Thoughts on Silicon Valley and the Rest of the World

There are few things that we at the Apture team find as exciting as combining Technology and Social Impact. This is why we have been fans of Kiva since the very beginning. One of our goals behind Apture was to better inform people about the world around them but being informed is only one piece of the puzzle – real change requires action. Kiva is one of quickest and easiest ways to make a difference in the life of a hard working, small entrepreneur in a developing country.

Kiva is of course also a technology shop and this weekend they are hosting the Kiva Developer Garage at their offices this Saturday, June 6 starting at 1pm. If you’re a developer in the Bay Area and want to hack on cool Kiva related projects and meet other people interested in Social Impact, you should definitely attend. A bunch of us, including myself will definitely be there so if you’re coming please tell us on Twitter and come say hi.

This is completely unrelated to Entrepreneurship or Economic Development but it is related to incredibly cool products, though definitely in the very very early adoption stage (product/market fit?!?). I’ve been missing the ocean (having spent a lot of my childhood on an island) and been going swimming every evening (no matter how cold) but this little gadget just transforms what swimming means:

Useful? I’m not sure, but it’s definitely amazing (thanks to Mike Krieger for finding it). By the way, did you notice the little icons beneath the photo? The photo above is an Apture Super Embed and you can learn more about the Lunocet Monofin by clicking the icons on the bottom. Try it out!

I find the following excerpt from texasinafrica to be the perfect summary of why I find Twitter incredibly valuable. Except that in my case it’s Startups + Africa and all the other things she mentions:

I’ve railed against Twitter in the past, mostly because I think it contributes to the culture of oversharing [...] But. Here’s the thing. The community of people who blog and think and write (hopefully not in that order) about African states, foreign policy, humanitarian issues, state failure, and a lot of other stuff I care about are mostly on Twitter. And it’s impossible to keep up with everything without signing up.So there you have it. I’m on Twitter in order to save time. And so far, it’s not bad.

Twitter has helped me learn more quickly – and that’s made a huge difference.

I’ve been reading a LOT about how to increase learning speed in startups and how to shorten feedback cycles to quickly see what is working and what isn’t and to then iterate on that. Because of this I found the following bit about decision/feedback loops in the military from Free Range International extremely interesting:

“According to Boyd, decision-making occurs in a recurring cycle of observe-orient-decide-act. An entity (whether an individual or an organization) that can process this cycle quickly, observing and reacting to unfolding events more rapidly than an opponent, can thereby “get inside” the opponent’s decision cycle and gain the advantage. Frans Osinga argues that Boyd’s own views on the OODA loop are much deeper, richer, and more comprehensive than the common interpretation of the ‘rapid OODA loop’ idea”

That rapid feedback loops are important in many areas makes perfect sense but I really liked how if you replace “opponent” in the paragraph above with “customer” you get a basic version of rapid learning for startups – except that you’re trying to make something they want instead of killing them. There’s a lot of other processes and approaches startups can learn from other fields.

I was just reading an interview Online Marketing/Metrics rockstar Dan Martell did with a Canadian business blog and wanted to share his great thoughts on the importance of celebrating your success.

We do not celebrate our successes enough. When your moving quickly to create something big and meaningful, you sometimes forget to celebrate along the way. I am constantly looking at ways to reinforce the good work done by our employees. For example, if a customer has said something positive about the company, I take it back to the employees. I explain to them how their work furthered the company strategy. If an employee or team was singled out, then I make sure I talk to them and again relate it back to our strategic goals. Talking about current successes and relating it back to strategic goals is a great way to reinforce the belief in the company’s vision. People need to be constantly reminded that their work contributes to the company achieving its strategic vision.

This might same like stuff from the first lecture of Obvious 101 but when you’re in the middle of a startup and you have 50 things to do every day and more coming in every day you often forget to take a step back and really think about what you’ve accomplished. Additionally, the type of people that startups often attract are so focused on their work and just doing a great job that they don’t realize the importance of what they’ve just accomplished. At Apture we bought Champagne for celebrating our “official launch” (the one with lots of press) in June 2008 and it’s still sitting in the office unopened because we spent that entire day fixing bugs and revving the product and the same happened with every other release we do.

Dan is exactly right in pointing out how important rallying around a success is for your team spirit (and your own) and taking the time to celebrate is (almost) as important as releasing awesome products that people love. Oh, and Dan thanks for taking us all out to lunch this week, I think we came up with some great ideas!

I just found this interesting tidbit from a paper I was reading last night that shows how teenagers in developing countries literally tend to underestimate the returns to education. Researchers asked students about how much more educated people earn compared to uneducated ones and found that they substantially underestimated the amount. More importantly, informing them about the true difference increased their likelihood of staying in school:

Jensen recently carried out a randomized experiment in which he gave secondary school students in the Dominican Republic information about how much more money an educated person makes compared to someone who did not get an education. He found that teenagers substantially underestimate the returns to education, and that providing them with this infor mation had a substantial effect on the children’s likelihood to stay in school. In the treatment group, children were 5 percentage points (an increase of 10% since only 50% return) more likely to come back to school the year after the intervention.

Before you think that this is somehow limited to the Dominican Republic a similar result was found in Madagascar where parents were more likely to keep their children in school upon being given similar information:

These results are confirmed by recent work from Nguyen, who provided parents in Madagascar information about returns from primary and secondary education. There, too, many parents underestimated the returns from education, and when they were informed about the measured returns reacted by making sure that their children went to school more regularly. At the end of the year their grades were also better.

This is one powerful illustration of how people often lack critical information that can improve their future choices. It is also a good indicator that giving people more and more choices without the necessary mechanisms for choosing between them will not necessarily produce the expected return.

