Entrepreneurship Social-Media and Skeptics Oh My! (Prt. 3)

December 15, 2009
5 Comments
tags: , , , , ,
by Elliott Payne

This is the final part of a three part series I wrote in 2008. It was my take on the developing web 2.0 landscape. Now that the fall semester has come to a close, I’ll be able to dedicate a little more mindshare to this website. I want to put a capstone on this, revisited, 3 part series and this year by offering my thoughts on a book I read about a month ago – Guy Kawasaki’s Rules For Revolutionaries. I offered some brief thoughts over on my “short-form” tumblr blog, but I really want to expand on those thoughts here. Check back within the next week or two for that.

=====

In my last post on this subject, I spoke to the benefits I’ve experienced thus far with social-media, where I think social-media is heading, and how social-media is all in all a good thing. I’m going to try to address some of the concerns present with current day social-media as I see them and also try to cover some of the criticisms skeptics have raised pertaining to social-media and maybe a rebuttal to them.

Time to wrap this thing up.

The Skeptics

The internet, since its inception, has been criticized for its lack of credibility and rightly so; the internet and its predecessor has been a hotbed of piracy, copy write infringement, porn, and all things sinister and evil. Services such as Apple TV, Netflix, and iTunes have only been around for a few years and those services have only recently become widely accepted mediums for utilizing the internet as a legal source of media. The long and skinny of it is that the internet is still a very unrefined place – the wild wild west of our generation.

There is no clear model of how to generate revenue from the internet; although many have profited greatly from the internet thus far, those successes are few and far between and there are no clear answers why some have succeeded and others have failed miserably. Furthermore, there is no sign of what will and won’t work in the future of the internet. We’re all pulling at straws, hoping that something sticks and this is the very reason there are so many skeptics of web 2.0.

In the past, the most effective way to make money on the web was through banner ads. But banner ads have been just a piss poor attempt at digitizing traditional advertising formats, producing abysmal performance per dollar spend in comparison to their traditional counterparts. Furthermore, it’s been argued that people don’t want to be marketed to while online – that they want to get in and get out and move on while surfing the web. Others claim social-networking is superficial, too time consuming, dilutes your personal brand, and is no replacement for face to face contact

I can’t help but think of Guy Kawasaki when discussing this topic because he seems to have been on the forefront of some of the trends brought on by the internet, if not create some trends, but I asked my business formation professor about what he thought of him (since he referenced him in one of his lecture notes) and my professor had one simple question: What successful ventures has he created or financed?

The question floored me to an extent, mostly because of the sheer simplicity of it. He had a way of cutting straight to the chase in his lecture style and he definitely delivered in this razor sharp questioning. He continued (and I’m paraphrasing here):

He [Guy Kawasaki] seems to have written some books on the subject of business formation and have had some success there, but be careful about what you read and really vet your sources because anyone can write anything they want, especially on the internet. Look into what they have actually accomplished and always take everything with a grain of salt.

Fairly basic advice, but for some reason it really resonated for me: So I asked myself “I like Guy Kawasaki, what ventures of his do I know of that have been wildly successful?” Well, I can’t really say for sure. I can only assume his “Alignment of Interests” section on his blog indicates some of the ventures he’s involved in and that his venture capital firm Garage Tech has a pretty impressive portfolio of companies listed (at least I’m impressed by the fact that one of my favorite finance sites, Motley Fool, is listed).

Like I said before, I came across an article in the WSJ about Penelope Trunk and through her blog found out about Guy Kawasaki, then alltop, then all kinds of super relevant and informative blogs and people like Zen Habits, Unclutterer, Life Hacker, Chris Brogan, Problogger and on and on. I kind of got so enthralled in all this new and intriguing information, I think I kind of lost a little bit of my analytical and usually skeptical approach to new or untested information. Once you start clicking through a lot of these links, you’ll notice that a lot of information will end up getting reused and recycled in a flurry of almost circle jerk proportions – not necessarily a bad thing in its own right when the information is relevant, useful, and legitimate. But very dangerous when one blogger makes baseless claims that get substantiated by multiple bloggers who may find that stance convenient to what ever world view they promote. Copyblogger speaks to the “circle-jerk” nature of bloggrolling I’m referring to here as a barrier to success for social-media as a means of revenue generation.

