Haywire

@semil's blog, building a technology community

Apr
2

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Full-Time Tech Writers Deserve More Respect

Category: Career, Culture, Media, Technology Leave a Comment

Because I’ve been a contributor to TechCrunch for so long and been consistent about contributing over the past two-and-a-half years, people sometimes think I’m a full-time reporter. That’s definitely far from the truth. Usually when this happens, I respond with the following: “Oh, no, I’m not a full-time reporter, nor could I be one.” My feeling is that, while the crowd likes to pick on full-time tech writers because they’re an easy target, the truth is more subtle. I know this because I’ve seen this live and up-front through my relationship with TechCrunch. The folks there have an extremely hard job, and I’d imagine everyone who does this professionally does. Here are some aspects of being a full-time tech writer that others may not know:

  • Number of posts per day: Many writers are required to write many posts per day. There are some obvious reasons for this, of course, since most people don’t want to pay for information online, but some non-obvious ones which I’ll explain below. Writing at this pace increases the likelihood for all sorts of errors and mistakes, not to mention the competitive pressure to write better posts (faster) than their competitors.
  • Competition: Writers build up their reputation partly by competing with other writers, so they’re racing against their peers to find and publish scoops before others, or to put the best analysis around the news. They can’t let perfection be the enemy of good given their time constraints.
  • Few Incentives To Share Brutal Truths: In the startup world, there are lots of incestuous funding and work-related relationships, and sharing opinions based on hard truths (many of which would be negative) don’t serve the writers well because they may not be contacted by companies in the future or be able to work in the industry later in their careers. Some way not care about this, but other writers may not want to close these doors.
  • Startup Explosion, and PR Explosion: Writers are literally bombarded by startups and their PR reps. I don’t think people truly realize how many people just start things and call themselves “startups,” so the market does need validation like investment notes, as crass as that may seem. Additionally, the amount of money spent on PR would shock people, and it’s hard to escape it — many VCs have reps, too. In many cases, even though investors wouldn’t admit it, they and many others sometimes rely on the analytical work of these writers to help inform their investment decisions.

Finally — and I think this is important — tech writers actually help startups a lot out of a pure desire to be helpful and see them succeed. I’ve seen writers ruin their nights or weekends to cover a launch or new product because the team didn’t get in touch with them far enough in advance. This is not to say that the writers pen glowing reviews, but others often don’t respect the writer’s time, and I’ve seen many of them change their schedule to accommodate the rest of us, the founders and investors, because generally this kind of work is viewed as not-as-important in the Valley. This is something I’ve been thinking about because I hear complaints often, and I always say that, having seen how this is done, this is a job that I wouldn’t be able to do — it is very hard and requires a different level of dedication and risks. All of this isn’t to say that full-time writers should be immune to criticism (just like any other job), but I’d like people to consider these facts before bashing the folks who do this hard work.

Apr
1

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Five Mega-Trends Which Make Nextdoor Fascinating

Category: Culture, Media, Technology, Venture Capital Leave a Comment

Last year, while working out of Javelin Venture Partners in downtown SF, our offices were next door to a company called Nextdoor. Yes, that’s true. I am not a Nextdoor user. I didn’t think much of them at the time, but I had to walk by them everyday to go to the bathroom. And, looking inside, I could see there was increased activity. This was the summer of 2012. Since then, I’ve read a few longer-form pieces about Nextdoor, and obviously they’ve attracted smart venture money. Despite all that, I tend to think about Nextdoor differently, in terms of a confluence of mega-trends that touches on some previous academic work and philosophies about the state of the U.S. economy and political atmosphere. From this angle, thinking about investment into products where societal trends are shifting is fascinating to me. Briefly, those are:

