Master of 500 Hats

Barack Obama: American Stories, American Solutions

a Story of Hope & Change, from the 44th President of the United States of America:

Help Make His Story, Our Story.

Help Make History.

SlideShare App is Live on LinkedIn Platform!

Congrats to LinkedIn and SlideShare on the LinkedIn Platform launch... now you can share & display your powerpoint presentations directly on your LinkedIn profile using the new SlideShare LinkedIn app.

See more about LinkedIn Apps & SlideShare in this video by Rashmi Sinha, SlideShare co-founder & CEO:

and here's Reid talking about LinkedIn Platform:

Hawaii Here We Come.

Now this is what i call work.

Me & Saya & the kids are headed to Hawaii in the morning. We're arriving at Kona on the Big Island, spending a few days at the Fairmont Orchid to relax & schmooze w/ hoi-polloi @ The Lobby. 

Saya's parents & grandma are also flying in from Tokyo to meet us there & see the grandkids.  should be lots O' fun :)

RIP Good Times my ass... let's get this party started.

What is Design all about? See Slide 37 for the Horrible Truth... holy crap.

wow.  gotta say, this guy has balls... as in cojones the size of cantaloupes.

Dave Cortright, if i'm fighting a guerrilla war and need a design done that will kill El Presidente, you are my man.

best slide i've ever seen to get a point across... bar none.

a great vision is:

1. focused on people
2. defined by outcomes they want
3. ordered in a stack-ranked list

- Dave Cortright

EBAY Q3 2008 Earnings: MarketPlace Rev$ Flat (note to mgmt: spin out PayPal, or expect to get taken over)

thx to Keith Teare for uploading eBay Q3 2008 Earnings ppt to SlideShare:

1. Marketplace revenue flat and/or decaying 
2. PayPal revenue flat this qtr *but* Y/Y growth, still plenty of potential
3. Skype shows surprising growth; maybe not bad a deal as ppl think
4. aside from acquisitions, still severe lack of imagination at the top
5. if they don't spin out PayPal+BillMeLater, someone else should LBO this sucker before mgmt drives it into a ditch. 

sigh.  so much potential being wasted. but hey, they do awesome powerpoints.

eBay 2008, Q3 Earnings

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: earnings ebay)

Got SchadenFreude? Profit from Other's Despair -- Enter the SlideShare "Credit Crisis in 30 Slides Contest" (Judges: Cuban, Varian, Kedrosky, Wilson)

Can you explain why High Finance is/isn't Going to Hell in a Handbasket in 30 slides or less?  Terrific. 

Enter the SlideShare Credit Crisis Contest (C^3) and you might win an iTouch, Nano, or Shuffle.  (yeah we know the prizes are cheap, but listen up mofo we're trying to preserve cash)

The Credit Crisis in 30 slides contest

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Credit Crisis Contest judges include:

• Mark Cuban (Dallas Mavericks owner / Entrepreneur)
• Hal Varian (Google Chief Economist)
• Paul Kedrosky (Finance Guru & Blogger)
• Fred Wilson (Venture Capitalist Pauper)

Mark Cuban	Hal Varian	Paul Kedrosky	Fred Wilson

just remember folks: the Startup you Save might be your Own.

Fear is the Mind Killer of the Silicon Valley Entrepreneur (we must be Muad'Dib, not Clark Kent)

Okay folks... i am getting really fucking tired of all your

negative shit. 

yeah, i know it's gonna be tough.  and the credit crunch / downturn / whatchamacallit has already changed the balance of power from entrepreneur to investor in less than a month.  if you are lucky enough to *GET* financing, your term sheets are gonna suck ass (learn about liquidation preferences & protective provisions). if you are running an existing startup, you are probably going to have to cut spending, cut hiring, and you may even end up firing people / doing layoffs.  and then you pay taxes and then you die. 

sorry, life's a bitch.

but listen up:

• Silicon Valley isn't Wall Street.
• Internet Startups are not mortgage finance companies.
• and... Entrepreneurs are not supposed to be Clark Kent.

in other words... WAKE. the FUCK. UP.

if you came to Silicon Valley to do a startup (or to join one), it ain't always fun & games.  this isn't Disneyland, or a Harlequin romance novel (unless of course you're Tom Perkins).  you don't always win every hand of poker, you don't always get a free lunch, an Aeron chair, or free child care. 

