How many people does it take?

There's an industry parable that I often quote:

A VC in training asks "How many people does it take to write great software?"

The sage CEO responds "two, one to write the code, and the other to shoot the programmer when it's done".

I've been actively working with an entrepreneur towards seed funding his new venture. He's been actively speaking with potential employees, business partners, and surveying the target demographic. We get great feedback, and incredible ideas which keeps expanding the product requirement list. And that's the good and bad news. Without his active pruning of the product branches, the Product Requirement Document surely would've collapsed long ago.

This set me to thinking about the product experience we see as consumers, or as professionals. Too often I have been involved with or seen products/sites that are beautiful, yet with so many irrelevant features which burnt precious capital, time, and focus. In many ways and markets, the great progress in LAMP tools and vast open source resources, the art of product management seems to have overtaken the impact of the science of architecture/programming in determining success.

For grounding, I try to hearken back to simple principles such as Google's home page, devoid of everything but its search box. Why? Because the site is all about speed...get the visitor off to their destination ASAP. Management product folk determined that it's to sacrifice near term revenue to optimize the #1 distinguishing site feature, speed. For long, this was a contrarian approach scoffed at my industry sages.

It's not only search. Look at the comparison of three large players in the dating vertical below:



The UI for Plenty of Fish is enough to give any respectable UI designer angina; but it works fabulously well.

How about the mother of simplicity; Craigslist? In many ways, you have to admire a self-professed 'geek' like Craig Newmark, who has consistently rejected 'cool' in favor of effective navigation. Check out the graph comparing traffic on Craigslist, Ebay and Amazon.



The Wii, with it's pedestrian avatars and antiquated graphics slaughtered Sony and MSFT in this generation's console battle. The essence of a site's success may be 'cool', but it's not a prerequisite for success.

You can't judge a book by it's cover.

Analog dollars to digital cents

Jeff Zucker, the CEO of NBC has a wonderful quote about the way the Internet is transforming digital dollars into internet cents. Essentially, he's holding up a mirror to the way a multi-billion dollar market has the potential to be a multi-hundred million dollar market due to the ravages of internet caused deflation. Silicon Valley Insider, has a wonderful chart showing the trend of newspaper ad sales vs Craigslist revenue here.

Nowhere is this savage deflation more visible than the print media market is experiencing, in large part due to the effect of a self-deprecating 'nerd' Craig Newmark and Craigslist. A bright future is before many entrepreneurs who hope to garner large market shares of once billion dollar markets, now relegated to large, but not gigantorous (sounds like an impressive size) opportunities. Analog dollars to digital cents is a threat to the establishment, but music to the next generation of Sam Walmarts, Henry Fords and Bill Gates. All deflationary leaders.

Here's an interview with Jeff conducted at Ad Age in February

Interviews with today's innovators

With the upcoming release of the Palm Pre, this weeks unveiling of Bling and Google Wave, as well as continued torrid growth of Twitter and Wikipedia, I thought it would be interesting to share a flavor of the opportunity and execution philosophy of the founders/senior executives of these companies see.

Enjoy the clips of:

Evan Williams- Twitter
Jimmy Wales- Wikipedia
Richard Stallman Open Source pioneer
Jon Rubinstein- Palm
Steve Wolfram- Wolfram Alpha
Steve Horowitz Android (Google)
Jason Kilar Hulu
Craig Newmark Craigslist

Rules of engagement

For the past four years I have been a guest in Amir Goldman's class at Wharton. This year, Howard Morgan and I will be commenting on their year-end entrepreneurial projects, and giving a few 'words of the wise'. It's a big responsibility, and I have tried to distill a many thoughts down to a few pithy snippets:

1. Companies are only as healthy as their customers. If you are supplying the auto industry or financial services verticals, no matter how smart you are, it's a difficult place to build equity value within an existing company. These industries are shrinking. On the other hand, growing companies, within growing industries are limited by the number of qualified people they can attract. Focus on growth industries and look to the largest, or fastest growing companies to be a part of.

