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Our first advert

My startup, along with several others incubated at Kellogg's Levy Center, were on show at Kellogg's Alumni Entrepreneurship Conference. Here is an ad that we put together for the occasion. Photo courtesy of Gil at Mobli.

Red, Orange and Green Apples

I was once given some advice, which I am reminded of today. There are three different types of people:

• Red apples: People who think you're crazy. Sometimes they'll even try to convince you to stop doing what you're doing.
• Orange apples: People who seem like they're interested and able to help. They're not sure. But either you, or they, or both of you, think they can help.
• Green applies: People who love what you're doing and want to help.

It's easy to see that you should be running away from the Red apples. What's not so easy to see is that you should also be running away from the Orange apples. You really think there is synergy and want it to work. But too often these Orange apples lead nowhere. When you're in the business of allocating resources at the speed of light, these are resources you should be spending, instead, on more Green apples.

His finest hour

"There comes a special moment in everyone's life; a moment for which that person was born. That special opportunity, when he seizes it, will fulfill his mission-a mission for which he is uniquely qualified. In that moment, he finds greatness. It is his finest hour."

-- Winston Churchill, British prime minister

Winston Churchill was plagued by numerous failures and disasters throughout his life. He was a political outcast within his own party. While others called for appeasement of the rising threat of Hitler in the 1930s, he warned of the dangers of this strategy. His individualism left him alone and without allies and followers. He was disliked by many in his political party.

Then, almost quite suddenly, in July 1940 everyone in his party, and Britain, turned and stood solidly behind him. Churchill's accumulated warnings about Hitler had come true. Churchill became Prime Minister of Britain, and then 'savior of Western civilization'.

Churchill's ascension to Prime Minister was a miracle. He could not have known that what he had been standing for, for many years, unpopular as it was, would be what made him the most certain candidate when circumstances changed and appeasement was found to be unsatisfactory.

Eric Lefkofsky's Three Quotes

Eric Lefkofsky, of Groupon and Lightbank, was at Kellogg, and highlighted some his experiences from his life to date. A summary of his talk can be found here. The talk was anchored around these three quotes:

"Business is like a multidimensional probabilistic chessboard. The rules aren't set, and the same moves don't always make you win. A lot of people can be really good in a set-piece battle; my biggest differentiating skill is I can invent new pieces."

-- Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal, head of SpaceX and Tesla Motors.

"I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing."

-- Ronald Reagen, First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981

"From those to whom much is given, much is expected."

-- Mary Gates, Bill's mother, in a letter to Melinda before she married Bill

Two-sided Markets

These days, investors are in love with two-sided markets. Eisenmann, Parker, and Van Alstyne explain why they are so interesting, and some strategies that need consideration with respect to them.

If you listed the blockbuster offerings that have redefined the global business land- scape, you’d find that many tie together two distinct groups of users. HMOs, for instance, link patients to health-care providers. Search engines join Web surfers and advertisers. 

When successful, these platforms catalyze a virtuous cycle: More demand from one user group spurs more from the other. For example, the more video games developers (one user group) create for the Microsoft X-Box platform, the more players (the other user group) snap up the latest X-Box. Meanwhile, the more players who use X-Box, the more developers willing to pay Microsoft a licens- ing fee to produce new games. And as user bases grow, margins fatten.

Getting close to wrapping up the quarter

This week is pretty tough. We're in the 9th week of our final quarter at Kellogg.

Many of us second year students are looking to the Summer and beyond, and have our minds on issues such as finding new accommodation, arranging furniture moves and finding that new life. Meanwhile, everyone is adding social events to the calendar, with final farewell dinners and events. With all this going on, we're almost forgetting that courses are wrapping up and final projects are becoming due.

If there was ever a time that I'd wish that we didn't have customers to serve, this might be it. But it's not. That's because, before wishing for that, I'd wish I didn't have school to think about as well. This particular wish will, of course, soon come true.

Without uncertainty, it's unsatisfying

"Without the element of uncertainty, the bringing off of even the greatest business triumph would be dull, routine and eminently unsatisfying."

-- J. Paul Getty, industrialist

Light up the darkness

From this clip:

[Bob Marley] had this idea. Kind of a virologist idea. He believed that you can cure racism and hate; litterally cure it, by injecting music and love into people's lives. When he was scheduled to preform at a peace rally, a gun man came to his house and shot him down. Two days later he walked on stage and sang. Somebody asked him, "Why?" He said, "The people who are trying to make the world worse are not taking a day off. How can I? Light up the darkness."

