What don't I know?

That question might be the most important question you can ask yourself when starting a business venture. Obviously, before starting any enterprise you should have a great understanding of both the industry and marketplace you are getting involved in. You have asked yourself, what is the lifespan of this business? What can I add to the market? What problem am I solving? (Unless of course, you are me, in which case you flush a whole pile of money down a toilet mainly because you didn't ask yourself any of those questions) How is my business different than other businesses trying to solve the same problem? Eventually you will get to questions you don't know the answer to. When you get to those, how you address them will very often be the key to the success or failure of your enterprise.

Fred Wilson over at A VC gave some public kudos to Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook. Zuckerberg hired a professional operator to take what was recently a very small company, international. Wilson cites the successes of other similar young executives at suddenly massive companies bringing in top notch operatives to keep things moving forward as the reason Zuckerberg gets a pat on the back. What he doesn't address is why this is an important indicator that Mark Zuckerberg (MZ) is a good bet to lead Facebook for a long time.

It seems that MZ has a genuine lack of arrogance. He understands what he doesn't know. He accepted he needed help at the highest level and acted swiftly and effectively to bring in a serious operator to help him through the unknown waters. So I too, tip my hat to MZ, and hope that this incredibly important business lesson is not lost on me in the future.

Asking the right questions

I have an idea for a product. How can I get it made?

I can't tell you how many times I see e-mails like this. I was even approached for a consulting gig this week by someone who has a product idea he wants to produce. Is it a good idea? It all depends on whether he asks the right questions before moving forward. Also before I invest my time and energy into someone else's entrepreneurial idea they are going to have to answer some very hard questions from me on the topic of their commitment to the idea.

That's really all it takes to get a product produced. Commitment. It takes a commitment of time and a commitment of money. Time to find the right people to fill the knowledge gap where yours wanes. Time to make sure you know what you want to do with the product once it is produced. Money to pay the people who can fill the knowledge gap and money for the prototype phase and initial production runs of you product. It is as simple as that. Any other challenge you think you will face can be shoved under those two umbrellas, time and money.

Getting it made is the easy part if you identify the knowledge gaps and are willing to pay to have them filled. The hard part is what do you do when you are holding "it" in your hand.

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Social, semantic, 2.0, 3.0, what is the web these days?

The brilliant boys over at Freakonomics put together a group of top minds to debate the benefits and challenges of social networking. Why has social networking exploded?

Some possible reasons:

Reason 1:

Social networking changes the way business is done. I am currently doing some consulting work for a web start-up. They are two young guys with a very interesting idea. How did I meet them? One of them showed up as part of my fraternity networking group on Linked In. I was interested in his company because I am seriously considering leaving mine. However, they have not received funding yet and aren't realy sure how to seek it. I have given them advice and pointed them in the right direction, but at the end of the day they need a veteran to help them through. I am not in a position to lead that charge for them. However, I knew the perfect guy. I used Linked In to introduce them. They've had a very productive meeting and my veteran friend is most likely going to sign on with my young friends in a mentoring-interim CEO capacity to help them through the funding process. Before Linked In was a story like this possible? No, because it is unlikely I ever would have met the young entrepreneur.


Reason 2:

A serious desire to connect with other people in an increasingly hostile world? It is harder and harder to make friends the older you get and I think it is a daunting task at any age once puberty hits. Social networking gives people the ability to reach out there and find people they really have common ground with, allowing them to connect on a different level than normal. Normal being, "I work with this guy and he isn't a complete ass so let me go to lunch with him." Occasionally those relationships turn into real friendship. Most of the time they disappear as soon as one or the other changes jobs.





Are there more reasons? Yeah, without a doubt, but these are two big ones in my opinion. I started to write this post a long time ago about how fragmented society has become and how that is hurting television ratings. What I am starting to realize is social networking is becoming as fragmented as society at large. MySpace rose, and then Facebook, Friendster, Linked In and more and more. It has gotten so crazy someone started a social network search engine called YoName.

Look at all the networks it searches:










26... I am pretty dialed in webwise and I haven't heard of some of those. I am 100% sure that isn't all of them, because one of my favorites is Ning, and Ning is not included on the list.

What does any of this mean? I am really not sure, but when looking at sociological interactions of the human race, social networking is a very interesting twist in the way we touch each other.

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Twitter will figure it out

Fred Wilson a venture capitalist from New York, is an early stage investor in a an upstart social media company called Twitter.

For the blissfully unaware Twitter has been the subject of much debate in the tech community as of late because no one can really figure out how they will make money long term. They are a company that launched without a business model and are hoping that somewhere along the way they will figure out how to make money. I think they will.

