Miles To Go.

DC in Bloom, early morning

The shots of DC mornings have been rolling in from friends this week with cherry blossoms in full bloom. Got me thinking.

I once had a great mentor in Washington DC who simply adored Johnny Walker Red. Pounded the stuff, well into his seventies and deep into the night. Though we were 50 years his junior, we tried to keep up while he showed us around the social scene of DC in the 80′s: big ballrooms full of taffeta gowns, art auctions with amazing numbers, crazy black gas guzzling limos. We made a lot of noise. Thankfully, he paid.

But, he had one rule: breakfast is at 8.

Now matter how late the night went, no matter how far we walked with Johnny Walker the night before, we all got to the breakfast table by 8, and to work by 9. He went off to practice as a partner in a very large law firm. We were in school. But the bargain stuck.

And so, I’ve gone on to my world of creating, building and leading start ups with some great co-founders over the years – most of them slightly younger than I. We often blend their urgency with my long range vision, their naturally updated thinking with my tried and true processes. Their tequila to my Burgundy. But somehow, it works, and often the work spills deep into the night. And the next night. And the next.  Much like those parties in Washington I remember so well. But every morning as the sun rises on our start up and every other throughout the country, we have to answer the bell. Make the great pitch. Push the next release. Counter the next punch from the marketplace. There simply is no room for sleeping in. No tolerance for being less than sharp when presenting or hosting at trade show or conference. No excuse for being late. Sorry, doesn’t work that way.

Yes, the late nights of my younger days marauding through the streets of NW Washington had some enduring value. But only because of that one hard truth: the bill is due in the morning. So do what you must to blow off steam. Enjoy yourself, often to the fullest. But never, ever let that effect how you perform the next day, or how others see your performance.

It wouldn’t be right.

(this was written well before 8 btw)

Great name!

Yes, Marissa Mayer is out there honing her strategy for a next move, and lots of buzz is around Mobile Ad-Tech. I’m quite keen to those developments, because of my activity in the space… you might say.

But before her time, Yahoo made an offer that prompted one of the best “What Would you Do” conversations of our generation. I caught the gist of it at during Peter Thiel’s talk at SXSW, but Inc. does a better job of describing it here:

…Facebook was just two years old. It was a college site with roughly eight or nine million people on it. And, though it was making $30 million in revenue, it was not profitable. “And we received an acquisition offer from Yahoo for $1 billion,” Thiel said.   

“Both Briar and myself on balance thought we probably should take the money,” recalled Thiel. “But Zuckerberg started the meeting like, ‘This is kind of a formality, just a quick board meeting, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. We’re obviously not going to sell here’.” 

At the time, Zuckerberg was 22 years old.

Thiel said he remembered saying, “We should probably talk about this. A billion dollars is a lot of money.” They hashed out the conversation. Thiel said he and Breyer pointed out: “You own 25 percent. There’s so much you could do with the money.”Thiel recalled Zuckerberg said, in a nutshell: “I don’t know what I could do with the money. I’d just start another social networking site. I kind of like the one I already have.”

Now for the What Would You Do part- a/k/a- WWYD.

If I were Mark Zuckerberg, I would have done the same. His talent is towering, his vision is far reaching. I would also say his youth might lead some to say he didn’t know what he didn’t know, but Zuckerberg probably did know. He had one great idea, and the likelihood of having another of such epic scale and impact was remote. He knew that lucky and good are not the same thing, and the former rarely strikes twice. He was, and is, part of an asset light generation that I have written about before.

But, I am not Mark Zuckerberg. Not even close.

I am not a sole founder (um, was Zuck?) and I would not imagine to be able to run something myself without the great work of those talented people around me. I might have other ideas I’d like to back, and more entrepreneurs I’d like to work with. I also deeply respect the stakes held by each of my shareholders, and would give due consideration to what they may want as well. Everyone has a number. And working for Yahoo, especially the new Yahoo, might be quite interesting. I may have hit the bid, not being Zuck.

But most of all, I love the fact that it was a ten minute Board meeting, or he thought it should be!

By the way, What would you do?

