May 10

Thoughts on Boulder Startup Week

Nerd, Travels 4 Comments »

I’m back from a week in Boulder, CO for their Startup Week palooza and holy shnikes was it a neat series of events. I wanted to do a braindump of my thoughts on the weekend while they’re fresh.

First, kudos to Andrew Hyde for pulling this thing together- what an amazing community they have up there. Paul Graham had written a post a few years ago that distilled the traits necessary to produce the next Silicon Valley. While Boulder is no SV (nor should it necessarily want to clone that) there is definitely something other than beer brewing in that town. And I’m not the only one this weekend that felt it – Chris from RWW (another AZ person) sensed the same thing.

What worked well

Plancast – this is an app that allows people to express their intentions of what events they’ll attend. This worked extremely well for coordinating things. It integrates w/ Twitter and FB and allows you to parachute into a situation and conveniently track what’s going on and schedule where you want to be. But it’s more because it allows you to connect w/ attendees after the fact so you don’t have to obsess over collecting people’s contact info while you’re enjoying the moment. I was skeptical of this app when I first heard about it because it has the same downside of LBS only amplified because you’re publicly projecting your intended location for the future. Well, I stand corrected: this is a kickass tool and I hope all conferences adopt it (or something like it).

Startup Crawl – I co-founded a company called Pubcrawl.net back in the day. We ran crawls in Phoenix and made a site which enabled 100+ other cities to run crawls of their own. We knew the magic interaction & serendipity that occurs when you get a group of people to travel together amongst interesting locations. This worked really well and I want to do something similar with the meetup group I run for techies in AZ. You meet the people in your group, learn about the companies that you visit and the whole thing is super-fun. The TempeNerd lunches have been somewhat anemic lately but I believe this tweak to the format will revive it and take it in a new and more social direction. Unfortunately Phoenix is so geographically disbursed it will be a challenge to find pockets of startups within walking distance but I have some ideas. I’ve put a picture set at the bottom of this post to give you a flavor for what the crawl was like.

Ignite Boulder – solid to very-solid. They rocked this event and nailed the major things you need to do:

  • venue with character
  • quality speakers
  • flawless A/V execution
  • likeable moderator
  • live-streaming for remote folks
  • intermission w/ beverages
  • legit live music
  • ice-breaker nametags
  • a pre and post party for people to socialize

You get these core things right and you’ll naturally draw interesting people. Jeff Moriarity is kicking butt w/ our Ignite event here but we can definitely learn some lessons from Boulder’s.

The bigger picture

I told Andrew the bigger picture of what’s happening here is a “unification of the tribes.” Economy 2.0 is going to operate very differently from what we know today. The facts we do know at this point:

  1. it’s unquestionably f#$%’d now and not going to fix itself.
  2. entrepreneurship will play a prominent role in the recovery.
  3. collaborative technical infrastructure has evolved to the point where people no longer need to be on-premise to participate effectively on a team.
  4. while in-person presence is not essential to render work, there is no substitute for intermittent convergence of people who can then remain in contact afterwards via digital means.

I don’t know that Boulder represents the “next Silicon Valley” but I also don’t know that we need another Silicon Valley. Whatever it is it’s stacking up to be a hub of startup activity. The quality of their community is testament that they’re doing something right up there in the mountains. I’ll definitely be searching for an excuse to get back there next snowboarding season and looking forward to staying in contact w/ some of the people I met up there in the meantime.

Props to peeps

Random shout outs in no particular order to some of the interesting people and companies I hung out with up there: Chris Hough, Suzan Bond, the Tweety Got Back girls Heather and Rachel, Lane Becker of Get Satisfaction, Micah Baldwin of Graphic.ly, Joe Stump of Simple Geo, Ari Newman of Jive (formerly Filtrbox), Ben Brikerhoff (formerly of Devver), Brandon Harper and of course Jeremy & Andrew.

If we met and I haven’t connected with you on Twitter yet hit me up.

Thanks Boulder people for welcoming us travelers into your community this past week. You guys have at least one guaranteed couch here in Phx to crash on when you need it.


