I have been poking around a little on privacy these days. With the release of the White House big data and privacy working group review it seemed appropriate to share this entertaining video of Aral Balkan describing how free is a lie. We are all giving up so much more than money when we use free Internet applications.
Messaging and anonymity are in vogue these days. Lots of fast growing apps. Big name venture firms like Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, and Sequoia Capital investing in the space. And lots of other big name venture capitalists coming out against the evils of anonymous apps. Names like Marc Andreessen, Mark Suster, and Hunter Walk have all come out against anonymous apps on an ethical basis.
Yesterday another prominent entrepreneur/investor, Jason Calacanis, joined in on Twitter.
This @YikYakApp is loathsome. Anonymous app + high school kids = bullying & eventually suicides. 18+ should be rule http://t.co/JsMHO00ymv
— jason (@Jason) April 30, 2014
Before reading on you really should take a moment to read the New York Mag article that Jason refers to in his tweet. It is horrific.
I believe all these guys are right. I believe that anonymity is an important topic to discuss. I believe that people who create software have an obligation to build services that do good. I believe that anonymity is bad.
I am an advisor to Yik Yak, the company Jason referenced in his tweet. In our first meeting I counseled them to get teenagers off the app. They implemented geofencing around middle and high schools. I connected them to their investment lead. I have been trying to convince them that pseudonymity and reputation mechanisms need to be built into Yik Yak to create acceptable social norming in the user base.
So I responded to Jason. The user behavior is loathsome. The geofencing is a start. But it’s not enough. The mask of anonymity is strong. When people have that mask on they will say anything they want about anybody. People can lie. People can break laws. There are no consequences to actions when you are anonymous. Online anonymity removes a basis of modern civilization that children learn when they are very young. Actions have consequences. That is not the case when you are anonymous. When you are anonymous social norms slide away. And Social norms are very important to regulating inappropriate online behavior.
A way to inject social norms into these types of communities is to not make being anonymous the default and only option when signing up for a such a service. To provide an option, not a requirement, to create a pseudonymity. This does three things. One, it makes some people in the community identifiable (but not by name). Two, a pseudonymity in and of itself increases the reputation of the user who selects one. And three, it enables the pseudonyms to create acceptable social norms and hold the anonymous cowards to them. Pseudonymity makes people behave well. And good behavior in turn creates positive human energy.
Good technology should have a positive impact on the lives of the people that use it. That is one of the wonders of the Internet. The positive impact that it has had on so many people’s lives. Right now anonymous apps are not so positive. The apps are either going to have to change to allow social norming or the people that use them are going to go away.
Update: Hunter Walk replied to me via Twitter and stated that he “did not come out against anon apps.” He is of course correct about his position. I did not intend to misrepresent his thoughts on the matter. Striking through his name above. Here is his thoughtful post on “Are We What We Fund? Should VCs Only Back What They Believe is Morally Correct.”
Atlanta Startup Weekend is back this weekend. This 54 hours of organized chaos take place May 2 through May 4 at ATDC. Entrepreneurs show up on Friday night, pitch their ideas, form teams, and code away. This hackathon has been around in some form or the other since 2007. The focus has morphed from pitching and hacking to customer discovery and judging presentations. Regardless it is tough to beat as a place to forge bonds with 100 like minded startup fanatics that will stay with you a long time. I intend to help with some coaching on Saturday. I hope to see you there.
You can register here.
As I mentioned toward the end of February, Force of Good was due for a facelift. It is here.
The number one objective was to move to a single column design. That seems to work best for mobile. We accomplished that objective. The other half of the we being Blake Perdue.
Give Blake a little direction and he is able to run with it. Blake not only cleaned up the design he also moved Force of Good from Typepad to a WordPress instance hosted on DigitalOcean. I have toyed with moving off Typepad for years. It just seemed to be too much trouble. Blake made it a breeze. I want to thank him for making it easy on me and getting it done.
I made some content changes to the about page and added a subscribe page to make it a bit more obvious on the various ways you can subscribe to a feed.
My guess is that some things are not working right, kind of rushed this out due to the Typepad outage. If you find anything wrong let me know in the comments and I will get it cleaned up. Still wrestling with the best way to handle nav but hope to have that finalized soon.
If you have any thoughts, bad or good, on the redesign we would love to hear those as well.
Today Jeff Hilimire introduced Advice For Good, an idea that blossomed out of the time demands of offering coaching and counseling to budding entrepreneurs. Interesting concept. Pretty simple too.
You donate at least an hour of your time to a non-profit or other charitable cause and then blog about your experience on this site, and in exchange you get to meet with one of the Advice for Good advisors.
To fuel the charitable fire Advice for Good is also getting into the event business. A few times a year there will be event where advisors present at a selected non-profit’s location and after the talk all the attendees will spend a few hours helping that non-profit. The first event is kicking off on April 29th at the Atlanta Community Food Bank. Sanjay Parekh and Ed Trimble are the speakers. You can sign up here.
It will be interesting to see if this gets legs. Color me a helpful and hopeful skeptic.
So the big news last week in Atlanta was the launch of TechSquare Labs. Artfully announced in the Atlanta Business Chronicle TechFlash the day before one of it's founders (Paul Judge) gave the keynote during the VIP lunch at the ATDC Startup Showcase, the new effort became quite the buzz. The other founder, Allen Nance, cleared up any confusion on what TechSquare Labs is all about on his blog.
Having known Allen and Paul for a bit it is pretty clear what they are doing. They are coming together and institutionalizing what they have been doing for a number of years. They formed a company to create companies. They formed a company to do the same thing they have been doing with the likes of Pindrop Security and Springbot.
