Archive for Disintermediation
October 16, 2009 at 5:57 am · Filed under Disintermediation, worklife
I was handing out Laura Fisher’s “Better Without Bosses” stickers yesterday when somebody pointed out that it was Boss’s Day sometime soon.
That would be today.
I don’t have a boss. Most of the people I work with don’t have bosses. We don’t even feel the need to say we’re “our own bosses” without being ironic.
It is not your boss’s fault she is your boss. The role is not the person. I’m tempted to appropriate this thing from the useless Chamber of Commerce and make today the day we relieve bosses of their onerous and burdensome task of projecting an unwarranted air of authority.
They are still, after all, chained to that rock.
September 14, 2009 at 9:10 am · Filed under Disintermediation, business, local
Yesterday Barbara and I attended a panel discussion at the Kerrytown BookFest called “The Future of Print Journalism”. I’ll leave the details to others; what I found of particular interest was the thrust of the discussion among the panelists, who were all editors of one sort or another who’ve survived in transition from being old-fashioned newspaperfolk.
On the face of it, the narrative was about the future of print journalism in a world where the business model has been undermined by free online content. There was talk of aggregation by Yahoo! (and Google, though nobody mentioned them by name once) and how it undermines the authority of newspapers. There was a stern comment from the audience about how bloggers stealing content from papers without citing it should be sued. There was a lot of realistic-sounding exploration of paywall protection of content and the apparent failure of newspapers to fathom micropayment approaches. A lot of discussion of “free models”, and what came across as antagonism from the folks still at the big plop-on-your-steps papers at the notion of free content.
I started being bemused half-way through, though. Because four of the five panelists explicitly described the economics of their business, talked about it worriedly, and then wandered away again into how crucial good writing is, and how expensive professional journalism can be, and all the other stuff that justifies their special credentialled sociopolitical role in whichever Estate they used to be.
I’m sure the fifth panelist would have acknowledged the business facts in an instant… if it only been brought up explicitly: Modern newspapers don’t sell journalism. They sell advertising. During the 20th Century, newspaper revenue has come primarily from advertisers.
And from about 1900 to about a decade ago, newspapers sold print advertising at monopolistic prices. They were essentially a cartel. Ads in books never took off; ads in magazines reached only widely-distributed subscriber demographics. Only the local newspaper reached the walk-in traffic that retailers sought; coupons really don’t work well in telephone campaigns; TV is ephemeral, leaves no record.
Yet nobody says of the Internet, “Those unqualified online advertisers are undermining our professionally-trained crack advertising team,” or “Do you realize what it costs to pick an ad to run next to an article on a foreign war?” or “Photographs of ham can’t just be downloaded from some website you know; you need professionals on staff 24-7 to get the quality our customers deserve.”
No, the discussion was about “the economy being bad” and “readers out there expect content to be free” and bloggers and customer bases and the threats and uses of aggregation.
I’m sure if there had been time to drive the conversation my way, somebody would have jumped in and said, “Yes, of course we know print advertising pays the bills, but nobody would buy the advertising and get the bills paid if it weren’t for the high-quality reporting we generate using all that revenue.”
But: Maybe people are still buying advertising. Just not from you.
Here. We’re friends. I’m just as predictable as anybody else: I’m going to talk about history now.
Pick up an actual print newspaper from 1820, from 1840, from 1860, from 1880, from 1900, from 1920, from 1940, from 1960. From 1980. Count the ads. Think carefully and look at the books (if you have access to them) and estimate the proportion of the income of each newspaper that came from advertising revenue. Yes, I know in the early days they were small, local affairs with maybe a thousand subscribers each.
But they got their bills paid. What proportion of those bills were paid by monies coming from the sale of print ads?
I’ll bet you a Get Out of Disintermediation Free Pass right now that the earlier papers had almost no advertising (including the money from articles somebody was paid off to print), that the proportion bloomed into a majority in the days of Hearst and Pulitzer and the Great Syndicators, that it became a cash crop paying 80% or more of the bills in the latter-day cull that killed all second papers in cities.
Print advertising was a monopoly. Still is, one supposes.
You can’t buy ubiquitous home-delivered print advertising anywhere else. Sure, you can pay sub-minimum wage people to wander neighborhoods and rubber-band flyers to front doors, or wait a few days and send out coupons in the Clipper thingie.
And yet. And yet. Everybody knows (and for once I mean it unironically) we all love the visceral quality of print, the solidity, the ability to page back and check, the clipping, the passing it around, the crosswords, the comics. The biggest fuss when a newspaper shuts down comes not from the advertisers (who are already gone by then), but from the subscribers. The people with the blue paperboxes lining the country roads. The ones willing to trudge out to the roadside in winter, before breakfast, and take in the paper and sit and read it in their homes.
