Andre Agassi, Do What You Love, Bob Dylan

If dreams came true, oh wouldn't that be nice

- Bruce Springsteen

A Google search for "do what you love" returns about 3 million results. Steve Jobs is often quoted in support of this obvious proposition of how we all should lead fulfilling, rewarding lives, and settle for nothing short of love. The thing is, something about this phrase, this idea, always bugged me. I just realized why.

A bunch of years ago I was in a meeting listening to a technology company pitch a potential buyer, regaling with all the incredible things, the potential value, that would be unlocked by tying all these tools together to give the buyer unprecedented visibility into their hiring processes. The buyer listened closely, and said "I agree with everything you describe. But it's the nirvana state, the end goal. What I want to know is actually how we get there."

Do What You Love is a nirvana state, an end goal, and output. It too simplistically describes the nuances, the ups and downs of life, the journey. It's valid, sure, but maybe not helpful in the day to day.

I was reminded of this while reading Andre Agassi's wonderful memoir, Open, last week. Agassi - one of the greatest tennis players ever, winner of numerous tournaments and accolades. On the first page of  his memoir, the very first page, he lays it down:

"I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have."

His journey ends with peace and yes, love, but man was he tortured getting to be the best in the world at something. It almost destroys him. Hate, not love.

It made me think of my professional journey. When I zoom out and look at it from the perspective of 20 or so years, it looks like a well-planned out series of moves and progressions, doing things that look pretty cool. When I zoom in more closely it looks more accurately like a series of serendipitous, random steps, lots of missteps and mistakes, and many many many regrets. In fact, not until 2006 or 2007, when I reconnected with John and started betaworks, can I ever really say that I was satisfied, maybe even happy, and definitely the only time I really felt good at something. Not until I was 40 fucking years old! And there were parts of building betaworks - getting office space, hiring people, setting up payroll, forming subsidiaries, raising money - that I am not sure I would describe that I "loved" doing. They were tedious, stressful, and hard.

But I was happy and satisfied and intellectually challenged. Maybe that's enough? 

Bob Dylan's memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, is also a remarkable, and related, work. At the height of his fame, coming off an unreal string of about 8 epic all-time great records, he dropped out. On the one hand, he is pretty clear why: to focus on being a parent, a father. Incredible. I also read another, related but different, reason. You see, Dylan couldn't explain to himself how he was able to channel something within and without to become maybe the greatest songwriter, and poet, ever. Quite simply, he didn't know how he did it. And he feels it slipping away. So he himself slips away into a place of different satisfaction.

I've come to the conclusion that doing what you love is the end game, the nirvana state. I'm not sure it's really even that attainable. Instead, it's probably a good framework, but also maybe nothing more, only to view the journey you take to get somewhere. That's more useful.

Training Wheels

With every mistake we must surely be learning

I was having breakfast this morning with a new friend who happened to come of Internet age when I did with a similar set of experiences (he was one of the first 50 employees of Yahoo). As we started to wax nostalgic over the good old days, oh around 1995 or 1996, I felt like maybe we were dipping into sentimental garbage. But then I thought that, maybe some of the past is in fact prologue; or, even if not, there were pioneering services, that either implicitly or explicitly inform everything we do. We don't talk about them enough, we don't salute them, we may mock their simplicity or wacked user experience. But they gave us the muscle memory to build upon, to strive to create better things. They were for some of us our training wheels. So here's to the crazy ones, some of the originals:

Bulletin board services - I first dialed into the SonicNet BBS from my apartment on T Street in Washington DC sometime around 1994 or 1995. The modem was at best 9.6 kbit/s. A green text on black background interface, impenetrable, but mindblowing to connect to . . . people . . where are they . .  chatting, talking, messaging. It felt almost dirty, yet taught us we could, indeed we would, connect to the world.

Usenet - oh beloved usenet, maybe the original real time social network, interest based, with norms, rules, again people. I lived for rec.music and alt.binaries. Never translated into a browser based UI, maybe it was never meant to be. This taught us sharing.

AIM - instant messaging in general but when we unbundled AIM from AOL in 1996, for maybe a year things were really beautiful. We learned instant, but also I would submit we learned how to spread memes.

Webrings - my favorite of all. How would we navigate this wide open possibilities of the web? Directory services - sure - but they felt top down. Ok, let's just organize it ourselves. Let's share traffic. Let's do it ourselves.

