Why You Should Get Rid of Cable

I’ve always been very skeptical and mistrustful of TV. I inherited this from my parents. Growing up I wasn’t allowed to watch TV at all up until the age of 5, save for a few Disney movies. We didn’t have cable, and were instead encouraged to play outside, play indoors with Legos or blocks, or draw/color. When we did get cable TV when I was around 9, I could only watch a show or two at a time, and became obsessed. I loved MTV, BET, and Food Network especially, but always saw it as a guilty pleasure, something I knew was bad for me. I feared that my peers didn’t have those same feelings towards TV, and would feel strange when I was at friends’ houses and the TV was on during dinner or at all times for a background noise. After college, living in an apartment building downtown with a few friends, one of my roommates cancelled our cable subscription without warning while I was away visiting family for a weekend. When I came back, I was initially annoyed, but have come to appreciate his decision. Here has been the difference since we cancelled cable:

• The layout of the apartment: Initially, our common space/living area was arranged with the television as the centerpiece. Since television has been removed from the equation, the chairs and couches that once formed a semicircle have been arranged in a more circular way around a coffee table. The TV now sits idly in the corner, and the centerpiece of the seating area is a coffe table where people can rest drinks or food.
• More socializing in the apartment: Since there’s “nothing to do” in the living room, all there is to do is talk and listen to music. Living with a few other people, there will inherently be in situations where you’re meeting new people (friends of friends, guests staying over, etc). People have no choice but to talk to each other.
• Save money: Cable ran between $80 and $100 per month, or close to $1200 a year. This amounts to $300 in personal savings. For for that amount you could subscribe to basic Netflix, Spotify, and Pandora.
• Watch better content: When you take TV out of your life and routine, you can’t passively consume whatever comes your way. You start seeking out better movies and shows instead of just seeing what’s on. In the past few months, I’ve watched some great movies and shows through recommendation actions and friends’ advice. Also, when you’re hanging out on weekends, you might read (physical book or online), which is probably better.
• You can still watch stuff: As long as you have a laptop and a HDMI TV monitor you can stream stuff to your TV. Netflix, HBO GO, Hulu, random sketchy streaming sites, etc. have mostly everything. The most common answer to this is “…BUT SPORTS.” You can usually find a sketchy link, and if not maybe just find a bar that plays your team. Tom & Jerry’s plays a Packers game every Sunday of the season, and has free house-made bratwursts at halftime! 

Try getting rid of cable for a while, see what happens in your apartment.

Interesting Use Cases for Instagram

“If a thousand words is equivalent to a picture / Then welcome to the cinema.”

- Jay Electronica

It’s no secret that I really, really (still) love Instagram. Besides being my favorite way of expressing myself digitally, I find the experience equally rewarding for photo consumption. I’ve uploaded close to 1,000 photos. The app has given us insight and vision into tucked away corners of the universe where there previously was none. These are some interesting use cases I have found myself and some of my friends employing:

• Figuring out what to order at a restaurant: When people walk into a restaurant, they often checkin on foursquare. From there they can look at tips, where people suggest things like “you need to try the spaghetti al limone.” However, a picture more accurately articulates what looks yummy and what doesn’t. On IG, search the hashtag of the restaurant, such as #suppernyc. You’ll see which dishes are most often photographed, and more importantly you’ll get to see what actually looks appetizing to you. Or, if you are nearby, upload a blank photo and geotag the restaurant you are about to go to. Click on the geotag location, and you will see every photo that was ever taken and tagged at this venue. From there you can really get a sense of the menu and feel of the restaurant, one that is far more telling than any foursquare or yelp review.
• College kids selecting a dorm to live in: This is always a stressful process for incoming freshman or returning students at a university or boarding school. Which dorm is the most social? Which has the nicest rooms or the nastiest bathrooms? There are plenty of forums online where current and former students discuss this, sites like College Prowler or College Confidential. But these are often anecdotal and narrow reviews, and don’t paint a clear picture of the dorm experience. I was chatting with an incoming freshman I used to tutor, and he told me he was using Instagram to look at different residential colleges. By searching for a dorm hashtag (such as #haydenhall or #ezrastiles) you can get a real look inside the building, inside the rooms, and inside the lives of the inhabitants. You can discover and follow real students in these dorms, and maybe even make some new friends.
• Meeting people nearby: Because of the geotag feature on IG, you can see who has taken a photo at a given venue. Once, I posted and tagged a photo of a bowl of ramen at Ramen Misoya near St. Marks in Manhattan. Someone random liked the photo, so I looked at their profile. I noticed the person had recently tagged a photo at Ramen Misoya as well as at the El Ten Eleven concert at Bowery Ballroom I had attended a week prior. We ended up chatting about the show and following each other on twitter. I think this use case is especially interesting, and why there are plugins for IG such as kik or InstaDM. But the location based and shared-experience aspect could add another layer and way to connect people.

