solutions to complex problems.

My advice to you: embrace the fact that everything in your life can (and should?) be a design problem. Think beyond graphic design, exhibit design, fashion design. See the world from a more holistic perspective – the world is a place full of complex problems in need of intelligent solutions.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I went to Stanford for their annual entrepreneurship conference, I wished that I could have cloned myself and gone to more sessions. So many of the topics and panelists were relevant to the things I’m interested in right now. I was excited to hear that many of the sessions would be filmed and posted online. The best one I’ve found so far is Jim Goetz, a partner at Sequoia Capital, speaking about writing business plans and pitching VCs. The video isn’t embedable, but is available here.

I watched the video twice, once to listen and once to take notes. My notes are after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

After reading “Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative” by Ken Robinson on and off for the last year, I finally finished the book on a plane flight home from San Diego tonight. Since I’ve spent so long finishing the book, my thoughts on it are biased toward the last few chapters:

“Creativity often comes about by making unusual connections, seeing, analogies, identifying relationships between ideas and processes that were previously not related. This is precisely why some of the most effective creative teams are interdisciplinary.” (pg 188)

This bit comes to me at an interesting time, as two weeks ago I was reading a post on Futuristic Play that discussed models of viral growth in Facebook applications. I was surprised to find graphs and models that were similar to those I worked with when I studied ecology. One important component of the post I was reading about viral growth discussed the difference between growth in an unlimited vs limited market – when growth models account for the 60 million or so user population of Facebook, they change from looking very healthy to showing a scary looking crash. Interesting to me, as these look eerily similar to the concept in ecology known as carrying capacity, and the crash idea similar to what happens when a species or ecosystem surpasses the carrying capacity of it’s environment. The similarities between these two ideas lead me to believe that there might be some useful overlap in models I studied in school as an ecology major and my current interest in social networks and web apps. Hopefully more to come on this in the near future (by hopefully I mean two things: 1) hopefully I’ll make more interesting connections and 2) that I’ll be able to write them down and post the them here). 

One more bit from Out of Our Minds, this time a bit that is applicable to challenges I’m working with at Affinity Labs as we grow from a small startup into a bigger division of Monster Worldwide:

“The most creative periods in the lives of organizations are often in the early stages of its work where there is a rush of excitement about the possibilities to be explored and before the organization itself has settled into fixed institutional structures and routines. Stimulating or reviving the creative impulse in organizations often requires that existing borders be perforated or dissolved so that ides can flow freely between different specialists who are too often kept apart from each other. The point of these collaborations is not for different specialists to impose their own ways of working on each other. It is to benefit from the stimulation of each other’s expertise” (pg 188)

It’s also worth noting that the reason that I started reading this book in the first place was because I watched Ken Robinson’s TEDtalk, which I found to be both entertaining and thought provoking. I include it here for convenience, but I recommend downloading the higher quality MP4 file from TED.

Louis Pasteur, the scientist famous for confirming the germ theory of disease said once said:
"Chance favors the prepared mind."

I’ve been thinking about this idea a lot lately, mostly because I’ve recently acknowledged that the only thing I’m lacking in my aspirations to run my own business is that great idea to base it around. I feel confident with the idea of running my own company, and would start doing so tomorrow, if I had an idea that I felt was worthy of that commitment. Knowing this, the next question is naturally: how do I find this great idea? Perhaps it is just chance, and great ideas are things that wake you at night with a start and force you to write them down before they slip down into the subconscious again. But I’m inclined to agree with Pasteur, and I think that there might be a method.

A few months back, I watched Ray Kurzweil’s TEDTalk. A few days ago, I read an article by Kurzweil in Inc Magazine, and I was reminded of his lecture. Kurzweils’ point that interested me was that certain things in the technology world are very predictable. You may not be able to predict what Google’s stock price will be in two years, but you can very accurately predict how expensive computer processing power is, or how cheap bandwith will be, or how much a gigabyte of storage will be. Furthermore, these trends increase not in a linear way, but in an exponential way.

The implication of this is that things that today seem impossible, prohibitively expensive, or too far ahead of the technology will be possible in the future – and the future is coming sooner than you think. In his words, "With the doubling of price performance each year in every kind of
information technology, you just need to wait a short while to find
that you can have your cake and eat it too."

OK, so what does this have to do with the next big thing? The way I figure it is that the secret to finding the next big thing is being able to recognize what is theoretically possible in today’s world but unfeasible due to financial or technological constraints. Take that idea, look down the road after 2-3 years of exponential growth, and try to see where the idea stands. Since data about bandwidth, processing power, and storage are so accurately predictable, the secret to the next big thing is being able to figure out what we can’t do today but can do three years from now – and then be the first one to do it, and do it well. I think this applies particularly to disruptive technologies – things that really change the rules of the game. In these cases, a certain market application is made possible when the growth of those predictable trends reaches a level that suddenly makes something possible that wasn’t before, in a critical point/threshold kind of model

Examples of this:

- Declining prices, increasing availability of broadband internet, digital camcorders, and consumer-level video editing lead to the YouTube explosion of user generated video content.

- Declining price of computer hard drives and digital video hardware allows the creation of a reasonably priced digital video recorder – say hello to TiVo!

- Decrease in bandwidth costs and increase in processing power make Vonage and other internet telephone services possible.

I’m not saying that coming up  with a great idea is easy – the conceptual connection between recognizing the predictable trends and realizing what (successful) products those trends will make feasible in the future is no small feat. But it’s one step closer to a methodology for identifying these ideas. And I’m convinced that the time I invest in keeping current with tech trends and learning about the bleeding edge of technology is worth the effort for the insight it may give me into the future.

Today I was reminded of what life is like when school work isn’t consuming my every waking moment, and some of my non waking moments (having a nightmare about a web design/CSS problem is a rather unsettling way to wake up). I spent a good portion of today engaged in good conversation with good friends, it it felt very refreshing. Over a late breakfast with two of my friends we touched on cool classes, business ideas, and religion. One of the ideas that came out of our conversation had to do with a recent article in business week about young entrepreneurs. Chuck Branding (25) is working on a business that helps people buy cars by doing all the legwork with finding a dealership and negotiating the price. The most interesting thing to me about his business was that 15% of his customers are "single women who are intimidated by car dealers".

I brought up this fact with my two breakfast companions, both female, and was surprised to hear them say that they would never buy a car without a male there too. I consider both of my friends to be independent, strong women, so I was a little surprised that this was the case, but I think this speaks to a real problem with the car buying process and a place where there’s room for a lot of improvement. And it also reminded me of the importance of seeing the world through other people’s eyes whose perspectives differ from my own – whether that be because of gender, race, nationality, whatever.

The other conversation I had today was with my roommate, and we spoke mostly of relationships with other people – what affects the quality of those relationships and the kind of people we most like to cultivate interactions with. Early in the conversation, I said that I felt there was a sort of x-factor in people that I couldn’t put my finger on, but that it was some rare trait/combination of traits that make someone really interesting to me. My roommate pressed me to try to define this x factor, and over the course of our conversation we came to the following conclusion:

The people that we cultivate relationships with, the people we find most interesting and most pleasurable to be around are those people that allow us to feel comfortable enough with them to share our true selves. These are the people who we share our most personal thoughts with because we know that they are worthy of the trust entailed in sharing those thoughts.

There were many other musings from my day of conversation, but I’ll save those for another post.