I am watching this video and I am thinking, is Square a microfinance company? Is Square like microfinance for white people?
Think about it. People use Square for micro transactions. I have lost count of how many times I have heard Jack Dorsey make his cappuccino example.
Square just made my list of Stuff White People Like.
Jack Dorsey And I Were At Columbia Yesterday Evening
Jack Dorsey Also Has A FinTech StartUp
The impending Age Of Abundance was prophecied in the scriptures thousands of years ago.
Showing posts with label Jack Dorsey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jack Dorsey. Show all posts
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Jack Dorsey And I Were At Columbia Yesterday Evening
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
New York City
Image via WikipediaSomebody from the tech fraternity/sorority has to do it at some point. If you think about it Bloomberg is also a member. This Guy Jack Dorsey
Jack Dorsey has gone on record saying his dream job is to become Mayor of New York City. More than being Chairperson of Twitter or CEO of Square, he wants to become Mayor. I don't blame him. There are about 50 billionaires in the city, I know the name of only one of them.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Jack Dorsey Returning To Twitter
Image via WikipediaI put out this blog post - Twitter At Five: Not Spitting Out Well - and the following day news was that Jack Dorsey was going back to Twitter in a major way. I felt vindicated. I have a thing for the Founder CEO. (Larry Page At The Helm) Jack Dorsey is the Twitter Founder CEO. No, Biz Stone did not co-invent Twitter. Jack Dorsey getting booted out of Twitter is not exactly the same as Steve Jobs getting booted out of Apple in 1984, but it is in a similar vein. It is a DNA thing, it is delicate. Only the Founder CEO can pivot like a service like Twitter needs to pivot. Facebook has not had that problem. Zuck's being in the driving seat explains that. Facebook has pivoted relentlessly.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Twitter At Five: Not Spitting Out Well
Image via CrunchBaseTwitter at five: The story of Twitter’s beginningsTwitter has been a remarkable tech success story, and I have blogged about it much here. But today I am going to celebrate its birthday by hitting at its prime weakness. Twitter has done a lousy job of making sense of all the tweets it collects. They all rest on your own servers, for Chrissake.
Thursday, March 03, 2011
This Guy Jack Dorsey
Image via WikipediaI am reading this profile of Jack Dorsey in Vanity Fair, and it has started to feel eery. I guess I have not known some details about the guy I should have known. First let me say I am an admirer. But I also threw a gauntlet his way recently: Jack Dorsey Also Has A FinTech StartUp. It was all in good faith. I'd compare my work into Nepal's democracy movement of 2006 to Jack Dorsey's work on Twitter. The difference is my work was so cutting edge, I have not officially been given credit yet.
But look at some of these lines:
Urban strolls are one of Dorsey’s favorite activities ......
Get out of town. Someone just described ME! Urban strolls are one of my favorite activities. The article also says the guy's dream job would be to become Mayor of New York City. Wow. First time I am hearing this. I knew he endorsed Reshma 2010, but I did not realize he was all that political. Warms my heart.
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
Immensely Excited
Image via WikipediaI am so very immensely excited with my startup. Some people complain of the work environment of a big corporation, start a company, and their behavior will tell you they long for the big corporation.
You have to be excited, you have to stay excited. You have to get excited when you hit a wall, you have to stay excited when you get over it. Why would you get excited when you hit a wall? Because, well, what were you expecting? If you did not expect to hit walls, you were not expecting right.
At this stage with my startup it feels like I am getting to watch the formation of the DNA. It is an amazing feeling. I have a small team. We are making steady progress.
Soon I expect to speed things up.
I am really liking it that we could launch for very little. I am really liking it that we will start generating revenues almost right away. I am really liking that. I am liking the immense human component of my business model. Suddenly I will get to party with a purpose. The more people you talk to, the better you get at it.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Jack Dorsey Also Has A FinTech StartUp
Image by Joi via FlickrGreat minds think alike. I have a FinTech startup. Jack Dorsey also has a FinTech startup. Square is a FinTech startup. But my FinTech startup is going to be bigger than Jack Dorsey's. I am giving Jack Dorsey five years to prove otherwise. I am not making this up, but I thought of something like Twitter about six years before it actually showed up. I was thinking, there has to be a way for celebrities to interact directly with the fans. But I was not thinking 140 characters.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Founder CEOs And Google
Image via WikipediaThe Chrome OS needed to kill Windows yesterday, five years ago. And Google is still not looking to kill Windows. Google not having a Founder CEO is the reason why. The early venture capitalists who put in the early money messed up. They should have brought in someone like Eric Schmidt as a COO, the Chief Operating Officer. Larry Page should have been CEO all along. Bill Gates was young and he was CEO. Mark Zuckerberg is still young. He even looks the part. You can't dismiss a Founder CEO just because he or she is young. That is extra true for history making companies. It is a DNA thing. Founder CEOs come with the DNA.