Physical paper. People love print. People live print. If they get sad enough at the diminishment of print journalism, do you think they will let it die?
Don’t be a fool. They’ll pay somebody good money to pass it out to them.
Are people buying ads? Shut your stupid marketing department’s yammering up and look. People don’t want ads, they want printed information. Even the people who clip coupons would be just as happy to pay you if you just listed the prices of every item at every store in town. They don’t want the coupon, they want the information about pricing.
And so what’s the future of print journalism?
In many cities in this country, the one newspaper is facing financial crisis. In smaller towns and wannabe cities (like ours), “the one newspaper” is dying. Yes of course in all those places there is probably also a superlocal paper about high school lunches and church meetings, and an edgy counterculture free monthly, and a free coupon collector, and a free real estate listing in the supermarket foyer….
Like I said, The One Newspaper is dying.
You might think this is what it will be like: Like 1882. Or 1860 or 1900 or 1930, even. The Empire of news is dying, not news itself. Not journalism itself.
The advertising monopoly is dying. The ecological niche occupied by The One Paper is a goner, not papers themselves. Specifically, the One Paper’s national-scale ad revenues are a goner.
Printed newspapers will have to start relying, again, on the revenue streams they enjoyed in the 19th century.
And because it’s how I always do it, let me jink suddenly from historical analogy over into biological metaphor:
Big animals get big not because they are specialists in what they eat, but to take advantage of economies of scale in their eating. The biggest cats are obligate hunter-carnivores just like some shrews, but have very special characteristics of gigantism and complex lifestyles to keep from wandering around all day burning calories hunting. Big whales eat very special meals (giant squid, krill), like many other marine species do, but are huge so they can avoid flashing around in big schools all over the place. Big dinosaurs probably got big so they could reach or manhandle their very special meals, but littler species could as easily have climbed trees or ganged up. And marsupial lions and wolves? Giant carnivorous birds, or moas? Giant sloths and mammoths? Specialists, but big because of economies of scale in their diets.
In the big picture—in the course of evolutionary history—megafauna come and go. As a type, following a particular specialized strategy that depends on being gigantic, they’re often driven to extremes by the presence of a small fruitful slice of resources in their environment. Unlike their smaller cousins, they go out on a limb and optimize their energy use and lifestyles so they can spend as little as possible to get as much food as possible as easily as possible.
But eventually the limb is gone.
And there you are, you big pile of yummy meat. Surrounded by other kinds of specialists, who didn’t invest in becoming huge.
The future of print journalism is a feast, not a famine. The One City Newspaper, the national newspaper, the Inherited Newspaper Empire: that is the main course.
A decade ago I would have predicted we’d see the industry roll back all that expensive infrastructure the One City Newspapers have developed, in setting themselves up as megafaunal ad-eaters, and we’d end up back in a situation about like 1880. A dozen papers, each with a slice of the subscriber pie, with a little advertising revenue each to keep them afloat.
Now I’m older and not so sure. Now I see a lovely chaos, a bloom of strategies, a roil of useful collaboration and competition.
What I wonder though, is what was never asked yesterday: who will be the first to fire the marketing department and keep the writers and editors?
That’s the next wave. That’s the immediate future of print journalism.
June 15, 2009 at 10:51 am · Filed under Disintermediation, Project, business, local
You’ve not heard much from me recently because I’ve been busy volunteering and helping Mike Kessler and Matt Lewis set up the Workantile Exchange, a new coworking membership organization in downtown Ann Arbor.
I’ll have more to say on that in a few days. Still some work to do.
Meanwhile:
There will be more, soon. That’s a promise.
March 18, 2009 at 7:15 am · Filed under Disintermediation, Project, local
Seems to me, if you
- had a roll of dimes and
- a spare half-hour when you were walking to and from lunch, or coffee, or a bar, or a meeting
- in downtown Ann Arbor,
…you might be a nice person if you dropped a dime into an expiring parking meter.
Especially if you were to see the parking enforcement person walking along with their little ticket thing.
March 16, 2009 at 10:15 am · Filed under Disintermediation, Project, Tidbits of nanohistory, business
Clay Shirky wrote the other day, in what might be the most-linked item in my voluminous and wide-ranging delicious stream:
When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.
As I’ve come to expect when reading Shirky: yes, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell people for years. [You know, if that Cassandra chick had been a smarter cookie, maybe set up with some agents or a PR firm or something, I bet she coulda made a fucking Fortuna. [Ba-dump-bump]]
As part of the “guerilla economic development” work I do at our company Vague Innovation, LLC, I spend a lot of time meeting with the nominal movers and shakers of the local business development community: folks from the Ann Arbor Chamber of Commerce, the Ann Arbor SPARK, marketers and Realtors and landlords and bankers and people who publish shiny color magazines have sunny offices in tall buildings.
