Inspired by a great post by Brad Feld about how he structures his day, we decided to ask a number of folks in the Boston startup community a simple question: How do you work? Last week we heard from Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital. Below, hear Tim Rowe’s answer.
How do I work? I guess these days I’m a kind of human switchboard. A lot of what I do is connecting other people. That could translate into being on email ALL the time. But I want to spend as much time as possible in face to face, electronic intermediation free communication. So my day is usually just that: meeting and chatting with people.
Fortunately, CIC is physically convenient to get to, so a lot of my meetings with outside folks end up at CIC. I can go through an entire day without looking at email. This creates an email problem, of course. I have (like most people like me) a HUGE load of inbound communication. Like 200 messages a day just looking at what Gmail categorizes as Priority. I never read anything but what Google thinks is priority, in fact. I have a terrific Aide de Camp, and she and I live together in my inbox. Either of us may see an email when it comes in. The goal is for her to handle as large a fraction as possible.
When the backlog gets big, my brain wakes me up at 5AM (no alarm clock). I creep out of the bedroom trying not to wake Amy, and I plow through it. This usually keeps my head slightly above water. I skip the stuff that isn’t urgent.
Then, every few weeks my aide schedules a “work retreat” day. This is a quiet day, with no meetings. The goal is to catch up on email, and also to do lengthier projects, such as writing projects. I’m on one of those right now, which is why I’m responding to this.
I like to escape to the Atheneum Library in Boston: a beautiful place that harkens back 100 years, and blessedly which bans cell phone use. Here I can usually knock off 100 of the more important emails that have backed up, plus do a few real writing projects.
I never attend work things on weekends. Really never. Weekends are for my kids. If I have to catch up on emails over a weekend, that’s in the 5AM – 7AM window. Does it work? It works OK. Sometimes I think about doing an email moratorium. I wonder if anyone does that.
While I don’t get home every night for dinner, we now have a plan: I’m home for dinner (almost) without fail twice a week, and go out with my wife one other night during the week. I end up getting to read to my kids about 3 times a week during the week, and usually on the weekends. Mondays is my night to cook, and I usually do that with help from OfCourseMeals.com (a startup I am helping that delivers all the ingredients + a recipe to your door, so you can cook without the hassles). Life could be a lot worse.
Setting the default app for a file can be accomplished in a number of ways, such as getting info on the file in the Finder and making your selection. If you want to save yourself a little time, however, just right click on the file and choose "Open With" while holding the option key. This will change the command to "Always Open With" so whatever you choose will be the default app for that particular file. When you make your selection, it'll also open the file in that app so you don't waste a few extra clicks you don't need to make. More »
While doing this might appeal to advertisers and bring in revenue, however, it could take Twitter further away from what many users see as its core value.
The AdWeek report says that Twitter is in talks with “multiple Hollywood producers and network execs” about possibly launching several original video series on the network, with at least one show debuting later this year as a proof-of-concept to attract advertisers. The idea is described by “sources with knowledge of the discussions” as being similar to MTV reality shows like The Real World, where participants would presumably interact with viewers via Twitter — and the video content would live on a separate page similar to the NASCAR project Twitter did recently, or the NBC Olympic news hub that is expected to launch soon:
“The show could live on a standalone Twitter page similar to the events page that Twitter launched in partnership with Nascar in June, although the series’ page would more closely resemble a microsite in order to feature an expanded video player. Another possibility is that the series would be distributed within tweets—promoted, organic or pinned to a brand’s Twitter page—with users clicking to expand the tweet into a full-fledged video player.”
A desire for ad revenue could lead Twitter astray
As the AdWeek story makes fairly clear, this effort — which we haven’t yet been able to confirm — would be driven primarily by a desire for advertising revenue. According to the magazine, Twitter is aiming to land sponsorship deals for its original shows that would be in the neighborhood of $4 million a pop. AdWeek says the video features would include “product integration” as well as promoted tweets, and that the idea would be to have Twitter users influencing the content of the show in some fashion (something that has been done at least once before through a partnership with an advertiser).
I confess that when I read this report, my heart sank a little. For me, and I think for many other Twitter users, the network has been an incredibly efficient and increasingly important feed of real-time news from people I am connected with somehow, as well as other sources that are valuable to me — whether it’s reports about the revolutions in Egypt or a tsunami in Japan.