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
The Mobile Web, The Audio Medium, The Global South
the human in the loop: The Audio Medium: A Third World Revolution Waiting to Happen Even a cheap feature-phone can be made to play audio content. And cellphones have high penetration in the developing world .... Cellphones will need to support easy phone-to-phone transfer of audio content ..... Podcasts may be a niche medium in the U.S., but there will be enough demand for audio content in the developing world that it will be as ubiquitous as blogs are in the western world. And like blogs and other long tail text content, content publishers will create content without the expectation of revenue; this audio content will be free and/or ad-supported...... All the existing content in text form can automatically be converted into audio form. This is huge, because it makes all existing text content accessible to the developing world...... 5 centuries ago, the written word replaced the spoken word as the dominant means of information transfer. I am rooting for the spoken word to stage a comeback.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Twitter Is Massively Complex
Image via WikipediaTechCrunch: Why Twitter Is Massively Undervalued Compared To FacebookTwitter should have had more users than Facebook, (Goal: A Billion People On Twitter) but that is not what we see. It is Twitter's fault. It is not like Twitter has ever had problems raising money. If you don't have problems raising money, you don't have problems hiring the engineers you need. Twitter was bogged down focusing on scaling: I always thought that was a bogus argument. Show me the Facebook fail whale.
I have thought long and hard about it, and I think the reason Twitter has not scaled like it should have is because Jack Dorsey went ahead and became Chairperson. What was one person's invention got handed over to a committee to grow and scale. They say in Africa it takes a village to raise a child. Maybe it does. But I don't think that applied to Twitter. It is a DNA thing. The founder CEO will make big bets. People who took over will not dare to. The other founders spent too much time basking in the Twitter glory of 2009.
Facebook should have grown like the big screen web. Twitter should have grown like mobile phones have grown all across the planet. Twitter has largely missed the boat. Why? You gotta ask.
FourSquare has competition, Twitter does not have competition. I don't feel like Twitter has been able to cash on that advantage.
User Friendly Twitter? Get Out Of Town
Twitter needed to try and come pre-loaded on mobile phones. Twitter needed to make sense to people who don't speak English. Twitter needed to make sense to people who are not literate. From the Twitter that I know and experience and get headaches over to that simplicity is a light year.
I know a Harvard graduate who is confounded by the hashtag. It is not her fault. It is Twitter's fault.
TechCrunch: Why Twitter Is Massively Undervalued Compared To Facebook:
Friday, September 03, 2010
Information Overload And Twitter
Image by The Economist via CrunchBaseTwitter, FourSquare: Mobile Web Thingies
San Francisco Chronicle: Twitter Creator's Quest: Bring Order To The Chaos
There are people who argue Twitter should not try to be their email substitute. I come from another angle. I think Twitter ought to try and become our information overload engine. It should be our email, our news reader, our search engine, our social graph. It should attempt to be everything. Because I got only so much time in my day but I don't want to be missing out.
That is not to say Twitter should be the only engine. There is plenty of space for many engines. But there is something very sweet about 140 characters. But the Twitter of today is not delivering. It spent long months scaling poorly. And during those long months it totally skipped out on the adding new features part.
Sometimes I wonder if Twitter has not had the wrong CEO from the very beginning. Evan Williams should have been the Chairperson, Jack Dorsey should have been the CEO, and who is Biz Stone? The person inside the company in whom the DNA of the company exists, that person is Dorsey.
GigaOm: Ev Williams: Twitter Will Actually Help Information Overload: Williams, an unusually theoretical CEO ..... compared Twitter to email, where information overload can be incapacitating ..... “The problem with email is that it’s sender-driven, and sender-driven media doesn’t scale” ..... recipient-based media can scale better “in a world of infinite information” ..... “Google is very good at ‘I need to solve a problem, I need to buy something, I need an answer,” he said. “Twitter is more ‘I’m interested in many things, I don’t know what I need to know.’” Where Google is more likely to be gamed by a company like Demand Media ....... scaling that system so you don’t have to pay attention to everything, but you don’t miss the stuff you care aboutReclaiming My Twitter Account
Towards Threaded Conversations On Twitter
Twitter: The Obvious Missing Features
Chris Dixon On Twitter: Not Impressive
Twitter Has To Scale The Signals
Twitter Does The Deed: Ads
Twitter Acquires Tweetie: The Drama
Twitter Need Get Work Done
Twitter Needs To Eat Into Its Ecosystem
Measuring Your Twitter Influence
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Fred Wilson: An Unassuming Kind Of Guy
Today Fred Wilson has a post on his blog that should have you drooling: Bits Interview.
