Likes & Launch
Month
Working with the USV portfolio means I get to meet a lot of outstanding candidates looking to join one of our portfolio companies. Here are a few characteristics I’ve found to distinguish the great candidates:
Curious
You need to be curious to create things that never existed. You don’t necessarily have to be curious about something related to the job you’re taking on, but you have to have curiosity for something.
What do you love? If you can’t think of anything, it will be hard to build a product out of love. You have to understand it to get better at building it.
Show Hustle Now, this is not just, “I got one ‘no’ so I’m going to give up.” That’s persistence, but hustle is more that that. Do your research, put your heart into it, cater to that company that has an open position, then don’t stop at one “no”. Understand what they need and work to become the person the company needs. This is not, let me send my cookie cutter resume to every startup (even when they’re not hiring). Do the work to understand what you’re applying to and why it would be a good fit. There are other candidates doing this, some with outstanding backgrounds too. Don’t get lazy where it’s important. Do the work. Be Smart Being smart is beyond just intelligence, it’s working to raise your knowledge, not just what you’ve been given. Logic works. Learning works. Do your research. What don’t you know? What aren’t you good at? Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, understand your own. Then be smart enough to push to the edge of your potential. See what exists there. Level UpIf I hear about a great new app, I immediately download it to check it out. This leads to two outcomes: discovery of a great app that I will continue to use for a long period of time that slowly creeps closer to my home screen or an orphaned app that was opened one time and then filed out of the way until I need more space and delete it.
According to Fortune Tech, I’m not alone.
“The rate at which web users consume and discard new apps is accelerating. Proof of that is clear: Chatroulette was popular for around nine months before users lost interest in its often-lewd content. Turntable.fm, which exploded in the summer of 2011, peaked that fall before people tired of its novelty interface. It was popular for long enough to raise $7 million in venture funding before finally shutting down late last year. Draw Something, a game which took off in early 2012, climbed the App Store rankings for just six weeks before Zynga (ZNGA) acquired its parent company, OMGPop, for $200 million. Almost immediately after the deal, the app began losing users. Recent viral hits which the jury is still out on include Snapchat, Vine, and Frontback, a photo-sharing app which gained traction over the summer but has been quiet since. The moral is: The majority of viral apps and companies have ended up as losers."
On my desktop it’s very different. I can save applications or files in what seems like infinite space, so there is less need to discard things often.
Phone capacity has a different constraint than the web never had. Not only from the development standpoint of the libraries you can ship into app stores for approval, but for the storage footprint on the phone. I’ve take advantage of Dropbox’s mobile sync features for photos but I still feel like space is precious on my phone more so than on my laptop.
I’ve never been a fan of iCloud, perhaps because of my existing membership to Dropbox or early sour experience with ‘sync’ through iTunes, but that’s the supposed promise. Endless space, but the price can get hefty to hang onto useless data if you’re paying per GB per month.
If iCloud were free and unlimited, what would change? What would you have on your phone if space weren’t a constraint?
When I visited Budapest and Berlin I had two data heavy apps that kept data cached locally. It worked great while on the move but was dumped when I got back to make room for new apps with unknown utility.
With the web, we were always restricted on speed of information but not limited in which webpages we could visit based on their data needs to run properly. Data was free as long as you had a connection.
With mobile, data hoarding is taxed. If you want to visit 100 different apps, that all need to be downloaded locally for performance, you either need to pay up or narrow down your choices. Only the best apps last, but what makes an app worth keeping?
There will always be space in my phone for utilities: Mail, Kik messenger, DuckDuckGo, Duolingo, Meetup, Sonos. The places I go to transact on a regular basis.
With entertainment apps, I think I’ve been more fickle. Most entertainment apps expect you to put time, content and energy into them but give nothing back. You don’t gain anything from using them. All of the drawings in DrawQuest go there to disappear. Snapchat too. Twitter updates are quickly swept away in the feed. It’s sizzle then burn. Some of these apps were built to avoid the data storage tax, to keep their footprints small on purpose. It’s a feature, not a bug, but how long can they really stick around if they don’t create any lasting value over time?