Twitter is a service that allows users to deliver quick messages (tweets) to the community of people who follow that particular user. The tweets can be delivered in various ways. It is catchy because in addition to it being incredibly easy to use it is kind of fun. It is stream of consciousness micro blogging. It is also a lot more.

How do you monetize it?

Well the first thing they can do is make it a "freemium" service like Yahoo or countless others. It is free for the basic service, but if you want more complicated features, it costs X dollars a month/year.

Advertising. Web ad spending is expected to double between now and 2011. If this is true it means a LOT of new potential revenue for a company like Twitter to capture and they have interesting ways they can do it. Basic text ads attached to tweets and contextual advertising (Google-ish) based on tweet content are two very simple and possible ways that Twitter could start generating some significant advertising revenue.

Here is something I consider more interesting. They could partner with communities that already exist and brand their service to those communities. ESPN tweeting customized score updates through the twitter engine with the ESPN branding and Twitter collecting revenue from ESPN each time. ESPN pays the freight, they give an interesting service to their fans, and the brands expand. I know there are similar sports services out there already, but you can apply to any business, especially some that DON'T already have services like that. I know there is interest, because at my company we have already talked about trying to do something with Twitter. I also made a suggestion to a friend who works for a daytime talk show and he was intrigued about some possible ways to put Twitter to use.

None of these ideas even touch on the potential monetization of Twitter's open API which allow other applications to be developed on the Twitter engine. Twitter is a relatively young company and look at all these different applications that have been built!! Pretty impressive stuff.

Good social media tools become good marketing tools and end up being profitable marketing tools as long as they have good management, technology and support backing them up. I believe there are some smart people working on the monetization of Twitter and they will figure it out. I spent 20 minutes working on it and look what I came up with.

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Jack Sparrow? Not so much

Being in the international trade game, I tend to look at international stories and politics in a different light than most people. Political unrest and conflict in various areas around the globe cause something called supply risk. I saw a story this morning about pirates off the coast of Somalia seizing a North Korean cargo vessel.

At first blush you can smile and laugh and think to yourself that anything the kicks Kim Jong Il in the teeth a little bit is good for the rest of the world. However if we take a moment and think what might be in that cargo ship and what could be falling into the hands of Islamic fundamentalist pirates we may begin to worry.

Piracy in the waters off Somalia and traveling through the waterways that surround the islands of Indonesia is rampant. Ships and good are routinely seized and held for ransom. My question is, what happens if the wrong ship falls into those hands? Not a pleasant thought.

****UPDATE: The North Korean crew retook their boat when the U.S. Navy showed up.

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Some thoughts on a Tuesday afternoon...

I just wanted to point out in the new layout there is a second set of links. The business links are business blogs that I read every day written by very smart people. What you have to take into account when you read the works of smart people, whether it be the Freakonomics guys or anyone who knows what they are talking about is they occasionally fall in love with their own ideas. I do it. I think everyone does to a certain extent.

At one point I thought it would be a great idea to own a retail video store. I thought it would be a great business that could pay the bills while I wrote the great American novel. Looking back now I was clearly an idiot. I bought into a dying industry at the end of its run without knowing a whole lot about retail, market conditions, budgeting or forecasting, or generally anything about business. It cost me on every level, but was also probably one of the better learning experiences of my adult life. Was it worth the lesson? The jury is still out on that one. Failing big is a hard teacher.

I guess the most interesting thing I learned from that failure is that I am not afraid to fail. Perhaps a better way of saying it is fear of failure will never stop me from putting it out there. The true enemy of all success, in my opinion, is fear. Whether it be fear of the unknown, fear of the consequences, fear of being wrong, or fear of life, the biggest factor in anyone's personal failure is being so afraid of the outcome it prevents you from trying.

The business blogs are writte by people that had the big idea or funded the big idea and helped that big idea turn into massive success. Marc Andreessen's blog is especially interesting. As big time minds go, his is among the biggest.

I hope you enjoy the new links as much as I do.

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The internet is dead and boring... says Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban did an interview with Lloyd Grove and said the internet was on the decline. Due to the backlash from the interview he has followed up with a couple of blog posts amplifying and inflaming his comments and detractors.

Here are some of his comments:

The days of the Internet creating explosively exciting ideas are dead. They are dead until bandwidth throughput to the home reaches far higher numbers than the vast majority of broadband users get today. Few people's actual throughput to their homes have increased more than 5mbs in the past 5 years, and few people's throughput (if you dint understand the difference between throughput and the marketed downstream speeds your read from your ISP, you should) to their homes will increase more than 10mbs in the next 5 years. That's not enough to define a platform that allows really smart people to come up with groundbreaking ideas.

