Miles To Go.

Charlie Green, author of Trusted Advisor

(MS) Since there is so much buzz around Sharing, (I’ve written about it recently here, here and here) and it’s key component, Trust, I’ve asked some experts to lend their opinions on my blog to fill out the color commentary. Here’s Charlie Green;

Whether you call it “the sharing economy” or “collaborative consumption,” there’s a fascinating new economic and social phenomenon going on.  While not identical, both terms refer to markets for the sharing of products and services between individuals.

It may seem obvious that the role of trust is pretty critical. But just what that role is turns out to be not so obvious.    

Background

The chroniclers of the movement are Rachel Botsman (Botsman & Rogers, What’s Mine is Yours), and Lisa Gansky (The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing). Botsman characterizes three sub-markets: product-services systems (like ZipCar), redistribution markets (eBay), and collaborative lifestyles (CouchSurfing).

Some of those sub-markets hint at huge scale economies: how many zillions of available-seat-miles go unused on the nation’s streets and highways on driver-only trips? How many available car-hours per day are actually used for driving, as opposed to uselessly hogging valuable real estate? And for nearly every traveler vacationing, there’s an empty house back home going unutilized.

Other sub-markets are more akin to intriguing social experiments: imagine a global foreign exchange student program run for adults, only faster, bigger, and with do-it-yourself vetting, and you’ve got something like CouchSurfing.

In an odd way, “markets” is precisely the wrong way to describe the social experiment part of the phenomenon – it’s anti-market, in a sense, to focus on collaboration and reduced consumption, rather than on increased sales and  intermediating exchanges.

But in more traditional senses, these are very much markets, with loads of interest. Technologies are enabling peer-to-peer interactions; but unlike stock exchanges and book-buying, many of them exist to facilitate real flesh-and-blood interactions. Subletting your house or apartment to someone, or simply hosting an out-of-town visitor, is no trivial social exercise. And lending out your car or tools, while not necessarily social, also involves a social risk.

Which is where trust comes in.

Trust in the Sharing Economy

If you’re going to open up your house to someone you’ve never met before, you will make some form of trust calculus about the possible guest.

The reverse is true as well: if you’re going to go spend some time as the house-guest of a perfect stranger, you also will make some assessment along the lines of, “Do I, or do I not, trust these people?”

Might there be a secondary market here for trust. Indeed, there might.  (Disclosure: I have a small relationship with one such venture, TrustCloud). Suddenly, the decision to trust has economic, and possibly very personal, consequences.

Trusting and Being Trustworthy.  People often talk about “trust” as if it were a single thing.  It’s not.  “Trust” is the result of a trustor and a trustee arriving at an agreement. Trusting is not the same as being trusted. Trust is, if you’ll pardon the abstract language, an asymmetric relationship.

To be clear, the one doing the trusting (the trustor) is the one taking the risk. If I loan my tools or house to you, you might abuse them. The trustee, by contrast, takes little risk.

The trustor’s decision is based partly on the perception of the trustworthiness of the trustee. Wouldn’t it be great, the thinking goes, if we could come up with the equivalent of a FICO credit score for would-be trustees.

The search for trustworthiness metrics goes in two directions. One is reputation;  the other is behavior. Reputation is relatively easy to assess; unfortunately, it’s also easy to game, and can easily be confused with notoriety. Kim Kardashian may score high on reputation, and even influence – but does that mean you trust her?

Behavior is harder to game: to fake behavioral dependability, I would have to establish a track record of dependable behavior – which is, after all, the point. It can be faked, of course, but such an elaborate con requires a level of effort quite out of proportion to the benefit, not to mention out of character.

Trusting. It’s easy to focus just on measuring trustworthiness, particularly in the product-services and redistribution markets, where the trustor wants information about the trustee to mitigate downside risk.

