Provided by ExplainItStudios.com

Provided by ExplainItStudios.com

Excerpts:

p 19 – “I like Apple because they are not afraid of getting a basic 1.0 (version of a product) out into the world and iterating on it” -Matt Mullenweg

p 23 – David Cohen talks about how tons and tons of features kill many startups. “This is a fundamentally flawed strategy that presumes users will adopt a new service just because it has more features. The reality is that most people use a particular service because it does one thing really, really well.”

p 24 – quote by Ev Williams “Focus on the smallest possible problem yo could solve that would potentially be useful … Focusing on a small niche has so many advantages.”

p 36 – sign on Techstars office in Cambridge, MA: “You are STUPID. LISTEN To Your USERS Or You Will Have NONE.”

p 55 – “(Fail Fast) means that you should be happy about having a bunch of little failures along the path to success, because if you’re not failing, you’re probably just not trying enough stuff.”

p 95 – In addition to the team, the product or service and the market (timing/size/etc.), Greg Gottesman adds one more factor to the startup must-have list: the right startup culture. Here is his list of characteristics of a great startup culture:

1. No politics
2. It’s not a job, it’s a mission
3. Intolerance for mediocrity
4. Watching pennies
5. Equity-driven
6. Good communication, even in bad times
7. Perfect alignment (“strategy makes sense and is aligned with the vision. People are doing what they are good at and in the right roles…”
8. Strong leadership
9. Mutual respect
10. Customer-obsessed
11. High energy level
12. Fun
13. Integrity

p – 116+ Hyper-productive small nimble companies simply do more faster – “they focus on what matters and make massive progress in the areas that actually have an impact.”

p 123 – Ari Newman says Make Decisions Quickly. “One of the most valuable assets an early stage company has is that it is nimble … teh consequences of not making decisions quickly is akin to giving up one of your best assets.

p 124 – “We lived the Mantra of ‘Build something valuable, get the word out, and then listen to your customers. Then iterate and repeat.’ … We also paid close attention to what our metrics told us (and skated to where the puck was going, instead of where it was right now).”

p 130 – Ryan McIntyre on data: “Use your head and trust your gut … Be prepared for the data to give you a head fake. Early success with a certain customer segment might lead to a decision to focus on a subgroup of customers that turns out to be really hard to sell to and which happens to represent only 4% of the overall customer base … (as a startup founder) you’ll need to get comfortable living with messy and incomplete data.”

p 135 – Revenue, milestones, products and code so NOT count as progress to Eric Reis. He defines progress in a startup as “validated learning about customers” which is where companies learn to grow renewable audiences through a scalable process that can be automated or at least delegated (meaning founders themselves don’t have to personally conduct every sale). He argues for companies to not have to sell their products “by hand. Instead, each potential customer has to go through a self-serve process of signing-up and paying money … they have found, over time, a formula for acquiring, qualifying and selling customers in the market segments they have targeted. Most importantly, they have lots of data about the unit economics of their business. They know how much it costs to bring in a customer and they know how much money they can expect to make on each one.”

p 146 – some of the free products they list that many firms use: Balsamiq for screen prototyping; DimDim for web meetings; DropBox for storage; GitHub for code sharing; MogoTest for making sure applications look great on every browser; Pivotal Tracker for issue tracking; SendGrid for email delivery; SnapABug for chatting with your website visitors, Twilio for audio conf/ phone/ SMS

p 162 – Andy Smith on Features: Quality Over Quantity! To build useful, meaningful features: (1) focus on ease of use and visual appeal; (2) build ONE thing well; (3) listen to some but NOT all user feedback (some feedback is just wrong)

p 165 – Ben Casnocha: Have a Bias Toward Action (aka Learn By Doing). Action! Constantly make decisions and act on them, then learn/ iterate/ evolve your thinking > more action.