Nick Bilton
Joi Ito
Twitter Buys An Analytics Company
the company now processes more than 65 million updates daily from its 190 million usersTaking On The Gulf Oil Spill With Kites And Cameras
The kites are flown to around 1,500 feet where they snap images of the area below at regular intervals....... give citizens access to technology that will let them document the effects of the spill themselves. He is putting the kite images into the public domain so they can be accessed and used by anyone without paying a fee.My last email to Fred went something like this: "Fred, I think sometimes you underestimate the size of your presence in the NY tech ecosystem. You touch so many lives by simply being in town." There is evidence of that underestimation plenty in this blog post.
I don't really like being profiled much. I would prefer people write about the entrepreneurs we back and the companies they build. That's where the interesting stories are....... he got me to talk about being broke right before hitting it big with Geocities in the late 90s, falling in love in college and following the Gotham Gal to NYC, and why my refusal to carry an iPhone is a "political statement."I am glad I beat Nick Bilton to profiling Fred, although my profile can hardly be called that, it is a sketch with maybe three strokes on the page: Meeting Fred Wilson In Person.
One On One: Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures
Wilson blogs daily ..... I started in 1986, when I was 25 years old. ...... When I showed up at this firm, it was a sleepy old firm, and they still didn’t use computers. ....... My first investment was a company called Software Developers Company. We put about $5 million into the company, and it wasn’t a good investment. ....... I didn’t think I was a good investor for several years until I had to navigate my way out of the software bubble that burst around 2001. When I came out of that experience in 2003, I really felt like I’d figured the business out. ....... The PC hardware bubble, the software bubble and the biotech bubbles all burst in the mid-80s and 90s. ........ we haven’t seen major risky mobile investments, yet. ...... That’s the beautiful thing about working in the financial markets; eventually, stupid stuff happens. ....... (Geocities) .. Before the sale, we were completely broke. We had to move out of New York City because we just couldn’t afford to live in the city. We had three kids, and I was barely scraping by to pay the mortgage. ........ Right before the Geocities sale went through, my wife went to the cash machine to buy groceries for the week and there wasn’t any money in our bank account. I told her to put groceries on the credit card because I knew we were going to sell Geocities the following week. But before that happened, we were living hand to mouth. ........ (New York City) .. I fell in love and followed my wife here. ....... I thought if I paired engineering, software and finance, that would make me an interesting package. ...... When we started Union Square Ventures in 2003, we didn’t envision the industry would be as big as it is today. Between mobile, social, location and other Web properties, these businesses have become huge staples in people’s everyday lives. ....... The businesses that become profitable are largely influenced by the entrepreneurs, and we are largely along for the ride with their decision. But, when companies are not sustainable, we have a lot to say. We don’t necessarily put a gun to their heads, but it’s not that far from it. ....... We looked at Tumblr before we met David Karp, the founder. When we met him it made the entire company make sense. ...... I sat there that morning and thought, hmmm, what am I? And I thought, I’m a venture capitalist; I’m A VC. ....... I’m not sure I could be a VC without the blog. You have to be out there in the hearts and minds of the entrepreneurs, and that’s the scarce resource with what we have as investors; it’s certainly not the money. ...... it angers me when I go to a Web page with a Flash video and I can’t watch it. Plus the whole porn thing. I’m a free speech bigot ..... I don’t like censorship ....... (Chatroulette) ... We met with him; he didn’t really know what he wanted to do with Chatroulette. I was eager to meet him, but after meeting him I didn’t get the impression that he knew what to do with it.Fred is a nice person. I used that bland adjective on purpose. Even his niceness is the unassuming kind. As for him being not a story, I seriously doubt that. I would rather read a profile of Fred Wilson than that of most tech entrepreneurs in town, but I would rather not have to choose. There is no dearth of space in cyberspace, we can profile them all. Fred is one of the early people in town. He helped set the ball in motion. I once compared him to Scorsese. He is like a really good movie Director, only he is not a movie Director, he is in the venture capital business. He is really, really good at what he does. You can admire that excellence without being in the tech scene. But if you are in the tech scene, you will admire it even more.
