969 karma · joined December 2, 2008
Formerly of Oracle, Datalogix (sold), Kindle at AMZN, Windows Phone & .NET at MSFT, IMSafer (sold), Soros Private Equity, and AskMe.com (sold).
Most time solopreneur and indie hacker, as often as I can time endurance sports nut (mountain bikes, road bikes, triathlons, trail marathons, XC skiing, DH skiing, and snowboarding), and full-time husband and father.
Remember that formula and you will be fine.
It's not a case for lowering your expectations, but it does set a framework for approaching different endeavours. It forces you to ask the question, if this goes amazingly well, how good is that really? Furthermore, it forces you to ask whether you are putting too much energy into your expectations. Finally, it's why slot machines (based on unexpected and uneven payouts) work so well. :)
As for the question, I was trying to discern if amzn was making the video conf functionality (debuted with the Kindle Fire) for customer service available, or if integration was contemplated and discussed in the content. It does not appear as such.
I wish I could give you 100 uovot s to encourage more of your behavior.
He's an endless supply of self promotion, and his brand and product is him. He's built a big agency, and a lot of that has to do with the energy he has put into his grind. However, when I hear that he puts family first, but then suggest people work as much as he suggests - it's just not realistic.
When my kids go to bed, I want to spend time with my wife, not my laptop.
His energy is infectious, but his most recent foray into Medium of posting emails to him about how awesome he is feels entirely too self promotional for my tastes.
Another poster pointed out that his uber point of "just start" is spot on. Stop analyzing. Learn from doing. Stop making excuses.
I'm reading the new Brad Stone book, and if you want a great example of got-it-wrong-a-bunch-before-a-big-win, look no further than Travis Kalanick. Build skills and learn. Even if you fail a bunch, if you work hard and learn, you are adding value to your life and what you can offer.
The user story for search has been solved. What hasn't been solved, it sounds like, is feature discoverability.
Best. Terms. Ever.
57.10 Acceptable Use; Safety-Critical Systems. Your use of the Lumberyard Materials must comply with the AWS Acceptable Use Policy. The Lumberyard Materials are not intended for use with life-critical or safety-critical systems, such as use in operation of medical equipment, automated transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, aircraft or air traffic control, nuclear facilities, manned spacecraft, or military use in connection with live combat. However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.
I found my way into a Product Management internship in 1994 by luck and happenstance. The honest assessment of the recruiter was "you are too technical for marketing, and not technical enough to test or write code."
There's some truth to that.
As someone who has been in product management my entire career, in my own VC funded startup, MSFT, AMZN, now ORCL (was part of a small company ORCL bought), spanning HW and SW, Cloud, and mobile phones, enterprise and consumer, I posit the following from my own personal experience.
I try to simplify things to make it easy for people to understand. Product managers need to worry about "the what, and the why, and sometimes the how". In smaller companies, where they are also managing scrums, etc, they can focus on the "when" but as companies grow, and more specialized program managers exist, or engineering leaders are more actively engaged in this part of the product lifecycle, they can worry about this less.
It irks me when I meet product managers who haven't written code, or don't try to prototype things. Ideas are cheap. I am not a great coder. I joke that me and code is like a kid and a hand grenade. At first glance it's cute, but it will get messy when the thing explodes. The best way to improve on a SW based idea is to show a hacker/developer crappy code. They can't help themselves but to try and improve it. Selling the vision has as much to do with the idea as it does with your ability to empathize with the customer need and pull together something into a cohesive thing that can be touched. Code always wins.
Your job, as the product manager, is to shepherd the idea/vision through to completion. That vision must be viable. You must not be in love with your idea. You must be in love with solving a customer problem. Engineers sometimes get stuck on the solve. Great product managers focus on the problem, and refine it with simplicity.
If you cannot answer "what" and "why" you are not doing your job.
I have spent 12 years in Seattle, 7 on this go round. I hate the weather here. You are wet and cold all winter. The mountains get snow, but sometimes rain, which freezes the snow, or makes the snow go away, negating the snow possibilities. The fact that you are surprised by how low the sun is on the horizon on a rare sunny day in winter, because you so rarely see the sun in the winter, is certainly entertaining. Let's also not forget the sun rises at 8:30A and sets at 4P in the winter.
The 2 months of sunny weather from July 5th are amazing. When the sun is out, this place is absolutely beautiful. But, for reference, I went for an early morning training ride yesterday and it was 44 degrees at 5:30A. In June. June!
Insofar as cost of living, this place is cheaper for housing, though the market is tight in the mid-market range for houses. Public schools are reasonably good depending on the district. Tech employers are not as voluminous as the articles would have you believe. IME, the Valley has way more tech opportunity, and less concentration in a a very small handful of large employers.