But in the collaborative lifestyles segments of the movement, it’s not just the trustworthiness of the trustee that is important, but also the trustor’s propensity to trust. In the fascinating sub-movement that is Couchsurfing, the parties aren’t just looking to cut risk: they want upside potential in terms of fascinating people willing to take social risks in order to meet others. They want trustors.

The 60s Redux?

The parallel with the 60s is instructive. Some of the era’s social experimentation didn’t make it out of the 70s. But the Beatles, Steve Jobs, and the Grateful Dead were all once-radical types who created models that are mainstream business today.

Even the hard-core economic segments of the sharing economy aren’t as radical as we think. The timeshare industry “shared” underutilized vacation home capacity; so did distributed computing in the 70s-80s. McDonalds’ discovery of breakfast was another capacity utilization play that paid off big.

In any case, we’re all going to be talking more about trust. And that’s likely a good thing for us all.

Doug Krugman, Greg Matusky, Roo Rogers, (M) and Xin Chung @S2 Learning Even

the woods are lovely, dark and deep
but I have promises to keep
and miles to go before I sleep
miles to go before I sleep

Robert Frost, in a poem of simplicity itself, captures the essence of the foundations of trust: promises kept.

I was at Shared Squared NYC’s monthly learning event last night, where a whole lot of people made good on a whole lot of promises. And there was lots of chatter about trust, as the social networks have spawned so much peer to peer interaction (and the P2P has spawned its share of weird interactions).

In short, the problem that is emerging is that people, for better or worse, form  judgements based upon online information, make promises and commitments, and then are disappointed with the related offline episodes. Happens all the time, across a variety of peer to peer actions. There are a gazillion examples of the difficulties of this toggle, like

• Lady GaGa tickets bought through Craigslist for cash at the last-minute
• A Wimdu rental, where the pics were great, but the pillows just plain smell.
• A RelayRide renter who changes his plans last minute and screws up the rest of your calendar

But the upside of getting trust right in the sharing economy (and in P2P lending, and in dating, etc etc.) is that more trust leads to more and faster transactions and interactions within a community. I think Stephen MR Covey (son of 7 Habits Stephen) had it right quite awhile ago when he wrote The Speed of Trust. You can add his good work to these recent pieces on the subject:

• The Trust Projects recent manifesto…
• Letters and outreach to the community by Scaffold and Legit
• Neal Gorenflo doing everything possible to forward the sharing conversation via shareable (Nice work!)
• Shared Squared finally announcing an event calendar in NYC

But, at some point, in order to truly scale, I really passionately believe the sharing economy must deliver an indicator of trust between the two parties in a transaction increases if not ensures the assets at risk. The only product in the market that is out there, doing it today and in increasing numbers with both communities and users is TrustCloud. (You can claim your TrustCloud here). And yes, I am an investor and have blogged on the topic here, here and here.

Eventually, they will be compelled to ensure trust is sufficient. And just as airbnb has done, others will need to underwrite that risk. People- and perhaps their insurers! – will want better answers to questions like:

• Will my car be returned in good order?
• Will my apartment be sacked while a couchsurfer is there?
• Will my boat he left on the rocks by this drifter that borrowed it?
• Is my daughter safe with this tutor who comes to the house?
• Will I ever see my lawn mower again?
• Will this ride share going to get me to work, or roll me out of the car in Mexico?

And all that attention has forwarded the discussion, but trust is not an absolute from the get go. We as humans observe behavior and actions before trust is earned,  and we frequently reassess trust levels along the way. It can work between online and offline as long as it is observed, recorded and elegantly presented in context.

So, not unlike the man in Frost’s Poem…

The accumulation of recorded behavior, events and affinities that leads to the confidence to exchange something of value, tangible or intangible is IMHO the most accurate and applicable definition of Trust that any P2P marketplace can rely on.  

And this is why, simply, behavior trumps reputation every time.

PS: I’d love to hear what you think of the new TrustCloud. Enter your comments below, or on their site. Mine is above at the top of my blog.