One of my close friends is very much anti social-networking. The irony here is that he’s a programmer who spent a significant amount of time in the bay area during the mid to late nineties who worked with a lot of start ups (even to the level of being the CTO for one). His gripe? He wants to spend less time on the internet not more. He shares the sentiments of social-networking being too much of a time commitment for little personal gain. He also argues that every time he logs onto what little sites he’s a member of (a fairly infrequent occurrence), one site falls out of light in favor of another. There’s really no keeping up with who uses what site and to what end, leaving you with a disconnected network of friends in different circles spread throughout the internet.

Look, I get it… I get that the “true” utility of social-media has yet to be defined, I get that no one wants to be pitched wares by their “friends” every time they log-in and check their messages, I get that legitimacy is in question every time you open google reader to check out what’s happening in the your world, I really do. But look, there is a new landscape out there, and I’m not talking about technology, I’m talking about new attitudes to and expectations of the internet.

Web 1.0 didn’t look any different from web 2.0 (well, maybe there were less annoyingly flashy websites in web 1.0), no one really knew what to do with it or what to think of it. We were still used to very limited sources of news and opinion at that time, and for that reason, those sources had to be highly scrutinized, editorialized, and legitimized through a systematic source of checks and balances. That process lead to a centralized monopoly of information providers simply out of the necessity to develop and maintain the resources needed to maintain the infrastructure of information. Web 2.0 isn’t about new internet technologies, it’s about new ways of generating and processing information, it’s about new attitudes towards an open channel of information that democratizes our most precious asset – knowledge.

from → Social-Media (Web 2.0), blogging, entrepreneurship, marketing

Posting this from tweetie 2.1 on my iPho

December 12, 2009
Leave a comment
by Elliott Payne

Posting this from tweetie 2.1 on my iPhone – as always, remember to experiment for yourself

from → Uncategorized

Entrepreneurship Social-Media and Skeptics Oh My! (Prt. 2)

November 13, 2009
5 Comments
tags: , , ,
by Elliott Payne

This is part 2 of a 3 part series that I originally posted in 2008. I’m revisiting this series because I feel like I’ve come a long way since originally drafting these ideas and so has the web 2.0 landscape. I’m using this to reaccess whether my ideas may have been right or wrong and to further refine my hypotheses about this dynamic market.

========

 

I think I ended cutting the last bit a little short because my brain tends to start running in circles the more I think about something. I’ll try to tighten up any loose ends as I continue on to part 2 of this 3 part series.

Social-Media (Web 2.0?)

The first thing that I should say on this topic is that none of what is considered Web 2.0 is really very new. Blogging (writing crap and digitally publishing it) has been around for ages, same with web forums, and a slew of other internet technologies that have been widely accessible and used for nearly a decade. Hell, if we want to step out of the context of the internet, move over youtube, public access tv has been around since at least the 80’s. But I’ll get into this in more detail in part 3 of this series. Just know that I’ve considered these concepts as we continue along. Shall we?

There are two main points I want to address (not that I won’t tangent off into more, but these are the main 2). First, and in my opinion, anyone who takes the time to create a blog should, at the bear minimum, put some thought into their role as a content creator on the internets, if not speak directly to it on their blog. There’s a lot of clutter on the internet and people should put a little consideration as to whether or not their contributions add more clutter, or actually add useful information (a point I really want to drive home, another time). Otherwise one can get stuck at point 2 of the “blog life cycle,” where you end up just regurgitating tired revelations over and over again.

Second, as an early “millennial,” I grew up with an Apple IIe in my classroom in elementary school (number crunchers and oregon trail FTW), remember getting our first PC at home which was a big deal, remember getting our first CD-ROM drive and installing it ourselves (again, this was a big deal in the early 90’s), and I remember using BBS’s before the internet. Long story short, I’ve spent most of my life around computers and depending on them, but I also remember a time when I didn’t have that sort of relationship… a simpler time, if you will.

I’m by no means an early adopter (this blog is proof of that), but I tend to stay ahead of trends and I think I have an eye for visionary ideas when I see them. But I remember reluctantly signing up for hot-or-not when my friend hassled me until I did, I always hated that site and its entire concept but it was a primer for sites like friendster which I also reluctantly signed up for back in 2003 when that same friend kept on pestering me to sign up. That was back when I was in L.A. for an internship and didn’t really know that many people, that was also when I saw the value in social-media for the first time. If you’ve ever lived in a city like L.A., you know that you meet people left and right like crazy because everyone is so friendly (or fake for those that don’t like L.A., I don’t believe it though) and because everyone is so social (ie parties, a lot). You would meet all these people at a party for a fleeting moment and then you’d log into friendster (and later myspace when friendsters servers couldn’t take the traffic and all around sucked at that time) find those people through your one or two friends who introduced you and bam! – you had this huge network of people who you found a real connection with and created real relationships with when, in the past, you would have one evening of drunken fun and never even remember their names ever again. I’ve still got really good friends that I keep up with to this day through that medium.