Of course, this is just my list. But these were how I learned to ride a bike. I won't forget that.

Sharing

This is for me the essence of true romance

Sharing the things we know and love with those of my kind

Libations, sensations

That stagger the mind

-Steely Dan

We are in the middle of the sharing age - Internet media allows (and empowers us) to share our thoughts, friends, sounds, videos, pictures, feelings. This is fundamental, and good: self-expression is a base human need and desire, and for too long our media was projected at us, and not with us.

I was reminded of the power of sharing, a different kind of sharing, the other day. I was walking down the street with a friend, a very successful entrepreneur and creator. He and his partner had sold their last company, and were now embarking on new projects, new companies; this time however they would be starting their new things not together but separately. 

In telling me this, my friend turned to me and said, "we've given each other equity in our new companies, you know, we want to diversify our risks." He told me the number, it was a material amount.

As we walked on, I thought to myself that his reasoning - diversification -  was exactly backwards. They were starting Internet ventures - both very ambitious and crazy risky ideas. The last thing they needed to do was have more equity in that.

But I don't think that's what was really going on. I think they were just simply sharing. Sharing equity. No strings attached. Doing it just because, maybe to them, it felt like the right thing to do.

At that moment I was humbled to my core. And tried to think about things that have been shared with me for no real reason other than maybe it was right just to share for the sake of sharing. 

It's really easy to share a song lyric that means something to you and I will keep doing that. I was reminded this week that it's also easy to share things that require a different kind of time, a different kind of forethought and planning, that result in a different kind of smile. I need to do more of that. 

Fearless

A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys

Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys

Last winter someone gave me a Nexus Android device they got at a Google event. It didn't have phone service so I gave it to my son to play with. He took to it immediately, especially having a mobile camera. He started snapping pictures of everything. Then sharing them. As a result, earlier this summer we got him a camera - a simple Canon point and shoot. He also took a photo class this summer. At the end of the class they printed their pictures on a office printer and made photo albums. 

It reminded me of a photo class I took when I was 14 or 15. I remember clearly the purple hue of the dark room; I can still recall the smell of the chemicals and the magical process of watching a photo come to life in a pool of substances. I remember the photo kids with their beefy eyes dilated from too much time in those dark rooms. I got sad for my boy, thinking that he would totally miss the process of creation, the science of it, the solitary and group pursuit. He wouldn't get to experience the context, rather than only the content.

Then something happened. He started fooling around with his "cameras." Snapping pictures of the world as he, a 4 foot kid, saw it. He began testing the limit of what an automated camera could do. For example, he found that if he put his finger in front of the lens it would focus on the finger, yet if he pulled the finger away right while snapping the photo, he would get a blurry yet interesting photo: 

He also experimented with layered pictures - taking photos of photos:

In a taxi yesterday afternoon we were chatting and while looking at me and talking he lifted his camera to the window and snapped a photo of the outside motion, without looking. A new style he was trying, he told me.

All these techniques were driven by his ability to see the photos immediately after taking the picture. He could see, right away, the results of his tinkering. Something rarely available in the past.

As a result, he became fearless. About experimenting, using what he had but also trying new techniques, methods. Seeing the results and reacting to them, altering them, discarding them. In real time. He's wondering if should save up and get at some point a digital single-lens reflect camera. Maybe he will, maybe he will lose interest in all of this.

Regardless, a new technology, one that I worried took away a most important part of the process for him (using the lens of my own experience), instead taught him something much different. And maybe more important. And he didn't need to inhale any chemicals to learn that.

So You Wanna Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star

And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds 
Are immune to your consultations 
They're quite aware of what they're goin' through 

The acquisition of Tumblr by Yahoo! is now complete, which has set off another round of analysis about the past, the future, praising and questioning the move by both sides, investor returns, and other sundry items.

All those I'm sure will be interesting, but I think they will miss a bigger point. Self-expression is an unbelievably empowering feeling. Internet services that allow for forms of self-expression have fundamentally changed how media, how content, is produced, marketed and distributed, regardless of the ultimate outcome of the services themselves. That's majorly important. Their impact is greater than the specific outcome - financial or otherwise - of any one of those Internet services.

I always wanted to be a musician, a rock star. But I can't really play guitar. Then I wanted to be in the music business, but then I learned that I didn't. Instead, my fantasy, ultimately, was and is to be a music writer.