2. We are at the beginning of a permacheap revolution. The coming of age of the digital generation who will start and run businesses with incredible capital efficiency will lower prices for customers, contribute to a surplus of real estate, think globally from the outset and be EXPORTERS of DEFLATION. You can choose to try to fight this, or jump on the bandwagon. The media companies, by putting up walls to prevent 'analog dollars' from becoming 'digital pennies' will unfortunately, be left with digital air.

3. The 'batch' world is dead. We are addicted to real-time communications and expect if from our peers, vendors and even friends. As Twitter has shown, this is a big opportunity, which I am sure, will have many branches

4. By embracing and empowering a community, you can simultaneously offer greater value, lower expenses and be a good citizen to boot. It's a great time to listen to folk like Craig Newmark.

The Hudson Year

I attended a lecture last night by Russell Shorto, author of An Island at the Center of the World. A history of Dutch Manhattan. He is an engaging speaker and the setting in historic Irvington, NY (sponsored by the historical society) was fitting.

This is the 400th anniversary of the English explorer who, claimed NY on behalf of the Dutch. Hudson was a twice failed explorer who was obsessed with finding the Northwest Passage shortcut to Asia. He had a reputation as an iconoclast and after contractually agreeing to promptly sail west towards the New World, he took off North and East, with a belief that the North Pole was only a rim of ice, backed by a temperate zone. When that failed, after 6 weeks, he headed West and into the history books.

The experience of the Dutch, and later the English, reminds me of Google's Marissa Meyer's statement; "innovation, not instant perfection, you need to iterate". The Dutch approach to its colonies was far different than the British. The Dutch believed in a capital efficient approach to its colonies, where they chartered trading companies to administer the territories with the objective of building profitable enterprises with a minimum of State investment. The British concentrated on building longer term value through deeper upfront investments in settlement and native subjugation. Both, unfortunately, embraced slavery as a facilitating means for their objectives.

Hudson 'discovered' NY in 1609, the West India Trading Company brought settlers in 1625 and in 1653 New Amsterdam was chartered as a Dutch City. Forty four years to build a recognized community; if only they had Craig Newmark to help!

Brevity is the soul of wit

A quote of Lord Polonius from Hamlet, cited by Craig Newmark last night at Gordon Platt's Media 3.0-What's Next?". Michael Wolff, author of The Man who Owns the News and Burn Rate joined him on stage and the contrast was stunning.

Mr. Wolff looks like he's right out of Bonfire of the Vanities with strong opinions, a hyper cadence and incredible certainty for his vision. Craig Newmark is modest, brief, and he said it best...'I'm a nerd'. You gotta love him.

A few points and observations:

1. Craigslist is an infrastructure that operates a combined business and social network. The success of the social network drives the business.

2. They really take the customer experience and community health seriously. Clearly a core Company value

3. 'We do one simple thing really well. Classifieds'. One of the challenges is to keep things simple, not get distracted and serve the needs of the people who come to the site.

4. The site, similar to Google's, is totally uncool. No graphics, minimal color, real estate dedicated exclusively towards community navigation.

5. Craigslist does not really innovate. Some 'cool things' in the back-end, primarily around fraud stuff, but no real original stuff since 1996.

6. The Company, or Craig, are the antithesis of 'internet speed'. If there is any sense of urgency, it's around keeping the site engaged with the community.

7. Craig "As a nerd, I like precision and measurement', however, I recognize that social media is just beginning and it's really hard to form opinions about good or bad at this point in a market's formation.

8. No advertising, no search engine marketing, only word of mouth to get the message out.

While at the session, I was toggling between Craigslist and Michael Wolff's news aggregation site Newser. Unfortunately, Newser does not offer a thrilling load experience on mobile devices and, IMHO does not stack up well against Daylife (where Jeff Jarvis and Craig Newmark are investors), nor my favorite Meehive.

It was interesting listening to the questions/observations from the audience and the moderator. Less interested in listening to observations gleaned through the windscreen, there was much bemoaning the decline of 'old media' as epitomized by the NY Times. Naturally, Craiglist, the permacheap of classified advertising, was an easy target for Luddite snipers.