Fast forward to 2008 and now we all have a profile on over a dozen websites: friendster, myspace, facebook, delicious, flickr, linkedin, digg, twitter, and on and on and on. Privacy and secrecy is basically a thing of the past, we’re all connected, and connected in very intimate ways. But what does this all mean, and what does it/can it do for you? Well, it doesn’t mean a whole lot… yet.

The way to make money on the internet is not an exact science today; this is still the wild frontier. But as we become more connected, we’re going to see more relevant content on the web. For instance, I’ve been reading a lot of blogs on alltop (an aggregation of blogs across an array of topics that I came across from reading one of the creator’s blogs). I was specifically reading a lot of blogs under the topic of design when I kept on finding a bunch of clothing brands and other nick-knacks that I really liked. I think I ended up spending a couple hundred bucks on stuff that month. The point is that the more you know about your market (segment, niche, etc.), the better you can service that market through your offerings whether product or service. Furthermore, the socially connected web is a lot more informal and personal, so you don’t feel like a lemming targeted by corporate America to exploit because the product or service being marketed towards you is something that might be passed on by a friend who thought it would be a good fit for you based on a conversation you were just having vs. the “spray and pray” method of putting a bunch of corny ads all over the place a hoping someone actually buys.

Another trend I’ve been noticing is that people are beginning to shy away from the mega sites like ebay and taking their business to more community based sites like etsy for buying and selling stuff like trinkets and crafts because they are better served by that medium because they are more closely connected (and because people are sick of getting scammed). I think you’re going to continue to see smaller web-based communities pop up to fill the gaps where the original mega sites like ebay and amazon left off, but you’re going to see this trend across the board whether you’re buying products and services or just looking for relevant information.

But as many of you know, not everyone sees things things this way. Stay tuned for part 3 as I cover the skeptics and their criticisms of this web 2.0 craze.

from → Social-Media (Web 2.0), marketing

Entrepreneurship Social-Media and Skeptics Oh My! (Prt. 1)

October 26, 2009
5 Comments
tags: , , , ,
by Elliott Payne

I’ve come a long way since starting this blog almost two years ago. I’m going to re-post this series of posts because I want to re-litigate some of my ideas on web 2.0 and see if they need a refresh and try to determine where my ideas need refining.

=====

Before I get ahead of myself, I should say that I just updated my about page. There isn’t much there, but you’ll notice I’m in school for an MBA (about half way through at this point). You’ll also notice that I’ve got quite a few different interests across a fairly wide spectrum (i.e. engineering and photography & DJing aren’t exactly 2 peas in a pod). So as I continue to explore various career paths and try to align my experience (and dare I say, expertise) up to this point with my relatively diverse interests to create a career where I don’t feel like shooting myself in the face with a shotgun every time I show up for work, the more I realize I’m pigeonholed into the kind of jobs that my academic background would suggest I take. On paper, I’m a one-dimensional number cruncher, deployed as a specialized cog in a large convoluted and disorganized system of industrial inputs and outputs.

The above lays the groundwork for the following post. I might have to break this up into several sections to keep things organized and on point.

Entrepreneurship and New Venture Development

For the sake of maintaining my beautiful face (what with all the shotgun blasts), I’m finding that I’m most likely going to have to start my own venture, or at least highly consider this option in lieu of the mythical perfect job where everyone has an oversized beanbag of an office chair, lunch is catered daily, and there’s a whole arsenal of nurf paraphernalia in the board room. And cold beer on tap in the cafeteria. Oh, and your to-do list has cure world hunger. And… well, you get the point. Basically a place like IDO, not that they have beer on tap, but it’s basically the kind of place I’d like to work if I could work anywhere I wanted.
Last semester I had probably the best class that I’ll have in the entire program. As much as I like Porter’s 5-forces and to use terms such as paradigm shift and functional frameworks in my daily vernacular of BS MBA mumbo jumbo, a lot of the shit thrown at MBA programs and MBA candidates is pretty fair: Great business leaders business school does not make. But last semester, I took a class on business formation and new venture development. My professor was a seasoned venture capital manager and financier as well as an accomplished entrepreneur; this class was almost more about life than it was about business. The key take home message, at least for me, was that you can’t be taught entrepreneurship as much as you can learn from other peoples entrepreneurial exploits. Basically, you get to learn about all the myriad of ways a financier/partner/your own mother will screw you when it comes to starting a venture – I’m being dramatic, but you can really get the idea of how wisdom comes with age when you’ve got old timers telling how many times and ways they’ve been duped (or even how they did it on sending end).