I've read many many music books (the best: Positively 4th Street, Chronicles Volume One, Please Kill Me, Our Band Could Be Your Life, The Trouser Press Record Guide, Beneath the Underdog, Miles, Rock of Ages, Lipstick Traces, Just Kids) and magazines (such as Spin, Uncut, Mojo, The Big Takeover, Forced Exposure, Backstreets).

The reality is, I'm not a great writer, at least not in the sense of what a professional writer is (or I believe should be). That's alright, I was never trained as such and never really learned to write well. Not sure I even aspire to that. I leave that to my partner and friends.

However, self-expressive services, like Tumblr, aren't concerned with notions, objective or otherwise, of quality. They don't make a value judgement about whether I am a good writer or not. They are a canvas. To create, with freedom. They implicitly say, do it yourself. They are about, first and foremost, self-empowerment.

I believe that rarely in history have we had places that allow us to express ourselves, who we are, at mass, to the world, with little rules other than as we might create to govern ourselves. Requiring no permission. Until recently, and via the Internet.

On May 25, 2007, I posted a photo on my Tumblr site. A few months later, on February 16, 2008, I first posted a song (New York Groove, Ace Frehley). Pretty much every day since then I have posted some song, some thought, some music related randomalia. 4,837 times. I even once wrote an "open letter" to a hero journalist of mine, Jann Wenner, about Tumblr and Rolling Stone.

Without thinking about it or even trying; without any plan; and clearly without anyone judging me (quite the opposite: with quite a bit of encouragement from people I only know through their pseudonyms), I know now that I realized my fantasy. I became a writer. Sure, no classic definition of music writer would ever list this experience there, and my writing usually sucks, and I'll never make a living from it, and god knows only a few people even ever notice it. But it's there, and no one's permission was needed for me to play out a small scale alternate reality fantasy, in my own little way.

Presciently, Thoreau told us to “beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.”

Empowering new people to do things is fundamentally important. Empowering new people to have the option to themselves be creators is as important. This completely changes the way we access, or perceive, media, because individuals have the power, the ability, to be in control.

That gives us all the opportunity to be rock stars, on a large or small stage, but a stage of our own, with no permission required.

So, regardless of the armchair analysis that will occur, at least today I am going to try not to forget that, while I may never really get to be that music writer I dreamed of, no one can stop me from writing about music. Even if it's in a small, but my own, way.

Interestingness

"You didn’t always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got a standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting"

- Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

Sometimes I think we live in an age of amazing exceptionalism. Entrepreneurs creating transformative things, athletes performing beyond their abilities, artists creating mind blowing spectacles. All of this greatness is available to us as never before, in a constant stream of updates, pictures, videos on demand, and blog post analyses. Never has greatness seemed so . . . close and attainable. 

Except maybe it is not. Maybe it only appears so close yet in reality is as far away as ever. Maybe all that greatness is solely the result of outliers (the ones that "burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars”), not normals, the same as it ever was, it only appears now that they are within the grasp of most of us because we can consume that greatness much more easily and often. Maybe I am just talking about how it's not within my own grasp.

But also maybe all of this is ok. Greatness, or being exceptional, may simply lie for most within ourselves, not in what we do. Yet, we still are a required piece of the puzzle. We play as important a role as anyone else, albeit a different one, and as a result we don't, or shouldn't, spend too much time obsessed with being "interesting." 

We can't all be poets, David Carradine once remarked. But, if we cannot be a poet, he added, we can all be the poem itself. That's just as interesting, and within reach, for me.

  

Memories

Well, I guess that it's typical 
To cling to memories you'll never get back again
And to sort through old photographs of a summer long ago
- Conor Oberst

Back around 1991 or so, me, my brother, and a few friends had an idea for a television show. We were the children of MTV, its progeny, there when it began, avid viewers, disciples of music television. But, MTV didn't play the music we listened to, stuff from independent labels such as Sub Pop, SST, Merge, AmRep. 