the popular [mis]conception of startups being free rides to a pile of cash and/or stock options is just so much horse shit.

twenty years ago, i moved out to Silicon Valley after graduating from college.  i did not do so with the intent to get rich quick, but neither to live among sheep.  i came here for geeks & technology, ultimate frisbee, and a free-wheeling, entrepreneurial spirit that has electrified the valley since The Traitorous Eight walked out of Shockley Semiconductor over 50 years ago and started a Revolution.

while i don't profess to understand credit or capital markets, i do know that internet startups cost less money than ever to get started. and unless i missed something, there are more people online now than ever, spending more money online than ever.  and i doubt any of these trends will likely reverse in the long-term -- lower costs, more people online, more e-commerce.  doesn't that seem like a pretty good environment for building new online businesses?  if not, then what the fuck are you doing here?  go back home & get a safe job in insurance or mortgage appraisals (oh, wait a sec...)

the long-term macro trend of growing global internet e-commerce has been the foundation of my own personal startup bets, and why i plan to continue to invest going forward.  the companies and people i bet on HAVE to be both optimistic & opportunistic, if only because THE ODDS AGAINST STARTUPS SUCK ***ALL*** THE TIME, not just in downturns.  you damn well *better* have a positive attitude, or you're just never going to get out of bed in the morning.

you mean the current market environment scares you?

try making payroll on credit card advances when you're carrying over $100K in personal debt (been there).  try dealing with your servers being stolen on new year's day while you're in the middle of trying to close an acquisition (yeah, that sucked too). try looking yourself in the face every morning, knowing 10-20 people depend on you for their jobs & families & kids, and feeling like you're completely inadequate to the task and can't hide it (every day for 3 years).

being an entrepreneur is a friggin' FEAR FACTORY, and a living nightmare every day of the week. this is nothing new.  4 out of 5 small businesses fail within the first few years, and the odds aren't that much different for startups.  you are going to be embarrassed, ashamed, labeled as an idiot, shunned, ridiculed, and occasionally driven from the village with pitchforks.  on average, YOU ARE GOING TO FAIL. MULTIPLE TIMES, in NEW & INTERESTING ways.

GET USED TO IT.

in fact, the more you are used to failing -- and failing fast, with data on how you fail -- the better off you will be.  for a great presentation on how to use speed & fast failure as the ultimate startup weapon, check out mike cassidy's presentation on SPEED: The Ultimate Startup Weapon.

Best Strategy Is Speed (Startup2Startup May 2008)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: stylus.innovation xfire)

and while we're at it, let me take on this issue of "conserving cash".  personally, i think it's the wrong message.  the point is not to spend less cash.  the point is to FIND YOUR FRIGGIN' BUSINESS MODEL.  if you know which direction you're going, it's ok to RUN... on the other hand, if you have no friggin clue where you going, it doesn't matter how slow you crawl you ain't gonna get there. you can slow down your spend until you figure out your business, but once you DO understand it, then by all means STEP ON THE GAS!  use your cash effectively to build product features, expand marketing, and hopefully use cash-flow positive arbitrage to MAKE MONEY.

to put it more succinctly: in a down market, it's even more important for you to understand the fundamental metrics of your startup, how activation & retention work, how customer acquisition & referral work, and how to make money.  these were always important, just more so now when people are looking harder at #'s.

*PLUG*: for more about how to learn more about Startup Metrics, see our recently completed STARTonomics conference. 

Silicon Valley has never been without risk or fear.  in fact, quite the opposite -- Silicon Valley is rife with fear & paranoia.  and yet GOOD entrepreneurs somehow manage to overcome their fear, somehow make their hopes & dreams bigger than their fear, somehow manage to find imaginative solutions to problems whilst being backed into a corner by a guy with a .44 Magnum who outweighs you by 75 lbs, and nothing in your pockets but a butter knife and a paper clip.  it doesn't matter.

and so i leave you with this:

the true Silicon Valley entrepreneur will find a way around these obstacles.  the true Silicon Valley entrepreneur is not frightened by a "down market".  they are not daunted by VCs who now have massive leverage.  and they are not going to back down.  the true Silicon Valley entrepreneur is full of optimism,  and sees the world as his or her oyster.

you are MacGyver. 

you are Jeanne d'Arc.

you are Luke Skywalker. 

you are Paul FUCKING Atreides, and the SPICE must FLOW, motherfucker.