I hate to stand alone against the stream of bigoted invective I hear from most of my New Economy peers, but people who wear suits and work in offices are good folks. They’re trying their best to help their town and region, their towns’ economies, to identify and shore up the entrepreneurs they recognize as the future of their local worlds.
They’re good people.
That said, a lot of my conversations revolve around the future of these nice folks’ careers. Like all of us, these are plain old human beings armed with the standard human cognitive heuristic toolkit. You know, the same one you have: some stupid mapping of your personal experience onto the whole world, the 5 ± 2 most memorable cultural norms they can bring to memory unconsciously, and the sense of massive importance of all that Received Wisdom they’ve been exposed to in their canalized plummet through life. Just like yours, you know?
As part of my work I keep a foot in both worlds (and a couple of others, too; you don’t want to know how that feels). And so:
I could go on. Hell, I did already. But I felt bad.
I deleted them all because they got more egregious and far more embarrassing for the “traditional business” folks as I totted them up. A list of searchable terms (and teachable moments) might do: “coworking”, “commercial insurance”, “business plan”, “admission price”, “intellectual property”, “next Google”, “corporate blog”, “personal brand”, “online marketing”, “open source”, “boot camp”.
Every one of those represents a little checkbox on the octagonal paper titled “Decommissioning Schedule of Battlestar BizDev.” A defaced gravestone in an overgrown family plot on a dirt road somewhere in ten years. A milestone on the road to obsolescence.
[And someday, when whatever is next comes along, the nanobio revolution or whatever, that will make people like you, you old fart, into stupid conservatives who still type into inorganic computers using some kind of "formal language". And you'll say you learned business sense the hard way on Facebook and with Google, and you'll say you've looked at the Senso but you can't figure out why people want to smell crap on other planets all day. And then you can look this blog post up "by Googling" on your stupid octagonal DVD of the "blogosphere" and be reminded: this has all happened before.]
These are good people. They try, really. But they’re crippled by insularity, by the people they hear and choose to listen to, by their distance from the Actual World. Hell, it’s a handful of them that even know the world exists as it does. No sense of the timescale “we” use, or of “our” means of action. A lot of these folks have heard about blogs and Facebook and Twitter now they’ve been in Forbes and NPR and stuff, but they don’t possess the cultural infrastructure with which they can parse what they’re seeing as relevant communication.
At least three people in very nice suits have made in my presence the joke about “Twitter is about what you ate for dinner” in the last month. So there you go. It’s no surprise that these people still aren’t welcome in the “tech community”. Which is sad.
And to be pragmatic about it all, and think about how cities and communities actually work in this capital-driven world we inhabit, kindof stupid: They have all the fucking money.
Ah, well. Cultural diversity gets short shrift these days. On both sides of that particular line: geeks and suits don’t get each other, though they often assume they do. [And Cf. "don't get me started on the other ones."]
Which, by a long and ranting road, brings us to our milestone parking spot for the day: Parking Data.
This won’t take nearly as long as the preamble.
We have a bunch of parking structures here in Ann Arbor. The Downtown Development Authority contracts with a commercial firm called Republic Parking to manage them, and parking is a huge source of income. The DDA also gets taxes from new buildings, as I understand it, and manages liquor licenses and oversees new developments and stuff. There’s more involved: it’s complicated and political.
[As a symptom of my own increasing frustration with culture clash here: If you're a geek? And you self-identify as an Interwebz-using computery person? And you're thinking or saying that politics or business practice is "unnecessarily complicated" or "opaque" or "useless"? That sounds to me like you're one of those assholes who say they "don't get math" as an excuse for not paying attention to it. Business practice and the law and local government infrastructure are complicated because they deal with real-world public-good complexity, dumb-ass. I don't care if you run some kind of "alternative community" or you're Lord High King Open-source Maven or a Libertarian Fundamentalist or whatever: don't dismiss "politics" or marketing or these other people's culture as trivial just because you're not familiar with it. It really undermines the argument you're "smart" whenever you do that in public. And when you do it in "private", thinking somebody like me isn't there as well, it makes me treat you like the child you are.
Or, shorter: Don't diss "the Man", monkey-boy. We're all man.]
If you’re tired by now, here’s a timeline of what happened.
Some time back, the DDA started putting counters on the parking structures, and around that time they started publishing online feeds that updated as the numbers of cars parked in the structures changed.
This was cool and geeky. We want a cool and geeky town, and this was a good step. +2 points for transparency, and for actually experimenting.