Luckily, in NYC then there was this thing called Public Access Television. It used to be on channels 16 and 17 via Manhattan Cable. Community, DIY programming. Anyone could have a television show. In a moment of Wayne's World delusion, we figured that we could make our own program. We walked into the offices of Manhattan Cable on East 23rd Street, filled out a one-page form (that's all that was required), handed it in, and got a slot on the spot. Thursday at 7:30pm. Right before the Simpsons. Prime time. Just like that. We had to come up with a name so we did so. The Underground Railroad: Independent Music for the Independent Mind. All we had to do was have the video tape - a 3/4 inch  tape - delivered to 23rd street every Friday at 6pm for the following week. It was as easy as that. We were on our way. 

Now the real work began - we found an old portable video cassette recorder with integrated mic. We called and wrote letters to labels asking for videos, for interviews, for anything. We plastered the east village with flyers. We got introduced to a ex-tank operator named Amit with war stories to tell but who was also an editor and had studio time - from midnight to 3 am. He accepted payment in cash or contraband or any combination thereof.

Over the next few years we pretty much put on a show every week. Hundreds of 28 minute episodes. The first video of the first episode was Shonen Knife - Red Kross. The second was Ween - Pollo Asado. My friend Steve and I were the "hosts" of the first episode, filming the introductions and "wrap arounds." Somehow, I think by calling up Mammoth Records, we were invited to interview Julian Hatfield, on the eve of the release of her first solo record, outside CBGBs. I had never interviewed anyone before. Luckily, she was more nervous than me. It was a disaster. 

But we did it, each week, for a few years. Spending half a day driving around in an Econoline van with Mike Watt. Meeting Mudhoney. Drinking with the Afghan Whigs. Interviewing Evan Dando in 1992 and listening to him play on acoustic guitar a song called "Fuck and Run" by an unknown female singer from a demo tape he had been listening to. Writing letters to Sub Pop. Meeting Jon Spencer. Begging SST for videos (they never gave them up). For years we got on the guest list of every show, everywhere, backstage and all. Had to get a P.O. box and cut a special deal with the mailbox operator because we got too much mail - videos, CDs, swag. 

When I tell people this story, they mostly have the same reaction. "You need to put the shows on Youtube!" The video tapes - cartons of them - are spread out. Maybe in California. Maybe at my mom's place. Some in Woodstock. Maybe they are gone. These requests usually set off a flurry of internal emails amongst ourselves: should we do this? Have you watched them? Which one should we digitize? This year we will really get around to it, yes this year we will, right?

And then when I think about it, I realize we probably shouldn't, and most likely won't, digitize them and put them on Youtube or Vimeo or wherever. 

It would ruin the memories.

Those memories are amazing. We had no idea what we were doing. It was DIY. It was punk. We were going to be famous. Get a "real" show someday. Something like that. The memories are also bittersweet: there are episodes we filmed downtown with the Twin Towers in the background. 

And as the years go by, and the specifics fade, these memories retain and enhance something even more. The romanticism of youth. Of music. Of friendship. Of Greenwich Village. It all seemed so fun, the stories are wonderful. We still tell them to each other.

But the reality was also something different. The memory is that editing the shows with a stoned tank operator editor was exhilarating. The reality was that it was a huge hassle doing it in the middle of the night, we were tired and cranky and fought all the time, and he was a terrible editor, it took him hours to do something simple.

The memory is that calling Jonathan Poneman of Sub Pop and speaking with him was fun. The reality that was that bothering a small businessman and begging for music videos was lame, tedious stuff, as was debating endlessly over and over what was really "independent" or not.

The memory of meeting and hanging out with your "heroes" was spectacular. The reality was that these were just people, sometimes cool, sometimes jerks, living in some surreal existence and we were bothering them, playing along to some bizarre post-teenage groupie game.

If I think hard about it, I recall that we fought all the time making this show. Oftentimes, it felt more like a burden than a joy. Friendships were strained to the breaking points.

You see, I don't need to remember the pain, humiliation, the crap. If I watched those episodes again, if I posted them online to be available for posterity, I am pretty sure I would be disappointed. Embarrassed  Reminded of alot of time and money wasted and stupid things done and said.

Instead, I just want to remember that, for a little while, we got a little closer to something, maybe to being cool. We got to touch those who we thought we ourselves wanted to be. We got to pretend we were rock and roll. It was, yes, romantic.

As the details fade, the stories - what we remember of them - become more interesting as the rough edges smooth out. My memories are better than the reality. Not only is that ok, it sustains me as I get older.  