Looking at the these three use cases, I see a common denominator: show, don’t tell. Location based image sharing can disrupt online reviews by providing a more intimate, more honest, and more casual look inside of a place. Currently, the reviews space is often seen as “Foursquare vs. Yelp,” but I think Instagram could be a contendor in the distant future. I think there could be some interesting plays here, and Instagram could be seen as a reviews and discovery platform. For this to happen, Instagram needs to implement a “search by location” feature, rather than the current options (search by hashtag or user).

As for meeting people nearby, lots of apps have popped up: Tinder, OKCupid, Grindr, Sonar.me. Skout, and to a less extent Twitter and Foursquare. Instagram could shake up this space or maybe do an acquisition that could help make their service more conducive to seeing who’s nearby. Most of these apps have a more sinister purpose, so I doubt Instagram wants to venture too much into this space, but there are definitely some interesting possibilities.

Can you think of any apps that have alternative use cases?  (Updated, Sarah Lacy just wrote about Nextdoor, which was intended to be an Angie’s List or Yelp for neighborhoods, and how neighbors were using the service to share info during a burglary attempt). 

“Venture capital is one of the most dangerous things you can do to a new business.”

DHH keeping it real, as usual.

“Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, bait the hook with prestige.” - Paul Graham

Makes one think….

Studying the Greats

I just finished watching “Something Ventured,” a documentary about the early days of venture capital in Northern California. The film focused on the founders and original investors in Apple, Genentech, Cisco, Atari and other mammoths of the industry. They interviewed luminary investors like Arthur Rock, Tom Perkins (founding partner of KPCB), Don Valentine (founder of Sequoia Capital) and others. Totally worth a watch if you want some context on the current ecosystem. 

At business school, Arthur Rock and others featured in the film studied under the legendary French venture capitalist turned professor Georges Doriot. Doriot went well beyond his duties as a professor and become a mentor to many young men, schooling them in everything from how to dress to how many cocktails to drink at a party to how to read the New York Times. 

When reading the paper, Doriot said, always read the obituaries first. There you will find the stories of great men, men whose lives you can use as a model when setting up your own life. 

I’ve been studying the greats both past, present, and future and am beginning to see patterns. These patterns help me put my own life in better perspective, and I hope to one day be an example for someone else.

Is Twitter Trying To Be The Internet?

Over the past couple of years, there’s been a lot of speculation about whether or not Facebook is trying to “be the internet” the way AOL once did in the 90’s. By that, I mean they were rolling out more and more features in an attempt to allow users to engage in all activities (chat, commerce, games, digital currency, etc) within their browser. The complaint against this was that in setting its ambitions too high and its sights too far, Facebook was spread thin. They were developing a lot of features but not doing any of them right. Over the last few months, however, this same suspicion has surrounded Twitter.