p 174 – Don’t wait for your product to be perfect. Go, Ship , Iterate over and over again (quickly). Continuous Releases! “Getting your product into the hands of your users quickly, with regular updates, is the key to getting a great product.”  Suggests an agile project management tool like Rally Software

p 183 – Dave McClure: “What’s key and really hard is simplifying your product and building a great user experience … Build a culture of feedback and measured analytics into your process and organization.”

p 183 – If you can figure out how to make money and make users happy, and how to do both of thise things at scale, you probably have an interesting business on your hands.

p 189 – Bill Flagg: “A real business boils down to one thing – serving peoples’ needs and getting paid for it in a way that you can operate profitably. The best way to do that is to know your customers.”

p 190 – Bill Flagg (RegOnline) puts this message on their invoices: “If you are not completely satisfied with your service, mark down this bill as you feel it is appropriate and tell me where we can improve.”

p 231 – Show, Don’t Tell. “I don’t want you to describe what you are going to do; I want to see it (even a rough prototype) … The great entrepreneurs (and salespeople) show. Just think of how Steve Jobs does it. Show me!”

p 246 – Make sure that you (and not a contractor you hire) owns all your IP (default ownership may often go to the contractor). “A simple solution wen working with independent contractors is to have a written contract that unambiguously assigns IP over to the company.”

p 247 – Local universities are often a great resource for first-time entrepreneurs (including the law school)

p 255 – default to Delaware as your state of incorporation – laws are well-known, company-friendly, and won’t have some absurd unknown law that trips you up

p 261 – vesting ownership for founders (more than one) – that way if someone leaves without contributing much, they don’t take all their equity with them.

p270 – 83(b) Election is a “magic document” that allows for you to pay all of the tax on the stock that has been granted to you ahead of time, regardless of vesting (one day 1, this stock’s value – and the tax due – is negligible). -Matt Galligan

As I said above, “Do More Faster” by David Cohen and Brad Feld is definitely worth your time. Read it and learn…

“I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.”

1. What do you understand the priorities to be?
2. What concerns or ideas do you have that have not already been mentioned?
3. What are your key next steps, and by when do you plan to accomplish them?
4. What do you need from me in order to be successful?
5. Are there any key contingencies we should plan for now?
6. When will we next check-in on progress/issues?
7. Who else needs to know our plans, and how will we communicate them?

Click here to read his HBR article, which has lots of useful background and commentary.

A fascinating and informative look at the history of information empire cycles.

Excerpts (page numbering is from hardcover 1st edition):

p 18 – So many revolutionary innovations start small, with outsiders, amateurs, and idealists in attics and garages.

p 19 – There was, it is fair to say, no single inventor of the telephone. And this reality suggests that what we call invention, while not easy, is simply what happens once a technology’s development reaches the point where the next step becomes available to many people … in (a) sense, inventors are often more like craftsmen than miracle workers. Indeed, the history of science is full of examples of what the writer Malcolm Gladwell terms “simultaneous discovery” – so full that the phenomenon represents the norm rather than the exception … The inventors we remember are significant not so much as inventors, but as founders of “disruptive’ industries, ones that shake up the technological status quo. Through circumstance or luck, they are exactly at the right distance to imagine the future and to create an independent industry to exploit it.

p 19 The importance of the outsider (to invention) owes to his being at the right remove from the prevailing currents of thought about the problem at hand. That distance affords a perspective close enough to understand the problem, yet far enough for greater freedom of thought, freedom from, as it were, the cognitive distortion of what is as opposed to what could be. This innovative distance explains why so many of those who turn an industry upside down are outsiders, even outcasts.

p 20 – describes 2 types of innovation: sustaining (improvements that make a product better, but do not threaten its market), and disruptive (conversely, it threatens to displace a product altogether)

p 57 – describes a common carrier in communications as one which refrains from picking winners in other sectors of the economy or public life – any area that privileged access to .. communications could influence.

p 57 – Common carriage … is as fundamental to free communications … as the First Amendment is to free expression.

p 57 – Bell’s dedication to common carriage was a promise to serve any customer willing to pay, charge fixed rates, and carry his or her traffic without discrimination.

