Changes Is Good

There is one card missing from somewhere between VIBE and MP3 Impact I had a card from a Company called ElectricVillage. I for the life of me cant find any of those cards but this is more or less a complete listing of every company I’ve worked for in my adult life.

The sheer intellectual horse power of the New Products Group was scary. The way its squandered even more so. The trick to innovation and new products is to push down responsibility as far into the organization as possible and then get out of the way! Corporate managers, the really smart former consultants brought in to keep the lights on and iterate on what someone else created, are poorly suited to giving up control or getting out of the way.

After a couple of years trying to figure out my consulting niche (I worked on projects from financial services to rap websites) I decided I was better at thinking about how to use technology, then I was building it myself. Through the editorial voice of the newsletter I could (and often did) talk to, and about, anything or anyone in the industry. It was also one of the few times I could openly call major music company executives “clueless” and get quoted rather then fired.

When I left VIBE to do independent consulting in NYC people thought I was crazy. Turns out they were partially correct. I actually thought I would work less being on my own then working for someone else. The business treated me well enough to do it relatively seriously for 6 years. If you want to do anything urban and Internet related let me know I’ve probably got the business plans for all the urban music sites, conceived prior to 2003, on CD somewhere.

This was a dream job. Before I got the gig I knew nothing about VIBE Magazine but my sister convinced me to talk to them. Chan Suh, of Agency.com fame, gave me a gig and Keith Clinkscales got me started building online businesses. Worked with a bunch of Internet old timers like Omar Waso, Bo Kemp, E. David Ellington, Kyle Shannon and a gang of others. This is back in the Pathfinder, go-go Internet, days when I was too young to get the import of being the money making Internet guy in weekly meetings with Walter Isaacson and Jim Kinsella.

Ronald David Jackson was running a print marketing business and doing pretty well when he saw change coming. I wanted to do more on Internet related work and convinced (perhaps begged?) him to hire me to help fashion a Internet strategy for his clients. I was young and had a lot to learn.

After college I had a degree and little else. I worked for TPR to make some cash while I figured out what I wanted to do with my life. Besides doing general layout and other graphic design work I taught SAT and GRE courses. The most important thing I learned while working here was Jimi Hendrix was not just for rebellious prep school kids. I had never listened to a Jimi album and I gotta tell ya that it was a life changing experience.

Right before starting college I spent the summer as a Kirby salesman in NYC. That basically means I went door-to-door in New York City selling a $1,300 vacuum cleaner. I did alright and stuck with it for the whole summer, until I started college. This was my next job after that. I started while still in school and basically did any tech related project my fellow students were willing to pay me for.

Stan Schroeder over at Frantic Industries did a more though and in-depth review of the WebOS options then the blurp i posted a few days ago If your interested in how folks are expanding the functionality and depth of web applications, this post is about as insightful as they come.

Stan Schroeder over at Frantic Industries did a more though and in-depth review of the WebOS options then the blurp i posted a few days ago If your interested in how folks are expanding the functionality and depth of web applications, this post is about as insightful as they come.

I’ve been a Prosper lender since October of last year and in January I started lending on Kiva as well but my online lending trifecta wont be complete until I can gamble on human hope using Zopa. Zopa is an online market place for lending to other folks much like Prosper in reverse. I’ve been anxiously awaiting the coming of Zopa but despite all the funding noise and media attention they havent made it to the US.

Well that may be about to change. According to an email they sent out this morning they are getting ready to launch, not just in the California as they originally stated, but nationally. With Zopa I’ll be able to loan money for as little as 6 months and further diversity my portfolio of person to person loans. From purely social lending on Kiva to the modestly social lending on Prosper and wholly economic lending on Zopa, I am becoming a banking institution $100 at a time.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeXAcwriid0]

While exploring GooTube I came across this humorous blueprint of how a company can be its own worse enemy. companies erase innovation through . Taken as a metaphor for the innovation process, it highlights a bunch of steps that get in the way of a great product. Even more amazing is this video was made by the good folks in Redmond.

Innovation is the hard to achieve because ultimately it requires a leap of faith. An emotional connection to an idea or ideal that is so strong it transcends the available information and may in fact contradict it. Its this leap of faith that management cant make, especially when their 401k’s, titles, and careers are on the line.

Business management is a pseudo-science that attempts to establish and maintaining order by institutionalizing processes that allow for control. Innovation is a pseudo-religion that resists control and requires the same faith in its existence that all gods have, since humans started creating them.

Our friends across the pond have pulled together some stats about what makes a successful entrepreneur in the EU. The stats are culled from surveys that were conducted by the National Statistics Institutes of 15 countries in the EU. The goals of the survey was to identify some FOBS (factors of business success), which to them means your business survived for 3 years with the same founder/entrepreneur involved in the running the show.

So, what did they find? 1) You dont need experience in the area to be successful. 2) Most of the entrepreneurs found dealing with customers and the details of running their businesses to be the biggest headache, which is just kinda funny. The younger the entrepreneur the faster the business was likely to grow. While women found it easier to get paid for invoices then men, male entrepreneurs felt better about getting to profitability then the women. My favorite finding from the report is that the more degrees the entrepreneur had, the more likely they were to claim their business was “innovative”.

Its an interesting report check it out here.

What does it take to build a business that gets a whole meme named after it? How do you get to be part of the Web 2.0 goodness that has been exploding all over the media? I dont know, but the web does provide access to lots of people that do. I contacted 10 of them for their answers to these questions and more.

Firing up my email program, along with a bit of courage, I emailed the founders of 10 different companies a series of questions about how they started their businesses and any lessons they'd picked-up along the way. I expected to get a few cruel letters of rejection and disdain from some overworked PR flack distrustful of blogs and unsure of their validity or usefulness. Instead, six founders running some of the Webs most interesting companies (at least the ones I use most often) agreed to chat with me.

Score: Indie Blogger 1, PR Flacks 0! Continue reading ‘10 CEO’s, 5 Questions, 1 Big Insight’

What does it take to build a business that gets a whole meme named after it? How do you get to be part of the Web 2.0 goodness that has been exploding all over the media? I dont know, but the web does provide access to lots of people that do. I contacted 10 of them for their answers to these questions and more.

Firing up my email program, along with a bit of courage, I emailed the founders of 10 different companies a series of questions about how they started their businesses and any lessons they'd picked-up along the way. I expected to get a few cruel letters of rejection and disdain from some overworked PR flack distrustful of blogs and unsure of their validity or usefulness. Instead, six founders running some of the Webs most interesting companies (at least the ones I use most often) agreed to chat with me.

Score: Indie Blogger 1, PR Flacks 0! Continue reading ‘10 CEO’s, 5 Questions, 1 Big Insight’

While trying to add a few recent web finds to my Ma.gnolia.com bookmarks I kept getting a strange error, “Domain not registered”. I thought perhaps I had typed the wrong address so I tried it again. I double checked the spelling , I looked for other links on the web, I tried accessing the root domain. Nothing worked! Ma.gnolia.com, one of my favorite bookmarking sites has apparently forgotten to pay its domain registration and been kicked offline.
Continue reading ‘D’oh! Opps! My Bad! I had to renew?’

While trying to add a few recent web finds to my Ma.gnolia.com bookmarks I kept getting a strange error, “Domain not registered”. I thought perhaps I had typed the wrong address so I tried it again. I double checked the spelling , I looked for other links on the web, I tried accessing the root domain. Nothing worked! Ma.gnolia.com, one of my favorite bookmarking sites has apparently forgotten to pay its domain registration and been kicked offline.
Continue reading ‘D’oh! Opps! My Bad! I had to renew?’