Then some folks I know, including these guys and Ed Vielmetti, did what good modern Internet culture people do: they created a handy open source software package that took the public data and repurposed it into a free way to use your phone to call a number and find out how many spots are available.
This was cool and geeky. We want a cool and geeky town, and this was a good step. +5 points for mashups, repurposing public domain data, open source, and some others.
Then the geek points added up to the point that the Ann Arbor News wrote a cover story about the mashup.
This was cool and geeky. We want a cool and geeky town, and this was an unusual good step from a typically clueless newspaper (Cf. “fish-wrap”, above). +2 points for cultural crossover to the MSM, and promoting the local geek culture to a mainstream audience.
Cue fan. Cue shit.
Apparently this is where the DDA first heard of the cool, geeky thing that had happened as a consequence of their publication of the data. As far as I can tell, they reacted just like anybody in the 1970s would have done: they noticed belatedly that their cultural role as gatekeeper was being undermined, and so they shut down the phone service access to the numbers.
This was neither cool, nor geeky. Burn –10 points for reinforcing stereotypes on both sides of that goddamned line I mention above, and throw in an extra –10 points for the ongoing online shitstorm of bad publicity and even newspaper publicity this is building into.
And here we are, today.
We’ve got people who are core members of the geek community up in arms about it. Folks are stepping around the stupid and ineffectual blockade the DDA started off with. They’re writing open letters that smack of outright political threat. They’re bringing in the big guns from outside town. They’re submitting FOIA requests for the numbers.
It was a simple little thing. A triviality, really. Susan Pollay’s email clearly misses the fact that this was an experiment, the very sort of thing that the phrase economic development means today in this agalmic open-source world.
But it brings the two cultures together in what are probably the worst possible circumstances: The old-skool scarcity-driven infrastructure probably didn’t know these people even existed. Or if they did, they had wildly inappropriate expectations about demographics and values and potential impact on the status quo. And the scarcity-avoiding geek culture that didn’t until until now give a damn about what “suits” did is now suddenly swinging the full measure of its attention to bear on this affront, and they’re processing it on fucking Internet timescales, without old-skool handicaps like “business hours” or “weekends” or “face to face meetings”.
To any of us who are watching with one foot on either side of this line, this is quickly turning into what you might call “spectacle”. No joke: hairs standing up on my arms as this little fooferaw started to come into focus. This (to paraphrase what the cool kids say) is what we call the fire we brought you long ago.
I wrote an email to a colleague from the Chamber of Commerce Friday, as soon as this dynamic became obvious to me. A heads up, mainly, since he’s not directly involved.
For a few weeks now (non-Internet time, remember?) he and I have been talking about what the Chamber and the old-skool infrastructure might able to offer “the 1099 community” or the “independents” or the “Not An Employee crowd” in the coming months. Admittedly we’ve spent a vast proportion of our meetings trying to reconcile our dramatically different assumptions about work and community, and last week we were just getting to a place where we could say stuff that didn’t make the other one smirk or look confused.
[Though he made that confused face when I mentioned glibly the bit about tearing down the hideous mid-century bank building at the center of town and getting a Town Square back. I'll win that bet, too, by the way.]
He’s framing what he sees as the future role for the Chamber in the coming decades in terms like expansion and cultural adaptation so that it can cope with the different lifestyles “we” NAE folks represent. He’s trying to help, and to make what has traditionally been perceived as a useful and necessary business support infrastructure available to more people who need help. Maybe he doesn’t see 100% that they don’t need that help, but he’s trying. He wants to help out and reach over the line for the sake of the city, the region… and to some extent to drag his organization into the 20th century [sic].
In our conversations I find that I’m framing what I see as the future role of the Chamber using concepts I’ve mentioned here already: as a safe decommissioning, as an opportunity for outreach between cultures that are fundamentally irreconcilable, as a model of what to do and what not to do in a nonoverlapping organization… and frankly because I like people and also money, and there must be some way of ameliorating the damage this whole thing will cause in the next decade (Cf. bank tear-down).
But I look at that list of benefits, and I realize that neither I, nor any of the people I know, want any of those “benefits”. But just like my friend in the Chamber, I also want to help the city… so it doesn’t end up abandoned when us New Economy people just leave in disgust. And the region… because I want there to be trains and convention centers and some non-provincial buildings built, and fuck “human scale” I want to see the bleeding edge of posthuman scale. And to some extent to drag out the useful salvage from the wreck of his organization and set it up and dust it off and introduce it to the 21st century [sic].
And in that email I sent last week, in which I explained briefly what I’ve said here in this rambling blog post, I pointed out that this little parking fiasco has something to do with the balance he perceived between our different views of the local landscape.