I’m about the x’s and O’s. She’s about 1′s and 0′s. (Notre dame photo)

I was saddened to hear of the death of Manti Teo’s girlfriend. It was a moving story of courage and recovery for Manti, and  demonstrated the empathy possible in a close knit nation called Notre Dame.  A truly moving story in time for the Heisman Media machine’s annual award.

And after the fact, it turned out to be all bullshit.

Manti was catfished in a hoax, whereby the girl he met online was… not what she appeared. I have written about this phenomenon extensively since the movie Catfish hit the screens a few years ago. Manti was focussed on x’s and o’s, she was all about 1′s and 0′s. If I recall, thousands of people wore lei’s to mourn the loss (of his mother as well) at a game, and the cameras couldn’t get enough of it. It has happened since, and it will happen more until people realize that, for all the time they spend online, they have to build and monitor a trust system they can rely on, or face the consequences of what is called Peer to Peer “P2P” risk. In short, buying through the classifieds has risks that don’t exist at Bergdorfs. And there is simply no way that could have happened if she had a TrustCard, or he had asked for one. DISCLOSURE: I am an angel investor in the sharing economy, including TrustCloud.

We are being more mobile and social everyday. believe me, I sit at the vortex of some 100,000,000,000 mobile impressions per month at Mojiva. People should start growing accustomed to being fooled with 1′s and 0′s, or not be shocked with the consequences. Manti is a telling tale for what is surely coming for most of America (except the jaded metro-skeptics) as we use mobile and social to power our interactions. Consider what Manti represents:

• Most of America still harbors vestiges of Classic Innocence that wants- indeed hopes- that what you see is what you get.
• Time demands and focus elsewhere – Manti had his dreams, and he spent 99% of his time (ok, still not enough) on his football. An expert on one field, but a rookie dater. And not much of a fact checker either.
• Doesn’t have time to track down all he sees online – and who does? And how would you?

It can suck to get catfished. Because we WANT to trust the peer to peer relationships we develop online. Sometimes, it means the car you rented on a sharing site comes back smelly. Sometimes worse. I’ve written extensively about the whoopsies in the Sharing economy here, here and here. Kickstarter has its case of the week, where Seth Quest may or may not have been forthcoming with his bona fides. And now on to dating, the ultra peer network  where Barry Diller will hook you up with a CRAZY BLIND DATE. Hmmm, can you say risk?

This will continue to accelerate as sure as mobile and social keep generating more P2P opportunities. And the risk will not be mitigated until there is a portable trust solution that people can rely on to quickly vet P2P prospects, reduce friction in transactions, and provide a trail of digital footprints if something goes wrong.

Until then, would someone please get Manti a real date?

BTW; The P2P networks have been working on trust within their networks, but unless they become the AMAZON of P2P, people will begin to demand that their virtuous data is partially theirs, and easily portable. More on Data to the people another time!

Meet Fake Grimlock

Mary Meeker just called it: Sharing is now a megatrend.

In her wildly popular bi-annual prognosis, Meeker points to the demise of asset-heavy life especially among 20 somethings wherebye sharing economy and  smartphones free time and money, creating an asset-light generation.

So how does this relate to virtual dinosaurs and dating? Hang on, let me tell a good story. Dialing it back a bit, I was watching Cat in the Hat with my son this morning and began to wonder about how that famous tech character might teach us something about a this big trend, now that Mary called it. Suppose I pose these questions abut the tech world’s favorite virtual persona Fake Grimlock… as only Dr. Seuss could:

Would you meet him in a mall? Would you pass him in the hall?
Would you let him drive your car? Would you let him drive it far?
Would you let him watch your pet? Would he eat them, hmm, sure bet?
Would you let him tutor the kids? Could you, would you blink an eyelid?
Would you let him sleep upon your couch? Would he scare you with those teeth- Ouch!
Would you date him late at night? Would you lend him money? Right!

Which means, essentially, if you were going to do a “Sharing Transaction” with an unknown Peer, do you trust the person behind fake grimlock? He’s extremely well known in a small circle of tech entrepreneurs (and deservedly so- he’s hilarious in a CAPSLOCK kinda way). But my point is, there are millions and millions of Fake Grimlocks out there.

