Gear Burger: Turbocharged

Gear Burger has been turbocharged.  You can read about the improvements here.

Side Benefit of User Testing: Team Unity

For the last several months, we’ve been undergoing a large redesign of a critical and complex user flow at Adroll. At this point, several hundred hours of work have gone into the project. Our UX intern started the project with a company-wide customer identification exercise that got everyone focused on who we’re targeting with our product and who we should be designing for. We then conducted extensive user testing with target customers throughout development which resulted in radical shifts from what we thought would be the “right” solutions out of the gates. The result is not only a better and easier to use product, but also a unified team. User testing not only focused our team on our target users’ behavior but also virtually eliminated internal debate and the resulting tension regarding who thought what would be best for our users.  In the long run it’s very possible that the side benefit of team unity will match the value of the much improved product.

Gear Burger: Outdoor gear deals straight to your inbox

My buddy Chad and I launched Gear Burger a while back as a little side project. When you sign up for the service, you select your preferred gear type and gear brand preferences (e.g. men’s hiking and skiing gear made by Patagonia, Salomon and Volkl).   Gear Burger then monitors one-deal-at-a-time sites like Steep and Cheap and Tramdock and sends you email alerts when an item that matches your preferences goes on sale.  The sales we see are generally 10 – 20% cheaper than the cheapest sale prices on the web.  You can also browse past deals within the catalog where you can also find individual products that you would like to follow and get alerts when they go on sale.   The live deals section contains all of the deals we are seeing that are currently active.  To date our system has seen 21,740 deals and tens of thousands of alerts.  We find it super useful for snagging great gear deals and we hope you do too.

Better can beat better + cheaper

I recently met a scrappy entrepreneur who is working on some very interesting technology that has potential to help large enterprises. He described his product as “ten times better and ten times cheaper than the competition.” It’s easy for entrepreneurs to slip into the mindset that their product needs to beat the competition on all fronts: price, service, technology, etc. The truth is that if you build something that really is 10x better than the competition, there is no reason to massively cut the price as well.

Cool projects for kids

Subscriptions for healthy things are the new black.  We love our vegetable subscription and delivery service because quality veggies are something we want in our life but they are time consuming and difficult to source.  Along the same lines, a company recently launched bringing subscription service to hands-on projects for kids called the Project of the Month Club. 

Strive valiantly

It is not the critic who counts,
nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbled,
or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood;
who strives valiantly;
who errs and comes short again and again;
who knows great enthusiasms, great devotions;
who spends himself in a worthy cause;
who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement,
and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly,
so that his place shall never be with those timid souls
who know neither victory nor defeat.

-Theordore Roosevelt

Email deliverability hacks

Email deliverability is a big deal…and unfortunately it’s as muddled as transaction processing. There are hundreds if not thousands of service providers who will tell you whatever it takes to get you to buy their product and ungodly amounts of marketing materials. At the end of the day, blacklists are nearly impossible to get off and email plays an integral role for nearly every web app in existence (sidenote: check out Product Planner for great visuals of email/signup process flows). Ted Rheingold of Dogster has written the best best list of email deliverability best-practices that I have seen yet. Auren Hoffman built on Ted’s post with a great list of email deliverability troubleshooting suggestions. Unfortunately I found these post via Noah Kagan only after I had spent countless hours wading through email service provider jargon & propaganda. Hopefully this post will save others some pain…

The stats behind Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Law Review

I’m a law school nerd and watched Obama speech with a friend who asked me what it really means to be Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Law School, one of the credentials that I find most indicative of Obama’s intellectual horsepower.

Every year around 7,500 people apply to Harvard Law School. Roughly 560 students matriculate with, on average, a 3.8 undergrad GPA and a 99th percentile LSAT score. After 1L year studying legal theory, around 40 of the best students are appointed to Harvard Law Review based on their first year grades and writing. Law Reviews are highly competitive student run scholarly journals considered mandatory by many for high-end legal careers. For the 7% that make it on to Law Review, 2L year is more legal theory plus highly detailed editing of emerging legal scholarship pending publication in the journal. At the end of 2L year, one member of Law Review is elected to be the next year’s Editor-in-Chief by the existing members. The Editor-in-Chief then runs the process of producing the next year’s editions of the journal. Since 1887, 121 people have been appointed Editor-in-Chief of Harvard Law Review. There were more than 7,000 Rhodes Scholarships granted during the same period.