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

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May 09

TOS changes should require publishing the diff

Entrepreneur, Nerd 1 Comment »

This is half rant / half proposal for a free business idea. I’ve gotten four emails in the past week from various entities (2 banks, 1 health insurance provider and 1 telephony carrier) that notify me of changes to their TOS (apparently I need to accept them if I want to continue being a customer). One of the documents was a 35pg PDF which presumably had a few sentences change since I first accepted it. Given how much we have going on in our company the effort involved in combing through that document vs. the likelihood of that task returning value all but condemns it to reside indefinitely at the bottom of my todo list.

A better way & an open letter to service providers

These verbiage haystacks are bad news. Your customers are busy people and while it may be in your best interest to cloak the tweaks to your policies that may stir up unrest amongst your customers, this practice is asinine. Publish the damn “patch” to the TOS so we can skim it, see the crux of what changed and rapidly make a decision about whether we agree the tradeoff is worth it to remain your customer.

Yes, your attrition rate will go up as a result (and it should) But the thinking that “we’ll just bury the new stuff in the huge doc and people will accept it out of frustration/lack of time” is hugely short-sighted. We already know 88% of the people don’t read the TOS the first time, you think that % is going to be any better when you ask them to re-read a slightly-modified version a few months from now? While you may get a short term attrition benefit w/ the current method you’ll eventually end up with angry rants from pissed off customers higher support costs from fielding inquiries caused by inaccurate expectations. By doing it the way you are now you set the stage for an inevitable exodus of angry customers to your closest competitor that respects the value of their customers’ time. And the loyalty they earn by making it easier to stay informed and make faster decisions is priceless – you will not see the people that defect specifically for this reason again. And they will be vocal about their exit.

Abstracting this to a business idea

So the meta from this is that there’s an opportunity for someone to deliver “Policy as a service” to companies. Us geeks can figure out how to put docs in source control or publish pages that automatically highlight the diff from the last version. But for the rest of the world the path of least resistance to writing/reading is creating a new PDF and expecting readers to comb through the whole doc.

Someone should develop a simple service that allows companies to publish policy docs (TOS, privacy, employee handbooks, EULA’s and such) and give their end users a way to easily see what’s changed before accepting it and track the history of acceptance. The stage is primed for a service like this to work and it’s something that would allow it’s creator to “do well by doing good.” It would drive better transparency in business practices, support consumer rights and promote better corporate responsibility.

If you build this and make a million, buy me a donut and follow me on Twitter.

Apr 27

Which commenting channels yield the most productive conversations?

Nerd, Ponderings No Comments »

Matt Asay wrote a post about a month ago and I’ve been meaning to respond. He argues that the comments section on blog posts tend to devolve into ghettos of expletives and personal attacks instead of productive discussion (I agree with this part of his post). He then proposes that Twitter is the medium we should be using to hold conversations around blog posts (this is the part I take issue with). Rather than describe at length why, here’s a graphic that summarizes the argument:


Examining what’s worked empirically

I believe commenting channels can be examined on the above seven dimensions. Admittedly there is zero science behind the above chart – this is purely subjective analysis via thinking about aspects of each medium and how they contribute to effective or ineffective discussion. In thinking about groups I’ve been involved with and which ones worked well the most interesting realization is that there’s a factor outside of the qualities of the channels themselves that trumps everything here: it’s the glue of interaction beyond the channel. The most meaningful discussions I’ve been a part of were in groups where we had in-person or real-time interaction punctuated by periods of asynchronous online exchanges. AZCFUG, CFUG manager list, Cambrian House, Refresh Phoenix, AZIPA – these are all groups that produced valuable insight and relationships, every one of them anchored by a good level of accountability through real-time interaction outside of the online channels.

When you strip everything away it’s not even the real-time aspect that’s critical though- it’s the accountability / reputation factor that ultimately drives quality discussion. When you know your words stick with you wherever you go, you behave differently. You show respect, humility, ensure what you’re typing actually adds unique value, etc. Remove this factor and you get the faceless, ghetto problem of Digg comments and the troll activity on our city’s newspaper site. You lose pride in ownership, start getting a few broken windows and the whole neighborhood adopts a license to behave badly. BUT… Twitter is not the antidote folks- starting a personal blog and supplementing it with Twitter is. Twitter alone is too short-form of a medium to communicate real substance and the “one-way follow” aspect makes it impossible to see the whole conversation as an outsider (unless people happen to be using explicit #hashtags). Yes, it addresses the accountability concern but it does so at the expense of introducing new issues of an “ADHD/Sound-byte-speak” and fragmented dialogue for the people involved. It’s like having UN delegates hold a debate where everyone can talk into their mic but nobody knows who’s hearing who because each set of headphones is tuned pickup a select fraction of the participants involved.