Maybe not everything needs to be preserved outside of our minds. As imperfect, fading and fleeting as our memories may be, maybe that is precisely what makes them - and us - special. I'll stick with those instead.

Manufacturing Scarcity

You can't always get what you want

But if you try sometimes well you might find

You get what you need

The musician Prince recently found short videos clips from the Twitter-owned video sharing service Vine to be offending because they contained clips from his music:

A representative of NPG Records wrote to Twitter to say eight video clips hosted on Vine contained “unauthorized recordings” and “unauthorized synchronizations” and asked the company to remove them immediately - The Next Web

Here is one of the clips in question.

This is not the first time Prince has gone on this crusade: "Prince, of course, has earned a somewhat unflattering reputation for his tireless efforts to hunt down unauthorized fan recordings across the web and have them obliterated."

In all likelihood, this is simply a case of a control freak "optimizing for control" (says @anildash). Not realizing the passion of his fans who want to share their experiences listening to his music.

But what if this is something more than that, something maybe ingenious that may not only be inoffensive to his fans, but also may enhance aspects of their fandom that were otherwise lost in the digital era. What if Prince is trying to manufacture scarcity where it no longer exists.

Back in the pre-Internet day, buying a record took some work. You had to find out about it (radio, fanzine), scrounge up some cash, get yourself to a record store (Tower Records on Broadway, for one), buy the platter, get back home, and listen. Then get a cassette, record some tracks, give the tape to a friend. A lot of friction, sure. But also a process that, because of the scarcity of getting a new record, had its own rhythms of fandom. Being the first to have something mattered in a different way. Not a better way, but a different way. I remember the first time my friend Steve played us Husker Du - he was the guide, we were his followers. We felt inside the process of discovery.

Which is why I always struggle when something, some content, is described as "quality." For isn't a degree of excellence purely subjective? Which is not to say that content does not have value, it's just that maybe it has less inherent value than we previously thought. My idea is that, prior to the Internet becoming a mass distribution platform, the value of a piece of content was more related to its scarcity of distribution than it was to any measure of its value. In equation form, we could think that traditionally Value (V) = Scarcity (S) * Quality (Q). Q of course, being largely subjective, is hard to measure. But S is not. I believe that S then acted as a multiplier of value. Seinfeld was a good show, surely; but it was only available at 9pm on Thursdays. Tuesdays were the exciting days when new records were released. And we didn't have even near to the number of alternative choices to occupy our time as we do now. Thus a massive S, and thus a massive V.

Maybe it follows then that, because there is so little scarcity of distribution anymore, the whole value chain has been disrupted, maybe even inverted. We need new forms of finding and exchanging value. Live performances. Kickstarter campaigns. 15 episodes of a new show all released at once.

Or, you can try to create scarcity, or at least the appearance of such. The feeling of scarcity.

What if this is exactly what Prince is doing. Regardless of whether he cares or not about his rights or control, what if, by policing or attempting to police Internet distribution about himself, he is making it feel as if Prince music is scarce? Manufacturing scarcity. You can't get it everywhere. You can't user-generate content about it. You can't bootleg it. He would be wrong, of course; there is no way to stop this sharing of digital content. But by issuing take down requests of random 8 second clips, he sure is ensuring that everyone is talking about . . . Prince.

This also does more than simply keep him top of mind though; for it then spawns a subculture of people who want to share and trade Prince content. But they have to use obfuscatory techniques. Like posting videos of live recordings that don't use "Prince" in their title. By pushing it underground, it then becomes cool again. Hardcore fans know how to find it, what to call it to ensure it remains hidden. You can't simply use Google to find it. You have to know the passwords, the secret handshakes. You have to work to find it. And then real personal points are scored when you do, and you pass it along.

By aggressively trying to prevent sharing, maybe he has engendered a richer culture of sharing itself. Maybe he has somehow increased S, and given people the feeling of an increase in V.

And therefore - maybe - Prince has created an environment where the perceived value of his art, his content, has increased. He has manufactured the elements of scarcity. Perhaps the information age technology which has basically eliminated this scarcity has also created new, different methods of value.

I'm sure all the above are the ravings of someone with too much on his hands to think about conspiracy theories. And to be clear, I don't necessarily believe that withholding in this way is the best long term value creator. See, e.g., this.

But what if.