Holy crap everything is mobile now

Don Draper and the Mad Men gang from Sterling Cooper return Sunday on AMC’s four-time Emmy Award winner, after a seemingly interminable 17 months away.

But a lot has changed in the 17 month hiatus. Not with the sixties, in which the show is set, but the ‘teens in which it is viewed. The Mad Men of the show were trying to grapple with the new medium of TV, which was a big departure from how people were spending time, and how advertisers spent money. They had a raw take on manliness, and a pretty much anti-PC bent to everything that transpired. I’ve written about it before (relating to another Vaux investment). They also wear pocket squares.

But in the here and now, the M’ad Men are on the scene (that’s Mobile ad men, and I’m among them) and there is another mass transformation in process.

Let me try to explain it this way: there is a scene in an early episode where John Hamm’s character driving upstate, listening to the radio (speeding, with a drink and no seat belt but that’s considered period charming). He hears a traffic report (backup on the bridge), and dismisses the information (ending up in a caught in the same). It was just the beginning of how ad-supported media would become capable of delivering information that is both timely and relevant, if not always used.

Today, a larger and larger audience will hear of Don Draper and Mad Men, watch his show, and comment on his show through mobile devices. It is the harbinger of the greatest transfer of time spent since the TV entered Don’s creative agency: out of no-where, people are now spending 10% of their total screen time on a mobile device. People are starting revolutions, looking up recipes, avoiding disasters, and of course watching MadMen videos on mobile devices. It’s going to get a lot bigger, at the expense of most other media out there. There are a few billion mobile devices in the world today, and it’s still growing.

I believe it will set off the greatest traffic jam of all time, in a digital media sense, anyways. Heres how it happened, in grossly oversimplified terms only I could dare to paint!

The publishers may have figured this out first. Companies like Time Inc, ABC, NBC Universal saw their audiences begin to shift. As their inventory of available pages evolved (aka circulation, or eyeballs in digital media speak), their mobile strategies got serious. They monetized through ad networks (see below), then other point solutions (see below also), some even tried to get online ad-networks to work in this new medium. Finally, they concluded that they needed a platform to run and maximize the yield on their entire mobile inventory. Lucky for them, there was one that served their needs.

The Early Mobile ad Networks were the first prospectors in this brave new worked of mobile, and they did well, stringing together exchanges of advertisers and publishers and taking a cut for matching them up. Though a hard business to differentiate in, the early winners were great exits. Enpocket to Nokia for a couple hundred. Third Screen to AOL for a little under fifty. Quattro to Apple for almost three hundred. Admob to Google for over seven. There are several more.

But a funny thing happened in almost all of those acquisitions: I truly believe the buyers really thought they were getting a technology platform that they could scale across their larger organizations, so they paid up. We’re talking billions of dollars in the hopes there was some tech under there somewhere that could give them a commanding lead in mobile.  But when I look at what those buyers are doing with the assets, I have to conclude they all didn’t get that. Not even the recent S-1 filings are all that impressive when it comes to ad tech. Facebook even acknowledged it as a risk- 122 times in their filing.

The point solutions came next into the market, trying to get attention (from anyone!) with their latest idea that would revolutionize mobile. Mobile Thumbprint (the equivalent of an internet cookie), video, full screen takeovers, SDK’s, app networks, real-time bidding and every other feature and business process under the sun has launched, and maybe saw Series A funding. Some were just too early. Most of them tried to give away the farm to get clients, and the VC money won’t last long with that model. Many are starting to top out, and will soon realize they have to bolt onto an enterprise with scale and relationships. It’s not going to be a pretty story as they get caught in the rush.

The Social Networks and social gamers have grown large and influential, but they too are noticing a problem- their audience is spending more and more time on mobile. Facebook is a game changer of epic proportions (here’s my take on a portion of that story) and they have massive advertising revenue from their online sites, but most of the leaders in the field have not figured out how to monetize mobile. If the trends continue (doubtless they will), they will be lined up at the mobile bridge in no time.