  1. Local Advertising, from Yellow Pages to Online: This is the market Groupon and others tried to go after, and it’s so huge, all of those ad dollars will get sliced up in many ways. Yelp is v1.0 of this, with a long way to go.
  2. Location or Proximity as Context for Knowing People: Buzzy apps like Highlight or Yobongo before it promise to present us with information about who is around us, but most of them struggled to provide enough context to make a persistent connection with depth.
  3. Poor State of Municipal Finances: The city of Stockton, CA is legally bankrupt. Income inequality is so high in America, and because states, by law, are not allowed to go bankrupt, those problems get pushed down to the city level. When city finances are in the toilet, budgets get cut, so things like community shelters or even police get cut down in some cases. (This meme has been picked up, as folks are suggesting people are using Nextdoor as an “eye in the sky” neighborhood watch.)
  4. Facebook Feed Losing Local Relevance: Maybe local papers will also die off. They’ll have to come online, and they’ll need a Facebook page, and then their stories will get stuck in a huge feed. But the desire to read local news is high, just not distributed well. A platform like Nextdoor’s mental model could solve this.
  5. Collaborative Consumption on a Local Basis: This is old hat, but bears repeating in this context. If it were easy, I think more and more people would share and/or resell slightly-used but quality goods with people they know, and I believe we are just in the early innings of this trend. One reason is the overall stagnation of the economy, but also an attitudinal shift away from excessive commerce and accumulating material items in favor of spending disposable income on experiences.

[One Caveat: To play devil's advocate, home ownership may continue to decline, which means people will rent more, implying they may switch neighborhoods more often (especially in cities) and then be less likely to invest in a service like this.]

Mar
31

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Good Advice I’ve Received In The Valley

Category: Career, Culture, Technology Leave a Comment

You ever meet someone and, they say something, and it stays in your head for a while? Chances are you’ve heard those phrases and sentiments before, but in that moment, based on that person, for some reason, the language sticks with you, and you keep thinking about it in the recess of your brain. I wanted to create a space where I capture those quotes and sentiments, and share them with you — and hopefully add to them as I get more.

This is advice I’ve received in person, 1:1, from the individuals listed below. I’m lucky to have spent time with some outstanding people, so I thought I’d share their wisdom below. Nothing is sensitive so I hope they don’t mind that I reproduce them, but they resonate with me even years after hearing them. In no particular order:

  • Hiten Shah: “Find the one thing that fixes all the other problems.” / in trying to change course, don’t do too many things, but rather find one thing to change that changes everything else.
  • John Lilly: “What do you want? What do you need?” / his framework response to those who ask for advice
  • Mark Goines: “I don’t want to fund entrepreneurs who want to change the world; I want to fund entrepreneurs who want to change an industry.” / cuts against common refrain about entrepreneurship as good, and instead casts it in a more realistic light.
  • Michael Abbott: “People won’t respect you until you ship something…anything.”
  • Tristan Walker: “Don’t underestimate people around here.” / i’ve found usually the most quiet folks have so many accomplishments around here.
  • Anonymous: “Live by the press, die by the press.” / applies to anyone or anything that is too media hungry.
  • Nakul Mandan: “We are here to make a difference.” / simple reminder on why we are here in the valley, not to be safe or afraid, but to realize something bigger.
  • Adam Nash: “I like to play host.” / a short and sweet sentiment about how elders should always try to welcome and support those who are new arrivals or earnestly trying to get somewhere.
  • Matt Cohler: “Everything is a platform.” / beyond product thinking, all of your career positions can be platforms for the next role or job.
  • Alexia Tsotsis: “Be nice.” / it is also a good interpersonal strategy.
  • Michael Dearing: “Let things happen organically.” / sound advice for the Type-A’s of the world, as much as you can try to engineer an outcome, it increases the likelihood it won’t happen.
  • Andrew Chen: “I hope you take a more difficult path.” / before andrew was famous, he gave me this advice and was quite adamant about me not taking another path.
  • Gentry Underwood: “I want to build something that can be even bigger.” / i was hanging out with gentry when clear came out and he was toying with the idea of buying orchestra (which i loved) to climb a bigger hill.
  • Kent Goldman: “Hang around the hoop.”