Glance

In my post a while back about my picks for the best service providers for startups, I included my favorite desktop sharing software, Glance, which I use religiously. Glance was recommended to me by a friend and I use it for all my demos also for some internal stuff when sharing a screen is needed.

Last night I ran into a friend I see every couple of years and talk turned to startups. I was amazed to discover that my friend’s cousin Taylor Kew is one of the founders of Glance.  My friend was happy to learn that I use Glance ~5 times a week. I was then saddened to hear that Taylor passed away in August ’07 of lymphoma. If anyone at Glance sees this, thanks again for delivering a great service.  I can’t imagine how tough it must be to work through losing a founding member of your team.

The power of defaults

The snack machine in my office building gets a steady flow of patronage throughout the day. Last week I used a dollar bill to buy a 50 cent pack of gum and noticed that the 50 cents I was owed wasn’t returned automagically. I then hit the coin return button and the machine coughed up my change. Somewhere out there, there’s a genius that revolutionized the vending machine industry by changing this default. I’ve left at least an extra dollar in the machine since I first noticed this change last week. Brilliant.

Edit:  So it turns out I was totally wrong about this.  My dreams of a revolutionized snack vending machine industry have been shattered.  Thanks to bostonwolf’s comment I realized had assumed the machine retained change.  I was wrong.  If there is change owed after a transaction, the machine spits up the change in the coin slot ~2 minutes after the purchase.  Too bad.

Facebook Ads now targeting professional titles, taking LinkedIn head on…

Facebook continues to quickly and quietly improve their advertising platform. In yet another innovation launched without formal announcement, Facebook now allows advertisers to target ads based on professional titles in user profiles. Previously ads could only target by keywords listed in users’ “interests” field. Now Facebook has indexed professional titles and allows for dynamic targeting through the Facebook Ads platform. Perhaps the recent launch of the advertising feedback function was in anticipation of an aggressive move towards monetization via heightened ad targeting? We’re still waiting on the Facebook Ads API but LinkedIn is still using a massively inflated CPM rate card despite their recent $1B valuation and and MySpace still uses Google adwords, putting Facebook miles ahead of the rest of the social networking pack when it comes to advertising technology.

Career Advice from Fred Wilson

Fred Wilson has a great post looking back on his career and how he got into venture capital.  The title “I Got Lucky” pretty much sums it up.  This is the meatiest part:

If you want to be a top tier venture investor, you must be recognized as one of the experts in the field you invest in. When I was at Euclid, I used to watch in admiration as guys like Bill Kaiser worked the enterprise software business or Paul Ferri worked the communications equipment business. They knew the business cold and if you wanted to start a company in their area of expertise you went to them first. That’s what you have to get to if you want to make top tier returns in the venture capital business.

The way you do that is you work for at least ten years in the industry, getting operating experience, building a killer rolodex, and learning how the business works from the inside. Then in your mid to late 30s, you can make the move to the venture capital business, as a partner, not as a wet behind the ears associate who doesn’t know anything other than how to push numbers around a spreadsheet.

I did it all wrong and got lucky. I don’t recommend anyone reading this to try it the way I did it. If you choose to get an MBA, get a real job out of business school. Help to build a few businesses in an industry sector you really like. Become an expert in that industry. Then try your hand at venture capital. You’ll be much better at it than I was my first ten years in the business.

It’s tough to say if I like his or Warren Buffett’s career advice more.

620,000,000 profiles

I’ve recently been doing some analysis focusing on the growth rates of major social networks and resume databases (I’m saving major blogging platforms for another day, although I’m guessing there are ~400M blogs out there). For the purposes of this analysis I calculated the user profile CAGR for each major social network and resume database, assuming 1M profiles in the launch year and ending with the best estimate of user profiles today (May 2008).