The Online ad networks may be themselves facing a rude surprise soon enough as more of their audience bolts to mobile. Online ad servers didn’t translate to mobile for a few very simple reasons, none of which I am about to give up here. But it doesn’t work, or it hasn’t until now and the bigs have been losing customers left and right because they could not get some basic mobile parameters to work. They need a bridge to mobile, and they will need it soon. Tailoring the existing online platforms hasn’t worked. They will need a bridge.

And so, the traffic jam begins to form at the bridge to mobile ad serving. Hundreds of online ad networks have to deliver on a mobile solution, but theirs have not worked to date. The remaining large publishers, and indeed the mediums and the smalls will have to finalize a sophisticated mobile strategy in order to compete as well. The point solutions who have entered the market will have to seek out scale. And they look across that yawning chasm to those that have made the move to mobile and are beginning to ramp (some thirty mobile ad networks, and about thirty of the largest publishers by my count) and they are thinking oh shit, if this trend continues I’m gonna get killed on this side of the divide.

It looks to me like there is only one bridge, and people are going to want to cross it sooner than later. Even a one-hand driving, seatbelt-scoffing, scotch-in-hand Don Draper would see that signpost up ahead.

Note: I founded, with Krish and Dan, and financed Mojiva, owner of the Mocean Mobile Ad Serving Platform. That is the bridge, IMHO.

Fred w phone. No unlimited data plan just yet...

There is a yawning gap emerging in the world and I think this gap will define the advancement of societies, the creation of jobs,  and even the happiness of populations in the decades to come: it is access to mobile data and I call it Flintstones vs. Jetsons. (shout out to April Rudin for the headline).

• Generation segue: Some of us remember Fred Flintstone. Worked in a quarry, drove a foot pedal car. Loved to bowl and eat steaks. Life was simple, and there was not a lot of reason to innovate. Pebbles and BamBam didn’t seem to be a big generational culture gap. A loveable guy in the Jackie Gleason vein.
• And his cartoon counterpart, George Jetson. Worked are Spacely, drove an automated space scooter. Astro walked himself, Rosie the Robot did the chores. Skyped with the office, used the tele-puter on his wrist. Loveable knucklehead is in a fast-moving world, but he kept adapting and he kept pace.

So my point, my belief, is that we have arrived at a crucial inflection point in our history, where people, countries, leaders (and entire industries) are choosing to go Flintsone or Jetson. And the catalyst for this decision is, clearly, the smart phone and the data it generates. The Flintstone are content with how things are. They have found ways to live until now without technology, and they resolved they would coast from here on in, whether in their carreers or their lives. Financial planners are on the list. So is much of the financial services (non retail) industry. Traditional media has hated the transition. KONY is no fan. Nor is Assad, or Mubarak. People of a certain age (but not all!). There are lots more.

Meanwhile, the Jetsons accelerate. The gap has not even yet begun to present itself.

mOcean at Mobile World Congress

If you have any doubt of how quickly this industry has grown, check out the Mojiva/Mocean (I am an investor) booth at The Mobile World Congress. MWC was, five years ago, just a bunch of suits from Nordic and Asian countries wielding flip phones for voice and text. Today, MWC is heralded as the biggest and the best mobile technology event in the world. According to conference organizer the GSMA, this year’s event played host to a record number of attendees, topping out at 67,000 visitors from 205 countries; an 11% increase over the 2011 show. The four-day conference and exhibition attracted mobile operators, software companies, equipment providers, Internet companies and media and entertainment organizations, as well as government delegations from across the globe. More than 50 percent of this year’s attendees hold C-level positions, including more than 3,500 CEOs.

Most telling perhaps, CEO’s were wearing jeans, T’s and blazers…

So here’s the shocker datapoint from cisco: 40% of the worlds smartphone data is consumed by… 1% of the world population. That means a small group of people are gaining an unfair (perhaps) advantage because of their access to information

• The subways are down: take the bus.
• This new place is overcrowded: here’s another local option.
• Gas prices are skyrocketing, but discounted in NJ this weekend.
• This client has spent xxx seconds on the site and is ready to take the next buying step
• Yo Twitter! The rally to unseat the government has been moved to the following sidestreet!

