Socializing

A few things I’ve learned…

*Reading startup blogs is not equivalent to having startup experience.

*You’re not ready to leave your cushy job until you actually do it.

*Start something small before you start something big.

*Don’t scale your team until you can affect your KPIs.

*Trust your informed intuition until you have data that indicates that its wrong. “When the facts change, I change my mind.”

*Outsource as much of your stack as makes sense, but be wary of startups that aren’t well capitalized and open source software that isn’t well documented or actively supported.

*Always build the stuff that’s core.

*The two truest idioms: you pay for what you get, and less is more.

#Winning on the Web

We started Infochimps because finding data on the web is hard. The pain of “find” is not unique to data: there is a lot of stuff on the web which makes finding what you’re looking for hard. Quora estimates Google has as many as 100 billion web pages indexed. That’s a pretty big hay stack. A lot of time is spent finding needles.

The flip side of this, is that its really hard to find customers on the web. In order to be found, a site needs to rank highly on the first page of a Google search result, or be so ubiquitous that people type it directly into their URL bar. A lot of money is spent finding customers.

The winners on the web are sites that can bridge this gap: that help customers find what they are looking for, and help sellers find those customers. These sites are commonly called marketplaces. Infochimps is a marketplace.

If it were easy to build a marketplace, everyone would do it. It isn’t. The best post I’ve seen on marketplaces is this one. Good luck finding it on Google.

Meta search engines like DuckDuckGo let you search myriad sites through a single search box, though you need to learn a lot of shortcuts (!data for Infochimps). Google might support choice, but they have a strong preference that you start your search there. The Google killer isn’t going to be a search engine in the traditional sense, but a marketplace of marketplaces.

“Make decisions with intuition but validate them with analytics.”

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This quote by the CEO of chip-maker Nvidia is one of many gems in The Corner Office by Adam Bryan. The book is a must read for any first-time CEO, and I would venture to say for anyone at a startup. My friend Ben Pieratt’s honest blog post inspired me to read it. Below are some of the takeaways I found most meaningful:

*Have debates about what the questions should be, not the solutions.

*Be clear about whether something you say is a light bulb or a gun. A lightbulb means this is just an idea, so think about it, see if you think it’s a good one. Either follow up or don’t, but it’s just an idea. A gun is, I want you to do this.

*Thanks to the Internet, there is a greater premium on the ability to synthesize, to connect dots in new ways, and to ask the simple, smart question that leads to an untapped opportunity.

*Bringing in a new team member provides a new set of eyes on a corporate culture. Use them to get a fresh perspective.

*When your team asks how you are, answer “I’m great and here’s why…”

*You have to be able to say that the strategy didn’t work, that the technology didn’t work, that the product didn’t work, but we’re still going to be great and be able to tell the team why.

*As it turns out, the most fun parts of the game are when you’re losing. When you finally beat it there’s a moment of euphoria, but then it’s over.

Recruiting

Fred Wilson says a CEO does 3 things: 1) sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders, 2) recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company, and 3) makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank. These 3 things have varying relative difficulty depending on the economic climate. During the financial crisis recruiting was a lot easier, but raising capital was very challenging. Fast forward to today, and you’ve got the opposite problem. Emory classmate Peter Corbett called it as he saw it at Summit at Sea: “You know its a bubble when its easier to get money than an engineer.” I can attest this is true in the bay area, as well as in Austin. It still isn’t easy to raise money, but it is easier to find VCs looking for good deals to invest in than engineers looking for awesome startups to work at. We are fortunate to have an incredible talent pipeline, largely thanks to our relationship with UT and our magnetic founder and CTO, Flip Kromer. That being said, we’re hiring! Please email me at nick<at>infochimps<dot>com, if you’re interested in being part of an amazing team with awesome perks such as daily catered lunches, 100% paid healthcare premiums, and all the bananas you can eat!

Maybe we’re in the middle of a bubble… I moved downtown in 2006 and have been shopping at Whole Foods (stock chart above) 3-4 times a week since then. When I first started shopping there in ‘06 it was packed at all times. Even though it was called “whole paycheck” the crowd was always very diverse. When the bottom fell out of the market in 2008, it was totally empty. The other shoppers in ‘08 tended to look seemingly well-to-do. As the market came back it got a lot busier and during the holidays last year it was a mad house. I’ve recently noticed the crowd thinning out. The patrons seem to be local to the neighborhood; people who actually live downtown. What I think is happening is that the people who had frugality fatigue and upgraded to Whole Foods from their neighborhood market, are now eating out instead of shopping for groceries, and the well-to-doers are going back to their highfalutin ways. Since I didn’t see this part of the cycle last time, I am guessing we’re only in the middle, but it is hard to tell. Happenings at Whole Foods and news that Flipboard raised $50 million on a $200 million valuation have made me question my “we’re not in a bubble” mentality.

OH: Data

I recently had the opportunity at SXSW to hear LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman speak about Data 3.0. Today I went back to the future at Data 2.0 Conference, at which I was a panelist and on the Program Committee. There were over 500 in attendance and many familiar faces, such as Mike Driscoll, Hjalmar Gislason, Gil Elbaz, and OrenMichels. It is becoming very clear to me about where we are and we’re were going with respect to the data web. Call it what you want, but here it is as I see it:

Provenance. Where does your data come from? How accurate is it? My response: who cares! Well, of course you should care, but only to the extent you have a baseline to measure against. I can tell you all day long my data is better, but if I can’t prove it against the competition, then it is simply marketing speak. I believe provenance will become less important and user reviews will become more important.