He probably says no to 1,000 or maybe even 10,000 pitches made to him to every one pitch he says yes to. If he invests in two companies a year, and he gets maybe 250 pitches a week, even the 10,000 figure is an underestimate. That is the nature of the beast. Perhaps there has to be a better screening mechanism and he should not have to go through as many pitches. (The Panel Pile Up)
One on One: Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square
co-founder and chairman of Twitter, an angel investor in Foursquare and chief executive of Square ...... The goal is to build another utility like Twitter that will scale to any kind of usage. Anywhere from coffee shops or clothing retail stores, to someone selling their couch on Craigslist, or getting paid back from a friend. ...... The hardware is fairly simple, the software is extremely complex. ...... One of the most successful mobile payment continents in the world has been Africa. ..... Right now we’ve created a really easy way to get the information into Twitter. I think the next big challenge is helping get the information out in a relevant way. ...... I said a long time ago that Foursquare can make cities better. ... Foursquare has started to replace Yelp for me. .... (2010) .. Hopefully a lot more start-ups in New York City. I think the start-ups here are building a really great foundation. .... In terms of technology, we’re going to see a better and more immediate experience around the everyday things we do in life. For example, health care. I expect we’ll see a lot more innovation around health care after the latest initiative goes through Washington.
One on One: Anil Dash of Expert Labs
formerly of Six Apart, which created the popular blogging software Movable Type. Mr. Dash is now the director of Expert Labs, a Government 2.0 initiative that aims to connect United States government projects with citizens who want to become more involved in the political discussion. ....... Apes will always need to groom each other, and Twitter is great for that. So while Twitter is important, a lot of what it’s used for today is not new content. It’s re-Tweeting or sharing links to content outside of Twitter. Gestures like re-Tweeting or “liking” something on Facebook are more akin to applause than to dialogue. I don’t just write for applause, I like to write to start a dialogue. ........ They have iPhones and use Twitter. ...... Bit.ly ends in .ly, which is actually a Libyan domain name. ....... Before Apps.gov, it used to be a very laborious process to distribute applications to the federal government. Now, the entire process is actually more open than the iTunes App Store. It illustrates the huge radical shift that’s happening in what people call Government 2.0.One on One: Brian Lam of Gizmodo.com
Sunday, June 06, 2010
Meeting Fred Wilson In Person
Image via WikipediaI did 1,000 crunches before I showed up, and here was Fred Wilson trying to impress me and a few Indians with yoga talk. There is a Bruce Lee school of thought. Your tummy muscles are the most important. If you want to feel the strength, do your crunches.
I did my 1,000 crunches, had my lunch. I was sweating like Mark Zuckerberg by the time I headed towards the train station. Zuck has proven beyond doubt genius is 99% perspiration. (The Hoodie)
I thought I was running a little late. The place was downstairs, in the basement. It was dark. When Fred showed up half an hour later, he was like, "Ugh, this place is so dark, I needed to be here at 2 AM instead."
It took you about five minutes to get your eyes adjusted to the light. I caught both Fred Wilson and Scott Heiferman during their first minutes. I had the advantage of well adjusted to the dark eyes.
"Are you coming Tuesday"? Scott asked me.
"Of course I am coming. Absolutely," I said.
Internet Week: Going To Three Events So Far
I briefly talked about Reshma 2010: Reshma 2010, Square, And Pro.Act.Ly.
"The Scotts in the Bay Area are behind her," I said: Jack Dorsey, Randi Zuckerberg. "We need to get behind her here too."
Scott is one of the earliest people I got to know after I moved to New York City. Every time we meet, we meet like old friends, but I have never been able to get him to reply to my emails, most of which have been FYI emails anyways. I have long made peace with that as a productivity issue for him. The circle he maintains email communication with must be tied to his work. And I am glad. Look at the distance MeetUp.com has covered in five years. Scott in many ways is the original tech entrepreneur in town. The NY Tech MeetUp he launched has been a major platform. If no longer saying hello to me will mean MeetUp.com goes to ever newer heights, I will happily swallow that pill too. Scott is one of those people who can make it sound like "change the world" is not a cliche phrase.
This was a few years back. A friend told me Scott was number five on the list of the top people in tech in New York City, as put together by the Silicon Alley Insider. I was like, no way. But I know the guy!
Today I told Scott I had applied for a MeetUp.com job, but Greg told me it was an entry level position.
"It does not have to be," Scott said. "Good luck."
That is Scottspeak for MeetUp.com has a department that handles the hiring decisions, I hope they like your application. I liked the spirit in which it was said.