Entrepreneurship at Northwestern: Fad or Fixture?

In recent months, interest in entrepreneurship at Kellogg and Northwestern seems to have generally been increasing. Support, resources and attention has risen to match this interest. I'm almost jealous that I'm graduating now, rather than starting at Kellogg at this point. Things were was not always this way.

When I arrived in Evanston in Fall 2009, there was little - if any - acknowledgement that Kellogg, and Northwestern, should be a place that a person should consider if they were genuinely interested in entrepreneurship. Since then a number of new initiatives have arisen. Here are some of the notable ones:

• Northwestern's Farley center expanded its NUvention entrepreneurship courses from one to three, and won national acclaim for them.
• At Kellogg, the Levy Center has opened an incubator to support student startups.
• For social entrepreneurship, there is noticeable support from the Levy Social Entrepreneurship Lab and KIN (pdf).
• The tradition of Northwestern Entrepreneurship Week was started last year. This year's is this coming week.

Sometimes the older folk at Kellogg reminisce that this kind of fervor is similar to the dot com era. At that time, there were large valuations for tech companies, and large IPOs - not too disimilar to what we have seen of Facebook and Groupon valuations, as well as the LinkedIn IPO. So I wonder if all the attention and interest will last once things in the external environment change.

The reality is, entrepreneurship plays a huge role in the economies of countries and the world. While Stanford may be a hub in the West, and MIT a hub the the East, the Midwest has been lacking strong leadership in this area. This is a shame, because entrepreneurship in the Midwest has its own, unique culture.

The Marshmallow Test

Malcolm Gladwell, in a New Yorker article, explains how an early test of self-control is a predictor of future success.

Children who are able to pass the marshmallow test enjoy greater success as adults.

In the late nineteen-sixties, Carolyn Weisz, a four-year-old with long brown hair, was invited into a “game room” at the Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. [...] A researcher then made Carolyn an offer: she could either eat one marshmallow right away or, if she was willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes, she could have two marshmallows when he returned. He said that if she rang a bell on the desk while he was away he would come running back, and she could eat one marshmallow but would forfeit the second. Then he left the room. 

[...] 

Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.

Let's link up!

With the end of the academic year, and our life at Kellogg, in sight, I seem to be getting far more LinkedIn and Facebook invites than at any other time in my life. (I also seem to be sending them, almost unconsciously).

I guess these connections are partly why we came here. Now, if I could only work out who some of these people are...

Email at the speed of thought

Sometimes I wish I could process emails at the speed of thought. I'm certain one day it will happen. No one could have foreseen that postal mail would be disrupted by email, a technology that seemed ti have appeared from nowhere. Some day the same thing will happen to email. But where will it come from?

I think one thing is for certain: it won't be built on the same technology stack as email: internet protocol, data packets, network wires, computers. Just as email was not built on the technology stack for postal mail, it's likely an entirely different kind of technology.

Nevertheless, this very different thing has to enable communication of some sort. Just as in the pre-Internet era, email might have been used to communicate between just two computers on the planet, the disruptive technology might well be in use today, helping people in two different places communicate. But what and where could it be?

I sometimes wonder if there isn't very nascent biological technology that might some day be developed into communication at the speed of thought. Extra sensory communication is known to exist for plants, so why not turn it into something more sophisticated for humans?

Some puzzles are just too clever for me

Someone once said to me, "What you guys are building is a platform that makes research more efficient!"

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I nodded my head so we could move on to other conversation. I should probably have delved deeper, because that comment continued to puzzle me for some time.

Today, it suddenly dawned on me that I finally understood what he was talking about. Some Kellogg folk are just simply too clever for me.

Lost time

"Lost time is never found again."

-- Benjamin Franklin, inventor

The Startup World Has An Org Chart

When I worked at the BBC, there was something incredibly striking in the way that some relationships worked. When the director of our division spoke, everyone listened. When the Director General spoke, people listened even harder. Some would say that these senior managers had lightening bolts coming out of their fingers, such was their power. In a single utterance, they could dramatically change the strategic direction of the organization.