The examples go on and on. A few minutes saved. A better solution for the moment. A bit more background before the interview. A better way, on the way. Compound that millions of times over billions of people and guess what: you have a new gap between the haves and the have-nots. Food for thought before you make your choice between Flintstone or Jetson!

Largest on water cleanup- Ever.

News spread pretty quickly that the Shell Oil LNG platform destined for Long Island Sound sunk back into oblivion last week, likely for good. In its proposed form, it would have towered above all other structures on either side of that great body of water and inspired the curses of generations to follow. It should have been a procedural layup, with the interests of the Sound split between two states, both struggling with budget and resource constraints, and zero organized advocacy to oppose the revenue generating and cost saving proposal.

Now the legend of how that didn’t happen continues to grow, just as quietly as it snuck up on everybody before the battle began.

Begin with Leah Schmalz, a delightful director of legal and legislative affairs for Save the Sound, a program of Connecticut Fund for the Environment who began the opposition eight years ago with meager resources and virtually zero platform to get the word out. She picked her punches wisely.

Then, out of no where, Kayak for a Cause jumped in, ostensibly because ”Save the Sound” had the brand that most directly fit the core values of the organization. But as KFAC learned more, both organizations realized the symbiosis of their existences. What followed was a virtual marching band of support for Leah and her work at STS. When STS needed to get the word out, KFAC designed an “on the water clean up” over 14 miles of sound. When STS needed a platform to gather more supporters, KFAC was there with a stage, a microphone,and a tremendous crowd ready to listen. When STS needed promotion during a crucial state senate vote, KFAC rallied its 10,000 donors to flood the capital with expressions of concern. And when STS needed financial resources to back up Leah, KFAC was there with five figure support, year after year.

Was is most amazing, perhaps, is that all of this was started with nothing, and done for love: One simple bet, and a few guys redirecting the proceeds to charity became an annual tradition along the Sound.

It’s now hard to fathom that KFAC has always been an entirely volunteer organization which somehow fields a crew of 500 committed souls every year to manage the logistics of a modern day Normandy with a beach party at the end. The leadership and organizational talents of this group are stunning. People like Shirleen Dubuque and Steve Showalter organize provisions, supplies and people with sublime, 11th hour hijinx. Kim Beaumont at DownUnder and Dave Haddox from Purdue have likely trained hundreds of kayakers to be safe enough to make the voyage. Tad Jones worked stage miracles for years, packing thousands of people into legendary beach parties that rallies the troops around the charities. Patrick Sikes was a master magician at logistics. Amy Rule and Kathy Foreman wrangle hundreds of volunteers to do undesirable work details at unmentionable hours. And Adam Uhrynowski and Brian Russell have this magic touch capturing the whole thing on film for us to replay over and again in the long winter months of  frozen water.

All of this energy was harnessed and directed to something good, for years on end. And then last week…

“In sending a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission requesting to vacate their certificates, Broadwater has signaled that their proposed floating gas plant is finally dead,” said Leah Schmalz. “Eight years ago, the citizens of Connecticut and New York recognized that this proposed project was not good for our environment or our livelihood,” Schmalz said. “It took years of fighting, partnering with federal and state officials on both sides of Long Island Sound, but now we can say that the health and safety of our Sound will not be compromised by the proposed industrial complex.” More here

Years ago, another KFAC treasure named Morley quoted Pete Seeger  in “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” from the stage, as she had witnessed KFAC grow from dozens to hundreds and then thousands.

I’ve been surprised by some good things happening in my lifetime. Sometimes quite suddenly.