From Spencer 323232 on gMail to Pineapple88 on EBay, people have for more than a decade created and maintained personas and avatars for everything from virtual gaming to very real Craig’s listings. Taking it back to Dot.com days, we used to hear the reason the internet was popular was … no one knew you were a dog. People could go online (Chatrooms!) under any handle they chose and behave pretty much with impunity. It was the digital equivalent of turning out the lights at a teen mixer. Stupid ideas came and went, as did plenty of fortunes and not a few great companies. But the ability to take on an alias, or even build an avatar in another parallel world lingered as a quaint benefit from back in the day. To some gaming sites, it’s a hell of a business that virtual world.

But now comes along Social, Mobile and Local where a billion people share their profiles, activities, photos and innermost thoughts with perhaps way too many friends. Privacy was redefined, or its boundaries were pushed out by the devils favorite vice, vanity. Rachel Botsman called it early with her Colaborative Consumption moniker, and subsequently has talked about trust within peer networks a lot. Now, as big data companies are starting to realize this data is meaningful, strong voices are pointing out that people should own their own data. Tim Berners Lee is one such voice, having started what I call the “Data to the People” movement with this Guardian interview. Add to this a rich mix of a green consciousness, underemployed/over-indebted college graduates and a sluggish economy and you get the Sharing Economy a/k/a the very more wordy Collaborative Consumption. Al it needs now is some glue, or as Neal Gorenflo recently said in a post to Shareable Magazine the dramatic transformation of the economy that’s needed is not going to happen until a large coalition begins to work together.

This is precisely why companies like TrustCloud, Connect.me  and MiiCard are helping stitch together a trust and reputation metric for the Peer economy. Basically, in 2012 everyone knows you are  dinosaur, and if you are transparent enough with it, more and more people are ok with it. So, for argument’s sake, let’s say Grimlock does not want to reveal his identity, but he wants to claim credit for all the good things he has done online. He has a ton of influence and follows (you can see that from twitter or Klout) but maybe he also contributes to Stack Overflow and helps out on GitHub under Grimmy22. Maybe he maintains an ebay account where he is top rated as a seller, but under FakeyBoy101. He has a few verifiable email addresses, and actually lives somewhere under the name Human B. Good. What if Human B Good claimed all that data and consolidated in one place- without actually divulging that he was Grimmy22, FakeyBoy101 or any other avatar. But he claimed the credit for all the good things he does for the community under whatever name. If he was transparent enough to verify and share his human identity, he’d be golden, or the human behind him would be. And all without blowing the connection to the mysterious Grimlock. Here’s my point: thousands of people every week are coming to that conclusion and getting TrustCards.

So… let’s look again at these peer transactions

Would you meet him in a mall? Would you pass him in the hall? 

This is the perfect CraigsList question. If Grimlock offered me $100 cash for my old iPhone in some dodgy exchange in the mall parking lot, it’s a pass. To much risk there. But if Human B. Good made the same offer (and had claimed all the virtuous data Grimock threw off), it would be a different story.

Would you let him drive your car? Would you let him drive it far?

This is the GetAround/Relay Rides/ Ridepost question. As Anotonin Leonard’s partner Benjamin Tinq (both OuiShare guys) remarked, “Ten years after Jeremy Rifkin wrote The Age of Access, shared mobility is fundamentally changing the way people think about car ownership, among other things. Especially the younger ones, to whom owning a car has lost its appeal of independance, which is now embodied by electronic and social media devices. So you want me to hand over the keys to  a $30k asset so Grimlock and his monster buddies can go up skiing Vermont for the weekend, and he will give me… $30 per day? Can you say asymmetrical risk? And for some extra credit reading, has anyone really looked at their insurance coverage when you turn your car into a small business. The answer is pretty disappointing (and the backup from the sponsoring sharing network won’t be good for much either, especially as that risk scales). But Human B. Good give me a better feeling about his identity, interactions and behavior with his TrustScore. Perhaps things would have been better for HighGear had they such a system in place. RideShare is already doing this, and more will follow I think.

Would you let him watch your pet? Would he eat them, hmm, sure bet?