"Honored to be meeting you for the first time," I said to Fred. "I watched your debate online. You won easy. But you did have a hometown advantage."
disrupt on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free
He was as gracious as possible before, during and after the debate. He has been the exact opposite of Mike Tyson after a victorious championship fight. He maintained that mode in his response.
"It was not much of a debate," he said. Talking to a group of Republicans about tax cuts is not hard, he has insisted.
He got hold of his name card as if anyone there needed to know what his name was or what he looked like, then he went to the bar to grab a soda, walked back to me and said, "Who put this together? Who organized this?"
He sounded puzzled as much as curious. I could have burst out laughing right there. I did not know. I took a guess and pointed at two important looking guys. Maybe them? Then I spotted Shana. I motioned her and asked her. She took him to the guy who had organized the MeetUp.
People got together in small groups. People moved around. Fred moved from group to group. I mostly wanted to listen to what he had to say. He was relaxed, and he was making insightful comments about some of his portfolio companies, and some of their founders.
The Gotham Gal did not show up because she was busy cooking for a party they are throwing Tuesday evening, Fred said. I have not visited her blog nearly as often as I have visited Fred's whose blog I visit almost daily, but when I have visited her blog I have learned a lot, perhaps more than from Fred's blog because she touches upon topics I know very little about, stuff like the local non profit scene, for example.
At one point I found myself with these three other Indians, two business partners, the leader of the team was married to this young woman who had made it to the interview phase of the two job openings at Fred's VC firm.
I got to meet the Columbus, Ohio, woman who is now in the Analyst position. Fred said one of the new hires is going to be bi-coastal, maintaining apartments in both the Bay Area and in New York.
So Fred walks over. He says he just wanted some water. I pass on the message. I get a glass of water in my hand, I pass it on to him. He sits down. A small crowd forms around him, about 10 people.
There is this discussion about the entrepreneurship scene in India. There is some frank talk. Some of the Indians volunteer to say things can get rough. The bureaucracy can be a nightmare sometimes. Society is more hierarchical. The culture is more sexist. The venture capital industry is not there yet. It can prove hard to pay your electric bill. They don't want your money. And if you don't pay, they cut off your electricity. But there are rewards to being able to navigate the culture. Labor is cheap and top quality. I said a high school friend of mine tried it in the US, that did not work, now he works his dot com based out of Kathmandu, and it has been working wonders, making him a lot of money. The guy gets on national television there, I said. That would be Kathmandu.
He talked at length about Twitter and David Karp of Tumblr. Twitter is set to do $100 million in revenue, but could they do a billion, he asked. He said Karp had that personality type that is the entrepreneur personality type. Every conversation he has with you he is trying to sell you something, either he wants you to invest in him, or he wants you to partner with him, or he wants to sell some idea.
He also pointed out New York is not there yet when it comes to the tech startup culture that the Bay Area has. Culture is really the word.
Fred said he was making an effort to get more software engineer graduates from the top schools to end up in New York City. That is another thing I really like about Fred. He loves this city. Look at the names of his current and former venture capital firms.
Then he walked over to the next group of people before he walked away. With that final group, there was a spirited discussion about "gold." I was feeling a little lost. Da what? Ends up Fred's blog post for the day that I had not yet read was about gold.
Fred Wilson: Gold Vs Real Assets
These were people who were fond of Fred Wilson. Fond is the word. It was a nice gathering. The gathering was proof a blog is a very real, social entity. It can bring together people. But if Fred had showed up at the San Francisco AVC MeetUp instead, the 100 plus RSVPs would not have been in New York, they would have been in San Francisco.
Fred has his standing in the tech community for work he has done, companies he has invested in. A few years back Geocities had been the best deal he ever did. By now it is between Twitter and Zynga, although the Twitter story is more compelling, and FourSquare could be doing really well in a few years. A Twitter IPO will get the Twitter story into the mainstream. Jack Dorsey talks about Fred Wilson every chance he gets.
I have a feeling after a Twitter IPO he and his firm might reach new heights.
Meeting Fred in person was not dramatic, as in, now I know what he looks like, what he sounds like. After months of reading his blog, I have a fairly good idea of his thought processes. I have watched hours of Fred Wilson videos on YouTube. So I had a fairly good idea of what he looks like, what he sounds like. But there is something about meeting in person. It feels real. Not that he ever felt unreal to me. He is down to earth, normal, pleasant, curious about things, passionate about his work. It is just that his accomplishments are outsize.
