The Fetishization of Product

[this post is likely to draw some controversy, not only b/c it goes against tech startup orthodoxy, but also b/c I didn't edit it before pressing 'Publish']

Should product be separate from business? As if business would sully it? Like asking about a business model at NYTM?

Are more people likely to use Uber b/c it has a great "product", or because of the availability of cars?

Twitter still has a horrible "product" - but nobody really cares.

I think we are moving into a post-product world, where people understand that the role "product" is to deliver the business, not the other way around.

Brand Is the Key to Scaling

The startup world loves to talk about the ability of a company to "scale." "Scale" doesn't have a precise definition, but it roughly means growing the business really big, with increasing, non-linear returns on headcount and equity capital. There are many levers for scaling - product, marketing, customer service, partnerships, etc - but they all boil down to one thing, regardless of product or industry: brand.

A Theory of Traditional and "Social" Media

Media has always been social. People have an instinctive need for shared narratives and experiences at a broader societal level than they can get from directly shared experience. Media has filled those instinctive needs since the dawn of history [1], from the Great Flood (mediated by the Bible) to the non-flood of New York City during Hurricane Irene [2]. Before writing we had storytelling and cave drawings, minstrels and town criers.

Somewhere along the line large media companies arose, and confused creating and distributing experiences with creating and distributing content [3].

The Importance of the MPG UI Paradigm

It makes computing accessible. It appeals to our intuitive senses. Where in the real world have you ever seen a WIMP interface? Maybe in your file cabinet, at best. WIMP is like doing everything with buttons and levers whose experience is disconnected from their effects. MPG is like manipulating the world directly. This is why kids get it so quickly, why it's so much more enjoyable than WIMP.

Apple realized this breakthrough, not just with the iPhone but with the iPod, whose controls were already gesture based (albeit with only two gestures). Previous to the iPhone, touch screen phone UIs were just WIMP based interfaces in which a stylus or finger replaced the mouse as pointer.

Contained Failure

One of the core messages of lean is "fail fast." Ryan MacCarrigan, VP of Marketing at Lean Startup Machine and one of LSMs best teachers, likes to tell the group that "failing" fast doesn't mean catastrophic-I-went-bankrupt-and-my-wife-left-me type failure. Quite the opposite: testing your riskiest assumptions first helps you avoid catastrophic failure, because the "failures" that you have in your model are contained within the boundaries of the experiment, and so become valuable learning moments rather than disasters.

My Favorite Block in NY

One of the things I love about New York City is the ingenious uses of space you find here. Putting retail in the first floor of residential and commercial buildings to take advantage of the premium they are willing to pay for the frontage / foot traffic is the most obvious. Building a state park on top of a sewage plant, slightly less so. But my favorite block in NYC for this by far has to be Grand Central Terminal.

Happy Birthday America, or Startups and Immigrants

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me"
        - "The New Colossus," Emma Lazarus, 1883


This year I'm especially proud to be an American. Working in VC has given me insight into so many founders' stories and helped me see how much of our innovation has come from immigrants and their children. US immigration policy is unnecessarily restrictive, but once you are here the sky is the limit. Other countries may have higher percentages of foreign-born citizens, and there are always the gold rush countries de jour (China and Dubai come to mind in recent times), but those places will never accept outsiders as their own. America is still the place whose national dream anyone can aspire to, and this is why the world's hungriest and most ambitious individuals still to come here to seek their fortunes, as they have for centuries. Democracy, capitalism, freedom of speech, and rule of law are the foundation; but immigration is the engine that will keep America exceptional long after China's economic growth slows.