TechSquare Labs. It's not an accelerator. It's not an incubator. It's not even a fund per se. It's not about the number of startups served.
It's focused hands on very early stage management to provide capital, coaching, product development, and team building expertise. It's for technical founders. It's for deep IP. It's to build big, meaningful companies. It's a welcome addition to the ever growing Atlanta startup landscape.
From time to time the subject of MBAs and startups seems to raise its head and did so again recently by a few of my fellow inhabitants of Atlanta Startup Village. First John Melonakos mentioned how Business School is not Street Cred for Startups and then Kevin Sandlin followed on with why Getting an MBA is Stupid.
Personally getting an MBA was one of the best investments I ever made. My MBA enabled me to understand at a very deep level business in general, finance, and marketing. When I joined a startup that went into hyper growth mode I was able to apply this theoretical learning and build upon it in a very practical way.
Regardless, most technology entrepreneurs seems to hate MBAs for good reasons. But what really took me aback was the quote John pulled from the article Could a Harvard Business School Degree Hurt More Than It Helps?:
For venture capitalists who pray at the altar of pattern recognition, it would be hard to ignore how few massive tech successes have been founded by entrepreneurs with MBAs on their resumes.
The first two startups that I joined were founded by MBAs. Both had successful exits. One a billion dollar market cap public company. The other a $275 million acquisition. The above quote did not align with my personal experience. It appeared biased to me.
So I went digging around. A good place to start was the Harvard Hurt article itself. To quote:
"It’s possible to turn to research conducted by Aileen Lee for her viral list of ‘unicorns' – slang for the 39 tech companies founded since 2003 valued at $1 billion or more by private or public markets. Only 12 of those 39 companies had co-founders with MBAs…
Only 12 of 39? That's 30%. I don't know how many MBAs there are in the USA but it is no where close to 30% of the general population. The degree is over indexed in the sample set. Seemed like a positive pattern.
So I decided to do a little more analysis closer to home. I went through Paul Judge's recent list of most valuable or promising startups in Atlanta. There are 25 companies on that list. I looked at the educational background of the current CEOs of these companies using simple internet searches and LinkedIn.
I was not able to ascertain the educational background of three of the CEOs (at least one is a college dropout). Of the twenty two that remained nine have a masters degree in business and fourteen do not. Or but another way, 41% of the CEOs from the list of the most promising startups in Atlanta have a graduate business degree. There was no other degree held by this group of CEOs that was even close to this percentage. I was somewhat surprised to see that science and technology grads only account for six (27%) of the CEOs. There were four that have undergrad business degrees (bringing the total that studied business to nearly 60% of the total), two liberal arts majors, and one that studied law.
While MBAs are not for everyone (I have advised many proteges to skip the degree and get their learnings in more practical and potentially lucrative endeavors), a good percentage of the people that run high potential startups have the degree. Getting an MBA may not be stupid at all. It's fine. Just don't be an MBA. What matters is what you do with the degree. That is what will earn you street cred.
A while back I wrote an article inspired by a Canaan Partners SlideShare deck on how to pitch. Having recently been asked to help out a few startups in the TAG/Venture Atlanta Business Launch Competition, I revisited the article only to discover that the embed was bad.
Seems Canaan updated the deck. It is below.
Today in the Atlanta Tech Village newsletter (sign up here) the Startup Genome Survey was mentioned. Startup Genome and the Kauffman Foundation have teamed up to conduct research on the Atlanta startup community. Taking the survey is quick and easy. At the end there is a link to this nifty startup map that is quite interesting if you play around with it.
So go ahead. Take the survey.
Google "what is a technology startup." When you do this article I wrote back in 2009 will most likely show up as the second result right below the Wikipedia entry. The Wikipedia entry is a little more interesting to me at the moment than what I wrote five years ago. This is what it says:
A startup company or startup is a company, a partnership or temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. These companies, generally newly created, are in a phase of development and research for markets."
The first sentence of definition was authored by Steve Blank. I have the utmost respect for Mr. Blank. His book The Four Steps to the Epiphany
Here's why. It does not pass the reasonableness test. If you were to ask members of a startup community if certain companies were or were not startups they would more often than not classify companies that have repeatable and scalable business models in place as startup companies.
For example as I write this I am sitting in the offices of SalesLoft at the Atlanta Technology Village, a building specifically built to to support and inspire technology entrepreneurs. Salesloft participated in TechStars in 2012. Just a year ago Salesloft had no revenue. Now it is seeing high product demand. The company is growing fast. Both revenue and people. They have found a business model and a market. By the above definition they are not a startup.
Does Salesloft sounds like a startup to you? It sure does to me. The CEO and all the employees think they are a startup. But by the above definition they are not. The definition is wrong. The definition intentionaly excludes execution. That makes it too narrow. All successful startups execute. They execute to scale.
And this all may be a matter of semantics within Mr. Blank's own diagram of the startup process the act of scaling the company is included in the startup cycle.
Going back to my Salesloft example they have conducted customer discovery. They have customer validation. They have a repeatable business model. They are in the process of creating customers and scaling the company. They are a scalable startup but not as defined by Wikipedia.
When it is all said and done I think the Wikipedia definition of a startup just needs a little wordsmithing to something like this:
A startup company or startup is a company, a partnership or organization designed to search for and scale a repeatable business model.
Moving around a few words enables the definition of a startup to include companies such as Salesloft (which it should). It makes the definition of a startup include early execution (which startups do). It makes the definition of a startup pass the reasonableness test (which it must).
This refined definition defines startups better. And that would be a better thing.