Mar
30

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Iterations: Google Challenges Apple At The iOS Application Layer

Category: Media, Technology Leave a Comment

This is a post I wrote on TechCrunch back on December 16, 2012.

Back in September 2011, a full year before the iPhone 5, I wrote a post here speculating, mostly for fun, how Facebook could approach the iOS platform by using a federated strategy to separate their core offerings into single-use apps across Apple’s App Store. Of course, this didn’t happen, though Facebook has a separate app for private messages (Messenger, through the acquisition of Beluga) and Camera, which was timed curiously around the time the company made one of its most savvy moves: buying Instagram. Since then, Facebook impressively rehauled their entire iOS app away from HTML5 to native and provide a great unified experience in one app, a marvel considering the complexity and scale of their system.

Google, on the other hand, has quietly built and executed on a strong federated suite of mobile and web services that now makes the Mountain View giant a force on Apple’s mobile platform. Alongside this post is a screenshot of all the Google apps for iOS I’ve downloaded to my iPhone (I realize there are even more), and just these almost take up an entire page. And, while Google’s dexterity here is quite impressive as it can provide services for VOIP, chat, local, news, and so much more, Google’s real opportunity relies around the different modes in which people will search for information via their mobile devices, mainly through a mobile browser, for videos, documents, maps, through voice controls.

Right now, Apple has a hammerlock on mobile handset and tablet profit margins, whereas Google has to partner with other OEM to make their offerings a reality. Over time, the margins OEMs can extract from mobile devices will likely face downward pressure. Right now, folks are buying phones almost every year, and the battle to innovate is intense. As competition increases, both for software and hardware components, those device margins will likely go down, and the next frontier for profits in mobile will be in providing robust search interfaces that will generate new revenue or expanding existing revenue streams. The main mobile search interfaces are:

  • Native Browser: Apple’s mobile Safari is given special access to UIWebView, so although Google’s Chrome for iOS is extremely well-designed and conceived, its functionality is limited given these controls. Still, Chrome for iOS is nearly a Top 50 “free” app will likely only become more and more popular from hereon out.
  • Videos: Until recently, iPhone users could search their preinstalled “YouTube” app controlled by Apple. Of course, Apple stopped that, forcing Google to create YouTube for iOS, which is a smashing success (no surprise here) and is by far the best app to mirror to Apple TV at home. The act of searching for video content directly via YouTube is a huge search and Google owns this.
  • Maps: Most people think of mobile apps as core utilities, and they are — but many folks initiate searches directly into mobile maps, transforming maps into another type of search engine. This is one major reason why Apple had to cobble together their own solution so quickly, simply because this search interface will be important to how they monetize mobile in the future. On a roll, Google just released Google Maps for iOS, and of course, it’s now the #1 free app on Apple — and they’ve announced they’ll open their iOS Maps SDK to others to build on top of. [As an aside, the dynamics around search within mobile maps is one big reason why Foursquare is such a valuable property, despite what the naysayers may say.]
  • Documents: Apple’s iCloud service smartly syncs files across its entire suite of devices, and finally does so quite well — for a yearly fee, of course, above 5GB. Google Documents, at tremendous scale, are used worldwide and their recent app, Drive for iOS, is quite well-done and serves the need of most users who work out of Google Docs (like me).
  • Voice Control: Some people like Siri (works great for me), and others hate it. Whatever. In Google’s own branded iOS app, their voice function is extremely good for crawling the web within that app, but of course, they will never have OS-level access to Apple’s platform, so it’s limited to their own services, which are currently separated across apps. [As an aside, I wonder if Google will unify these in order to expand the reach of their voice control technology.]

What we have there, then, is an extremely powerful and resource-rich technology company with hundreds of millions of users across many web product lines that has somehow begged, borrowed, and stole its way to providing one of the most robust suites of iOS software without the benefits conferred to those who enjoy native iOS access, preinstalls, or default settings. Naturally, Apple knows this and will seek to limit to which of Google’s apps can control the phone or tablet, but over time, as Android is slowly reigned in, Apple will not be able to undertake a similar strategy at the Android application layer. Therefore, Google’s position to (1) lock-in Android users into its integrated services and utilities remains strong and will get stronger and (2) if they can continue to build superior iOS apps, it will bolster their position for services — the next frontier for profits on mobile, after hardware — and all this, on the platform of one of their most formidable rivals.