Talk about precious assets! I would not turn Baxter over to Grimlock for fear of dinner! Rover.com is already onto this, and has trustscores flowing out to their 70,000 dog watchers nationwide. Essentially, people Human B. Good would get the job, and Baxter would come home safe (and incidentally, my home would be safe, seeing as how Human B. Good has the keys to the house).

Would you let him sleep upon your couch? Would he scare you with those teeth- Ouch!

This one comes right out of AirBnB’s book- and Wimdu, LoveHomeSwap, HomeAway, InterHome and lots of others. While millions of room nights have been booked, as the early adopted give way to a more mass acceptance of “crashing on the couch”, so to will a demand grow for “who is this”, and from both sides of the transaction. AirBnB has had its “Ej Incident” and the “Hookers on Holiday“, which at the very least left a bad taste (sorry) for the hosts. I’ve heard there are plenty more where those came from. But there is risk on the guest side as well, just ask the poor blokes who wired in advance for their Fun and Sun Holiday in France and got… (sorry) just pictures for their trouble (the house did not exist), and the hosts, well what do you think? Again, no keys in this scenario for Grimlock. Human B. Good, more likely.

Would you date him late at night? Would you lend him money? Right!

So after the roundup of the “Sharing Companies”, it makes sense to imagine the other places that a trust and identity system could help other Peer economies. While I have heard stories of young ladies throwing themselves at Grimlock at his personal appearances, I’m not so sure that is scalable. Dating is the ultimate peer transaction, and one where a few simple verifications would do a world of good. To wit: a) does the guy really make $100k+ and b) are those photos of the girl recent or retouched? Likewise, peer lending could be greatly enhanced with a similar solution. Of course, the incidence and transaction data that flows back through the intake API becomes crucial to the richness of the scores.

So to wrap this one in a bow… there is a great saying about trust and context: I would trust my dog with my life, but not with my hamburger.

Grimlock has done a good many great things for our tech community across a few social networks. He is known to the community, and he adds to it. And that’s fine for the virtual world. But for the rest of us, so much of our lives pass between the virtual and real worlds. And many of us have piled up so much virtuous data, it’s time to start harvesting it, claiming it and organizing it in one place that makes it useful to a variety of networks.

We all have our data from our own versions of Grimlock out there. Start using it.

 Full disclosure: I mention TrustCloud here. I am an angel investor in same. 

This is a popular post from my prior blog, revived for Miles to Go…I originally called it Herbert Sharpless Spencer and the 1,400 mile crawl across France. It’s true testament to the family traditions of gritty determination, hyperbolic story-telling, and wandering around aimlessly in the French countryside.

Legends die hard in the Spencer family, especially when they are based oceans away and told by grandparents that are beyond questioning. A trip through the French countryside with my father clarified a lot, and embarrassed no-one.

Herbert Sharpless Spencer grew up in a coal mine in central Pennsylvania, as this was all that was left by our forebears. By the time he was of an age he could lie about his age, he volunteered for what appeared to be a much cushier job: rifleman in the US Army’s Big Red One commanded by General Pershing. His proficiency hitting squirrels (for dinner!) at 50 yards with a .22 rifle qualified him for the job, no doubt. Compared to the strip mine, it must have seemed like a nice trade. Obviously never out of the county- let alone the country- Herbert arrived in St. Malo, France in 1918 and was promptly sent to the Argonne Forest to an area called St. Mihiel, where the Germans had been terrifying the French by their proximity to Paris. (Actually, :30 by car for us, but we were flying.) It was warfare at its worst, stagnant lines of barbed wire and trench lasting for tens if not scores of miles uninterrupted.

So Herbert is in France for not longer than a week, stationed in St. Mihiel for not much longer than a few days. He hears the all clear, rises out of the trench, and promptly takes four bullets in the legs, losing one completely and seriously maiming the other. He is given up for dead. But, of course, he isn’t. By his telling, despite what must have been excruciating pain, he bound his (last) leg with his shirt, fashioned two crutches out of fence posts and started walking as best he could.

He finds a stream, drinks profusely from the collapsible army issue cup (now a Spencer talisman) and somehow finds the will and strength to save himself. Powerful force, that self-preservation. Downstream, he happened upon a farm house, and mustered the nerve to knock on the door. It opened, and he came to a tough realization: he spoke no French. True to form, the woman spoke no English, and shut him out. I’ve been treated rudely and felt out of place in some far away places in my life, but nothing like that. And no, the French aren’t usually that bad. But Herbert kept walking to a monastery he called St. Michel and somehow pulled through.

