Starcraft and Startups

Starcraft is popular within tech startup circles for good reason. It’s a an cold, heartless meritocracy. It values investment in yourself. It requires hardcore analytical thinking. It makes you divorce yourself from the emotional rollercoaster that is day-to-day success and failure. In fact, it teaches you to love the good kind of failure and to learn everything you can from it. And it reminds us that real communities based in shared goals and common experiences can thrive across geographic, cultural, and lingual barriers.

I know this, in part, because I spend a non-trivial amount of my free time playing. I’m good enough to know that I’m not truly good. I also know it because of this guy. I’ve seen every episode of his show since I discovered it in June of last year. He’s brilliant, and surprisingly wise for his age.

I haven’t been excited by sports for probably ten years, but I now watch every major Starcraft professional tournament. I’ll take this over football any day. With it, I get to participate 1-on-1 with great people from around the world, and I get to be on the edge of something new.

Technology is disrupting sports, too, and as usual, the geeks got there first.

Shareholder Value

Fucking brilliant:

…trying to maximize shareholder value is ridiculous. I couldn’t run a company where you had to use that as an excuse for why it was doing things.

This says so many things about entrepreneurship to me. It’s at the heart of why I love small companies. People working towards a specific mission are energetic and approach work like a they’re on a crusade. People working towards increasing shareholder value don’t really give a shit (unless you’re paying them really big bonuses, which creates its own problems).

Credit for that quote goes to Rob Kalin. (Almost) equal credit goes to Fred Wilson for his response:

The shares our firm bought in Etsy back in 2006 have gone up in value more than 10x based on the last stock purchased in the company (last summer). One of the things I’ve learned over the years by working with special people like Rob is that you can create shareholder value as “exhaust” by focusing on an alternative mission, one that is closer to real problems faced by real people.

Shareholder value is a byproduct of running a successful company, not a primary objective.

I wish MBA programs taught this.

Entrepreneurship as Art

I freaking love this article. The core of it:

Over the past fifteen years, startups have been catalyzing global cultural changes that had previously been the realm of artists. Facebook is the perfect example, a company nominally driven by a desire to “change the way people interact”, a phrase that could just as easily be spoken by a conceptual artist. (…) One could argue that it’s all art, but the medium has shifted from canvas to Delaware C Corporations.

One, I think it’s a great thought, and very well put. I, and many other tech entrepreneurs that I know, are all motivated by this aspect of starting up. I just tend to think of it as “tweaking culture”, kind of in the same way that a 1950’s gearhead tweaked his engine.

Two, I love how unapologetically long-term Brad is thinking:

I don’t think this is a trend we’ll see culminate in the next 5 or even 10 years — this one is going to take thirty years to fully play out and the effects will be felt for decades if not centuries.

That’s the way my head works too. Don’t talk to me about 5 or 10 year impacts—how is the shit we’re doing affecting the future? How will my kids lives be different because of what we’re building?

This is why I go to work in the morning.

Push vs Pull Publishing

Everyone’s already written their thoughts on Quora. I’m a little late. Oh well.

Having casually blogged for more than seven years now, my first thought was that Quora was a new model for content generation—pull. Traditional media is push—they tell you what they think you probably want to hear. Blogs are also push. Quora, however, is pull—people ask questions and wait for someone to tell them the answer. I as a publisher don’t have to sit around and wonder what people want to hear.

This could be a huge boon from a blogging perspective. Most small bloggers don’t have the time/resources/know-how to select topics that will get them the most traffic. Does that mean that Quora, or other services utilizing pull models, could potentially challenge push-based blogging?

I really don’t think so. At least not in the form we see currently.

• Blogs are personal identity tools as much as anything else, and your ability to depict your own personal identity is significantly limited in a world of strongly typed content. 
• Bloggers that really care about traffic also care about advertising revenue. And revenue is always maximized when you control the entire experience.
• Bloggers that don’t care that much about traffic (trust me, there are plenty of us) write primarily for ourselves. Do I hope that some people see what I’m writing? Sure, but I primarily select topics based on what I want to write about.

The entire question seems like somewhat of a straw man in retrospect, but I really did wonder at the outset we were observing an disruption of the blogging publishing model. What’s more interesting than the “no” answer above is what this thought exercise tells us about where the Q&A model could go in the future. 

Giving authors tools to manage their own identities and generate revenue will shift this equation. I’d love to see a Q&A service that allowed you to write questions and answers on your own property and provided aggregation.

Nothing

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. … Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”

Reinhold Niebuhr, credit David Brooks and the NYT