Let's be clear about my opinion of Mark Cuban. He is a visionary businessman that has created a billion dollar fortune out of ideas. That is something to be respected, in my opinion, because I spend a large part of my day trying to come up with the next winning idea. However, in this particular case I think he is dead wrong.

Let's assume for a moment he is right about the bandwidth that most people's homes will be able to manage. All that means is the smart people will have to think of ideas to make use of the bandwidth people have. I am sure there are start up companies out their right now that are working on data compression technology that will allow the kind of content delivery Cuban thinks necessary for the internet to advance. Maybe the better questions is why do people need more throughput to their homes for the net to advance beyond it's current state?

Take a look at the history of the internet and the creation and loss of great wealth that has come with it. Look at the new tools that are popping up and the different ways of interacting with everyone that is, was, or will be in your life. To say the net is in its infancy might be a gross overstatement, but it is definitely in its adolescence. The world is making demands and the markets follow demand. If the net truly needs greater throughput to expand, it will have it. My hypothesis is that someone will think differently and come up with a better idea of how to use the bandwidth that exists to advance the net for themselves and for the world.

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***EDITOR'S NOTE*** A lot of my respect for Mark Cuban has been lost. He is scheduled to appear on Dancing With the Stars.

Puppet

Lately I have been feeling like a marionette. I feel like I have not been in control of my own destiny. Work this last year has been tumultuous at best and while at one point I thought this position would bring me fortune, I am beginning to think that is not the case.

In the last couple of weeks I have taken steps to regain control of my destiny as it were. I have launched an entrepreneurial venture that could prove very lucrative should my partner and I be successful. He has a history of success in these types of ventures so he seems like the ideal person to be getting into business with.

Also, I have been working on an invention, design modification that will increase the fuel efficiency of Class 8 18 wheeled tractor trailers by a significant amount. I have been told that if you can save truckers 1 cent per mile your invention has merit. If that is the truth this is potentially worth billions. I have approached an engineer with a long history of achievement to assist me because while my little mind can conceive a great many things, I have NO idea how to actually make it work. I am meeting with a patent attorney this week.

I have a number of other entrepreneurial ideas bandying about in my addled mind, but these are the two that are getting launched within the month. Of course, the patent attorney could tell me I am late to this particular party and I will have to flush the idea and the venture with my non-engineering partner could crash as quickly as it took flight, but I am cautiously optimistic.

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Ladies and Gentlemen, you are being played...

...and so am I.

Unfortunately, there is not a damned thing we can do about it. We like to drive our cars and therefore we need to buy gasoline. When we buy gasoline we enrich those who strive to screw us, but we need to get to work, or the beach, or wherever.

Read this please.

That article details how gas will reach record highs in relatively short order despite crude oil being about $10 a barrel cheaper than it was last time gasoline breached the $3 a gallon mark.
The reason it details is an unusually high number of refinery outages lately and an inability of the oil companies to bring gasoline to the masses.

Hmm... If I was a multinational oil conglomerate or ten and I wanted to drive record prices during peak usage time, would I manufacture a reason to reduce the gasoline supply to the marketplace? I think I would. The oil companies know we will buy the gas anyway. Because they know we will buy the gas anyway they can do whatever they want. The only way to get them to turn the tap on and keep it on is to reduce demand. Will we reduce demand? Under no circumstances. So when paying $3.75 a gallon in July for regular so you can drive 500 miles to your destination of choice, remember, we are all to blame.

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Credit where it is due

Our internet access at home is completely screwed right now. We have Bellsouth DSL and for whatever reason we cannot access any websites save the Bellsouth home page. This, of course, is a significant problem, because both No Wife and I are wired people. We communicate with friends and family through the internet. We get our news from the internet. I work for an internet company and when I work from home I work on the internet. We are wired and right now we are disconnected. Our issues began yesterday at some point in the early afternoon. After I got home from basketball practice I called Bellsouth customer service and a rep named Jim spent over 2 hours on the phone with me trying different fixes. He was incredibly patient and extremely knowledgable. He was also reasonable and logical. We had a disagreement about the source of our DSL nightmare, but when I took him through the sequence of events that clearly laid the fault at the feet of Bellsouth he did not get belligerent or try to obfuscate. He simply said, "I have exhausted things on my end. Let's set up an appointment for a technician to come out to you." We set a time and hopefully things will be fixed on Thursday morning. It might have been the best customer service experience of my life. So I say bravo Bellsouth. Bravo!!

UPDATE: Apparently, it was a dns error that could have been fixed over the phone. I still give credit to Bellsouth, because the guy who came in fixed it immediately, but damn 2 hours on the phone for something that should have been a 30 second fix. Ouch!!