I could feed DrawQuest, SnapChat and 2048 for 6 months straight and have nothing to look back on. Nothing to show for the time spent. Just an app that looks exactly the same as the first day I downloaded it. So switching costs to a new entertainment app are easier.
If more apps were built to progress you over time, maybe their life as a top app wouldn’t fade so quickly. Even CandyCrush had lasting impact because you lose all forward progress if you delete the app. It may be challenging for a UGC app to build that progress over time when it would require more data on the users phone. Those committed would have to give up storage from something else to get there.
How different would the app ecosystem look if phones had 1TB drives and apps could ship up to 1GB of data? Would apps still go viral and fade? Would we hoard more? Or would we just wait longer for our apps to download?
[Props: Article originally found via Timoni who speaks to the impact young users have on driving popularity but not sticking around. Then commented on by Rickwebb who takes a look at the parallels of Hollywood’s Studio model to Facebook’s app constellations.]
(Mailboxes for 20 at a downtown Hacker House. Thanks for the warm welcome Adrienne.)
At 8:30am on Market Street or Mission, you’ll see a number of people hurrying into buildings but no coffee carts selling $2 steaming cups or donuts on display. No line around the block for Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts. The commuters are on their way, unencumbered with hot coffee or an almond croissant. Why would they stop outside when there are baristas brewing Blue Bottle 30 feet from their desk, and at no cost to them? How could a cart or a deli survive when competing with free food and drinks within reach of these hard working (and well paid) Internet workers?
Lots of community in SF is locked inside. Twitter HQ is contained within a tall building in the middle of Market Street. Facebook has a campus accessible only by car or bus. Even smaller companies are holed up in offices away from street view. From the outside, you would never know there were so many builders inside.
Visiting from New York City, a place that often requires dodging people on sidewalks or hurrying to nab the last empty bench in the park, it feels desolate. Even the neighborhoods at 7pm have stillness about them. This is not a city without people, it’s just they convene out of view.
Campus living
On Tuesday night, I attended an event at one of the Campus houses, a hacker townhouse with 20 bedrooms, two kitchens and a sizable patio. Walking up, I wasn’t sure what to expect. It was a nondescript townhouse on a quiet street. No signs from the outside. No open windows with talk wafting into the streets. I was buzzed in and immediately immersed in a bustling community of people talking, eating, and sharing inside. There were 30+ pairs of shoes by the door and numbered mailboxes in the entryway. Behind one front door was an entire neighborhood of creatives, builders and entrepreneurs.
As rent increases and demand outpaces supply for rentals, community living makes sense. The campus rent is around $1000 per room month, reasonable for a place downtown.
Cheap rent isn’t the only upside. A drone entrepreneur, living in a different hacker house, told me about the freedom community living gave him. He lived in SF for over a year but never in a permanent place. He floated from hacker houses to Airbnbs for weeks at a time. He said he kept few possessions, expect for a motorcycle. It enabled him to move on quickly and to commute from anywhere without the concern of available public transpiration. If he decided he wanted to move across town or to another city, he could decide on a whim. Own nothing, just float.
I could relate this this. I’ve done this myself as a sublet in NYC, Chicago and LA for a few months at a time, just brought a suitcase and found a sublet with furniture included. It helped me decide whether I wanted to choose that neighborhood or another. The difference was, the maximum number of roommates I’ve had at one time is 3 people, not 23. I had acquaintances at each place, not a built in community.
New York City Commons
In New York City, if I wanted to spend time with 23 friends at one time, we’d have to meet at a park, a bar or an office space that had the luxury of all of that room. Small common spaces within NYC apartments (or at least the ones $1000/per month could buy you) limit the amount of community that can be contained behind closed doors. Our personal communities spill onto the streets and public places.