Mar
30

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Web Search, Beyond Google

Category: Culture, Media, Technology Leave a Comment

Over three years ago, Chris Dixon wrote a great post about “What is Strategic for Google.” You should read it, though I’m sure most of you have already. One of his conclusions is that the browser helps control a different input search bar so that people don’t have to type in google dot com and perhaps go somewhere else. That was three years ago, however, and since then, a web user has more robust choices to search within other sites, as I’ve tried to list below. (Google began in 1998.) There are fears intent-based search could be eclipsed by “discovery” mechanisms presented to users on other sites, but what’s interesting is that the following sites have their own interesting sub-intent-based searches:

  • Quora: Started in 2009, opened to public in 2010, finally improved native search, and this is where I conduct about 15-20% of my native searches.
  • Twitter: Started 2006, now the go-to place for real-time search.
  • LinkedIn: Started 2003, best site to search for people in a professional context.
  • Facebook: Started 2004, (will become) the best site to search for people in a personal context.
  • Pinterest: Started 2009, and will become (I believe) one of the largest search properties on the web.
  • Prismatic: Started 2011, and has built a unique engine, way beyond a Google alert’s power, to allow you to follow only the most relevant information on new or novel or developing topics. During the #Newtown horror, I used Prismatic only to follow the news on this specific topic.
  • Evernote: Started 2004, is the best cross-platform notes service and, though I’m not a huge user, I’d imagine the legions who are search within Evernote a ton.
  • Yelp: Started 2004, essentially brought the yellow pages online, or is trying to.
  • Foursquare: Started 2009, began as a mobile check-in service, but nicely flipped model to include search, both on mobile and web. (h/t to @besvinick for pointing this out)
  • Kayak, Hipmunk, Airbnb, and other travel search sites.
  • ** Amazon: Started in 1997, the place people go to buy stuff now. (** Started before Google)

What this does all mean? I don’t know yet, but I woke up thinking about it. Google went public in 2004, and was quite profitable quickly. Most of these companies, aside from LinkedIn, started then or thereafter. Some are very new. Many of them contain information that was either input directly by users and/or organized by users. There is more human activity in determining how this information is organized and discovered, and while users still go to Google.com or use the search bar in browsers powered by Google, I believe the amount of these “sub-searches” within sites like those listed above will only increase, because the information is sorted in a different way from the beginning, and perhaps could be more relevant to users. Are there other sites within which you search often?

Mar
29

By

Hosting Noah Doyle (@noahventure) “In The Studio”

Category: Culture, Technology, Venture Capital Leave a Comment

Before the whole Apple Maps fiasco, I was lucky to have Noah Doyle from Javelin (where I eventually worked) in the studio with me. Noah is a pretty special founder and investor. Earlier in his career, he founded a company which went public and then was bought by UAL. And, as he was angel investing, he stumbled upon the team at Keyhole, invested, and eventually joined as an executive as well. That turned out to be a good decision. Keyhole was acquired by Google and became “Maps.” Noah knows maps! In this discussion, he explains how Apple and Google paired up for the iPhone launch, but how, over time, Apple will need to detangle itself from Google’s Maps APIs.

Mar
28

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Hosting Ashu Garg of Bloomreach “In The Studio”

Category: Career, Media, Technology, Venture Capital Leave a Comment

This video of Ashu, CTO of Bloomreach, is one of my favorites. Bloomreach is a rocket-ship company in the B2B marketing space, and the insights that led Ashu and his team to this market are not trivial. After immigrating to the U.S., studying, working at IBM and then Google, Ashu studied, for decades, just how personalized content and information could become. Bloomreach is Ashu’s first company, and it will most likely be a smashing success. It already kind of is. I invited Ashu to the studio back in the middle of 2012, and since then, his company has continued to take off. I’d recommend watching this video to see a founder who is deeply technical — and one who is not seeking attention, as I had to convince him to come on — to see another side of Silicon Valley which attracts, retains, motivates, and supports the best talent from all over the world. Ashu is in that class.