Going beyond its core microblogging platform, Twitter has recently rolled out expanded tweets, a Political Barometer measuring possible election outcomes, the $CASHTAG, an Olympics homepage, a partnership with Outlook.com, a music discovery partnership with Pepsi, and many more features. These features step on a lot of toes: from news sites like BuzzFeed or New York Times who will see fewer pageviews to InTrade to StockTwits to Rapportive to Pandora.  I was recently grabbing coffee with my friend Kenneth and we discussed how more and more actions that we leave Twitter to do (buy something, write a blog post) could end up happening within Twitter, and how many Twitter-connected services could be in trouble. They already bought Posterous, a long form blogging platform, and it would make sense for them to acquire a payments platform like Gumroad. But the question here is not if they could become the center of all activity on the web, but if they should. Humans benefit from specialization and exchange. It is nearly impossible for Twitter to be everything to everyone and give each feature enough attention. But with tons of venture money at stake and a huge staff of eager engineers and product managers, the concept of “doing less” does not seem to be in the cards for Twitter.

Recently, Twitter has pissed off a lot of people in the developer community and the Twitter ecosystem. Companies that are heavily reliant on Twitter’s platform have either found themselves kicked off (Dalton Caldwell) or replaced with one of Twitter’s own features (StockTwits). Perhaps this will discourage people from integrating their products with Twitter or building on top of their platform, but I doubt it. My friend Leigh’s vision of Twitter is that it is the Amazon river of all online content, and tributaries flow into it (Path, Instagram, Tumblr, Foursquare). When you snap a picture or buy a book on Amazon, you complete that activity on another service and filter it through to Twitter. But should that action happen on Twitter? I think in most cases the answer is no, but this battle will continue to happen as long as Twitter is pressured to monetize and startups want easier and wider distribution.

When the news broke about the position at Yahoo!, I was watching Marissa Mayer’s speech for an NPR event at the Computer History Museum. I recommend watching the whole thing, especially for anyone finishing up undergrad or graduate degrees. Marissa recalls how she had 14 job offers coming out of grad school (hold on let me go cry in a corner), and narrowed her decision down to McKinsey and Google. At the time (1999), Google had about 20 employees, and she remembers their flimsy paper business cards and makeshift recruiting process. McKinsey was the premier name in management consulting where Fortune 500 CEOs were groomed. 

This was a big moment in her life after six years of higher ed, and she was forced to choose between drastically different trajectories. To make the decision, she looked back on all the best decisions she had made in her life, and tried to see what they all had in common. What she found was:

In each case, she’d chosen to be around the smartest people possible. 

Mayer said she felt Google had a “2% chance of succeeding” while other startups had a “.02% chance.” She had a gut feeling that this group of people were skating to where the puck would be. 

In each case, she’d done something she was not ready to do.

She retrospectively found that every time she’d made the right decision, she’d asked herself “what did you get yourself in to?” Being in over her head forced her to tread harder to stay afloat while learning and avoiding complacency.

The point of this post is not “work for a startup after school and don’t sell your soul to the man.” I feel that in many cases, working for a big company is the right move and is almost contrarian nowadays. Harold Kim spells that out nicely in his post “Why I Don’t Want To Work for a Startup out of College.” What I loved about Mayer’s insight was that she had found a pattern and used that data to make a decision. She recalls spending hours creating flow charts, using different events or people from her past as pivotal moments that put her on a different trajectory. For myself, figuring out which startup (or big company) I want to join next, and seeing my friends and peers start their adult lives, I think we can all learn from Marissa. 

(The part of the speech I write about starts at ends at 15:50)

Takeaways from Ben Lerer’s speech at DreamIt Ventures

Yesterday I had the opportunity to listen to Ben Lerer speak at DreamIt Ventures in New York. The Lerer Ventures portfolio is the stuff my dreams are made of, so I was psyched to find out Ben was speaking. The event was sold out days ago, but luckily my roommate Scott is interning for Ben’s company Thrillist and hooked up a couple of tickets for me. I got to meet some awesome entrepreneurs at DreamIt and received a few knowledge bombs from Ben, who is somewhat notorious in the New York tech scene. Ben is a renegade, scrappy and immaculately polished at the same time. He embodies the hustler’s spirit I discovered in myself around middle school, when I started outsourcing lawn mowing jobs to friends. Ben talked about how he was a “scum-bag club promoter” in college, which reminds me an awful lot of my sophomore year of college. He reflected on building his own business, what he looks for in an investment, and the general startup climate at the moment. Needless to say, the talk was awesome, and here’s what I took away from it:

1. Diversify revenue

Thrillist was started to tackle the problem of localized content. Ben liked lifestyle media companies like GQ and Esquire but felt they did not capture the feel of each city separately. They built out an ad sales team to make money originally, then expanded into partnerships with local businesses, then acquired JackThreads to move into e-commerce. They are still looking for new revenue streams to this day. This strategy makes the organization much more nimble as a whole, because it can continue on if one revenue stream fails. He spoke of his investment in Birchbox, and how he felt the company should aim to become the go-to hub of women’s beauty on the web, not just a monthly subscription service. 

2. Be bold, but don’t be foolish

When Ben started Thrillist with his business partner (a college buddy), they each put $15,000 into a checking account. They set up a time horizon and set goals for user growth and validation. If they didn’t make those goals, they would scrap the idea, or go until they ran out of money. Too many founders keep pushing in one direction despite data that suggests they’re not succeeding. In other words, listen to data, not your ego.

3. Don’t join a company that promises you the moon

This really hit home for me as someone who’s going through the job search. Ben talked about being totally honest and upfront about what a job entails when talking to a prospective hire. He tells them the hours will be long, the pay is crap, he’s a pain to deal with, and the work will not be glamorous. By being transparent with job candidates, they know exactly what they’d be getting into, and many are put off. However, those who do go forward succeed at a higher rate, and are not disappointed or bitter while on the job. Many companies, especially startups, will do almost anything to woo talent, and will make a bunch of false promises about growth opportunities or exit possibilities. I’ve seen 24 year olds get hired as “Directors” at startups, which without doubt is title inflation and that person will be disappointed when they find themselves cold calling. 

4. DNA matters

Ben talked about what he looks for in an entrepreneur when making an investment, and about why he chose to start a men’s lifestyle company. It comes down to DNA: does this person understand their vertical deeper than everyone else? I asked Ben about his investment in Everlane, a company I’m very bullish on, in the Q&A part of the talk. He answered that he invested before Everlane had designed or shipped one T-shirt, because he know the founder Michael inherently understood fashion and e-commerce and he had to join him. DNA is more important than technical skill, connections, or pedigree.

5. Have fun

Ben’s dad sold his company last year, and they went on a vacation to celebrate. On the trip, he could tell his dad was proud of his accomplishment and happy to have profited, but missed the day-to-day excitement of the grind. This reminded me of Ryan Carson’s post “Selling Your Company Doesn’t Make You Happy.”  As technology people and as humans we’re always working towards some finish line. Looking around that room on 38th street, I could see tons of smart, talented, fire-in-the-belly people anxious for that big exit or raise. What we all realized at that moment was that THIS was the fun part: the furiously jotting down notes at panels and meetups, the late night skype sessions and strategy calls, the cheap rental cars to Philly to give presentations, the setbacks and the butterflies in your stomach and the small validations that keep us going. It’s easy to look at someone like Ben, or Chris Dixon, or Ben Horowitz, and become frustrated with your current state. But I’ll bet if you were to ask any of these guys what the best times in their lives were, they wouldn’t say the day they sold their companies, they’d say the days they were in the trenches as founders. As Josh Brown says, these are the good old days, so have fun.

We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. We expect more from our technology and less from each other.

— 

- Sherry Turkle.

From the “SlowTech” presentation by Joe Kraus (Google Ventures).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzpX0TLKS9Q

My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The ’80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don’t know who will lead us through the ’90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.

-Lee Atwater, Life Magazine February 1991, 1 month before his passing.