In the startup world, there is often a perception that relationships are loose: everyone is on an equal footing and that the strange power-dynamics that play out in org chart ridden organizations do not play out. I've found this to be untrue.

Around Chicagoland, which is a fairly small start-up community, there is definitely an org chart. I'm still trying to figure out how the players fit together, but one thing is clear - the venture capitalists are the directors and CEOs of this community. In Chicago, there are one or two in particular -- I would say Lightbank and Matt McCall -- that have lightning bolt-like authority coming out of their fingertips. I've witnessed this first hand, as I've watched people jump to help them any way they can.

The lack of an organizational chart showing the power relationships is either and advantage or disadvantage, depending on your perspective.

Pirates of Silicon Valley

Ethics get short-shrift in the tech world

From Googler Damon Horowitz's talk at TEDx Silicon Valley, reported in Venture Beat:

To illustrate how ethics are getting short-shrift in the tech world, Horowitz asked attendees whether they prefer the iPhone or Android. (When the majority voted for the iPhone, he joked that they were “suckers” who just chose the prettier device.) [...] Finally, Horowitz wanted to know whether audience members would use the ideas proposed by John Stuart Mill or by Immanuel Kant to make that decision. Not surprisingly, barely anyone knew what he was talking about. 

“That’s a terrifying result,” Horowitz said. “We have stronger opinions about our handheld devices than about the moral framework we should use to guide our decisions.” 

The obvious response is that technology-makers aren’t supposed to think about the morality of their products — they just build stuff and let other people worry about the ethics. But Horowitz pointed to the Manhattan Project, where physicists developed the nuclear bomb, as an obvious example where technologists should have thought carefully about the moral dimensions of their work. To put it another way, he argued that technology makers should be thinking as much about their “moral operating system” as their mobile operating system.

Blogger returns from the outage

In the software development world, there is something called 'eating your own dogfood'. It means, though you not only provide the service, but you yourself use it as a customer. Google's Blogger runs this site, and there has been an outage over the last day... [ though I've been experiencing such withdrawal, it's felt like three days for me... how sad am I :-(   ].

However, frustrating the blogger outage might have been, that Google eat its own dog food is the only thing that's made it acceptable. From Blogger's blog, Blogger is Back:

What a frustrating day. We're very sorry that you’ve been unable to publish to Blogger for the past 20.5 hours. [...] We use Blogger for our own blogs, so we’ve also felt your pain.

Disadvantage = Advantage

"For every disadvantage there is a corresponding advantage."

-- Clement Stone, executive

The obvious truth about networks of people

I used to think that networks - between people - are relatively straightforward. There are people that you know, and there are people that you don't know. Web sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook are good at catching some of those connections, but not all. Even in our MORS430 Leadership in Organizations class we learn about weak ties and strong ties in our networks of how we are connected to others.

Yet, there has always been something difficult about this model. How well do you really know all those connections on Facebook or LinkedIn? How often do you keep in touch with people from previous jobs and elsewhere. Do you trust all of your strongest connections?

In recent weeks, I've hit a revelation: this model is wrong. There is not a network of people we are connected to in different ways. There are networks of people we are connected to in different ways. LinkedIn and Facebook are not capturing some partial element of my network. They are two different networks that I belong to. It is a simple truth that has escaped me for a long time, but thinking about networks has changed the way I view the world. Because there are many unspoken types of networks.

For example, there are information networks. In these networks, the brokers help me access knowledge and information that I don't have access to. Often, this information is private. For example, they'll know which startup have been shortlisted by a incubator or angel investor. You could almost describe them as 'gossips'. Then there are reciprocity networks for introductions. The brokers in these networks will introduce you to people with resources. They'll say, 'you should speak to X'. They'll actually help you get in front of the right investor.

What is interesting is that the broker in the information network is not necessarily the broker in the network of introductions. They can be different types of personalities, and so play different roles in each type of network. Beyond information and introductions, there are other networks, from those for getting different types of work done, to even those that spread diseases. The brokers in each type of network will be different because each type of network requires different characteristics of that broker.

It's an obvious truth: we live in many networks. Which ones are important to us? What does it mean to be a broker in each?

30 days of school remain

It's May 10th. One month from now, June 10th, will be my class's last day of business school. That means we have 30 days left. 30 days to enjoy student discounts. 30 days to enjoy the delights of the Jacobs building, Kellogg's home. 30 days to cement friendships. 30 days to wrap up school work, and other affairs.