The Introverts Dilemma

I don't think introverts actually define themselves as introverts. Instead, we know the feeling, the uncomfortable moment of human interaction after you say something in person to someone and you suffer the potential ego death while awaiting their reaction. It's not that we don't want to express ourselves, our interests, desires and personality. To the contrary, we do. It's just too difficult and painful to do so. Back in middle school they called us quiet or shy. They still do.

For many introverts, the Internet was and remains revelatory. Allowing for intimate (yet distant) connections that are asynchronous (yet real time), anonymous or pseudonymous (yet expressing identity), frequent (yet levying no cost to walking away from), and multi-dimensional (yet involving no eye contact), at some level it feels like the "Internet" was designed definitionally to solve each and every insecurity of the introvert. I recall with total specificity the first time I dialed into the SonicNet BBS in 1995 using a Gateway computer from our apartment on T Street in Washington, DC; really, it blew my mind. People just talking about stuff. Strangers. Compadres.

And therein lies the Introverts Dilemma. Because the Internet so readily solves the problems for us, it has also spawned new ones. For these online connections, discussions, friendings, tweets, message boards and sharings, over time all invariably lead to . . meet ups, IRL get togethers, face to face human contact. Participants in the online groups we join in eventually want to meet each other with real life person-to-person interactions. "Hey we should get together in person." "Let's do a meet up someplace." "Let's have coffee we should get to know each other better." It's natural and beneficial; but man, the horror for the introvert.

I was thinking about it this morning, however. Maybe unlike other dilemmas this introverts dilemma is not a problem, but a solution. 

I force myself to talk in public even though I abhor it. I am pretty sure I have chosen the profession I am in even though it forces me to meet people all day. I have made amazing (or lucky) personal decisions because she makes me confront the quiet.

Perhaps all these things occurred because otherwise I would sit alone all day and talk to myself, in my head. Thanks Internet for, in part, solving this dilemma for me by opening up the world to these possibilities.

Into The Mystic

Yesterday I was on the subway, listening to music or something. We came  to a stop and a gentlemen walked by me to exit the car. As he did, a button on his jacket caught my headphone cord, which pulled my phone out of my pocket, flipped it up in the air, spun it around, and then we both watched it fall into the crack between the subway car and the platform.

He looked at me, and me at him. He half-apologized; it was a very weird event seeing the phone spin up and down through this 3 inch crack. A guy next to me shouted "No Way!" The doors closed and the train moved on.

Shouting man asked me what I was going to do. I shrugged, dejected, and said "I suppose I will go to a store and buy a new one and set it up." He went back to looking down at his phone, I could see his hand tense up as he held his device tighter.

So later that morning of course I went into a store and bought a new phone and went back to my office and set it up. It took longer than I wanted, so part of my day was spent restoring things. I lost some pictures, apps, songs that weren't backed up. But I got it back and running eventually.

This could be a story of how amazing our technology and devices are. After all less than one day later I have most of my things and you wouldn't know the difference. All my phone numbers and email addresses magically appeared - even some old voice mail messages. If I didn't write this you wouldn't know it happened.

This could also be a story of how technology doesn't work and we are slaves to digital devices - I lost some pictures that weren't backed up of my mother-in-law's 80th birthday party the other night, as well as some gorgeous shots of mountains in Utah where I was lucky to be last week. Some apps too, maybe. Probably some email and I missed some text messages. I was stressed being disconnected while this happened.

Instead, I don't think it has either of those meanings, and it probably  doesn't have any meaning whatsoever. A few years ago I lost a chunk of archived emailed - a few years worth. Some interesting things in there - a few key digital years of my life in the technology business, gone, forever.  It sucked.  Whatever. We move on. Our technology is wonderful and amazing and connects us in ways we couldn't imagine a few years ago. It can also disconnect us if we don't remember that the crack between the subway car and the platform is only a few inches wide, but pieces of our lives can fall through there. It's both things.

"We were born before the wind,  Also younger than the sun"

Real Names Be Proof

Sometimes I forget to appreciate how amazing Internet services can be. By that I mean how often they can expose the real world to us. Which is interesting because the criticism of our Internet-always-connected-society is that it removes us from the real world, it creates false virtual connections in place of real human ones. 

Not true. These services can bring the real world to us in ways we could never have imagined.

How so? Some examples (some of which USV has invested in).