Unfortunately, it seems that being a real-time information utility, as valuable as it might be to me, isn’t valuable enough in terms of the revenue it produces for Twitter, and so the company is looking for other avenues that will translate into a bigger payoff. And that apparently means TV.
As Hunter Walk of YouTube describes in a blog post about Twitter’s evolution, this process — moving from simply being an information utility to being a media entity that controls more and more of the content it distributes — has been driven in part by the venture financing the company has raised, which gives it a private market valuation of more than $8 billion. That translates into a lot of pressure to develop not just a business model, but one that generates relatively massive quantities of revenue and eventually profits, and being an information utility just doesn’t have that kind of money attached to it. Says Walk:
“A Twitter that functions as an open platform charging folks for API usage and a services model is riskier than one which makes basic assumptions about consumer engagement and ad revenue.”
Producing ad-driven content is not Twitter’s core value
Although the AdWeek story is still only speculative, a decision to wade into producing original TV-style content wouldn’t really be that surprising. After all, Twitter already plays a fairly major role in the “second-screen” experience for sporting events or appointment-style shows such as the Academy Awards, with users watching the stream of tweets to get instant commentary on shows, and a big part of its strategy has been to form more partnerships with networks like NBC.
So why not take the next step and move from passive comment stream to active developer or co-producer of a show created specifically for Twitter consumption? And video is definitely where the money is (at least for now) when it comes to digital content.
That said, however, I think moving in that direction — while it could produce some ad revenue for Twitter — might be a critical mistake. It’s not just that other technology companies who have tried to become original-content players in video have failed miserably (with Yahoo being the most obvious example), or that video can be an expensive and time-consuming distraction, in part because Hollywood and the entertainment industry are used to chewing up outsiders and spitting them out.
If you use Twitter as a short and fast news-consumption or information-delivery system about topics you care about, are you really interested in seeing promotional tweets for a Twitter-produced television-style reality show in your stream? So far, advertising-related tweets have been relatively benign in terms of their impact on the user experience, but if the company is pouring millions into developing original content, the pressure will be on to expose more people to it — and the signal-to-noise ratio of a stream (which is already an issue for many) will inevitably go down. And in the long run, I think that is a recipe for the kind of disaster we saw with MySpace and Digg.
As a small startup, attempting to target and sell to a big company may seem daunting at first. It’s perfectly natural for “Where do I even start?!” to kick in. Matthew Bellows, CEO of Yesware, is ready to ease your fears, with precise insight into how to take your first steps. Cold calling, identifying a champion, and the big meeting are just a sneak peak into the topics he cover during Tuesday night’s Startup Selling to Big Companiesat Intelligent.ly. We sat down with Matthew to learn a little more before the big night.
What is the biggest challenge that a startup faces when targeting a big company with their product?
It’s hard to narrow it down to just one challenge, but the most important one to overcome is finding a genuine champion to lead the internal conversations within the big company. Without finding that person, it’s just not possible to close a deal. I’ll talk about the process for finding and building a relationship with your champion during my class.
What is the importance of cold calling?
Cold calling has three important benefits:
1) There’s absolutely nothing better for honing your 30-second pitch and getting a genuine conversation going.
2) It’s often the only way to get in front of older decision makers who don’t deal with email well.
3) Almost all sales teams want a majority of their younger salespeople making dozens of cold calls a day – so you just have to get good at it.
How has Yesware helped you hone your sales process? Can you provide any real-life examples?
Two major ways: the template libraries help me respond much more quickly and accurately to prospects, and email tracking gives me incredible insights into how people are responding to my emails. But I’m the only one on Yesware’s sales team – bigger teams have several more features that help with CRM syncing and collaboration.
The real-life example I hear about the most from salespeople is, “Yesware told me this prospect just opened my email, so I gave him a call right away. ‘I was just thinking about you!’ he said and I got the deal closed.” I love hearing those stories.
If you could be an expert in one skill by tomorrow, what would it be?
Synchronizing my body and mind. I’m not sure we’ll get to that in the class, but we can talk about it afterwards if anyone wants.
Background: GitHub was launched in April 2008 and has rapidly become both the largest social network of developers and the most common place to host and collaborate on software development projects. They raised $100 million from Andreeson Horowitz earlier this month.