Structure v Semantics. What does normal even mean? Your normal is probably different than my normal so why should I force my normal on you? Structure is enough. As long as the data is structured and in machine readable format, it can become easily usable. On the Data Ecosystem panel, Oren put it plainly, “it is so much bigger an issue to have the data in the first place”.

APIs. Gil Elbaz says Data 3.0 is “millions of APIs”. I agree. We have the construct that each dataset is a single API, with one or more different ways to query it. As we go from tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands, and ultimately to millions of datasets, we will indeed have millions of APIs!

T’s & C’s. Will creative commons or open database license win? The more important question is who is going to enforce these licenses and how. Are we going to see hackers being taken to court for violation of these licenses? My first job in law school was in the rights and permissions group atZiff Davis Media. I was in charge of finding and enforcing infringing uses of our trademarks and copyrights. The vast majority of the infringing users didn’t care and didn’t change their behavior. Ziff Davis did nothing about it. The reality is that bits are just that, bits, and its what you do with them that matters.

I will leave you with this: it is not the size of the bit, but the relevance of the data.

Hiring the right people is critically important in a quickly growing startup. Each new hire can significantly change the company in a good or bad way. There is a saying that A players hire A players and B players hire C players and I am a big believer in only hiring leaders, future leaders and key contributors. B players hire grinders and losers. The difference between a grinder and a loser is work ethic, grinders have it, losers don’t, but neither have ambition. That being said, anyone can change, but don’t hire them until they do. See below for who we’ve hired.

Leaders and future leaders are those that have positive energy, coachability and proven ability to execute. All leaders and future leaders need to have positive energy. They need to be optimistic, enthusiastic and passionate. There are a lot of people with these characteristics: they are called A-type personalities; however, this list is reduced dramatically when you filter out those that are not coachable. A good leader not only knows his/her strengths and can identify strengths in others, but knows his/her weaknesses and manages to others’ strengths and helps them improve their weaknesses. If you think you know it all, don’t apply for a job here, if you already know a lot and want to know more ∞, please send me your resume. With respect to execution, it is important not to confuse someone with lots of ideas with someone who has a proven ability to execute. Ideas are dime a dozen and can be paralyzing in a startup without the ability to identify and execute on the best ones. Leaders have had success in executing on great ideas in absolute terms and future leaders have had relative success in doing so, or absolute success on a smaller scale.

Key contributors are team members that have positive energy and coachability but have only proven their ability to execute at a small scale, with or without relative success. For engineers, we look at their git repositories and for business folks, we look at whether they have tried to start a business, build a community or otherwise have clearly articulated they have the get shit done gene. Leaders and future leaders will develop key contributors into future leaders.

Would love to hear your thoughts on hiring, and what has worked for you to recruit top talent. It is very hard to find, especially when you’re committed to not hiring anyone who isn’t at least going to be a key contributor.

Open Letter to Twitter Using Others’ Tweets

Dear twitter, FIX YO SELF. We need to talk, I need some clarity. Seems that many cool third party twitter tools and services are being shut down due to Twitter Terms of Service enforcement notices. Sad :-( Let’s make Twitter a gr8 platform for us to connect, build & inspire!! =D Unfortunately we’re limited by Twitter’s terms of service which is quite restrictive. We’ll continue to experiment though. :) Twitter search has said “Older tweets are temporarily unavailable” since I started here in Jan ‘09. Stretching the meaning of “temporarily”. I want to go back to my first 1000 tweets to see what was happening in my life… #justsaying seems kinda cool.. Please provide more clarity so I may study and ask the Holy Spirited for understanding. I still love you even with your lack of tweets.

Biz book review in haiku: The Mesh by Lisa Gansky

Sharing is ripe for
High cost frequently used goods
Such as Car2Go

TEDxAustin 2011

I had the pleasure of attending my second TEDx conference yesterday. It was well attended and a first rate production. I took down what I considered the key take away from each presentation, and will share the best of the best with you.

Sunny Vanderbeck, Satori Capital: We’re suffering “short-term-itis”.

David Cameron, Prime Minister UK (video): How can we make things better without spending more money?

Gilbert Tuhabonye, Marathoner, Genocide Surviver: Run with passion.

Flint Sparks, Zen Psychotherapist: May your greatest longing be met by your greatest gift.

Gregory Kallenberg, Documentary Filmmaker: There is no perfect solution, the solution is compromise.

Osama Bedier, Googler: Online payments is going to profoundly change commerce.

Sylvia Acevedo, US Chamber of Commerce Hispanic Woman of the Year: 10,000 people in the US will turn 65 every day for the next 10 years.

Peter Hall, UT Professor: Always make maps, always question maps.

Brene Brown, UH Professor: Believe that you’re worthy.

Dr. Lionel Tiger, Rutgers Professor, Coiner of the Term “Male Bonding”: Alpha males and companies like Infochimps (mentioned in his speech) will beat out wimpier competition.