Even office culture can be seen buzzing outside throughout the day. Few companies offer free cafeterias, so entrepreneurs have taken it upon themselves to develop in the commons. More restaurants, food trucks and pop-up street food vendors arrive around business districts. Even small shops that survive on delivery are apparent with delivery bikes momentarily chained up outside office high rises. More demand, more supply is created that benefits everyone who lives in that area.
Businesses are building behind computer screens but their people are fueled by the buzzing city outside their company walls. The ecosystem is easy to see from any street corner.
High Quantity Collisions
Zappos’ CEO Tony Hseih believes “the best things happen when people are running into each other and sharing ideas.” That’s where the ideas live, in people living within the same space. So much so that he’s built all of the Downtown Project on this vision, maximize collisions and accelerate serendipity. More creativity happens between diverse perspectives than in unified ones. To get involved, just start spending time in Downtown Las Vegas, the community is visible in desert daylight.
There is more of a closed commons culture in SF. The mechanism for people being together is there but it’s in protected communities. Like Twitter’s cafeterias, coffee bars and common work spaces or Apple’s mandate of only one set of bathrooms in the center, in order to encouraged people to make eye-contact and make things happen – these are taking the idea of the commons into private networks. Only Twitter employees or Apple employees will be part of that commons. Everything outside of those walls, stays outside.
Open Circuit v Closed Circuit Collisions
Collisions are a good thing, but should they happen in a closed circuit? If you take a private car or bus to your office, eat breakfast, lunch and dinner inside, and only walk from your office door to your private transportation out, are you part of that city? You may spend more time with colleagues but is that enough to create more meaningful creative collisions? Should only company employees collide or should there be more invested in the commons like in Las Vegas & NYC? I think the former may be great in the short term, but the latter is a way to help develop great cities in the long term.
Maybe we should have more hacker houses in New York City to help new creatives float in, even just for a little while. In San Francisco, maybe there should be more public, street-level coffee shops supported by big company employees (even if employees drink free). Giving back to city commons helps the whole city rise.
(Thanks to RunofPlay for the image, with timely football theme.)
The single most important thing to the USV Network is the people who comprise the 50+ companies.There is so much value built within a single team that is only further amplified when those teams get to work with peers one degree away. The knowledge base expands beyond just USV companies because each person in the network brings the expertise from their current company and every company they’ve worked at prior.
We got a snapshot into Amazon’s ‘Bar Raiser’ method during a discussion on hiring great product managers. Thanks to Douglas Hwang, Product Manager at Etsy, who shared a few insights from his time at Amazon. [Disclaimer: These are my notes from the discussion–not straight from the source.]
A core requirement of the Bar Raiser method seems to require internalizing this core idea:
“It is better to accidentally say no to good people than accidentally say yes to bad people.”
Now, this seems easy in principle, but can come under a lot of pressure in a fast growing company. You need an iOS engineer yesterday and your current team is already working through the weekends. Yes, Jason Fried’s Rework said “Hire when it hurts”, but this is beyond that. No, this is still not a good reason to hire an okay candidate.
Let’s look at it this way, hiring a bad candidate comes at a huge cost and hiring the best candidate is the least cost. So what resources are wasted?
Now all of these aren’t deal-breakers, as you grow, you will make bad hires. But the hit to resources will need to be compensated in other ways so just realize you’ll need to overcompensate for morale after a bad hire leaves.
The bar raiser method helps your team be more efficient at the top of funnel (candidates coming in) so that less time gets wasted with bringing on weaker hires.
The hiring process at Amazon can consist up to (and sometimes more) of 7 interviews conducted by 7 different people, with two key decision makers. The first is the Hiring Manager; she will be adding this candidate to her team so she is ultimately responsible for evaluating the candidate for their ability to get the work done. The second key decision maker is the Bar Raiser; who is from a different team and won’t be working directly with the candidate but is responsible for making sure “this person is raising the talent bar at Amazon.” Both decision makers must say ‘yes’ for a candidate to get hired.