Imagine a big see-saw, with a basketful of rocks sitting on one end. That end is down on the ground. At the other end, up in the air, is a basket half full of sand. Some of us are trying to fill it, using teaspoons. Most folks laugh at us. “Don’t you know the sand is leaking out even as you put it in?”

We say, that’s true, but we’re getting more people with teaspoons all the time. One of these days that basket of sand will be full up and you’ll see this whole see-saw just tip the opposite way. People will say, “Gee, how did it happen so suddenly?”

Us, and our little teaspoons.

Leah Schmalz is now working on controlling emissions and ecoli bloom from the Bridgeport harbor. Kayak for a Cause launches for its twelfth year on July 21th. And Long Island Sound is that much nicer because they do what they do.

I just flew over America again.

I went to LA and was pitched in the Palisades Room at the Santa Monica Fairmont for two straight days and all I ever saw were VC’s, bankers and their cars rolling up to the front entryway. We didn’t see any Occupy groups, but they would have had a blast I’m sure. I took a break and saw my Choate roommate Michael Scott for dinner in West Hollywood and it was plenty more of the same with a few stars and starlets thrown in (not typical VC fare, that).

All good and all nice people. But I have this palpable sense that, slightly below the surface of the Brave Face of America (any in many towns between LAX and JFK), there is a shitstorm brewing among people who are tired and distraught. It’s probably about jobs, and the fact that we really don’t have enough of them to go around. That and the facts that, despite the 1,000 attendees at the Monty Conference, we are throttling the engine to create them. The coming world war will be an all-out global war for good jobs, says Gallup’s chairman Jim Clifton. I couldn’t agree more, and they won’t come from shovel ready Government civil works, nor from meaningless tax credits and incentives.

More proof of the disconnect irony comes from the Daily Beast’s Zach Karabel: The last time the markets were at their current levels—the tech-heavy NASDAQ index is also at its highest since the Internet bubble burst in 2001—sentiment was radically different. In May of 2008, Bear Stearns had nearly collapsed, only to be bought on the cheap by J.P. Morgan, and the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers was a nightmare scenario that had barely been contemplated. The housing bubble in the U.S. was clearly deflating, but unemployment had not yet spiked. And while many believed a recession was looming, few forecast a financial crisis. Still, the outlook was cloudy at best, and a descent from 13,000 seemed likely. The strength in financial markets, and stocks especially, is not a proxy for real-world economies.

It’s been said before and needs to be said again: Wall Street isn’t Main Street. The Dow can be 13,000 or 14,000 and it won’t matter a whit to the millions of unemployed and underemployed. Few jobs are created by rising equity prices, and companies will not hire unless there is stronger demand, no matter how high their shares climb. They will sooner pay a dividend to shareholders, buy back stock, or acquire competitors than hire extra bodies that are not necessary for managing current business or creating new ventures.

And that’s the root issue: though America has a GDP of about 3x the nearest competitors (being japan, UK, France, Germany, Italy) its growth has been anemic compared to China, who still lags the top five. We spend too much, we don’t take in enough, and it’s becoming a bad running joke in world lending corridors (where are those)? As any creditcard will remind you, in 20-30 years, 10% growth compounded beats just about anything. But last time we heard footsteps, we hit the dot.com boom and pulled away with innovation and productivity gains never seen before.

That’s what is needed now. And I think Mobile, social and sharing will be three places where innovation will lead.

Ride share with this gang?

I’ve been spending some time learning more about the sharing economy and some of its players. As an angel investor accustomed to clearly defined problems, grand solutions and natural revenue models, it seems like the beginning of the story. Kinda like a lot of people showing up in munchkin land- somewhat disoriented, terribly excited, not sure of the path forward.

Dorothy was pioneer when it came to couchsurfing (wimdu perhaps?), but she woke up in a terribly different world. She had to make snap judgments about people, and she had very little context to help (The Good Witch of the North notwithstanding). She was taking very real risks with herself, her dog, and her ruby slippers. But she had to rely on her wits: no help from web 2.0 and social media to help her make big decisions on risk  (one of the great segues of all time folks).