So what do you suggest?

The question becomes, “short of being able to have face-to-face interaction serve as an anchor of civility in discussion between online exchanges, what do you propose as the most effective means of holding productive debate online?” If you look at the above graphic you’ll understand why I believe the answer is to return to using the personal blog w/ a combination of verified comments for short responses and trackbacks for more substantive responses. Twitter has IMHO shoplifted people’s mojo and derailed this practice that used to be commonplace. I believe we’ll see Twitter fatigue and a resurgence of the way it used to be with volleys of blog posts that mutually link amongst one another. Facebook link shares and Tweets are pointers to content – like a fluid, more social RSS feed. But the real substance of discussion has always and will continue to reside in blogs.

Apr 23

Free Biz Idea: Hindsig.ht accountability

Entrepreneur 3 Comments »

My friend Josh suggested I submit this idea to Sunlight Labs to build. That seems like a noble effort they’ve got going but I figured it might be more interesting to instead do a blog post and cast it into the wild. So here’s a free business idea for someone who needs something to build:

Give me an easy way to compare what people said they would do with what they actually did.

Hindsight is 20/20 right? The first place to incubate this app is using government. Leverage the data.gov “open government” initiatives that aim to create more transparency through exposing raw data via API’s and offer a service that counters a real problem.

Problem description: Legislative officials get elected based on specific promises and then renege and vote the opposite way. They bury the issue, voters forget, they get re-elected indefinitely and the cycle continues endlessly.

Start with this very focused use case around this problem and build an app that lets me see the track record of how Senators and Congressmen voted vs. how they committed they would vote.

Question: How do you monetize this?
Answer: Build it as a platform with the logic abstracted but with the first iteration focused specifically on this government scenario. That’s your freebie giveaway. Make this available and free as a public service and have it serve as a marketing tool for the underlying platform which you’ll then sell to companies who want the same accountability/hindsight for their own internal decisions. This works for any scenario where there’s a record of expressed intent for a decision followed by the actual decision. Follow the lead of companies like Spigit and Inkling Markets who hosted public “fantasy league” prediction markets to create awareness and drive sales of their underlying platform.

All the data necessary to get this going exists publicly. You’ll have to get an intern to aggregate the unstructured historical info that’s scattered via newspaper articles and such on how politicians proclaimed they’d vote, but going forward much of this data should be available in structured format via the data.gov effort.

So my question at this point: “Is there anything remotely like this that already exists?” Sunlight Labs or Startup Weekend– what say ye? Could you guys knock out something along these lines? The domain is available.

Mar 31

My Fasttrac talk on Product Dev

Entrepreneur, JumpBox, Speaking 2 Comments »

Big thanks to Francine Hardaway, Phil Blackerby and Ed Nusbaum for inviting me to speak with their class on monday and share what we’ve learned on product development in our experience in building JumpBox. Fastrac is a great program sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation. I went through 2 semesters of this course a few years ago and it’s an honor to be invited back as a presenter. Note: realistically Kimbro is the visionary behind our product and he should be the one to give this talk, but I did my best to distill the 10 lessons I’ve gleaned around product dev while riding shotgun in building our our company/product offering. Here are the slides (feel free to share, embed, email, whatever):

We played the “product box” innovation game and had two teams invent and sell a new type of lawn mower in 10min. This is a great exercise to grok the difference between features, advantages & benefits. Here are the product boxes they came up with:
Gallery is empty!

We had a little friendly “industrial espionage” given the proximity of the teams ;-) but good times. If you’re starting a company I definitely recommend looking for the fasttrac course in your area. It’s inexpensive and “gets you out of the building” and talking with other people who are in the same boat.

Oh and I try to share helpful info and links for entrepreneurs and software startups. If you use Twitter follow me for those tidbits.

Tagged with:
Mar 23

The iPhone app I would buy today for $300

Apple, Nerd 6 Comments »

Is this feasible to build? Bonus points if you can figure how to cancel out external music while letting me listen to my own.

You have a UI prototype and a pre-order for at least one at $300- someone please build it.
If nothing more consider doing it as a public service.

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