The Ultimatum Game

The ultimatum game is important from a sociological perspective, because it illustrates the human unwillingness to accept injustice and social inequality. More on Wikipedia.

Dinner With 12 Strangers

I've always thought of universities as unique environments - islands of social life in an otherwise vast and dispersedly connected world. Social experiments and useful applications from this environment, once established on scale, prove to be just as useful in the outside world. The best example of this is Facebook. There were facebooks at universities first and foremost; Facebook became the facebook for the world.

In this way, an interesting tradition at Kellogg and other universities and schools is 'Dinner With 12 Strangers'. You sign up, and are randomly put together with others from the same university or school. You meet people that you might not otherwise meet.

GrubWithUs, while not having started out of a university, is taking the same concept to the masses. You go on to their website, and pick an evening and a restaurant to sign-up for a meal with 12 random strangers. It is the Dinner With 12 Strangers concept, but taken out of the city.

This raises some interesting questions. The first is, 'What other uniquely university environment activities might now have wider appeal because technology makes it easy?'. The second is, 'Is society changing? Are we more willing to treat strangers in the same city as us in as friendly a way a strangers in the same university?'

The only thing that matters to investors

Brendan Baker, of AppMakr fame, has another excellent post. This one is on how to communicate traction to investors. He claims that this chart is the only thing that matters to investors:

Find his full post here.

Google is changing the rail tracks

Microsoft's Windows has long dominated the operating system landscape. Some argued that it gave them an unfair advantage. It allowed them to build an Office Suite that exploited the capabilities of the Windows Operating System far quicker than rivals, such as Coral's own suite - which dominated the DOS era. Microsoft's attempts to bundle Internet Explorer into Windows, to again use the operating system to dominate another market, led to an infamous law suit.

HTTP has long been the intermediary language - the protocol - used between web browsers and the websites that served these browsers with web pages. HTTP has some problems. So what do you do if you own both the web browser and the websites that the browser visits? In Google's case, the answer seems to be to create a new language that fixes HTTP's problems.

Google's Chrome browser is now communicating with Google's own websites using a different protocol to HTTP - using a protocol called SPDY instead. As a result, Google websites viewed using Chrome had page load times that are 64% faster than without using Chrome. Google is far from having a law suit on its hands, but as Google Docs, Google's own office suite, improves in quality, Google's rivals may find that improving the web application is not good enough. They may be disadvantaged from even the underlying communication protocol beneath them - the rail tracks.

How do you judge each day?

"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant."

-- Robert Louis Stevenson, Author

Finally conquering the B-School learning curve

Just over four weeks from the end of my MBA classes at Kellogg, I finally feel like I've got into the rhythm of how to study effectively. It's almost a shame it's taken me this long, but I've finally figured out how to most effectively read a case, and even how to keep myself focused and attentive in class.

I blame the slow learning curve (or re-learning curve) to my long time away from the books. I graduated from my undergraduate university in June 2001. I started at Kellogg in September 2009. It's no wonder business schools are trending younger these days, though I still think you need a good amount of work experience to appreciate business school.

Perhaps most alarming is that I'm only now truly appreciating some of the core classes that, when I first started, seemed uninteresting and irrelevant. For example, I never thought I'd say this, but I wish I had taken another accounting class. On the flip side, for some courses, I think one can just learn from the textbook.

Analysis of Appmkr's $1M seed round raise

Anatomy of Seed

View more presentations from brendanbaker

How Did You Hear About Osama Bin Laden’s Death?

Mashable is running a poll, How did you hear about Osama Bin Laden's Death? I, for one, heard the news through Twitter. A snapshot of the poll results suggests I'm not the only one. It's crazy to think Twitter did not exist five years ago.

The Royal Wedding: A lesson in marketing?

Friday, and a little bit through the weekend, there has been a lot of chatter about The Royal Wedding. I've been shocked that there is so much interest, here in the US, for an event that seems so distant from Evanston, Illinois - where I am.

Then it occurred to me: isn't this all marketing, in one form or another? Interest in the UK has grown. Tourism will feel an immediate boost. Beyond the immediate impact, people all over the world can only be made to feel that there is something a little high-status about the UK, with all its pageantry and attention it has drawn.

Now might be a good time to stick a Union Jack flag on your product or service.