The results show that there are nearly 620,000,000 robust user profiles among these services today, a figure that has grown at a 64% CAGR since ’95. Orkut has grown at the highest CAGR (231%) while MySpace claims the largest raw number of profiles (173M). The chart below nicely illustrates the social networking explosion staring in ’03, underlined by the steady growth of resume databases starting in the mid 90s. The exponentially higher growth rates of social networks can be attributed to the viral features that have come to define them. Traditional resume databases are useful but are generally non-viral so they continue to grow steadily. This analysis does not take into account spam and fake profiles and the chart massively simplifies the growth trends by retrospectively applying each company’s CAGR.

• CareerBuilder
• Alexa #8
• Launched 1995
• 24M resumes
• Average 1.85M additions per year
• 28% CAGR

• HotJobs
• Alexa #1 (Y! site)
• Launched 1996
• 30M resumes
• Average 2.5M additions per year
• 33% CAGR

• HI5
• Alexa #76
• Launched 1996
• 98M user profiles
• Average 8.16M additions per year
• 47% CAGR

• Monster
• Alexa #337
• Launched 1999
• 80M resumes
• Average 8.88M additions per year
• 63% CAGR

• MySpace
• Alexa #3
• Launched 2003
• 173M user profiles
• Average 34.6M additions per year
• 180% CAGR

• LinkedIn
• Alexa #54
• Launched 2003
• 22M user profiles
• Average 4.4M additions per year
• 86% CAGR

• Facebook
• Alexa #5
• Launched 2004
• 70M user profiles
• Average 17.5M additions per year
• 189% CAGR

• Orkut
• Alexa #51
• Launched in 2004
• 120M user profiles
• Average 30M additions per year
• 231% CAGR

Andreessen on Drive

Excerpt from a great post over on Marc Andreessen’s blog.  Definitely worth reading:

When I was 10 [in 1928] I wanted to make movies…

I had seen a picture called Wings — the first and only silent picture to win the Academy Award — with Clara Bow… and a new fella named Gary Cooper [who subsequently became a huge star]. I went and just fell in love with that picture. It was a Paramount picture playing at the Paramount Theater [at the time, the studios owned the theaters] in Jacksonville. I had seen that it said Adolph Zukor Presents, so I was in awe of Adolph Zukor [the founder and CEO of Paramount]. I spoke to the manager of the theater that day [to see] if he would give me a job. And he gave me a job handing out leaflets…

After four years in the job [he was then 14] I eventually met Adolph Zukor… when he came to Jacksonville. I asked him to let me come to Hollywood to work for him. He said, “Well, you’re just a kid, but you’ve been working for Paramount now for four years at the theater. So you finish high school, keep in touch, and I’ll hire you when you get out of high school.”

Now that was extremely kind of him… when he said to keep in touch and finish high school, my main objective then was to finish high school. But the most important thing was writing him a letter every Sunday. He didn’t tell me to write him every Sunday, he just told me to keep in touch. So I wrote him every Sunday for four years.

He didn’t write back — I didn’t hear from him but it didn’t matter. I never lost confidence or lost courage. I just knew he was looking forward to my letter each week as much as I was looking forward to writing him.

One day Gary Cooper came to my hometown. I was writing movie news for the hometown paper. I saw Mr. Cooper and I told him I would be out here in Hollywood to work at Paramount as soon as I got out of high school. And there again, for some reason, he took a quick liking to me. I told him about my letters to Zukor every Sunday and he asked me what I would be writing about this week, and I said, “Oh, about meeting you, Mr. Cooper.”

So he said, “Give me a piece of paper.” So he… wrote a note to Adolph Zukor saying, “I’m looking forward to seeing this kid on the lot.” So I wrote to Mr. Zukor telling him I had met Gary Cooper and enclosed the note to him.

Then I heard from Mr. Zukor indirectly. A woman named Sidney Brecker, who was his secretary, wrote to me and said, “Mr. Zukor has been receiving your letters. But he feels that you don’t have to write every week. If you wrote once every three or four or five months, that would be enough.”

Well, that didn’t discourage me at all. I continued to write to Mr. Zukor every Sunday. But I also had a new pigeon, Sidney Brecker, his secretary. So I wrote her every Sunday too. My whole main objective all week was what I was going to write to Mr. Zukor. Then I had to write another original letter to Sidney Brecker…

I wrote [Zukor] a letter every Sunday for four years, keeping in touch. The day I got out of high school [in 1936, in the heart of the Great Depression], I was in a day coach headed for Hollywood, where you sit up — probably four days and four nights. I had $48 in cash that I had saved up, and two loaves of bread, and two jars of peanut butter and a sack of apples, and I headed for Hollywood. Got off the train downtown, took the streetcar straight to Paramount, and told them at the gate to tell Mr. Zukor I was here.