I said to my friend two things, and I hope I’ve set this up so they might make sense when I repeat them here in public:
(1) That it will probably seem from “his side”, among the suits and hallways in which people come and go according to agenda and business hours and rely on telephone conversations, that nothing much has happened. Some extra phone calls to the DDA maybe, some annoyance felt as this pissant internet crowd throw their weight around and complain about something this trivial. That in the long term this tempest in a molehill will look like it blew over and disappeared, and then “his” folks can get back to business as usual. Or maybe that things will get smoothed over, and the data will be free and things will get all geeky and fun again and all the frowns will turn upside down.
…but also, independent of how it plays out on his side: (2) When we look back years later, this will be the week we say the ground shifted. Or if we don’t identify this exact “triviality” as the turning point, then it’ll be one of the seventeen cued up and waiting in the wings.
Last week it was a decent and smart thing, an appropriate use of his time, for my friend to be paying attention to his goal of “outreach to the independent tech community”. It was good that he was musing about how the two cultures might mutually adapt to fit together for one another’s benefit.
Today, though, a switch is thrown: it’s now possible—no, it’s now the most likely outcome—that folks from the Chamber of Commerce will be watching in a year, or two, or five as all the businesses rush to join something else. Some other organization, not the “answer” to them because it won’t be set up in response to the Chamber or the SPARK or the DDA. Something new that just doesn’t give a damn about any of that old junk, or even recognize its existence.
An orthogonal institution.
Because of this fiasco about the parking, or maybe because of any one of the seventeen other accidental clashes that could function just like this, whatever rises up will not look at all like a partnership founded on principles of outreach and mutual support.
It won’t be founded on anywhere near the kind of cooperation it might have been.
The New Thing is not fully formed yet. It shambles on towards its Bethlehem, independent of what’s happening under its feet. But its eyes are open briefly, and today it’s paying attention to the friendly, helpful people in the suits who only want to help. And I suspect what’s moving though its collective mind are appraisals, a kind of sizing up that should make the friendly business development old-skool institutions pause. A look that increasingly feels like a brief consideration for salvage, of food value. Not a spirit of friendly symbiosis, but a glance that takes in all the hinges, all the convenient places for a pry bar to lodge.
I suspect these things happen too fast to respond to, when you insist on keeping your eyes to the path you started on, when you listen to the cues you’ve learned long ago.
And to be frank, maybe that’s best for everybody.
March 15, 2009 at 5:38 pm · Filed under Disintermediation, Project, business, business-fail
I find myself disenchanted with what you might call “traditional” business culture lately. Now you, a savvy Interwebz reader, may be the sort of person who lives on a Coast near a Valley or in a town with a Needle, the kind of town with lots of people and loads of young up-and-coming goateed creatives and stuff. Living as I do in the middle of flyover country, I’m not sure “traditional business” means for you what it does here: lots of golf, inordinate striding, breakfast networking meetings, calling important people by their first names, and—the kicker, for me—a tendency to assume that people who made money in the last business cycle, or the one before that, or one a Long Long Time Ago, that those people are rich now because they are good businessmen.
This is the kind of self-reinforcing unexamined mythology that leads young entrepreneurs to their doom. You get an economic development infrastructure in place, you get boards and angel and VC investors all used to what they’re used to and standing by the claim that “business is always essentially the same no matter what the domain.” They set up boot camps and training seminars and they arrange these networking lunches and earnest young people in black suits or khakis show up and eat slices of pizza (at Tech Startup Events) or hors d’oeuvres (at Future Of Our Region Events), and they listen to that crap.
When I invest in a company, it’s the team I’m looking at. And by that I mean: I want to see somebody who reminds me of me when I was a kid.
When I hear an pitch, I need to understand it in the time the elevator door takes to open. And by that I mean: (a) we live in a town with stringent “human-scale” building height restrictions, so (b) you can tell we’re pretty fucking provincial so use only a few small words I’ve known since I was on the football team.
When you’re getting ready to launch, you need to get your business plan ready and make a convincing case for your market and your prospects over the next five years. And by that I mean: nobody ever reads the damned things, but at least we know we can tell you what to do and expect you to listen to your betters, sonny boy.
When you’re trying to raise serious money, you need somebody in charge of the firm who’s familiar with the language of business, of marketing, and the culture of startups. And by that I mean: When somebody paying more attention than me tells me you have a clue, I’ll stiff you with some tried-and-true club buddy of mine and you’ll fucking do what he says if you know what’s good for you.
And so forth.
Of course, I know you don’t live in this imaginary town I do. These are all straw man exaggerations. I’m just resorting to hyperbole to stage my own pitch. Right?
You betcha.
That said, and strawmen aside: I think smart people are actually smart, and that dumb people mess up new businesses.