p 58 – At the heart of common carriage is the idea that certain businesses are either so intimately connected, even essential, to the publicgood, or so inherently powerful – imagine the water or electric utilities – that they must be compelled to conduct their affairs in a nondiscriminatory way … four basic industries being identified as “public callings”: telecommunications, banking, energy, and transportation. Each plays a certain essential role in the workings of the nation and the economy, and thus these are the industries that have attracted regulation as common carriers, or infrastructure.

p 69 – …this is a case where the greater harm of monopoly reveals itself to be not economic but expressive. The (crushing film monopoly) Trust’s rules controlled not just costs, but the very nature of what film, as a creative medium, could be. In an information industry the cost of monopoly must not be easured in dollars alone, but also in its effect on the economy of ideas and images, the restraint of which can ultimately lead to censorship.

p 70 – Last and perhaps most damaging was the Trust’s arrogation to itself of the role of official censor. The Trust simply did not allow films it deemed inappropriate to be made or exhibited.

Not enough time to finish this entry, but especially noteworthy content on pages 116, 134, 146, 162, 164, 168, 198, 220, 244, 252, 280, 290, 292 and 300.

Visit http://timwu.org for more info.

You heard it here first. Anthropology is the study of humanity. DECODED will become known as one of the most important anthropological books of all time, because of its raw, intimate truth about the poor urban black experience from the 1970′s through late 1990′s and how that has come through in popular music.

I haven’t really listened to much of his music (yet), but I hate that Jay-Z sold crack for many years, but I respect his honesty about it and his book helps me understand the world he’s from (see the excerpt from p 218 below*).

As a white man living in beautiful Mendham, NJ it’s easy for me to judge him, but it’s better to have been able to gain some understanding about him.

I can’t possibly do the book justice, but here are a few excerpts from DECODED:

(On the word nigga, which some say is a matter of acknowledging the deep and painful history of the word): “To me, it’s just a word, a word whose power is owned by the user and his or her intention. People give words power, so banning a word is futile, really. “Nigga” becomes “porch monkey” becomes “coon” and so on if that’s what’s in a person’s heart. The key is to change the person. And we change people through conversation, not censorship.” ~Epilogue

(On Biggie Smalls’ line “Look at our parents, even they fukn scared of us”): “With that line, Big captured the whole transformation (of the influence of young men as crack cocaine hustlers) in a few words. Authority was turned upside down. Guys my age, few up with watching their moms struggle on a single income, were paying utility bills with money from hustling … teenagers wore automatic weapons like they were sneakers. Broad-daylight shootouts had our grandmothers afraid to leave the house, and had neighbors who’d known us since we were toddlers forming Neighborhood Watches against us too.”  p 13

I can’t find the passage, but to me a highlight of the book is when Shawn talks about now recognizing the deep courage it took for a young person to walk past all the brewing trouble and (seemingly) easy money of the streets to make minimum wage at McDonald’s. This is another unsung facet of life in poor neighborhoods – maybe worth exploring in future albums.  (Found it on p 75: “It took me a long time to realize how much courage it took to work at McDonald’s, to walk through the streets past rows of hustlers wearing that orange uniform. But at the time, it seemed like an act of surrender to a world that hated us.”  Think about those last words “to a world that hated us” and how it must feel to live your entire life with everyone you know truly believing that and having it reinforced by every one of your experiences.)

p 94 “It’s easy to take shots at performers wen they seem to self-destruct. But there’s another way to look at it. When you reach that top level, there’s suddenly so much to deal with on all fronts – you have old friends and distant family who are suddenly close, people who feel like they should be getting rich from your success. You have a target on your back from other people … who feels like your success should be theirs. You have to deal with lawyers and accountants, and you have to be able to trust these people you’re just meeting with everything you have. There’s just more of everything. Women, money, “friends,” piles of whatever your vice is. There’s enough of whatever you love to kill you. That kind of change can destabilize even the most grounded personality. And that’s when you lose yourself…”

p 154 “America, as I understood the concept, ated my black ass.”