The Bar Raiser has an important stake in bringing up the level of talent at the company, which removes a hiring manager’s bias to move quickly to fill a role directly on their team. This method may eliminate candidates who were a fit for the role but wouldn’t find a long-term home in the company.
Does your company have a set method it uses for more efficient hiring?
I’m interested to learn more of what’s worked or hasn’t and at what company size.
The day the Amazon Fire phone came out I just finished “The Everything Store” by Brad Stone. In the last chapter Stone mentions that a phone may be next for Amazon, perhaps even before the book is published. It took a bit longer than that for the phone but it got me thinking about the static nature of books, especially non-fiction.
We’ve moved into this wave of building and collaboration. Yesterday, I wrote about the rise of collaboration KPIs and some of it’s challenges. Today, it’s thinking about how collaboration as a product could move forward or significantly alter some of the industries that haven’t been exposed to it yet. The first one I’d like to take a look at are books.
When thinking about the shifts in social and mobile, there are a few trends that have emerged:
Social v1 : Relationships online
Connecting people to people around content.
Social v2 : Publish to the people
Connecting people creating content to people consuming it.
Social v3 : Build together
Connecting people creating content to people creating content.
Social Books: Getting content into the community
Most publishers have only used Social v1, having other people spread the word about their books, as their entrance into social. They don’t do much to socialize a lot of the content inside of the book.
Kindle has tried to build in sharing features within it’s digital books but it’s still a closed platform. I think they’ve missed the mark on making a book truly social. It’s not easy to share a snippet of a book with your community. The content is locked up, which means people hack around the system: taking screenshots, retyping portions of the book or going through their Amazon Kindle account online to see what they highlighted. There is too much friction to share.
Super Books: Having the community contribute content back
And sharing isn’t just a one way street, that also means those books don’t link out to provide the reader more context about what they’re reading. If you wanted to learn more about a historical event or see a map, you’d have to leave the digital book to find out. There seems like a large opportunity to have the book readers provide links back into the book that make the reading experience greater. Just like Wikipedia allows contributions to make media rich pages.
They also haven’t leveraged the opportunities in Social v2, having authors closely connect with the readers. Wattpad, though more focused on stories than books gets this. Writers publish stories to Wattpad, sometimes even once a week, so that they can connect directly with their readers. Readers can then give instant feedback to the writers on the stories. Traditional publishers leave that to the author to connect off platform with readers.
Iterative Books: Ever evolving content
Book collaborations often happen before the book gets published. Editors work with an author to clean it up or search for errors. But a few eyes aren’t likely as good as the crowd. If I were a reader and I found a typo in a book, there isn’t a way to push that change back to the author so that the next person who downloads that book doesn’t see it.
“The Everything Store” is a great book on Amazon but their history is still being written. I wish the story would continue as new information becomes available, like the release of the Kindle Fire phone that was just mentioned at the end. I’d love to hear about what Stone learned since publishing the book without having to wait until he publishes an entirely new book.
Even if Stone doesn’t have the time to write in new details about Amazon, it’d be great if the author could collaborate with a collective of writers to publish additional chapters to the book over time.
Instead of a single tomb in my kindle app, creating an evolving book that reflects what new information emerges. This is asking a lot of the author and questions the traditional way books are priced, but that’s why it’s ripe for disruption.
Where will this happen
The capability of technology means it’s possible, but the industry hasn’t adopted those ideas. Wikipedia has shown that multi-authored histories or non-fiction entries are possible. Unfortunately, the publishing world sees it as a threat, not as the social innovation that’s missing.
There are innovations happening in this space. Gitbook has taken Github’s collaborative text capabilities and used it to create a platform for authors to sell books. There are some early non-fiction books on the platform but many aren’t charging money. That’s when more publishers take notice, when the revenue makes sense. Hopefully that won’t happen after they stop publishing new books.
Have you ever contributed to a book or thought about writing a book as a collective? Any good tools you’ve seen?
(Photo: Splice in action, source: Billboard.)