Search etsy for "magic wands"  

More than 4,000 results, but more importantly, from hundreds and hundreds of real people who, for whatever reason, make magic wands. People like TheHappyStar or deannaharward.

Similarly, here is the list of just some of the open loans to small business on the Funding Circle small business lending platform:

A company in Wales looking for capital to expand chicken housing.  A small construction firm in East Anglia looking to expand.  A small hotel in need of capital to to upgrade their lighting to energy saving LED.

Over at Kitchensurfing Clare Lang will come into your house and cook you brunch.

Over at See.me some artist named Nicolas Silberfaden has a portfolio and community showing his superhero (I guess) art.

These are just 4 quick examples selected at 6am on a cold dark NYC morning when I am sitting alone before anyone here is awake.

There is so much humanity in these services, these are real people doing real things connecting with .  . .  the world. I can't imagine anything more real, and important, than that.

Banking and Unbundling

You might be somebody's landlord, you might even own banks, but you're gonna have to serve somebody - Bob Dylan

If it is the case that the Internet unbundles things, that the "power of connected networks such as the Internet is that they unbundle all that came before them," then looking at areas that might be in the process of unbundled might be interesting. I've previously thought this was mainly and initially happening in media and education.

But maybe it's actually occurring most quickly and aggressively in financial services. The Economist, in a survey of non-bank finance, recently wrote: "this is a time of huge opportunity in finance — as long as you are something other than a bank." Banks and financial instituions often centralize things - capital, capabilities, credit, underwriting, risk assessment - things like that - and clearly the last 20 years have seen the rise of integrated financial institutions, so-called financial supermarkets, that in theory gain from being able to provide every financial service available under one organization. But what if those capabilities were better performed separately, and unbundled from the core institution; would the services be provided better (faster and cheaper)? As the Internet reduces information and even transaction costs (even to zero), not only does the notion of a finance supermarket not make sense, but the economics to those "buying" the services don't either.

So are we seeing this then? I would submit yes. Take just a few examples off the top of my head: Market Invoice, Zopa, Prosper, Funding Circle, Lending Club, Transferwise, Dwolla, Stripe, Pollenware, Venmo, RateSetter, Wonga, Simple, MoneySupermarket, Anthemis Group (some of these are companies USV has invested in). These cover retail banking, consumer lending, business lending, money transfers, receivables financing, payments infrastructure, and more. Each one of those does what a "bank" would do, but in a specific area, utilizing the Internet as broadly as possible for most components of its business, and often at a level of service that is much better than previously offered (and most definitely less expensively). Some of these are peer to peer businesses; and some of these are doing over $1B in volume. 

Each one and many more represent the unbundling of the bank. Yet banks are big and entrenched. If and how they respond will be one of the more interesting things to watch in the upcoming years.

Competition, It's a Bitch

Yesterday it was reported in the Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s most popular newspaper, that Samsung has raised the price of processors sold to Apple by 20 per cent. It is well known that Apple has been making strides to reduce its reliance upon the South Korean company’s components ever since the flaring up of the acrimonious court cases these pair are now famous for. One component Apple is unable to source from other suppliers is the central processor. Knowing this, it seems like Samsung has decided to turn the proverbial screw. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that “Samsung Electronics recently asked Apple for a significant price rise in the application processor. Apple first disapproved it, but finding no replacement supplier, it accepted the increase.” Hexus.net

In our startupy world, we often think of competition coming from the ability of new companies to innovate by being nimble, fast, using lean principles to iterate quickly and forcefully. 

We talk about how difficult it is to be an incumbent, beholden by legacy business models and structures, unable to withstand the momentum of the mighty startup that has nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

But sometimes the most aggressive, even innovative, forms of competition come from the incumbents themselves. Which demonstrates that in an era of connectedness, when information flows so fluidly (and maybe freely), competition can and will come from many places, that it's even harder to compete than ever, and that one's differentiated advantages may only be advantages for a much shorter time than traditional business study has taught us.

Samsung, among other things, has been a component supplier for Apple for years. Some peg this relationship at over $1 Billion. For that time period they have watched a new market (so called smart-phones) develop, and participated in that market from the supply side. But now a few years in, it looks like the supply side is not enough for them. Samsung is famously producing its own smart phone devices that look like they may be able to compete with Apple, it's component customer. Not only compete, maybe even outperform: "Samsung's Galaxy S III bested the iPhone 4S in the third quarter of 2012 to become the world's best-selling smartphone" PCMag.com

Think for a moment about this most interesting dynamic - one of Apple's main supply chain partners is now developing devices that may be outselling Apple's core iPhone franchise. At the same time, it is raising the very component prices that it supplies to Apple. It is pushing hard from both the bottom and the top. Competing in both places.