I had been to St. Michel a few times, on the Normandy coast a few hours drive outside Paris. I had shared those experiences with my Dad, and was able to bring him there recently with my publicist Greg and his Dad Paul. The place is glorious, as I imagine has been for 1,000 years. It’s also too far for a recently maimed rifleman to crawl to if he starts from the Argonne forest, even if he did start in 1918. My dad came to this conclusion on his own. “Perhaps there’s another St. Michel”, I suggested.

We spent the next week looking, with stops at the beaches of Normandy and the streets of Paris, just the four of us finding precious experiences together and generally enjoying ourselves immensely. (view short film). The culmination was our journey was the Argonne Forest and a field outside a town called St. Mihiel where 86 years prior my grandfather was shown no great respect by a German machine gunner. After a picnic (Dad is now a pate aficionado) on the banks of the Meuse where Herbert may well have dipped for drink we made our way into town to inquire about. It was a sleepy place, not to much changed from back in the day, I imagine. We were directed toward the old town, where amongst classic French row houses and walled gardens, we discover a monastery. Apparently, it was the Army hospital during the war, and was adjacent to a wonderful church. The name, of course: St. Michel.

Herbert Spencer had crawled across town, not across France. But his wounds were real, as was his valor. I was moved to see his son and my father piece it all together. It was magic.

This ain’t easy either

I’ve spent a lot of time with a legendary Broadway producer, working on an epic project that has been documented before: A Line in the Sand. We’re still workin’ on it.

The development process has been a pretty interesting study for me in how an entirely different species functions. In my travels for ALITS, we often were impressed not by the differences (between Islam and Christianity, between Americans and Arabs, between people with oil and people who buy oil) but by the similarities between.Well, taking a moment to think about it, I realized that based on what Nelle has taught me, Broadway and Silicon Alley have a lot to teach each other as well. Here are just a few of my favorites:

• It’s hard to make a living, it’s easier to make a killing. This is perhaps the most true of the Broadway maxims. Bad shows flop, and quickly. Good shows go on and on, recoup and payout like mad. There isn’t much in the middle. Much is true in Silicon Alley. Startups are such a tricky game, and usually require so much more capital than founders can muster, it is a rare bird indeed that escape from that jungle with all his feathers. Conversely, it’s actually hard just to develop a product and plod along these days, making a decent wage or earnings to feed a family and put them through school. It’s damn near impossible, in terms of the odds. Ironically, only the winners (and the good shows) are picked up in the media, and it seems like it was so easy. 
• Do you want it Tuesday, or do you want it good? I can’t tell you how many times I have heard this from writers, who remind me you could have 100 people work on Gone with the Wind and it would be finished sooner. But perhaps not better. Likewise, mobile apps, websites and all manner of digital media solution are never masterpieces: they are works in process, at best. My advice, don’t expect to get it perfect, get it out and start talking to customers about it.
• Stars attract rock stars, and the opposite. If you think it’s brutally hard to recruit star talent in Silicon Alley, try Broadway. The best way, the only way to get it is to start with… a star. A great script begets a great Producer, who attracts a great Director, who has stars that love to work with him/her etc. No different with co-founders and first hires in start ups.
• Good to be tough, better to be nice too. Oh god the things I have heard come out of the mouths of seemingly otherwise charming and polite people in theatre. Spicy! But I’ve always heard it delivered in the kindest, gentlest ways possible. No one actually gets visibly upset, even though they are bleeding buckets. So, I would chalk that up to being superb at your craft and willing to defend your interests, but doing it in a well thought out, perhaps classy manner actually gets better results.
• Leverage a good review. Know when you’re rollin’. Theatre folks are good at this, entrepreneurs perhaps less so. They know when they have the leverage of some momentum, and they move accordingly. I think too many entrepreneurs are to busy executing to recognize this.

Anyways, that’s what I’ve learned up to now about Broadway. Anyways, maybe it helps somewhere.