p 154 “Poor people in general have a twisted relationship with the government, We’re aware of the government from the time we’re born. We live in government-funded housing and work government jobs. We have family and friends spending time in the ultimate public housing, prison. We grow up knowing people who pay for everything with little plastic cards – Medicare cards for checkups, EBT cards for food. We know what AFDC and WIC stand for and we stand for hours waiting for bricks of government cheese. The first and fifteenth of each month are times of peak economic activity. We get to know all kinds of government agencies not because of civics class, but because they actually visit our houses and sit up on our couches asking questions. From the time we’re small children we go to public schools that tell us all we need to know about what the government thinks of us. Then there are the cops…”

p 155 “Housing projects are a great metaphor for the government’s relationship with poor folks: these huge islands built mostly in the middle of nowhere, designed to warehouse lives. People are still people, though, so we turned the projects into real communities, poor or not (Notice how starkly this last sentence contrasts with the entry 5 paragraphs above that begins “On Biggie Smalls’ line…”). We played in fire hydrants and had cookouts and partied, music bouncing off concrete walls. But even when we could shake off the full weight of those imposing buildings and try to just live, the truth of our lives and struggle was still invisible to the larger country.

p 155 “Politicians – at the highest levels – would try to silence and kill our culture if they could hustle some votes out of it. Even black leaders who were supposed to be representing you would turn on you…”

* p 218 “The worst thing about being poor in America isn’t the deprivation … The burden of poverty isn’t just that you don’t always have the things you need, it’s the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you’d do anything to lift that burden … The sad shit is that you never really shake it all the way off, no matter how much money you get.”

p 220 “The shame and stigma of poverty means that we turn away from it, even those of us living through it, but turning away doesn’t make it disappear.”

p 220 “To some degree charity is a racket in a capitalist system, a way of making our obligations to one another optional, and of keeping poor people feeling a sense of indebtedness to the rich, even if the rich spend every other day exploiting those same people.”

p 221 (on the seventh degree of giving in Judaism) “The seventh degree is giving anonymously, so you don’t know who you’re giving to, and the person on the receiving end doesn’t know who gave. The value of that is that the person receiving doesn’t have to feel some kind of obligation to the giver and the person giving isn’t doing it with an ulterior motive. It’s a way of putting the giver and receiver on the same level.”

p 239 “…How can he do both unless he’s some kind of hypocrite? But this is one of the things that makes rap at its best so human. It doesn’t force you to pretend to be only one thing or another, to be a saint or a sinner. It recognizes that you can be true to yourself and still have unexpected dimensions and opposing ideas.”

DECODED – read it, twice.

David Geffen is certainly not perfect, as is more than aptly pointed out on many pages of this book, but I also find him to be an intelligent, forward-thinking, interesting, complicated and sympathetic character as well.

Final post will include excerpts from (first edition hardcover) pages 20, 34, 48, 60, 68, 90, 106, 108, 132, 142, 144, 146, 156, 158, 168, 170, 172, 174, 181, 224, 266, 374, 376, 394, 406, 414, 424, 450, 468, 470, 484, 488, 520, 536, 554, 560, 562, 568, 574, 594

The book is a quick read that conveys an interesting and thorough tale of late night TV.

A few excerpts:

• p 152 – CBS Head Howard Stringer was trying to win Letterman for his network and thought the deal wouldn’t turn just on money, but “it had to be about fulfillment and opportunity and a well-earned moment in the spotlight.”

• p 264 – “All (Conan O’Brien) had was his winning personality and the underdog factor.”

• p 278 – David Letterman, once at 11:30 on CBS up against The Tonight Show, “…was a late-night phenomenon. He was bringing in younger viewers in the time period that hadn’t been seen since Carson’s greatest days. More than that, he was attracting the hardest viewers for advertisers to reach: Light television viewers, those who watched little or noting regularly, were changing their habits to catch Dave.”