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More baseball. Yes, I know it is December

I read this very sad article about Mark McGwire last week and wanted to wrtie about it, but I have been absolutely swamped at work. The article is long, but the general gist is that Mark McGwire has faded completely out of the lives of everyone he ever knew before the steroid scandal. He doesn't see his old friends from home anymore. He doesn't talk to his former teammates, agents, or coaches anymore. He lives in a gated community and plays golf and is trying to live as quiet an existence as possible.

This is only relevant because he recently became eligible for the baseball Hall of Fame. There has been great debate lately on blogs, on the radio, on ESPN etc as to whether McGwire should be elected to The Hall, whether he will be elected to The Hall and what is going on in the minds of the voters.

Most people I know don't think about this or care about this. I am not sure I particularly care either, I just hate hypocrisy when I see it. For all the talk about cheating and degrading the great game of baseball the facts seem to support that the press and MLB management knew about the steroid problem long before the ridiculous congressional hearings. They knew about it before BALCO. They knew about it before Barry Bonds passed Babe Ruth's home run total. They knew about it before McGwire was humiliated in front of the nation. The press and management knew and collectively did nothing.

Why?

The 1994 baseball strike crippled the business of baseball. It alienated the fans and tarnished the game for a LOT of people. The 1995 season saw significantly depressed attendance. merchandise sales were way down, television and radio ratings were off and ownership was in a panic. Things started to come back in 1996 and 1997. Then we reached the golden summer of 1998 when baseball recaptured America's sporting heart. Mark McGwire & Sammy Sosa's home run title chase became the only story of that summer. McGwire's fist pumps and Sosa's heart and finger kisses were on Sportscenter every night, in every magazine, on every newspaper. As McGwire got closer to 61 home runs the brought out Roger Maris' family to celebrate in pomp and circumstance of a sport reborn.

Sure, McGwire weighed about 65 pounds more than he did when he was a rookie and looked to be bursting out of his uniform. It was true Sammy Sosa looked like he had been inflated with an air pump. Yeah, Barry Bonds looked like a human bobble head doll. Who cared? Sportwriters wrote about the glorious romance of baseball's resurgence and the ownership breathed a collective sigh of relief as fans flooded back to the stadiums and people turned on ball games in record numbers.

Any baseball writer who wrote about the glory of the summer of 1998 who deson't vote for McGwire's candidacy is a hypocrite. Any baseball owner who talks about how steroids soiled the game are also hypocrites. That Mark McGwire has been humiliated to such a degree that he can't even talk about baseball with his neighbors is an absolute shame. It is a crime against baseball and baseball fans.

In the grand scheme of things is this important? Not remotely, but the article made me sad for the big guy.

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I guess Bob's wife wasn't that happy.

I just read this story about the CEO of the company that makes Enzyte being indicted for fraud. here is a blurb from the article if you dont have time to read the whole thing.

A federal indictment names Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, its owner and president, Steven Warshak, and five other individuals, including Warshak's mother, on charges that include conspiracy, money laundering, and mail, wire and bank fraud.

Is anyone surprised? Look, I understand that the public at large is gullible and what guy doesn't want a bigger schvantz, but come on. A pill that you can buy by calling an 800 number and giving your credit card is not going to make you a better lover. As a matter of fact if you were a good lover the size of your penis would not be especially important.

We men are pathetic creatures, truly.

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Where have I been? Working my ass off motherf*****!

I have really wanted to post, but I have just been completely slammed at work. We are very close to a record month and it is incredibly busy. I was recently describing the upcoming situation to my staff and I said something to the effect of, "I am looking at the calendar here... and umm, yeah it is going to get busy next week and not slow down until June of 2007."

I absolutely have no time at all to post but then I saw this article. It is from the Shreveport Times. Apparently some black students were told to move to the back of their bus so some white students could sit up front. I read this. After I threw up I thought about it for a long time.

Racism is right there folks, bubbling under the surface in a lot of different places. Anti-Semitic, anti-black, anti-immigrant hatred is boiling again in a lot of different places. Pat Buchanan has the top selling book on Amazon.com. Suddenly my gut is roiling again.

Real problems are not solved with reactionary responses and protectionist views. Our social problems and our economic problems will never get better unless we begin to look at them in a different way. One that isn't colored by hatred, ignorance, and petulance. We need a new social theory that is unifying, freeing, and collective.

I am going to paraphrase this quote because I can't seem to find it but Buckminster Fuller basically said this, "We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth much longer if we don't start to look at ourselves as one planet of people and our destiny as collective." Our ideology and strategy needs to be inclusive. It needs to be compassionate and it needs to start now.

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