1. Almost 2 Million Users are on GitHub
Let’s get the obvious bit out of the way. If you’re a fisherman, you go where the fish are. If you’re a hiring manager or recruiter, you go where the talent is. If you’re looking for technical talent, you go to GitHub. With almost 2 million users, GitHub is THE BEST PLACE to find great developers.
2. Learn About Prospects’ Work & Hobbies
GitHub takes its project hosting component and goes one step further. It lets developers share what they’re working on. You’ll know exactly what projects a prospect has contributed to, what projects they’ve started on their own, and perhaps even find out what their hobbies are or what they think is important in the meantime.
For example, a friend of mine open sourced an Arduino project that sends him a tweet when the pH levels change in his saltwater aquarium. If you found him on GitHub, you would know just from this one project that he is an Arduino enthusiast and that he is a SERIOUS saltwater aquarium hobbyist.
Bring up either one in a phone call and I guarantee you won’t get hung up on. You might even have a hard time getting him to hang up. More importantly, you’ll have established a meaningful connection by taking the time to show that you actually cared enough to learn about his interests and past projects.
3. Find Out How Well Regarded They Are In The Open Source Community
You can get a general sense of how well someone is regarded among developers with a few useful metrics provided by GitHub. These include number of followers and “watched” repositories (“repos”). If the numbers look like this guy’s, you’re probably going to have a hard time hiring him, but the more you become familiar with what the averages are, the more you’ll gain a sense of what are meaningful numbers.
You can also dig a little deeper and get inside their repositories to see how popular the different projects they’ve worked on are by how many times they’ve been “watched” or “forked.”
You cannot discount a developer because he appears to be unpopular, but, on the other hand, someone that has been watched by a number of developers and someone that has repositories that have been forked likely produces valuable code.
4. Learn How Developers Work
GitHub is based on Git, a version control system that helps developers track changes to a project and control what makes it into production.
A developer makes a “pull” request to work on a piece of code locally and a “push” request to send the changes back to the repository on Github so that the changes can eventually make their way into production.
A good way to get a bird’s eye view of what this process looks like is to go to the Github Timeline, sit back and watch the show. It’s weirdly addicting. If you want to swoop in for a more detailed view, all you have to do is click on any repository and check out what’s happening in as much detail as you like. This goes for any repository, not just the ones that fly by in the timeline.
5. Keep on Top of the Trends
GitHub provides a couple of very easy ways to to stay on top of important trends that will give you a big picture of the market to aid you on your way to finding great prospects.
GitHub’s “Explore” feature includes a Languages tab that provides a nice breakdown of how much each programming language is used in the GitHub community. If you click on any of the languages shown, you’ll find that you can quickly see what projects and developers are using that langauge in a way that’s getting noticed.
Finally, GitHub’s Repositories tab will let you see “interesting” and ‘popular” repositories by number of forks and watches. Now, next time you go to a candidate’s profile, you’ll be able to notice a new popular language or framework they’re using because it was trending on GitHub.
Jump in and start using GitHub and you’ll be more prepared to strike up meaningful conversations with prospects about their work in no time!
The teens are taking over! At least, that's what we've garnered from this week's social TV chart. Sunday night's Teen Choice Awards was by far the week's social champion, pulling almost double the social activity of the next runner-up.
The live broadcast presented a smorgasbord of adolescent pop culture icons, including the stars of Twilight, as well as Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez. The latter celebrated her birthday on stage after accepting the award for choice music group on behalf of her band, Selena Gomez & The Scene.
Pretty Little Liars and The Vampire Diaries each dominated in the shows' respective genre categories, landing both programs in high positions on the social TV chart… Continue reading...
While online merchants have been getting better at combating online fraud, it still cost them $3.4 billion last year, or about 1 percent of online revenues. Now a Toronto startup is hoping to help reduce that figure by employing an increasingly ubiquitous tool: the smartphone.
SafePay Solutions Group is launching a tool in the U.S. and Canada for merchants and consumers that uses a smartphone to verify online purchases. It gives merchants an added layer of protection against fraudulent purchases and helps users prevent someone else from putting purchases on their card. But it will face a lot of challenges in trying to make an impact.