Nowadays, there are more ways to make an assessment about people. People vouch for each other on sites like LinkedIn, Honestly, and Connect.me. People accumulate likes and helpfuls from sites like TripAdvisor, Facebook and Yelp. And some products go further, combining those elements plus offline verification to develop multi-layers scores, like TrustCloud (I’m an investor). Through all these inputs, we have begun to infer things about people based on their actual behavior over time. Here’s how a well-designed trust solution might have helped with her key judgments:

1. The Scarecrow- great domain expertise and happy to assist. Probably a contributor to Yelp or TripAdvisor and frequently tagged helpful.
2. The TinMan- experienced and analytical, probably has people vouching for him like the static inputs of Honestly and Connect me
3. The Lion- I have this guy tagged as a reputation guy. Very proud and looking to clean up what people think of him. Uses Reputation.com a lot.
4. The Wizard- He’s all about influence, which means he spends most of this time on klout.
5. Dorothy- a teambuilder and leader. Probably destined for LinkedIn. But having trouble verifying place of residence!

The point is (and I have taken a veritable yellow brick road to get there) that we no longer live in Oz. There is real, relevant data out there that when properly gathered, weighted, and presented can really help the sharing economy navigate their challenges. (Here’s a great blog from Charles Greene on Trust). But no single point of reference and no rigid formula will serve the Trust needs of every community, let alone every situation.

This is a challenge and a journey that requires multiple layers, great heuristics, and the power of the network effect. (which is one super reason for all these layers to work together). I look forward to watching how this evolves, and who gets to the Emerald City first.

TY New Sign: speech is over!

Continued from Moneyball and TY #1… Choate will soon honor Baseball legend Tom Yankus in an as-yet-undisclosed grand gesture. But lifetime winning averages on the diamond are one thing. Winning averages over a lifetime are quite another. As Rod Serling once said, there were signs along the way.

So thirty years on, what I have learned is that the signs he gave us, and the strategies we executed, were actually great lessons in life.

One note: in an act of stunning simplicity and ultimate cunning, TY ”changed the signs” every year- to the same signs! From from 1958 to 2010! No one on another team ever stole, in spite of their simplicity, because no one would have been stupid enough to use the same ones every year. And as TY adds “We made them simple to be certain that OUR guys got them right!”

Here are a few of my favorites:

1. Thumb to chest was a Delayed steal. A unique move where the baserunner waits until the long after a normal stealer would take off, and then takes off. No-one alerts anyone of the steal, and the result is everyone on the opposing team yells at each other. No sweeter song than listening to that while standing on second base. The lesson was to Stay alert, you may catch them napping.
2. Red hankee out on the clipboard was a suicide squeeze. I loved the finality of it. We needed a run, and we had a guy on third. Everyone had to execute and it was a walk in the park: anyone chickens out and its an out, a double play, out a bat in the head. The lesson, of course, have confidence in yourself.
3. Arms Behind Back was a hit and run. It was a great way to get things moving, and take a chance when the upside is there. A missed sign here meant a sure out, but execution meant you could score from first. The lesson was to measure the risk against the upside (or downside)… and run like hell.
4. Hand to the Shin was a bunt. It was a way to get things started, to build a little momentum and confidence and perhaps manufacture a run. It taught me that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and taking it bit by bit was not a bad way to get things started. Particularly with younger ballplayers, getting a little confidence under the belt was key.
5. And finally, hands on hips meant, invariably, “kid, you still have a lot to LEARN”!

Did I have any clue that, as I took my lead off first and peered toward the Choate bench for TY’s next move, he was actually giving me signs I would use the rest of my life. The way I thought ahead, maybe so. Which would explain why I was picked off first once or twice, daydreaming. But, by and large I put the signs to good use. Still do.

Next: TY the interview:What did he kids teach teach the coach? And finally, likely, some details on what’s coming down on the honors front.