There’s a sign on the administration view of every website I’ve run for ten years. It’s on my laptop’s desktop, too. It’s a reminder to me, as a manager and a meddler and a planner and a guy who’s trying to help and at the same time make a buck. Every one of these reminders says the same thing: This doesn’t work the way you think it does.
The biggest danger, in my mind, to a person starting a business—whether it’s some hare-brained entrepreneurial thing, or a nonprofit, or a “lifestyle” business (a term I despise)—is taking advice from people who assume they succeeded because of what they did.
The core of my advice to folks wanting to found a business is simple enough to pass along here: listen to “coaches” and “bootcamps” and economic development people only enough to convince them you respect them, and to learn what they expect so you can use that to your advantage, but don’t let them fuck with your money or ideas.
Notice I didn’t say stay away from them: I said be nice, try to really listen, do your best to learn, and along the way do the minimum amount necessary to ingratiate yourselves to them. If you can’t do those things, you actually do need a “people person” around, because it’s all about risk amelioration, not financial returns. Because you’re doing this to minimize the disruptive influence of their received wisdom.
Here’s why: These people succeeded by chance. Quirks of fate. They happened to sell off their companies or execute some other exit strategy just before some random economic downturn. They had rich relatives. They happened to be in the room when some dude wanted to invest in a startup. They had a smart administrator who kept them out of the research wing. They were middle managers in some global giant fucking firm and (more’s a pity) never heard a real human idea in their lives, and now they think they can tell you how to run your business. They go to meetings with their own clones and nod and shout Hallelujah whenever somebody utters a mantra about “invest in the team” or “business savvy” or “demographic targeting”. They not only imagine, they will say outright that every business is essentially the same, and that what matters is making the right mystical passes in the right order and also running it by your guts.
Bullshit. These people are human beings.
That said, they’re the small fraction of human beings who have the goddamned money. It’s not your customers who are going to make your new idea into a company, Startup Grrrl: it’s those fools with all the money.
Let me be as precise as I can be: human beings are stupid. You are too, by the way. But they are moreso, because they’ve had success after navigating an uncertain course through the ratmaze to their perceived cheesy Winning State. And when that happens, our intrinsic human mental wiring kicks in and all of a sudden they’re doing pattern-recognition on scant data. They’re superstitious. They are poor at modeling. They suck at generalizing, and for the most part their culture is founded on principles of reinforcing their notions.
[Like yours is, and mine is... but leave that for another day.]
Risk, reward, reinforcement. So strong, they don’t even have to repeat it to get it engrained; they just play off one another.
This doesn’t work the way they think it does.
Here’s what I think, instead.
Save your money, if you can, and don’t burn it at the altar of the priests in black turtlenecks and sports coats. Hang out with the ones you can, as stated above, but don’t waste money. Don’t risk your money or your time on them.
Instead, find five other startups. Seriously.
Form a Guild. Form an association that lets you each do what you want, spread the work around, support one another. Form a community of 30 people, not three, that can demand the attention (when needed) of one rare but actually useful business advisor at a time, and aggregate your risks across all your firms, and kick the bastards out when you’re done with them.
Coach each other.
I believe smart people, people with ideas like you have, are actually smart. And I think people with new ideas are more likely to understand the one true thing I plaster all over my own sensorium: This doesn’t work the way you think it does. This doesn’t work the way they tell you it does. This doesn’t work by formula, by superstition, by the novel application of pat anecdotal hand-waving or ritualized networking or in-group marketing to people who can’t bother to learn the difference between a social network and a website before telling you how to run your company.
There is no heuristic.
What you need is advice on how to fill out forms. Names of people who give out money, and what they expect. Examples, hard and factual, of business plans that have actually been followed. Access to people who are running businesses like yours, and right now.
What you don’t need is pabulum. You don’t need obfuscation, a gatekeeper who will let you get access to the people they convince you will help, or who wants to dabble and sees your idea as a good starting point. You don’t need people who are a bad match for your culture; any asshole who tries to change that culture you have now, no matter how much a n00b you think you are, without first convincing you beforehand that there are measurable returns and you can undo the changes if things go wrong? They gonna fuck you up.
Hell, you don’t need anybody at all whose advice doesn’t come with a warranty and a money-back fuck-off clause that kicks in when they give you bad advice backed by misleading credentials.
In other words: Sure, you need expertise you don’t have, but treat your “advisors” the same way you would treat your accountant: protect yourself from stupid people.
Any human being is as good as another, when it comes to common sense. Unless they’ve presumed they are winners because they did something a long time ago, under completely different circumstances.
When that’s the case, they’re a liability.