I have been experimenting with saline based solutions to test my theory of perception of heat reduction. They have worked for the most part, the challenge has been that they last about :30. I need longer. I have not experimented with any of the break+mix solutions from the wikipedia article, though am aware of them.
My preference for an endothermic reaction with a PCM is that in theory the mechanism is reusable, or easily replaceable, the weight penalty is low, and the complication of the solution (no pun intended) is also low).
There are some of these "cool materials" on the market right now, and they are somewhat interesting, though they are not operating as a heat dissipation level of the endorthermic reactions.
My vision for this product (at this point in time) is a sleeve that houses chambers with the endothermic reaction solution, and those chambers are either in an arm sleveve, or inside of a hat (think of the head band of a runner's hat).
Whether that solution is a one time use, and thus replaceable in the chamber, or multi use, and thus more permanent, is not really my challenge right now. A marathoner going to secure their Boston spot would pay $50-$100 for a hat that is guaranteed to keep them cool on a 90 degree day when their alternative is to keep throwing ice on themselves at aid stations, or stuffing cold sponges down their shirts. This is how it is handled today. Same for the age grouper triathlete who is getting ready for a sprint or Ironman. These folks are pretty obsessive about gear and kit, and aren't very price discriminating.
Principle characteristics I need are light weight, self contained reaction, non-toxic, and can remain cool/cold for as long as possible while dissipating this heat. Reusable is ideal, but one time use is also OK.
We did not get the D&O. That was as much a legal representation screw up than my own failing. I was the CEO, so the ultimate blame lays at my feet.
Term sheets don't matter, but one thing that is getting lost in all of this is that we had definitive docs. We had been given keys to the VC office to take up positions as residents until we had office space. Money from other investors was already in escrow. It's not like we got a signed termsheet and moved. We signed the termsheet in Sept, moved through definitive docs until Nov, and it all fell apart in mid-late Nov. It sucked.
re: the notion that _you_ would have known about a creep online, that's awesome. It's great that you were so self aware. Not every child can say the same. A favorite quote of mine applies here. No matter how you cut the math, and no matter how much you don't like the answer, 50% of the population is below average intelligence.
All of the content on our site explicitly suggested to parents that they should talk to their children _before_ installing our software. Talk about why they were installing it, and show them how it works. Every kid hated it. Of course they did. I would have. Unfortunately, kids have plenty of time to think about ways to circumvent protections their parents put in place. Parents have jobs, multiple kids, schedules to maintain, etc, and in general were outgunned on the technology front. They are all screaming for help, or suffering in silence, throwing up their hands because they cannot solve the problems for themselves.
When we started IMSafer, we were all in our late 20s or very early 30s. We were all hacker types. We also had young kids. One of our advisors was a police officer (personal friend) who spent a ton of time with us talking about the realities of the bad people out there. It's not Chris Hanson crazy, but there are really, really bad people out there. More often than not, related to the harmed minor.
First, there was a case where a high school girl was equipment manager of her school football team. She was gang raped by some of the players. She was talking about that in chat with her friend, talking about committing suicide, and talking about how she couldn't tell her parents. She was afraid of what they would do to her. To her! Our engine caught much of this, and flagged it for the parents. It worked out in the end. We found out about this after the fact when the parents contacted us to let us know how our software probably saved her life.
Then there was the situation where there was a father who was a community fire chief. His child installed the software on his father's computer because his father was abusing him, and was spending time in really really bad chat rooms. The kid was hoping we were monitoring the alerts. The child eventually reached out to us asking why we hadn't sent the police. It was heart breaking.
Lastly, there was a kid who was buying drugs from a contact online. Is this a sexual predator? No. But a predator nonetheless. Our software flagged it.
There are bad people out there. Some of them are the Chris Hanson predator types. They aren't all sexual predators, but they are still looking to gain access to children without parental permission.
Children and young people react with "this software violates my rights!" As a child, under the age of 18, in the US, has no rights. A parent is supposed to parent. They have no right to privacy.
The software was not meant to record chats. It worked as a sort of a sliding window, and only when there was a flagged issue would a parent get a notification. That notification would include some of the chat around the offending line to give context, but nothing more.
With regard to access to kids - parents can look into a living room and ask "who is that?" Well it's Johnny. He lives down the street. The parents can talk to Johnny's parents. When a child is in an MMO and has a "friend" list a mile long, parents can't really ask "who is Fragg3rKill3r225?" Worse, their kid may not really know who that person is either.
At the core, IMSafer was about helping parents manage the relationships their kids were building online. As a parent, it is your job to know who has access to your kids, and how they are influencing them. Most parental control software is billed as keeping porn of the computers. IMSafer was about keeping the bad guys out of the kids lives.
We were offered some additional capital but it wasn't enough and our conviction was smashed. Until you've been in this sort of situation, you can't know how you will feel or react. Experience is a great teacher.