During the event I felt a certain tension. I can't be a full fledged tech startup guy right now. That is a year or two away for me. But I advise one startup - PayCheckr - and am in talks to become a full timer with another: TeaSpiller. I am itching to get into the scene.
Larry Ellison's 1995 Network Computer Vision
Lady Liberty Whispers
After the event, around 5:30, I walked over to the Apple store on 14th and 9th. The iPad felt a little heavy in my hand. The virtual keyboard sucks. The thing had to heat up if held long enough. I think the world of Steve Jobs but I don't seem to relate to his products. It is as if he is a great president of a country on a planet I don't live on, or at least a country on a continent very, very far away. I found myself gravitating to a large screen Apple computer with a regular keyboard. I just wanted a browser, a big screen, and a physical keyboard. My fear is they might make the Chrome OS netbooks too small. Got to keep the screen big enough.
From there I walked over to the Chelsea Piers to take in the Hudson. There is something about that smell of water that can collapse time. That water can smell like some of the water from a long time ago.
I walked back to Union Square and went into the McDonald's there. I eat healthy for the most part. But I think it is important to eat one bad meal once in a while.
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Thursday, June 03, 2010
Reshma 2010, Square, And Pro.Act.Ly
Reshma Saujani, running for New York City's 14 Congressional District talks to The Next Web from Chad Cat on Vimeo.
Reshma Saujani At The Huffington Post
An Afternoon At The Reshma 2010 Headquarters
A 14-7 Office For Reshma 2010
My Political Resume, Reshma 2010, And September 14
Reshma Saujani, Carolyn Maloney
My Talk With Kevin Lawler Of Reshma 2010
Reshma 2010 Get Together In Little India
Reshma Saujani Ad Spotted At The New York Times Website
Reshma Saujani, Scott Heiferman, Chris Hughes: TechCrunch Disrupt
Reshma Saujani, Haiti Earthquake, Harvard Yale, And 2016
Reshma Saujani "Gets" Tech
Reshma Saujani: Innovation, Ethnic Pride, Thought Leadership
Reshma 2010 has been on the forefront of technological innovation. Reshma 2010 has been the first campaign in America to use Square, Jack Dorsey's revolutionary new product. More people are going to use Square than have used Twitter. And now Reshma 2010 is the first campaign in America to use Pro.Act.Ly.
Reshma 2010 is not just a campaign for the 14th district, it is a campaign for all of New York City, the entire metro region. She is the embodiment of the New Woman. That has got to speak to the East Side. Women should be able to take equality for granted. The brave new world of technological innovation also has to shift the paradigm on gender relations. They go hand in hand. Technological innovation and social progress have to go hand in hand for technological innovation to be meaningful.
Call Out The Sexism
Reshma Saujani deserves the support of the entire NY tech community. She has huge support among the techies in the Bay Area. New York gets to match that. The only other New York politician wearing the tech hat is Mayor Bloomberg himself. I like the guy. I supported his reelection effort last year.
I became an Independent For Bloomberg, I think Reshma Saujani might be able to pull me back into the Democratic fold.
I call it a double whammy. Obama went to Harvard. Clinton went to Yale. Reshma Saujani went to both. Another double whammy is she is a woman, and she is Indian. Electing Barack Obama was a big deal. Race is America's original sin. But electing someone of Reshma Saujani's background is going to be a bigger deal. It should not matter if people who look like you are 70% or 12% of the country. It should not matter if they are not even 1%. Individual excellence should count. But for anyone to suggest Indians are any kind of a minority is off. We live in a global era.
Reshma Saujani is the national candidate for the tech community, the innovation community across the board. I am not just talking dot coms, but also green tech, bio tech, nano tech.
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Sunday, May 16, 2010
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
The Jack Dorsey Story
I came across this post on TechCrunch linked to from Fred Wilson's blog. It is really something. Jack (@jack) is the guy who invented Twitter. The first tweet is like the first phone call. The post is worth the read.
- The guy is from the Midwest. He grew up in St. Louis. A guy who went to the same high school as me in Kathmandu and the same college in Kentucky lives there now.
- He started out at Missouri State.
- He taught himself programming early.
- He has a thing for New York.