I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.

Virtual Goods Oct 10th || SNAP Summit Oct 28th (SF)

2 awesome geek events coming up in SF this month organized by friends, and many of the speakers are also friends... highly recommend you check them out:

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Fri, Oct 10th: Virtual Goods Summit

The Virtual Goods Summit is a one day conference focused on the emerging market opportunity for virtual goods and economies. Once restricted to the world of online gaming, virtual goods and currencies are influencing the development of social networks, community sites, and other new and exciting markets.

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Tue, Oct 28th: SNAP Summit

SNAP Summit is San Francisco's premier conference on user experience and engagement. Through a day of insightful talks, panels, and discussions, you'll learn why the top social sites succeed, and what you can do to be more like them.

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Resumes are for *Shit*. The 4 Things You Really Need: LinkedIn, Blog, Keywords, Social Media.

Robert just penned a pretty good post on how to tune up your resume for the "economic slowdown".  He gets it mostly right (write?) -- do your best to stand out, write a regular blog -- however, i think he's a bit long-winded on his recommendations and overlooks some fundamentals (which he actually does practice, but doesn't mention so much).

So as i commented on Guy Kawasaki's blog almost 2 years ago, i'll summarize again why Resumes are for Shit, and why all you need are 4 basic things to get a kick-ass job (or whatever u want really -- still have to write that post later on why money-sex-power-drugs-guns are pretty much commutable):

1) get a LinkedIn profile, and pimp it out -- HARD. 

a simple LinkedIn profile is nice, but it's not what i'm talking about.  you better work, sister (sashay, chante!) -- get your connections into LinkedIn, fill out a work history with different positions you've held & expertise gained, get recommendations from people & partners who you worked with (not just your boss), answer questions on topics that matter in your line of work, etc.  most importantly, reference companies, products, skills, and other keywords that are important to you & others (see below).

note that other social networking profiles don't substitute for LinkedIn.  there was a time when i thought Facebook might eventually subsume LinkedIn, but i was clearly wr... wr... WRONG (ok there, i said it).  both LinkedIn & Facebook -- and for that matter, MySpace as well -- have broadly established & well-entrenched userbase that likely prefer one of those 3 primary SNS platforms.  but still most people who call themselves "professionals" should maintain a LinkedIn profile, even if it's not their primary hangout.  LinkedIn is *THE* place that most recruiting (or any) professionals use for people search, and LinkedIn search results generally rank at the top for many Google name searches.  note: if you have a common name like John Smith, even more reason to create popular content attached to your name to distinguish you from other John Smith's who rank for basketball, accounting, or other types of specialized content.

fyi, Guy was initially a bit of a Luddite re: my suggestion to use LinkedIn + Blog as alternatives to a traditional resume, however he came around later and penned one of the single most useful posts about LinkedIn i've ever read (tip: an old friend may have helped change his mind on that one).  if you haven't checked it out, i strongly encourage you to do so.  Guy doesn't really need LinkedIn, but his suggestions are top notch.

2) write a regular blog, and 3) ABSOLUTELY DOMINATE selected keywords (the ones that matter to you or others). 

surprisingly, this doesn't take as much work as you'd think. 

if you write regularly, passionately, & intelligently about topics people care about (ie: search for), use appropriate keywords in headlines & titles, you'll start to rank for that content rather quickly.  in fact, i've accidentally blogged about topics / keywords i don't really care about, but ended up ranking for anyway.

let me explain.

NEWSFLASH: there are a lot of people out there who blog.  a few of these crazy people blog regularly.  a few of those few know how to use keywords in headlines, and how link text & basic SEO fundamentals work.  a very small further few write well and are fun & interesting to read.  however, there are very very VERY few people who blog regularly, interestingly, & specifically with respect to the keywords they care about.  if you are one of these people, you can rather easily become king of your (perhaps small but focused) hill, by using regular & interesting blog posts that score well and rank for search keywords of note.  it also helps if you include or embed photos or other media (see #4).

you can of course use other search-friendly sites & services as distribution for your content & keywords, but blogs (& blog headlines) are pretty well optimized for search so it's probably the easiest place to start... tho twitter & friendfeed & a few other notable services work well to amplify & distribute original signal from your blog or other social platforms.  i'll describe some of these below.