We had a speaker every week who shared all their war stories. I’m not going to get into too many details about the stereotypes associated with the personalities of entrepreneurs and the details debunking those stereotypes – like everything else, they come in all shapes, sizes, and flavors. I’m also not going to cover how they they were all pretty smart, creative, and so on. However, I will note that, in almost every case, these entrepreneurs all made their mints through impeccable timing. One rode the telecom deregulation wave of 70’s the, another got great deals on some real estate in the 80’s. The point? Timing is everything.

I think I’ll continue on this topic sometime in the future, but for now, this is a good segue into the next part of this three part series. Social-media, Web 2.0, whatever you want to call it, the timing is right for this whole thing to make a mint for some people.

Stay tuned and leave a comment with your thoughts.

from → career, entrepreneurship

Do You Suck at Doing What You Love?

October 15, 2009
Leave a comment
by Elliott Payne

What if you were just plain not good at some passion or hobby that you love?

It’s a question that came to mind recently. Especially with my last blog post. My intention with that last post was to build momentum behind some ideas I (and some friends of mine) had; a sort of rally cry.

But here I am months later, school semester fully underway, and work rapidly picking up steam. I can’t help but to look back at that and ask myself, am I too ambitious? Or is the reality that I just lack good ideas worth executing?

I feel like pursuing entrepreneurship would be tantamount to “finding my calling.”

But what if I’m no good at it? What if I can’t think of any good ideas?

Given the knowledge that you’re a “sucky entrepreneur,” do you push on anyway?

If it brings fulfillment, maybe you should…

from → career, entrepreneurship, happiness, wisdom

A Primer On Regretting Your Online Prescense

August 25, 2009
2 Comments
tags: , , ,
by Elliott Payne

This topic has been coming up a lot lately as the use of twitter and, especially, facebook is becoming more and more ubiquitous. A lot of people are becoming concerned about how their constant updating will be perceived and whether or not they will look back and regret some of their past contributions to the public sphere.

I recently watched Primer, a movie about a group of young entrepreneurs who mistakenly invent a machine that allows you to travel back in time. Once they realized what they invented, they tried to determine how to monitize or sell this important technology. They soon realize that it would be too difficult to sell and potentially dangerous for other people to know about. So they decide to use the technology to game the stock market & become rich (in a nutshell, of course there’s more to the story).

What does this have to do with your internet persona & over sharing? Well, a lot of the decisions we make & ideas we harbor are a product of our life experience and our assumptions of our realities based on our understanding of the world. This is inherently a dynamic process and we gain new perspectives of how the world works everyday. So it goes without saying that many of our approaches to life can fundamentally change as new information and understanding come to light, changing our assumptions and ultimately our ideas and philosophies. In the case of Primer, their understand of the world changed in such a drastic way that they were forced to re-evaluate their ethics & morals. Do you tell your angel investor? Do you pitch the technology to VC’s or DARPA? Or do you “cheat” the market, become rich and buy a private island in the Caribbean (the whole reason you got into entrepreneurship in the first place)? Does the end justify the means?

This an exciting process that is really interesting to watch unfold. Why should we feel regret? What new experience has reshaped your reality today?

from → Gen-Y, Social-Media (Web 2.0), entrepreneurship, wisdom

Calculated Inexperience

July 16, 2009
Leave a comment
tags: , , , ,
by Elliott Payne

This thought is a bit of a follow up from the previous post.

I’m a not a very traditional engineer in a lot of ways. I suck at simple arithmetic, I’m very extroverted, I get bored by tedious & repetitive tasks, and I’m very into artistic expression. But one trait that fits the bill is that I’m a very analytical person. I follow a very stoic and logical philosophy when it comes to my approach to life. But I’m also a hypocrite in that I’m a very emotional being… more on that later.