I finally purchased http://www.cansar.com after a very long and extremely painful process but I’m excited to finally have it. It’s really my fault for not having done so years ago since I’ve been thinking about it since I started using the Internet and just never judged it to be important enough. By the time I did, it was already gone.

I want to keep this post short but do want to say that I find domain name squatting to be a HUGE and unnecessary barrier to operating on the Internet – there is already enough competition between people with legitimate claims to the same domain, and domain name squatters only make things worse and don’t help anyone. Yearly domain name fees were set low to make them affordable for almost anyone (generally around $10) but as a result they were also cheap enough for squatters to buy them by the hundreds or even thousands. The current domain name system favors those who entered very early, bought as much as they could grab at the beginning and could then forced everyone else to buy from them. Since they are the only seller of the product they can get extremely high prices if they find buyers who want a particular domain enough. Markets don’t work very well when there is little substitutability between products and the supply of each product is constant at 1.

To the person who sold me this domain, I hope you enjoy your money, and I hope you find someway to contribute to society in a more useful way instead of creating obstacles to the rest of us. I would have much rather donated that money to charity to see it go to waste on you.

I recently wrote about alternate currencies as a solution to the financial crisis, specifically to the ineffectiveness of monetary policy at the zero interest rate bound. Well it looks like Greg Mankiw (independently) agrees with me which is quite exciting. When currencies loose value over time the Fed could lower its rate to less than zero (e.g. you give me $100 today, I’ll give you $98 in a year) and still find people who would be willing to lend at those terms:

Reduce the return to holding money below zero. Imagine that the Fed were to announce that, one year from today, it would pick a digit from 0 to 9 out of a hat. All currency with a serial number ending in that digit would no longer be legal tender. Suddenly, the expected return to holding currency would become negative 10 percent.

It definitely is an unorthodox solution that would be difficult to implement in practice but it’s also novel and interesting and it helps us understand why certain solutions work and others don’t:

I understand that this plan is not entirely practical. But you have to give the student credit for thinking out of the box. And his plan does address a fundamental problem facing the economy right now: Given the fall in wealth, increases in risk premiums, and problems in the banking system, the interest rate consistent with full employment might well be negative.

One key challenge to coming up with good solutions to problems is understanding why things are the way they currently are and what an ideal solution would have to accomplish. Coming up with good ideas that don’t quite cut it is an excellent learning process for getting closer to the optimal solution.

Update: The Economist talks about Switzerland charging foreigners a fee to keep their money there in the 1970s – effectively imposing a negative interest rate (this would have to be a percentage of the assets kept there instead of a lump sum).

Over the last two years, but especially in the last few months, Twitter has become an extremely efficient way of sharing information. You can follow people whose interests you share, learn from what they link to, and if you really like what they are saying you can share or retweet it. Only having 140 characters to communicate with forces people to become more and more succinct and it leads to very interesting behavior. This limit has made it OK to simply post a link combined with a short comment, something people are far more likely to do than write long blog posts. If people like it they will retweet it and people who see these retweets will do the same resulting in an extremely quick transmission of information. More importantly a search over that conversation will quickly let you see what people are saying and thinking about something – down to the last second.

A lot of people have been talking about the immense potential this offers to understand how people feel about any topic or product and learn from this data. Skittles was widely applauded for its innovative marketing campaign that turned skittles.com into a live display of what people were saying about skittles (including the campaign itself). At Apture we want to take the best ideas that people have on the web and make them available to everyone – to democratize them. With our new Apture Twitter Viewer anyone with a website can now integrate a live search stream about any topic right into their pages it takes less than ten seconds. We did this on apture.com/twitter/ and being able to see what people are saying about the things you write about is truly exhilarating - I’ve found myself visiting the page over and over to see what people are saying. It makes your webpage more powerful, more up-to-date, and gives your readers a reason to keep coming back. Apture user Steven Johnson realized this immediately and wrote an excellent post about the power of bringing internet conversations to your website with embedded Apture Twitter Viewer showing what people are saying about his new camera flash, the Lumopro 120.

We also pride ourselves on doing more than the obvious – apart from immediacy the most powerful features of Twitter are its interconnectedness and the ability to share. How often have you seen someone reply to someone else on Twitter and wished to quickly see the other side of that conversation? We make it easy, clicking on a person’s Twitter name inside of any Tweet will bring up their profile and Twitter stream. We do the same for hashtags, click on one to see what other people are saying about the topic. The other aspect is media. With the Apture Twitter Viewer will open any supported media you link to in a new Apture window so you can see it right there. We support Video, Images, Audio, Maps, and much more from more than 30 sources, all available right there.

Now combine immediacy, interconnectedness, and multi media sharing: See what people are saying about the things you care about, see who they are, where they are from, what else they are saying, and see all the media they like – isn’t that powerful. It really lets you dive into a conversation, all in just a few seconds.

Sign up for Apture, follow us on Twitter, and if you like my writing, follow me as well.

It’s official now, Apture has raised $4.1 Million in Series A funding, led by Clearstone Ventures. We are all extremely excited and could not wish for a better partner in this – Clearstone immediately understood the big vision behind what we are doing and the new opportunities that it will open up. We got great press today including an excellent article on Techcrunch as well as lots and lots of congratulatory Tweets – you can read more about the actual announcement on the Apture blog. I’ve always said that laser focused companies with great ideas can still make it in the current environments and we are very happy to be another proof point for this. We have a lot that we want to accomplish and we now have the resources to really focus on executing our vision. Stay tuned.