4) create notable online social media (video, pictures, presentations, etc) relevant to your line of work and link [to] them / embed them on your blog, your LinkedIn profile, and other online sites.

this one is actually overlooked by a number of very thoughtful (but not very colorful) bloggers.  i once wrote a post about Facebook licensing their platform to Bebo in response to Google launching OpenSocial.  the copy was pretty much empty blather except for the somewhat insane graphic at right that i created using powerpoint, and then uploaded to Flickr (and also to SlideShare), then embedded in the post.  i probably spent about 5 minutes writing the post, but i killed most of an afternoon (3-4 hours) putting together one silly image to satisfy my own freakish psychotic social network addiction.  the photo later got picked up by several other bloggers, and when i checked just now the Flickr photo had over  6000 views.  the SlideShare presentation (just one slide) has about 5600 views.  and the photo comes up on the first page of google image search results for the term "social graph".  whaddya know: my crazy-ass graphic is DOMINATING the social graph term!  and i bet my post gets more awareness than any ten other high-and-mighty bloggers who wrote some in-depth intellectual analysis (yeah i know i do that shit too).

the simple thing is --

we are visual creatures. 

we dream in color. 

people love images, and they watch a lot more TV than they read.  you've heard "a picture says a thousand words"?  well as far as blogs are concerned, it's damn well true.  i'd even go so far as to say there is such a thing as keyword visual arbitrage -- essentially, that there are high-volume search terms with low-volume associated images or video, that you can draft off and use to discover & attract new audience. this may seem like link-baiting, but actually it's just satisfying market demand for visual imagery around key terms that people have expressed an interest in.

in fact, i'm often criticized by several folks who say that my trademark "ransom note kidnapper" font style choices -- bold, underlined, enlarged, or many-colored fonts -- clearly let people know i am both childish and insane.  and some folks may be right that it is incredibly annoying and odd, but it is a visual brand choice i've made (whether consciously or not ;)  whatever your perspective, i've developed my own special (olympics?) audience.  the choice of using "AARRR!" as an acronym for my "Startup Metrics for Pirates" is pretty much the auditory complement to the visual point above.

if you don't care to be quite as lunatic as i, you can simply use embed code and links to bring your popular social media from other sites & services into your blog or social profiles.  i'm particularly fond of Flickr (graphics), YouTube (video), and SlideShare (powerpoint), as these services are also destination sites in themselves, and drive their own unique traffic to content you distribute on those sites. many people who do embed rich content also overlook this fact -- that the same content redistributed on multiple platforms can draw incremental users & attention, and that some of these platforms may be better at driving relevant traffic than your own blog or text-based sites/services. 

in short, the rich media you associate with your blog and certain keywords also DEFINE WHO YOU ARE and WHAT YOU MAKE / USE / ENJOY.  if you can cleverly associate social media -- literally, media to share with other people -- with your persona, and with specific tags & keywords, then you can merge these things into one. 

in summary: you become a notable social object by associating rich media & keyword text with the person you are on blogs and social network profiles.

in closing, i include below examples of the graphic, video, and powerpoint content associated with "Startup Metrics" that i typically embed on my blog & social profiles:

Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR! (Startonomics SF 2008)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: dealmaker media revenue)

Startonomics SF 2008: Yeah, We Rocked Your Face.

Summary of Startonomics SF 2008:

We Came, We Measured, We Conquered. 

  [mike drop to tha floor...]

all presentations & videos available via SlideShare and UStream, also on the Startonomics Blog.  additional coverage on CNet / Webware and Mashable, and other smart blogs. presos below via new SlideShare presentation pack widget:

| Get your Presentation Pack

look for us to hit the LA area sometime in January; other locations in 2009.  to hear about future Startonomics events, follow the Startonomics twitter acct @ STNX. much props to our speakers, sponsors, & supporters... and especially to Debbie Landa & the team at Dealmaker Media for kicking so much hiney.