Mar
27

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Let’s Properly Define The Term “Venture Capital”

Category: Career, Culture, Technology, Venture Capital Leave a Comment

The idea of “venture capital” has evolved over the decades, enough to fill a small history book. It’s too easy to lump different types of investors into the “VC” monolithic bucket. So, I’d like to offer up a current, 2013-version definition of what *is* venture capital and what *is not* venture capital — and of course, I’d like your comments as I seek to refine this, so consider it a work in progress:

Let’s start out with what *is not* venture capital. Venture capital is not private, individual angel investing. Venture capital is not seed funding in a large syndicate. Venture capital is not growth or expansion capital deployed into companies that are already successful. Venture capital is not late-stage investing. Venture capital is not buying shares in private on secondary markets. Venture capital is not acting like a hedge fund.

v1 – What, then, *is* venture capital? Venture Capital is the aggregation of external capital by an institution with the sole purpose of investing that capital (usually as a lead investor) into early-stage, privately-held companies based on very little information (imperfect information) with the intent of funding businesses, products, and services that mature alongside markets to the point where the investor can realize a larger return, either through an acquisition, secondary share sale, or going public and liquidating within a 7-10 year time horizon.

OK, now your thoughts — how would you change or amend this? (see comments below) I realize there are legal definitions of venture capital, and that some angel investors think of themselves as venture capitalists. I won’t argue with the law or what others think, but will amend the definition to what I personally believe it is.

v2, final – What, then, does venture capital to me? Venture Capital is the aggregation of external capital by an institution (including companies, or even family offices managing their own funds) or individual with the sole purpose of investing that capital (often as a lead investor) into (relatively) early-stage, privately-held companies based on scarce information (imperfect information) with the intent of funding and assisting in the growth of businesses, products, and services that mature alongside markets to the point where the investor can realize a larger return, either through an acquisition, secondary share sale, or going public and liquidating within a 7-10 year time horizon, if not sooner.

Mar
27

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Hosting @BradfordCross “In The Studio”

Category: Career, Media, Technology, Venture Capital Leave a Comment

I joke that Bradford Cross is like a fine wine — an acquired taste, in the most positive sense of the term. Bradford is one of the few people I’ve met and worked with that has very deep motivations for taking the path of entrepreneurship. That doesn’t make it right or wrong, or better or worse, than others, but it does set a bar that is very high, and Bradford is someone who strives for that bar. I was lucky to meet him early in his Prismatic journey, and man, we loudly debated the likelihood someone could pull off personalized news like he and his team have. Then, I got a chance to work with him closer on product, strategy, and mobile during my time with Javelin, and it was awesome to see Bradford grow as a technical entrepreneur, outside his comfort zone, to learn more about design, marketing, and distribution. I’d encourage you to watch this video (originally taped back in the spring of 2012) to see just how “in the zone’ Bradford is — this is something I like to look for in founders when I meet them.

Mar
26

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Hosting Gautam Gupta (@gramblings) “In The Studio”

Category: Career, Media Leave a Comment

As I add more archives from “In the Studio,” it’s awesome to look back on some of the earliest episodes we shot at the start of 2012. Today’s video features Gautam Gupta, who is a close personal friend, and happens to be the CEO and co-founder of NatureBox. In this video, Gautam first shares his experience of being in venture capital from a very young age. Turns out he spent close to seven years in venture before breaking off to found his first company. I’d encourage anyone who is young and thinking about venture to hear from Gautam about his experience. In this discussion, we also talk about his company — NatureBox — which is on a tear right now, distributing healthy snacks on a monthly basis to households across America. Even thought we cut this video in January 2012, now over a year later, it’s fascinating to see how far Gautam and his team have advanced.

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