the cornice

I’m less than a full week into my tenure at First Round Capital and I’m already having more fun than I had hoped. One of the primary reasons I wanted to join First Round was because of the firm’s focus on companies at the earliest stages of their development. Already, I’ve seen a number of high-quality opportunities from enthusiastic entrepreneurs setting out to solve big problems. I couldn’t be more impressed with the people that I’ve met and the products they are setting out to build.

Just before starting with First Round, I began to read some of the work by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Coincidentally, there are parallels between his field of study and product management. The lessons are straightforward, but seeing them in book on evolutionary biology was unexpected!*

In no particular order, here are just a few of the basics:

• Parallel One. Life began with simple organism; products should start with a simple premise. As Dawkins writes, “Genes, then, cooperate in cartels to build bodies, and that is one of the important principles of embryology.” Similarly, product success begins with fundamental building blocks. Any product may involve coordinating multiple components to solve a complex problem. But the first release needs to focus on the most basic elements. Deliver measurable results against a single part of the problem then build out the cartel.
• Parallel Two. Nature abhors inefficiency; so do your users. In nature, if you are not efficient, you die. Maybe you starve or maybe you are killed by a predator, but the end result is the same. The same is true for product managers. Inefficiency will harm your product. I’ll wager that in the history of user feedback, no product manager has ever heard a user utter the words “Your battery life is too long” (yes, I’ve got iPhone 3G on the brain) or “Your product is too snappy.”
• Parallel Three. To survive, species adapt to their surroundings; great product managers listen to their users. In my experience, product managers tend to be very good at listening to user requests for more _______. A greater challenge is understanding what they don’t need. In this respect, there is a corollary to the need for efficiency. Each feature that’s not massively adding value to your core proposition is slowly killing you (hat tip Will Aldrich). If your users don’t use a feature (or stop using a feature) cut it - otherwise, it’s just a wisdom tooth extraction or appendectomy waiting to happen. Nobody wants that.
• Parallel Four. Chance is a major factor in evolution; it also a major contributor to the success of a product. In species, this chance may be as massive as catastrophic change in the environment or as molecular as a genetic mutation. Translating to product management it simply means: launch! By definition, if a product is never launched, chance can never help it to succeed. Don’t wait for it to be perfect, get it good enough and start creating opportunities for success. Launch! The worst case scenario is that you fail fast and cheap. In the best case, you survive and begin to evolve.

* In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Nature is a bad-ass PM.

I’m still learning about what it means to lead a life on the Web. When I least expect it, the ripples from the smallest actions seem to grow into much larger waves.

Here is an example. At the Web 2.0 Conference in 2006, there was a great “hack.” Internet industry players had gathered at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. In addition to panel discussions, there was also an expo floor showcasing companies that had paid premium slotting fees to demonstrate their latest products. Typically the prices for a similar type booth runs in the tens of thousands of dollars. Not an easily afforded sum for a start-up – especially the earliest ones.

Not too far from the official expo area there was another “mini-expo.” However, it wasn’t officially associated with the conference. The story I heard was that the conference organizers had somehow forgotten to book / block this room. In their place, an early-stage venture capital firm called First Round Capital reserved the space and used it to create a more capital efficient “mini-expo” for their portfolio companies. Conference hack! As soon as I heard the story, I became a fan of First Round Capital.

Earlier this year, when Facebook introduced a feature allowing its users to become “fans” of companies, I was happy to show my support for First Round. Unfortunately, my support for them was about to make things uncomfortable.

This past winter, after Microsoft announced an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo, Josh Kopelman of First Round devised a little experiment. The idea was to get a sense of what was going through the minds of Microsoft and Yahoo employees. Did the acquisition talk make them want to leave their jobs? Using Facebook’s social ads program, he created an ad (example to the right) targeted at both Microsoft and Yahoo employees, asking “Thinking of Leaving?” What Josh didn’t know (and what this example doesn’t show) was that these ads also included the profile pictures of people who had declared themselves to be “fans” of First Round Capital. Without me knowing, my picture was included in one version. Friends who saw it simply asked, “WTF?” Insert the awkward moment. I had no idea about what was about to begin.

I had no plans to leave Yahoo, and I certainly did not want to give anyone the impression that I did - my time at Yahoo had been among the most enjoyable years of my career. I had only met Josh briefly but I reached out to let him know what I thought of his experiment. He too was surprised to learn about the use of fan images in the ad. He immediately halted the test and issued an apology. Spooked by the incident, I removed all “fan” pages from my Facebook profile.

Meanwhile, my dialogue with Josh continued and we exchanged ideas on some of the opportunities and challenges presented by the new world of social ads. Eventually, we made plans to connect during his next visit to the Bay Area. That was in February. We’ve kept the dialogue going ever since. I’m now proud to say that this July, I’ll be joining First Round Capital as Principal in their San Francisco office. Serendipity.

I suppose it could be argued that these social ads wound up doing exactly what they were intended to do, but I don’t agree (besides a $0.05 CPM coupled with six months of dialogue is just not an efficient way to sell). Instead, two misunderstandings led to a dialogue. The first misunderstanding was mine - I didn’t know that by becoming a “fan” of a company that I was also lending it my likeness. Josh shared this misunderstanding and did not know social ads would use the images of his firm’s fans. To both of us, this was an unpleasant alarm of how much is still to be learned about this new medium.

In fact, this past Friday I heard these same alarms. Having already told my closest Yahoo colleagues that I had decided to leave Yahoo to join First Round Capital, I decided it was time to become a First Round “fan” once again. Then after I finished my last day at Yahoo, I joined the Yahoo Alumni Group on Facebook. Of course, these two items showed up in my Mini-Feed. What I never expected was that these two little items would be reported on by TechCrunch.

A second awkward moment courtesy of Facebook. Hopefully, this one turns out as well as my first.

It turns out that Clay Shirky has made quite a bit of impact on me the past few months. It was his post on the television habits that jump started my renewed commitment to reading books. And of course, as part of that syllabus, I included his new work, Here Comes Everybody on the nexus of technology and sociology. I just finished it. What a terrific read. It may be best described as Malcom Gladwell meets the Internet. Read it.

My favorite line, “[T]he future belongs to those who take the present for granted.” This will be running through my head for weeks to come.

Is the primary beneficiary of modern productivity and efficiency gains really the sitcom? The laugh track? Is this the best we can do with the scientific and industrial gains of the the past century? I hope not. Recently, Clay Shirky has wrote a great piece on the sitcom’s role in developing modernity. It’s called, “Gin, Television and Social Surplus.” Read it.

In his essay, Shirky raises a shocking fact. Americans spend two hundred billion hours a year watching TV. Count it however you like, 200 billion hours, 12 trillion minutes or 545 billion episodes of Urkel, Arnold Drummond, the Brady family, Uncle Joey... Wow.

Shirky asks, What will be?  What will the future look like when our generation of content consumers, the sitcom watchers(!), is supplanted by a generation which has grown up with a computer and mouse not just consuming content, but also producing and sharing it. With so much time wasted, a tiny 1% shift in behavior could have a massive impact on our society. Good things will happen. Read the rest of this entry »

This Wednesday (April 30th) in Mountain View, Dealmaker Media is organizing a forum on social media. Their events are always top notch and this one will doubtless continue the trend. As part of the event, I’m participating in a “speed dating” session as a corporate speed dater. I’ve been lucky enough to participate in a past event and really enjoyed it. It’s a fantastic way to meet with 16 entrepreneurs and learn about 16 businesses in 90 minutes. More details here.

Hope to see you there.