Apple's suppliers are now becoming its competitors as those downstream suppliers have moved upstream.

Competition comes in many forms and flavors, but it is no less aggressive and interesting when it comes from large companies battling each other.

The Great Fragmentation

A few weeks ago my partner Albert Wenger wrote about Facebook being unbundled: "Facebook's Real Mobile Problem: Unbundling" where he opined that "mobile devices are doing to web services what web services did to print media: they unbundle." 

Then I recalled this blog post from University Ventures which wonders whether "colleges and universities are the next object of the Great Unbundling." This is what Dale Stephens of Uncollege has been saying to me for a while - that education is being unbundled into its component parts: content, teachers, credentials,community, physical campus, mentors, hiring and network.

Then I remembered this wonderful essay Jason Epstein wrote in the New York Review of Books ("How Books Will Survive Amazon") which suggests that the broad general based publishing industry is at odds with the Internet network: 

"Specificity, reflecting the structure of the web, will matter: a guide to the cultivation of daffodils will more likely succeed than a more diffuse gardening title."

In other words, publishers and bookstores will be unbundled.

What if the power of connected networks such as the Internet is that they unbundle all that came before them? They disintermediate incumbent industries but also do the same to any new attempts at re-aggregation?

AOL back in the day, among many others, did not perceive this and instead built its service around the idea that the wide vastness of the web needed to be tamed, consolidated, presented in a singular user experience. That vision turned out to be wrong. Google's turned out to be right - how fast can we get you away from our service into the messiness of the Internet. 

What if then this unbundling and resultant fragmentation is some kind of digital/physical force, law or property? If it is a feature, not a bug.

What would the implications be?  Well some are:

*this process of unbundling and the fragmentation that results from it will continue, if not accelerate

*this is great for users of services - someone will build, and users can find, the specific application or service that serves their desires precisely

*this may be great for some entrepreneurs that embrace this state of fragmentation and can set their expectations to be consistent with it

*maybe not so great for other entrepreneurs and even venture investors - the winner take all era of web services may no longer make sense and thus may be ending.

Let the fragmentation begin.

What If We Give It Away: Lessons from TED

"Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right"

What if the value your service or company provides may not be the one you originally or naturally think it does? TED used to be a simple conference - you pay (a lot) to attend, and in exchange you get to see, in person, some great speakers and meet some interesting people. Great content and even better networking. 


But then TED started giving away the content (TED talks) - basically for free and in almost real time. It also started giving away its brand - allowing the use of the "TED" moniker for other events, conferences, in related and unrelated fields (TEDx). And then giving away its methodology - its format and processes. So what was the result? The TED brand recognition is greater than ever, its content is viewed on the web by millions of people who have never even been to an event, the TED speaker slot is coveted and is even a form of credibility or accreditation, many many more people have been to "TEDx" related events than ever before, and the flagship in person conference sells out as fast as it ever did at the same high prices.

In other words, by giving away what one would generally think of as a company's (a media entity) greatest assets - its content,  brand and business processes - the business has grown enormously in just a few short years. "We found that, giving stuff away, we received even more in return" says Bruno Guissani, European director of TED.

Flipping and basically giving away what one would normally think of as core competencies, core assets, can grow a business dramatically and quickly. With the content, processes and brand more freely available, the community and the set of values can instead drive the business. And those are not as easily replicable. In the case of TED, there used to be just one price point and opportunity for users to interact.  Now there are many (attend the event, watch the videos, go to a local TED, do a TEDx). It is now a 365 day brand, whereas it used to only be a 3 day event.

Imagine how powerful this could be in other areas - for example, what if I could throw a BonnarooX concert in some back yard, using the methods form the festival, inspired by the music clips freely available to me to watch.  

And now maybe we are beginning to see this in other areas too - such as education (see EdX out of Harvard and MIT as one example). I wonder what other areas this can and will be applied to - imagine not only media but also life sciences. 

Giving away what you hold most dearly may turn out to be the best business strategy there is.