Here’s how it works: A consumers downloads the free SafePay app (on iOS for now with Android, Windows Phone and BlackbBerry coming later this year) and enters in their billing address and the first and last six digits of all the credit cards they want to register with SafePay. When that customer or someone who obtains the user’s credit card number tries to make a purchase at a site that uses SafePay, the user is sent a real-time in-app push notification alerting them to the transaction and providing them 60 seconds to approve or decline the sale.
SafePay starts working the minute it recognizes a user’s address or credit card numbers during the shopping cart process. If the user declines a purchase through a push notification, the transaction is canceled. If a user isn’t near their smartphone to deny a fraudulent charge, the merchant processes it like any other transaction. But users can flag the transaction and report it after the fact to their bank or credit card company. SafePay is working on a feature for this fall that will allow a user to set a default denial if they don’t respond to a push notification.
SafePay’s founder and CEO Mick Bhinder, a veteran of Visa, American Express and Discover, said the service will roll out first with five unnamed online retailers. Retailers will pay a $240 annual subscription for SafePay. He believes many merchants will find this valuable because of the potential for reduced fraud liability.
“The credit card companies and banks have said merchants are 100 percent liable for fraud. Our solution prevents losing bottom line revenue from fraud and it also protects consumers,” Bhinder.
SafePay is part of a growing number of mobile tools aimed at combating online fraud. Banks in recent years have rolled out mobile fraud alerts, sending messages to users when a transaction looks suspect. SafePay, however, is different in that it takes a merchant angle and also asks for every purchase to be verified, not just suspicious transactions.
But it faces some big challenges to really make a dent in online fraud. Merchants will only find protection and significant cost savings if a large number of users sign on. But users won’t have much need for the service unless a lot of big name retailers are on board. Even if a user signs up and there are a good number of sites participating, a thief could still use stolen card information on thousands of sites that don’t employ SafePay. Unless it’s somehow comprehensively rolled out on most big retail sites, it’s going to be hard for SafePay to really cut into online fraud.
I’d be more optimistic if SafePay was used by banks or credit card companies, who can encourage their merchants to participate. But the financial institutions don’t bear as much penalty for fraud as the merchants do so they might not have a big sense of urgency. Still, I’d like to see a smartphone powered service like this gain acceptance at some point. We have smartphones with us all the time and they can act as a real-time tool to spot and prevent fraud.
Mac/iOS: Sometimes you might want to keep important data with you on your iPhone, but you don't want to just leave it open for everyone to see. Password Pad is a writing app for Mac and iPhone (and Java) that allows you to encrypt your cloud-synced text with either XOR encryption or Triple DES encryption. More »
Like me, you probably ignore most of the email you get from Twitter. But if you happen to care about the debate over whether Twitter is a media company you’re going to have to dig through your inbox.
The latest piece on this is by Nick Bilton at The New York Times but like many pieces on this, it misses the most impressive media effort by Twitter to date, focusing on a few projects that strike me as sideshows:
Last month Twitter announced a one-stop shop for Nascar fans that corralled Twitter messages from drivers and teams at the Pocono 400 race. The Nascar-branded page that Twitter highlighted in television ads was incredibly visceral, with pictures from inside driver’s cars. Fans could practically smell the fuel from the pit.
Destination pages matter less everyday, precisely because Twitter exists. But check out your inbox and look for an email from Twitter with the subject line So-and-so and X others “have Tweets for you”. Here’s one of mine:
Twitter started sending these back in May but I only recently bothered to notice them. (Read Mathew Ingram of GigaOM on the emails, and on Twitter as media company.)
The links Twitter is recommending are really good, and why wouldn’t they be? They know who and what I’m interested in arguably better than any other service I use (except maybe Gmail.) They’re targeted to what I want specifically, which is the exact opposite of the destination page mentality.
Email might be the wrong way to send these, but it just points to the ease with which Twitter can not only be my real-time news feed, but also the curator of the biggest stories of the day, personalized to exactly what I care about.
I agree with Jared Keller of Bloomberg that Twitter is pretty clearly both a tech and a media company. (Really, any company that is just media and no tech may as well be called a dying media company).
If you want to grasp the power of Twitter as a media entity, don’t point to a NASCAR landing page. Point to its customized feed of the best stories of the day that it’s already sending to my inbox.
If you're running two Macs with iCloud support (Lion or Mountain Lion), then you can use iCloud's network to remote SSH back into your home computer no matter where you are with just a few lines in Terminal. More »