The experience economy - Chris Dixon
The corollary being, if you spot an growing company that was never covered by techcrunch, uncrunched, techmeme, verge or scoble - be glad. It is very likely the case that they are knocking their user experience out of the park. That is a good place to start your lessons.
Bijan Sabet: Jeff Bezos: Regret Minimization Framework
This is fantastic.
via Jeff Bezos, 2001
I went to my boss and said to him, “You know, I’m going to go do this crazy thing and I’m going to start this company selling books online.” This was something that I had already been talking to him about in a sort of more general context, but then he…
Source: bijan
Marketing vs fear mongering, where is the line?
Bemilo, a £2.95-a-month service (that’s about five bucks), uses a special SIM card that can go in any phone or tablet. Amazingly, and somewhat terrifyingly, parents can log on to a web interface that basically serves as a remote dashboard to their kid’s phone or tablet. There, parents can read all texts, including deleted ones, and can even control who their kid has contact with. Parents can also monitor and restrict browsing of certain websites (read: porn). The BBC has the full story, as does The Telegraph. “It’s a SIM that is just like any other SIM you would buy for any other network, but it enables parents to have full control in the context of safety,”
How about wait till you trust your kid with a cell phone and then give him/her a cell phone. How is this different than giving your kid a car for instance. If technology permits, would we give our kids a car but control what zip codes they can drive to and/or who they will let into the car. Something about this feels more like fear-mongering to parents rather than truly teaching kids responsible behavior.
Source: technologyreview.com
Advice to my daughter
Earlier today Jason Chen asked for a special kind of birthday gift from his audience. That got me thinking of my daughter. She will be 2 in a month and I figured now is as good a time as any to start iterating on how will I encourage her as she grows older.
My inspiration for today’s post is Neil Gaiman. His advice is for young minds graduating in arts but I think it applies to all of us.
- When you start, you have no idea what you are doing. This is GREAT!
- If you know what your zen/passion is - don’t let anything get in your way.
- Learn to write by writing. Replace write with create/code/fly/run/swim/surf, etc
- Learn to deal with failure
- Learn to deal with the problem of success
- Mistakes can be useful (dare I say, ‘are’)
- If life gets tough, make good art! (love this). Replace art with create/code/fly/run/swim/surf, etc
- Your biggest competitive advantage is the fact that you are the only you. If you reach a point where you feel you are walking naked down the street, completely exposed in your work, you are just starting to create honest art.
- Don’t lie. Acknowledge that you might be chronologically challenged occasionally.
- 2 of the following 3 is good! {Great Work, People like to be around you, Always on time}. All 3 is fantastic but you just need 2/3 to succeed.
- Let go and enjoy the ride
- Go make amazing, interesting, and honest mistakes.
<me> Most important. Feel free to ignore all the above. Know that you serve an amazing God who gives you freedom, courage and a destiny that is filled with hope, love and truth. </me>
Mark, by now you must be asking yourself the obvious question. “Where and out of whose pocket does this money come from?”
Well, just think of it this way… Let’s assume you own a very expensive piece of waterfront real estate, and you hire a broker to sell it for you. After exploring the market and after getting indications of interest, your broker advises you that $10 million would be a great price for your home. You meet with the potential buyers and decide to sell it for $10 million. After the $1 million commission you have to pay your broker, your net proceeds are $9 million. An hour later, you drive by the house and see your broker in the driveway shaking hands with some different people. You pull over to see what’s going on, and you find that the people you just sold the house to for $10 million are very close friends of your broker. To your dismay, you also find out that those friends just sold your (former) house to somebody else for $15 million.
The same exact game is going on here, Mark. You’ll be selling 388 million shares of Facebook stock in your IPO. A likely scenario is that your broker “friends” are telling you to sell your shares at $40 per share. You’ll take their advice and sell at $40 per share, and the buyers will be Morgan Stanley’s biggest fund management clients. By the time you drive around the block, these folks will have sold their shares at $50 per share. In other words, using the same real estate scenario, you’ll have sold something of yours for $15 billion that is really worth $19 billion. And for that “unique” privilege, you’ll be paying your “friends” at the banks $150 million as a fee.
Makes you wonder who your real friends are…
Source: danariely.com
If you’ve been doing what you’re doing for years and it’s not-so-great, you are in a rut. Many people refer to these ruts as careers.
The annual Sunday Times Rich List yields four very important conclusions for the governance of Britain (Report, Weekend, 28 April). It shows that the richest 1,000 persons, just 0.003% of the adult population, increased their wealth over the last three years by £155bn. That is enough for themselves alone to pay off the entire current UK budget deficit and still leave them with £30bn to spare.