".....One night, I couldn’t sleep, I just had to write a prototype script. It would sit on a server, take incoming emails, broadcast them out to a list, and also record them in a database that I could view on the Web.” That was the first glimmer of Twitter......But for a variety of reasons, dNET did not get traction in the market, and so Jack embarked on a period of freelance programming before joining a podcasting start-up called Odeo, primarily to work with Evan (a.k.a. @ev) Williams, formerly of Google....... The very first tweet was an internal one that Jack sent out at 12:50 p.m. on March 21, 2006: “just setting up my twttr.” A few minutes later, he tweeted innocuously: “inviting coworkers.” This was the beginning of the Twitter revolution....... Jack and his colleagues lugged big plasma screens across the country and set them up in the hallways of the conference to display the live Twitter chatter about the conference sessions in action, one at the registration desk and one at the exit from the main conference room.......“We were really good at getting the right friends in. We had a lot of high-powered, vocal bloggers using Twitter at South by Southwest. They were talking about it non-stop at the conference. And the press happened to be watching, too. And it just blew up.”....... I was really surprised by the velocity.....“We weren’t really ready to take money right away, but we got a note from someone. We went to meet them for breakfast at the top of this hotel in San Francisco and had a pretty good conversation. We were still kind of forming the company and whatnot. When we got back to the office thirty minutes later, we found a scanned image of a check for half a million dollars in our inbox.”.......It was not where he comes from, but ‘Is this guy fun to work with? Is he going to challenge us? Is he smart?’ This person was going to take a seat on the board.”.......Fred Wilson says he likes to think of himself as the entrepreneur’s consigliere..... The beauty of being a venture capitalist is we’ve seen all these issues a lot of times......... “Fred had our phone on priority dial, so he could reach us at any time.......He is very engaged and whenever we need something, we call him up. He is excited to do anything for us.” Jack points out that Fred isn’t just focused on big-picture strategy, but also on the nitty-gritty features of Twitter as an avid user. “We listen to what he thinks and what he needs from the product,” says Jack. “And that has been a great way to get into the relationship and for both of us to trust each other more. As we worked on the product together, we began to learn, ‘Oh, this is how Fred is, and this is how Jack is.’ We began to learn each other’s faults. And that couldn’t really happen any other way.”........ I want a VC who is always thinking a few steps ahead of me....... “We had a lot of conversations with people down in the Valley,” Jack said. “At the end of the pitch, the person across the table would say, ‘Well, we’ll let you know fairly soon, like in an hour or so. We just want to talk internally, but we’re really excited.’ We didn’t react well to that. We wanted to be questioned, we wanted to be challenged, and we wanted to see some of their thinking around actually developing this product.”....... Jack found more of those challenging VCs on the East Coast than on the West Coast. “I think it was just an attitude thing,” he said. “I found the East Coast to be a little bit more aggressive. They say what they mean in the hopes of just moving on right away. On the West Coast, people were a little bit more laid back. If they thought we were going down the wrong path, they wouldn’t necessarily say it, but they might make it known in an indirect way. I just didn’t appreciate that at all.”........“We turned down a bunch of VCs,” Jack said. “We saw a name, but there wasn’t enough behind the name immediately. A VC has to show me right away that I can trust them. It’s hard to do. But when it’s right, it’s right. And we were very fortunate in it being right with Fred. He was very aggressive, in a good way, in a thinking way. He had no subtlety at all. But more importantly, he was a day-to-day user of our service and he obviously loved it. He came to the pitch with a bunch of requests for features and lots of questions about why we had done what we had done........ During their courting period, Fred showed Jack he could provide more than just money; he could contribute to the product’s vision and direction to help lead the company to success. If your VC doesn’t show you that passion for your product and your own personal success, as well as an ability to add value during the due diligence process through their strategic or product insight, then he and his firm may not be the right business partner for you. As Dorsey put it to me, “When selecting our VC partner, I knew I was hiring a boss I couldn’t fire.”....... The entrepreneur is your client. It’s a very weird relationship because the entrepreneur is not exactly paying you, even though they really are paying you. But they absolutely can’t fire you. In fact, you can fire them. So it’s among the weirdest kinds of service relationships that one could come up with.”.......the best entrepreneurs don’t focus on the money, they focus on their dream for the business......Are you done? If you are, then exit. If you’re not, keep going for it.”...."
Friday, February 19, 2010
Location! Location! Location!
Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever
I take hometown pride in FourSquare. Twitter is in California, but FourSquare
is in New York. I have met the two founders
in person, Dennis (@dens) and Naveen (@naveen), although I am not Facebook friends with either yet. Craig Newmark, Dennis Crowley, Jennifer 8 Lee: Koreatown
Dennis Crowley: I Underestimated Him
Make no mistake, FourSquare
is on the cutting edge. Location
liberates the web. Time
magazine's person of the year one of these past years - You - would like to share where he/she is. There is a funny video
on YouTube from last year that shows the successor company to Twitter
will disallow vowels and hence make messages shorter even. Ends up, we were not going in that direction after all. 140 characters are a good size for the atom. But we were instead going for something simpler and more fundamental. I never thought Google might kill Facebook
or that Facebook
might kill Twitter. If anything the dawn
kills the night, it is not the other way round. FourSquare
will not get killed by Twitter or Facebook, and it is far ahead of its competition Gowalla. Did I spell that right?Location is going to be the starting point for many things you might want to do. And because FourSquare
does location, although late to the game, FourSquare
I think is poised to beat Twitter
itself in the monetization department. Are you telling me my customer
just checked into my establishment? How can you not monetize that? It is official, we are now an urban
species. Homo Sapiens
Urbano. I took to FourSquare gingerly. I avoided it. Then I started texting in my check ins. Now I realize it is such an essential tool if you are trying to turbo charge your social
networking. Roaming
the tech and biz circles in the city is like going to all the top schools in the country at once. NYC
is cream of the crop. You want to feast on people as you move out and about. FourSquare
makes it fun to explore a "dense" - Dennis' word, you can tell, the guy really likes his God
given name - city like New York City. Big cities
are popping all over the world. Actually it is impossible to explore without. I never integrated my Twitter
account to my Facebook account. But I have integrated FourSquare to both Twitter and Facebook. Most of my Facebook friends are not in New York. Heck, I went to high school in Kathmandu. My Facebook page is public - anyone can visit all corners, so I don't have to feel bad about not accepting friend
requests - and it has more than 10,000 pictures of NYC. I plan to add tens of thousands more over the years. I do that for my non New York
friends. NYC is magic all over the world. My FourSquare check ins allow me to share some of NYC with my far away friends. I remember looking down upon Twitter
starting out. I only jumped onto the bandwagon in February 2009, thanks to @jobsworth. What am I doing? I am staring at the computer
screen. What do you think I am doing? 140 characters, that must be for the lazy bones. I write full blown blog
posts. What do you think I am doing? My skepticism with FourSquare was not as pronounced, but I have taken to it rather gingerly. I was not at all excited when they did their demo at the NY Tech
MeetUp, I believe last March. Many startups fail. Not all that do not fail are on the cutting
edge. FourSquare is on the cutting edge. It is rightly called the next Twitter, although it might take a year or two to scale out to Twitter size. I am patiently waiting. Last night I checked into five locations on or near Bleecker St just to make a point. Go FourSquare.
Dennis (@dens) and Naveen (@naveen) are not Charles
Darwin, not even close, heck, if they are Evan Williams, and Jack Dorsey, or Biz Stone, they have not proven that yet, but they might, I think they will, and I would not put the two as being in the same league as the Google
founders, not now, not five or 10 years from now. But this Please Rob Me talk reminds me of a heckler taking Charles Darwin
to task: So if you are suggesting we descended from monkeys, may I ask which side of your family would that be for you, did you descend from the monkeys
from your mother's side or your father's side? I don't accept friend requests on FourSquare from random people. Knowing you might not be enough down the line. And some day I might disconnect my FourSquare with my Twitter
and Facebook, but that day might be a few years away. FourSquare allows you to share location, but it does not force you to share it with everybody. You can choose not to share
that widely. It's your choice. Considering how easy it has been for me to become Mayor
of two places, one thing is for sure, if you are on FourSquare and checking in, you are easily a member of the tech
elite. And if you have not been visited by burglars yet, it must be because there are not that many burglars
among the tech elite. If you are sophisticated enough to play with FourSquare, you are sophisticated enough to know what your privacy options on it are. And if you are sophisticated
enough to code Please Rob Me, you surely know you are messing with the facts. That is dishonest. Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
For long TechCrunch has been my favorite blog, but I am beginning to have my doubts. I think ReadWriteWeb might be better, although with less traffic. TechCrunch
pulled a cheap stunt on Farmville, and now they are trying to do the same with FourSquare. You don't report on the cutting edge
if your first instinct is to demonize
the cutting edge. Maybe you can't be trusted with the cutting edge. Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising
I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla
TechCrunch: Please Rob Me Makes FourSquare Super Useful For Burglars
TechCrunch: FourSquare Reponds To Please Rob Me: Please Shut Up
Mashable: How Robbers Did Their Dirty Deeds Before FourSquare
Gawker: How Not To Be A FourSquare Jackass
FourSquare: On FourSquare, Location And Privacy
The message I left at the various blogs: The real culprit is the construction industry. They have not applied invisible paint on our houses.
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