I’ve been spending a lot of mental capital on figuring out what my next step should be and a lot of that debate is centered around the contrast between instinct & advice or common wisdom. I have a strong interest in starting a venture; of course, the right way to go about doing this is to study up on how business are funded, how venture capital works, get an MBA, analyze the prevailing market trends and, of course, drink from the firehouse of information that’s out there about current or formerly successful entrepreneurs. Like I said, I’m going to do this thing right if I’m going to do it.

But here goes the problem, there is no “right.” There’s only did, or didn’t. Logic follows that startups fail more than they succeed and any analysis of the situation will always bring you to the same logical conclusion. Don’t.

So I return where I left off at the part about being a creature of emotion. I love my job right now. In fact, it’s my dream job. It’s very challenging, very dynamic, offers endless learning opportunities, and I’m highly respected by my colleagues. As I write this, I’m 27 years old and am blessed with such an amazing life; but, if I just work for the rest of my life, I’ve basically reached my peak. Sure, I’ll finish grad school and make more money and gain more responsibility, but I’ve cleared a lot of the greatest hurtles to success. I have to stop thinking through this so much and I have start getting emotional!

I recently watched this video from my youth again and realized that success isn’t enough, I have to do great things. I had suppressed my memories from my childhood so much that I forgot how much of a fighter and survivor I was and had to be to make it through that crap. I can’t waste all that effort on complacency & a BMW M3, I have to act! I need to be young, stupid, bold and naive. I need to try to reinvent the world and be so ignorant that I think I can!

Let’s go!

from → entrepreneurship, wisdom

Limitations On The Wisdom of Elders

July 15, 2009
Leave a comment
tags: , ,
by Elliott Payne

One of the topics that I keep revisiting in my mind is the concept of reinventing the wheel. On the one hand, I want to use whatever ground work that has been laid before me and I want to learn from other peoples mistakes; on the other hand, I want to trust my instincts and work through problems my own way so that I can foster creativity & innovation.

Sometimes we need to challenge the convensional way of doing things because those methods were developed under a different set of constaints and, therefore, had different limitations build in. Othertimes, we can work & think more efficiently if we use solutions to problems that were created through generations of iterations of trial and error.

What’s the best approach?

from → career, entrepreneurship, wisdom

Quick Update

June 5, 2009
Leave a comment
by Elliott Payne

It’s been a long time since I posted an update. The beginning of this year ended up being a whirl-wind of events and it just didn’t provide the kind of environment for me to keep on top of the website. Don’t worry though, I still have long term goals for this as a placeholder for a lot of new thoughts and ideas. So don’t give up on me yet.

In the mean time, keep up with me on twitter by clicking on my feed to right, and stay tuned because I’m going to be opening up some time to put some of my thoughts here soon.

from → Uncategorized

Stress as a Motivator

March 17, 2009
3 Comments
tags: , ,
by Elliott Payne

Somewhere along the line, I’ve been labeled as a pretty calm and collective guy buy my friends, and people who are generally close to me. I always chocked it up to the fact that I’m kind of a science guy who likes to take a Spock-like logic and reason based approach to life. But I came across a thought recently while talking with my partner, about relative levels of stress (her baseline ability to be stressed out is a bit higher than mine).

The conversation came to light while talking about focus. She’s at that point where a lot of things are beginning to converge; mainly keeping up with matters of career, health, relationship and just life in general. There are so many things going on in life right now that things can get really overwhelming very quickly.

So the question came up about how am I able stay focused even though I spend the entire week away from home and I spend all day Saturday in school? I hadn’t really thought of it because my life was so busy, I was just going with the flow (so it seemed). But it was at that point where I fully realized how stressed out I was (am). See, it’s not that I’m a too cool fool, it’s that I’m so sensitive to stress that I employ all of my essence to extinguishing whatever in my life is causing me stress.

So what’s the take home message?

I’ve always had this belief that stress should be avoided at all costs and that somehow, if you ever got stressed out, you were less of a person for not being able to “handle your shit.” Maybe we shouldn’t be so averse to stress, maybe that’s the way our bodies and minds let us know what we should be working on and striving for. Let’s embrace our stress, acknowledge its existence, determine its cause, and channel its power to extinguish the root cause. Let’s use it to give us focus and to accomplish our goals.

Stress can be the fire under your ass that pushes you to do great things.

from → career, happiness, professional, wisdom

« Older Entries