And I’ve been here ever since.

IRS on Purchasing Fish with Cash

After all these years, I’ve finally figured out how the IRS wants me to account for fish I purchase with cash. It’s right there on page 5 of the instructions for the 2008 form 1099, a form that otherwise governs miscellaneous income and payments to contractors.

Include fees, commissions, prizes and awards for services performed as a nonemployee, other forms of compensation for services performed for your trade or business by an individual who is not your employee, and fish purchases for cash.

I hope this was as helpful for you as it was for me.

*The tax information above has been provided for general guidance only. It is up to you to understand and adhere to the appropriate tax rules. Any tax-related information provided by this site is not intended as and should not be construed as legal, tax, or investment advice. You should always consult your tax advisor to help answer specific questions regarding how tax laws apply to you and/or your business. The tax summary provided is necessarily incomplete, and the tax laws and regulations are subject to change. Therefore, this site does not guarantee and is not liable for the accuracy or completeness of any tax information provided, or any results or outcome as a result of the use of this information. To learn more about U.S. tax requirements, please visit the IRS website. For tax advice or more technical questions about how tax laws apply to you, please consult your tax adviser. Or just don’t by back-alley fish for cash.

Career Advice from Warren Buffett

Many business schools have a “Warren Buffett Club” that makes an annual trip to visit the Oracle of Omaha.  Buffett is extremely outgoing to such groups and usually does a lot of candid Q&A.  I recently saw an unofficial transcript from a Tuck Q&A session in ’05.  This response of Buffett’s was particularly amusing:

Q: What is your career advice?

A: If you want to make a lot of money go to Wall Street. More importantly though, do what you would do for free, having passion for what you do is the most important thing. I love what I do; I’m not even that busy . . . A few months ago I was talking to another MBA student, a very talented man, about 30 years old from a great school with a great resume. I asked him what he wanted to do for his career, and he replied that he wanted to go into a particular field, but thought he should work for McKinsey for a few years first to add to his resume. To me that’s like saving sex for your old age. It makes no sense.

I’m not going to touch the sex comment, but I think his advice about finding something about which you are passionate is great.

Wallstrip on Daaa Merc (CME)

Funny stuff today over at Wallstrip. After 5 years in Chicago, I realize that the SNL guys didn’t have to make too much up for Bill Swerski’s Superfans.

John Edwards feeling pretty

I have nothing against John Edwards, but this is one of the funniest YouTube videos I have seen yet. Thanks to the WSJ Law Blog for the tip!

$3.5 M violin + Joshua Bell + subway stop = ?

Amazing article in the Washington Post I found through a post by Steven Levitt on the Freakonomics Blog (“What happens when a maestro plays the subway?“). The Post got Joshua Bell, arguably the world’s greatest living violinist, to play the most complex and difficult classical pieces of music possible on his $3.5 M violin (crafted in 1710) for 45 minutes in a DC subway station.

The results? $32 in tips, $20 of which came from the one person who recognized him. Less than 10 people stopped out of the +1000 that walked by. The whole post article is really interesting, but if you don’t have time to read it skip to the end and watch the last video which recaps the whole 43 minutes. The videos aren’t embeddable so I can’t post them here. Pretty amazing stuff.

Freebase

Lots of buzz recently about Metaweb‘s product Freebase. My friend Kevin directed me to a good essay by Esther Dyson on Huffington Post that attempts to explain how Freebase will try to fill the space between the world of the fluid Wikpedia entry and that of the rigid Oracle database. While the goal of Freebase is clear (to organize information in a functional manner such that computers rather than humans) the path they will take to get there is far less apparent. Also, as I have written before, in order for information to be organized and interpreted by computers, the information has to be online in the first place…

iPhone…

This is going to be everywhere in 45 seconds, but damn it looks pretty cool. Runs OSX, huge screen. Wow.