Further: If you want a good example of how economic development professionals can undermine perfectly functional ideas and business models by just not knowing what the words mean, have a look at this.
January 11, 2009 at 12:15 pm · Filed under Disintermediation, Project
Recent stupidity with Comcast (their ever-incrementing “local franchise fees” and “taxes”; that annoying stalker “dude” that “manages their reputation” on Twitter; generally degraded subjective quality of service here in the household; daily excursions into Nothing on the Pre-paid Television Again™) leads me to once again examine alternatives to monopoly cable franchises.
AppleTV: Is appealing in many ways—not least because given Comcast’s pricing scheme we would have to watch three movies every day to exceed Comcast’s annual fees—but there’s one problem. My Mom (85 years old) is the main TV-watcher these days, and has adopted a very 20th-Century modality for viewing, viz: Click the “channel up” button over and over until something catches your eye, and watch that until you get bored, and then go look at the “most likely” channels, and… repeat until bedtime. AppleTV, on the other hand, enforces with its egregious MacBook Wheel™ interface, a “traverse a hierarchy of uselessly outmoded and misleading taxonomic crap, until you get stuck in a dead end and accidentally push the unlabeled button meaning ‘exit’ instead of the other unlabeled one meaning ‘back’, and give up in a fit of pique” interface, aka Visual Phonemail.
FTL, Apple.
NetFlix seems fine as a supplement to some broadcast outlet, but there’s no spontaneity. And no local television. And no immediacy. NetFlix is a planner’s game, and one cannot plan everything.
Broadcast TV? In this market? Shyeah, right.
And that leaves the dishes and the telephone plays. AT&T U-verse, some kind of torrent-driven computer thing… the usual cruft.
Why, without lapsing too far towards antipanglossianism, does this worst of all possible worlds exist? Or, perhaps: what might one do to fix it?
So I find myself musing about “setting up our own Cable company”. Even @comcastcares said, when he cropped up other day in my Twitter feed to ameliorate my loss and manage his employers’ brand: Anybody can lay their own wires.
Well, no; technically, no. Not everybody can lay their own wires. That would involve doing impact studies (did Comcast do ecological impact studies before digging and stringing up all that copper and glass? I don’t recall seeing them), and getting licensing on many levels, and slotting said supernumerary cables into the already-crowded utility easements out there in the world, and not getting your wires clipped by other people’s service technicians, and so forth.
So, yeah, anybody can lay their own wires about the same way anybody can have their own gravity. Just expend a lot of time and resources and energy piling a bunch of random shit together in one place, and it will happen spontaneously.
So what other ways might there be to disintermediate our way out of this stranglehold I’m feeling just now? Yes, sure, it’s a moment in history where the fortunes of broadcasters and cable companies and satellite franchises may be changing, since they’re all struggling to keep our distracted attention. maybe somebody could leverage their dilution into some kind of break-up of their hegemonic strength.
Let’s be specific. How might any one of us—or even a committed minority—take a slab of that rich pie and share it amongst ourselves? I have, for instance, a more-than-sneaking suspicion that delays in WiMAX rollout might have something to do with the cable companies’ business models. And that FCC over-regulation of emergent P2P broadband wifi networks stifles competition with established players. And that, oh, I don’t know, actual physical wires are not taxed at a rate commensurate with their real value to the companies that own them.
So what’s possible?
Tangentially: If somebody would just fuck the freakin’ AppleTV interface with tagging or some kind of sensible “channel clicker” interface, it would be a win. But noooooo….
January 7, 2009 at 4:29 pm · Filed under Disintermediation, Project
A few days ago, Barbara and I discovered the Google Book Search Partner Program, and reading things over we wondered how some of the books we’ve scanned which are in the Public Domain might be submitted and shared.
So I wrote to them:
We digitize and redistribute public domain books only, and are wondering whether it’s possible to submit them to Google Book Search via the Partner Program. The demo/intro screencast suggested that all books need an ISBN or statement of rights.
How would you deal with works that are (provably) in the Public Domain? Is there a way to submit them, without first attaching a useless ISBN to the scans?
And Greg from Google just replied:
Hi Bill,
Thanks for your interest in the Google Books Partner Program. While an ISBN is not required for participation in Google Book Search, please note that participants may only submit copyrighted titles to Google Book Search for which they hold rights. We are unable to accept public domain books through our Partner Program.
If you have any further questions at this time, please don’t hesitate to let me know.
Sincerely,
Greg
The Google Book Search Team
So by this argument, should we do what Plain Label Books appear to have done, which is slap a faux copyright notice onto definitively Public Domain (and crappy) texts from Project Gutenberg? Or should we perhaps do what Kessinger Publishing does, which is scan and republish physical books in the Public Domain, and claim a spurious copyright on that?
