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Leveraging Ideas

Ideation on social media, venture capital and startups


A Twitter HaikuJune 14

tweets connect afar
other substitutes be damned
I’d choose a handshake

Related Posts



Recognize Sunk Costs and Move OnMay 28

dogs-playing-poker

I am re-posting a few paragraphs from my friend Michael Karnjanaprakorn’s most recent post: A New Path.

Michael’s doing some exciting stuff with All Day Buffet and I wish him the best!

…A couple of weeks ago, I had breakfast with Annie Duke (professional poker player) who told me a great life lesson and story around sunk costs.  In the most basic terms, the concept is used in making good decisions (which is the secret to the success of professional poker players).  Wikipedia defines sunk costs as “costs that cannot be recovered once they have been incurred.”

So, for example, if you’re waiting in line at the grocery store, and the line next to you moves faster, most people won’t hop over to the faster line because of the time they “invested” in their current line.  This makes absolutely no sense as anything invested in your past shouldn’t influence your future.  Another example revolves around relationships.  Most people stay together because they’ve “been together for the past five years.”  Again, people shouldn’t make decisions based on past investm

Streams: Layers and DataMay 26

This past week TechCrunch jumped on the stream meme. Erick Schonfeld published an article that generated some noise, citing a recent post by John Borthwick.

Playing with Facebook this week got me thinking more about the role of data within streams. Specifically, I have a few follow-up thoughts to my last post on the value and consequences of real-time information. At a basic level, streams are flows of objects, with each object containing unique metadata. However, this metadata can be abstracted to create parallel streams layered one on top of the other. I think we’re about to see a rise of what I’d call ‘data abstraction layers.’

Facebook’s stream already provides a glimpse into what an abstraction layer might look like. Individual inputs enter the stream, but they often have significantly more value when threaded together to produce a synthesis unrecognizable if only viewed separately. Think about the assumptions/conclusions that can be drawn and delivered from disparate data: the sum is often truly greater than the parts.In a minor way Facebook already has created a data abstraction layer delivered in the form of

The Consequences of Real-Time InformationMay 13

Real-time is the new black. Everyone from Facebook to the New York Times is pumping any feature they can slap a real-time label on. While I’m a big proponent of the real-time movement, the media’s incessant focus on the *consumer web* has failed to probe the consequences of what it means to manage real-time information and derive actions or produce consequential decisions.

In my opinion real-time at the consumer level is considering real-time only at the highest levels: discovery and creation. Platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc) allow us to publish content in real-time, and a nascent market of applications allows us to aggregate, filter and parse that content (Tweetdeck, Friendfeed, Summize, etc).  However, these products focus almost exclusively on *taking information in* but not on leveraging that incoming signal to derive subsequent action. Humans can create content much faster than they can effectively process it, and thus, while our technology systems can be automated to pull and parse information in real-time, information is only valuable when we are able effectively interact with it.

Plan for Your Competitors’ Vision, Not Their RealityMay 11

From day one Workstreamer has been very focused on the process of Customer Development. We’re competing in a very large market filled with a variety of legacy products as well as an increasing number of new entrants looking to re-segment and disrupt old ways of doing things. In a highly competitive or burgeoning market it can be disarming to see new entrants burst onto the scene or read about incumbent competitors scoring large new rounds of financing. At Workstreamer have the good fortune to believe that our approach and features (yet unannounced, but currently in heavy beta usage) provide us a true competitive advantage over the competition. However, we are very cautious to avoid a common trap: becoming complacent by planning for the competition’s reality rather than its vision.

What do I mean? When a startup first conceptualizes a product, the team normally has a vision for what problem they’ll be solving and how they will solve it. This vision is often large in scale and hugely ambitious. However, Rome wasn’t built in a night. Thus, executing on this vision becomes a game of engineering small chunks, launching, getting feedback and then engineering some more. Achieving a vision is an iterative process and as the environment changes, so to will that vision.

Un-launched startups enjoy th