Two weeks ago we kicked off the first Product Management Summit of 2014. It’s an event we hold twice a year for a full day to bring together all of the Product managers from the USV Portfolio. The goal of these summits is to provide portfolio peers a place to share best practices, lessons learned and tools that make the biggest impact. Given the diversity of perspectives, I always learn a ton from these events.
As a way to give more insight about each company, we always start the day with introductions and a question. At this event we asked each Product Manager to share one of the KPIs that they are currently focused on.
As you would imagine, most product KPIs revolve around user growth, downloads, content consumed, and revenue growth. Now one KPI that surprised me was from Splice, it was “number of collaborations”.
This makes sense, Splice is a platform that allows music creators to share pieces of music in order to collaborate to make a final song, but it’s the first time I’ve had a company mention collaboration as a KPI.
Now, collaboration is a not a new thing, especially not in music. Many songs on Soundcloud were collaborations between multiple people, they just didn’t happen on the platform. Since Soundcloud isn’t a tool for creation, they wouldn’t measure number of collaborations, only completed songs. Shared works in progress and final products have a home on SoundCloud, but not the process in between.
Building a platform focused on multiple people working together brings up some interesting challenges:
1. Collaboration already happens, why is it a problem to solve?
Most collaborations happen offline. Co-creating in the open is challenging and there aren’t many tools that help make it easier (yet). The Postal Service got their band’s namesake from sending files to each other by mail. Now with digital file sharing, files can be shared in an instant but usually aren’t shared publicly. And even if they are, it requires a purchase of closed software like Abelton on both sides to open or change the file.
2. Collaboration as a digital workflow can be clunky.
If you work on a team of more than 5 people you’ve probably used a tool to collaborate on a project. Whether it was Google docs, Asana or Pivotal Tracker, members of your team likely had to make adjustments to their regular workflows to participate in the collaborative workflow. If everyone isn’t using the same tools, it’s harder to work together than defaulting back to email.
3. Roles and responsibilities are undefined and changing.
If you’ve used a digital collaboration tool with your team there is usually a clear definition of who’s on the team, what they will work on and what the end goal is. With an open collaboration platform, people can collaborate with people they’ve never met. The only unifying incentive would be the final product, but that can be largely undefined until work begins.
4. A social network built on differences.
Facebook and Linkedin, are social networks based on people you know. SoundCloud, Twitter and Wattpad are a social network for people with shared interests. On a collaboration platform, it’s a social network of strangers who have different, but complimentary, skill sets. If everyone was the same, it may not create interesting collaborations. It’s the fact that individuals find people who are different than them that makes it work.
5. User acquisition should come in twos.
For most social networks user acquisition is very much a single player. If you acquire one customer and they start using the product, that is a win. With a collaboration network, you need at least two people. If people were able to collaborate without the platform, why wouldn’t they do that? There isn’t really a ‘single player mode’. You need two people working together to consider it a win.
6. Convert teams but encourage side projects.
There will be existing teams that use a collaboration tool. It might be harder to get those team collaborations on platform because they probably already have an offline workflow to complete tasks together. Github is a great example of a collaborative tool that teams love. Developers get hooked on the tool at work and then expand to use it for themselves to work on personal or open source projects.
7. Skills make the team, acquire talent to fill gaps.
The ideal customer for a collaboration network is someone that has an underutilized skill and wants to collaborate with other people. Or someone who has a project they started that is missing something. They key is to help surface these skills or projects to the network to encourage collaboration. A customer must know what they are good at and how they can contribute. That can be a harder target to hit with user acquisition since it could be very open ended. If the person who started the project already knew someone who could help complete it, they could’ve brought them on.
Closing thoughts:
I’ll be curious to watch as more collaborative companies figure out the best way to grow their collaboration KPIs. From Splice to Scratch, Github to Assembly, the next wave of social is emerging. This time it’s about bringing together strangers with complimentary skill sets, not just shared interests. Where else have you seen this happen?