Which kind of erosion of the public domain would you like me to try first, Google? Shall I show “snippets” of Public Domain Books, like Kessinger, and make people pay ridiculously inflated prices for crap POD copies of things that would be better downloaded for free [from you, I'd argue]? Or should I go through the motions of Greg’s interpretation of your Terms of Service and lie about my rights so that I can slot something into your ill-fitting business logic?
Or maybe, perhaps, because these books are in the Public Domain, you might get a clue about what that actually means, and acknowledge that I, and you, and everybody has the rights to those works.
That’s what “Public Domain” means. We have the right.
Put your manager on the line, Greg.
January 6, 2009 at 8:24 pm · Filed under Disintermediation, Project, local
Five simple questions. Somebody should be able to answer them.
- What fraction of the tax base of local folks work in small family businesses, DBAs, individual contractors, consultants, and ad hoc for-profit partnerships are there in Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County? [Best you don't step across the line into the neighboring counties, just for this particular question.] I don’t mean people collecting unemployment insurance, nor people on the rolls as W-4 employees; I mean actual self-employed and contract workers. What fraction?
- What proportion of the people generating useful, lucrative work in the region give a damn about more startups? In other words, what is the proportion of actual human beings involved in your “entrepreneurial” ventures, compared to what one might call, oh, I don’t know… going ventures maybe?
- What is the median rent paid by a company in Ann Arbor for office space, per square foot, as a function of company size (in real people)? I’d like to see charts or tables, at least, and not some list of lowest possible prices in the airport light industrial ghetto. Downtown is where people talk to each other.
- Where is one supposed to host a fucking business conference, if you [SPARK, the Economic Development People in the Address of Fucking "Innovation"] don’t have room for a paltry 120 people in your damned “headquarters” downtown in the County Fucking Seat? You think the basement next to the bums is too crowded, you should try a damned restaurant balcony sometime.
- What have you done, recently, to inform people who are (strangely) starting or running businesses in town? I don’t mean pimping for angel investors and fucking landlords, or even starting folks “meeting and greeting” one another in the appropriate khaki attire. I don’t mean trying to pick up sexy young programmers next to the park. I mean what have you actually done to help people understand how to produce a 1099 for a friend, or file trademark applications, or protect intellectual property, or set up a website for themselves?
Bonus question: What use are you? Not to me. To the actual community.
Here’s what I think, frankly: I think you believe in the sad, inbred population of “successful” entrepreneurs around here, who for the most part sold their companies just before economic downturns, or surfed their way to success on University-funded research spinoffs, or who come here to rent cheap office space subsidized by ridiculous tax credits without ever planning on interacting with the actual community. I think you believe the middle-aged white men who made their bucks did it because of “skill” or “diligence” or maybe even (among the more literate of you) “acumen”, instead of being lucky and ruthless and warming a corner office seat while actual people did actual work down the hall in their cubicle warrens. I think you believe that the local hyena’s pack of angel investors and coast-connected VC are the way to foster “innovation” around here (just like back in the early 1970s), the way to “bootstrap the economy” around here (just like the commercial realtors “bootstrapped” on the back of dying family businesses), the way to “transfer” “innovation” somehow to “local” businesses, just like Larry and Serge might do someday.
In other words, I think you believe their stories, the mythology concocted by normal people whose rewards were won because they stood in the right place at the right time, or told the right sucker the right story under the right economic conditions, or just looked right. I like the cut of your jib too, but I’m not stupid enough to think you have a better chance of running a real company than that ugly fellow over there.
And you know, I don’t mind you falling for that claptrap. I don’t mind you believing things informed more by survivorship bias and received wisdom than actual facts.
What I mind is you passing that crap on to useful, earnest, diligent, kids, and leading them to believe they’ll be the next Google if only they work harder. That they need to find somebody to borrow money from, to leverage their ideas so they can grow and launch a startup and execute their exit strategies.
Why, instead, aren’t you teaching them to have reasonable, comfortable lives? To work no more than eight hours a day, to invest wisely and foster collaborations widely, to speak respectfully with their elders and seek insight from their peers, to share and build persistent and supportive social and cultural networks locally and abroad?
I know why. Because you don’t value them. You value your investors, your angels, your landlords and insurance agents. You count the number of asses warming chairs in properties other people own, the number of dollars moving up the hierarchy and into the measurable tax base.
What gets measured gets done. The problem is, you measure a myth.
January 6, 2009 at 9:31 am · Filed under Disintermediation, Project, local
And yet here we have a screenshot of the Ann Arbor SPARK’s commentless, noninteractive “blog” taken on 6 January 2009, trailing edge of the Year of the Earth Rat.
About 90 days since the last “news”.
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