I want to respond to a few of the comments, as I was the main protagonist in getting this idea off the ground, CEO of the company, and the business/product guy surrounded by the talented engineers who made this happen.
The decision to invite the board member on to the call the day before the money was in the bank was my call. My biggest mistake of my career. I have learned from it, but it was my call and I blew it. Nothing about the situation gave us any reason to believe that we would have a problem. By the way, if anyone wants a front door key to a tier 1 VC firm, I am sure one of us still has theirs.
On the topic of the business model. Let's first talk about the derivation of the idea. Having spent my career in tech and Wall St, I have seen the migration of high IQ talent into spaces where the marginal utility of IQ was trending to 0. We wanted to find an opportunity where we could be smart and do new things, and that would, theory lead to money. The base thesis here was that no one had made money in the kid protection space for a while. IQ follows money. Viola. We were right - there had been no innovation in this space in a long time, and everyone was focused on keeping porn off computers. We decided to try and focus on keeping bad guys from getting to the kids.
We can all have an intellectual discussion about whether this was an overblown social issue or not. I don't feel like rehashing that here. What we did know is that we had a novel approach to solving this language problem, and we built an engine. We did not solve it with Bayesian analysis or ML. We went a different route, and the engine was very effective.
Our premise was that we could sell the software to parents. We did all the things many of you would do. Built an MVP (before there was a phrase for it), talked to customers, etc. It turns out that the axiom from real estate is true here. People lie. What parents said they would pay for, and how they reacted when using the software were totally different. Many of them expected the software to come with a computer, or be paid for by someone else. They told us they would pay for it, but in reality they expected it to come from an AV provider. That never would have surfaced in talking to customers ahead of time.
We then pursued a deal with McAfee. I don't know if at this point in time I can talk about that deal or not, but suffice it to say, that wasn't the golden ticket.
After spending time refining the business model to get parents to pay, we (as many companies do) fell backward into our business model. It started with a fortuitous call from a large company making a massively multiplayer game for kids. It turns out many of these companies who cater to kids have rooms full of moderators for in game chat. People are very expensive. Some tech found out about our software, installed it, and found it very difficult to beat. They were intrigued enough that they asked us if they could install it inside their server farm. When we took the call, every answer from us was "yes of course" but in reality we had no idea. Credit to Tommy and Erik for figuring out in short order how to make the demo a reality. The first company figured they could reduce their people count from 600 to 60 with our software being the first pass filter.
Once we figured this market opp out, we started reaching out to other companies. Long story short, we were looking at deals of $250K per year for our software. Bad timing being what it is, this was all happening around the time of the financing closing. So while Benchmark (wow, that's the first time I have said that name out loud in connection with this story in public since 2003) was moving forward on what they thought was a consumer software deal with massive growth potential, it looked like we had a business opportunity in enterprise-y software for community moderation for companies catering to minors.
When Benchmark pulled out (worst kick in the stomach feeling of my life having to pass that news on to the team) we scrambled. The deals from these game companies were coming along but we weren't going to have enough runway to get them closed. The eventual buyers of the company were building similar software, and they had heard our name enough in their calls with their potential customers when being told why they were not being moved forward in the deal that they wanted to buy us. It was a little bit of good luck and timing in an otherwise crap sandwich state of play.
To sum up: 1) We knew who we thought our customers were: parents 2) We were wrong about how they would act: parents didn't want to pay for this type of service, despite what they told us 3) We were wrong about the virality of the service: despite saying otherwise, parents wouldn't tell friends they were running this software because of what they perceived as potential social stigma 4) You can sometimes fall backward into your business model 5) Benchmark did us wrong, but that's life. Move on and do great things. Jason, Erik, Tommy and David are some of the most talented people with whom I have ever worked, and I rate IMSafer as the time of my life. We had a lot of fun, and built some amazing stuff (patent filing in case you are interested: http://www.google.com/patents/US20090089417) 6) Survivorship bias is a bitch, and there are many stories of smart guys not getting over the hurdle which never get told. We weren't idiots, or morons, or whatever. Sometimes things don't make it. The real question is what did you learn and how to you do something constructive with what you learned.
I am happy to answer any additional questions.
Though you could argue that paying for and building a gym gives you exclusive right to a physical asset.
Out of hand rejection of subscription businesses is your prerogative, but there are businesses which charge monthly rates that have surperior proritary products or services, or which use the membership as a means to incent more purchases, that can be very successful.
<full disclosure - I love CEK :)>
Handing out phones to everyone is a bad ROI. Are you building apps? If yes, we have phones for people commited to building on the WP7 platform. Send me an email at brwatson at Microsoft and we'll get you sorted.
Oh, and our tools for WP7 are free.