Hey Look

My Thoughts on Path

I’m fascinated by Path. As a disclosure, Path’s founder Dave Morin is an investor of mine, but he knows I’m not afraid to tell him if I don’t agree :) and the company inspired me to write for the first time in a while, so here goes.

Path is different because it’s aiming to bring meaning to our interactions. There is a lot of fluffy tech that utilizes easy viral mechanisms to grow but doesn’t do anything. These companies get funded or make a few developers comfortable, and in the spirit of capitalism more power to them.

There’s something to be said though for technology that seeks to bring us together. Not about how many friends, followers or likes, but about what you’re genuinely doing, enjoying or thinking about. Dave knows a thing or two about how to make commercially successful technology yet he chose to create this company because he also knows about how to make meaningful technology.

I love the idea of removing the filter that changes what we’re actually doing and feeling with what we tell people we’re doing and feeling. No my-mom’s-going-to-see-this filter means a more genuine and personal interaction. Path is attempting to tap into the desire we all have to understand each other on a deeper level, not just have more information about each other. Filling that need is where the company value lies.

It’s a pretty bold move to put your name behind a product that doesn’t have the viral features that you know will get your app into the most hands in a short time. The Path team is doing this because they believe that what they’re building will make the lives of people who use them better.

I’m not sure yet if I’ll use the app regularly, but one thing I’m betting on is the vision of Dave and his team. I think they’ll continue to build fresh technology and I’m excited to see what’s to come!

Building a Network

Recently @bradcoughlin asked me this on Twitter:

I’m pretty interested in the the subject and thought it merited a blog post. In my opinion the strength of your network is directly proportional to how effective you can be.

When I first came to SF I realized that tech was the first thing I’d ever been really excited about. At the time I was in pr (a career I couldn’t have been more ill-suited for) and had to make the tough transition into product.

One of the main reasons I’ve been able to start a company is via support from my friends/advisors/mentors. Here are a few of the lessons I found in building an effective network.

• Know your stuff: being well-read matters. You have one chance to make a good impression, seize it! Devour RSS. Read every tech, VC and relevant consumer publication you can find. When I was a broke intern, I used to park it in the magazine section of Borders and spend 1-2 hours a day reading (buy one or two if you feel guilty).

• Get out there: For the first 1-2 yrs I probably went to two mixers or education events a night. Have as many meaningful conversations as possible. Seek out people who are doing things you’re excited about and learn about their experiences. This gives you a basic understanding of what you’re interested in.

• Follow-up: One-on-one chats are the best way to actually learn about someone. Most entrepreneurs I know meet with at least one new person per day.

• Ask someone to tell you their best story: founder types LOVE to tell stories. They thrive on passion + a certain amount of risk, which usually means they have at least a handful of hilarious, mind-bending stories about building their business. These stories are often the best lessons (which should be learned over delicious beers and a good meal in my opinion) and are a good way to really get to know someone.

• Be a good friend: Connect people to other friends who might be useful or interesting. Offer to help someone if they need it (things like pulling together a marketing plan, talking through a piece of strategy or product spec). By helping others I’ve found it strengthens your friendship and comes back around many times over. It also feels really good.

• Do what you do well: The more capable you are, the more respect you’ll get.

All pretty straightforward stuff. I’ve found that people in the tech industry are enormously open and eager to collaborate and share, so you won’t have trouble once you put yourself out there.

There’s definitely a separate post on how to do this if you want to reach out to other tech communities, let me know if you’re interested in that.

Good luck!

Melody

Big Omaha Recap (or how to make a bunch of people mad at you)

I recently had the opportunity to speak at the Big Omaha conference in Nebraska a few weeks ago. While I intended to incite a bit of conversation, I had no idea that I’d start such a riot.

I really loved Omaha, the city was vibrant and I met a number of smart, energetic entrepreneurs. I wasn’t thrilled with my talk performance, despite lots of preparation I ended up getting some major stage fright. So I ended up losing most of my logical argument and what had been awesome in my bathroom mirror only a few minutes earlier, didn’t end up being as great as I’d planned. I’ll do better next time.

The topic was on entrepreneurism, the most important things I’ve learned while starting my company, discovered through experience and passed on by other founders. I’d been told that the conference would have a lot of people who were about to start their own thing, were looking to take things to the next level or wanted some inspiration, so I wanted to talk about a few things that helped me in the company building process, things like:

• using competition as driver to step up your game
• how to get over the fear of failure
• the value of being a good person
• making sure to spend your time on things that you want to define you in ten years

The real kicker though was my point that if you want to build the best possible company, you should move to SF, NY, Chicago, Boston or Boulder. (queue angry Omaha mob)

While I expected some push back, I didn’t expect such an explosion. My goal was to kick off what I thought was an important conversation around how to build your business as quickly and as effectively as possible if you live in a smaller tech community. Unfortunately, forgetting my speech means I didn’t make a great case. Therefore, what followed was several hundred tweets about how wrong I am, that I hate Omaha or just twitpics like this:

After the talk I had a lot of brilliant conversations with people on Twitter and in-person. I thought it important to explain my point further, so we can discuss . I’d love to hear your thoughts, please leave comments!

In my opinion, if you’re an individual who’s serious about building something great; the best business in the universe for whatever problem you’re trying to solve; you’ll give yourself, your company, your co-workers, your investors everything you have at your disposal to make them successful.

This means going to the place with the most intellectual capital. Building a network of people who are succeeding at what you want to do, who have the experience in the things you don’t, who can answer problems you can waste months trying to solve. It means building trust with partners who will quickly do deals with you because you know you both have a shared work ethic and great product.

It means spending every non-working moment at events and conferences learning about every aspect of your business (lean startup theory, customer driven development, marketing, analytics, design, customer acquisition, sales, etc). While you can build a great business anywhere, these things are more readily found in big cities and make the business building easier.

If you wouldn’t drop everything to do these things, you’re playing a different game than most of the rest of the people in tech.

One of the major pieces of feedback I received was that I was speaking against what BigOmaha is about - community building. In reality, building a business as fast and as well as you can and building a community are two only slightly related things. The first is the goal of an individual, the latter of the community and both are great.

A community should never hold an individual back, and if it can’t foster the individual it’ll never be truly competitive. So, the focus should be on improving those conditions not holding individuals. Improving a community  is a totally separate discussion than mine, however it seems like people are really interested in this and it might make a great headline topic for next year’s conference.

Perhaps the next BigOmaha should have panels that talk about how the region can attract more investment, how to incentivize regional youth to be entrepreneurs, how to participate more fully with other communities and how to attract more talent to the region.

I hope that BigOmaha is about building conversation about how to succeed in this industry we all love, being open, helping each other get there and creating some awesome technology. I hope it’s about building better businesses, moving the industry forward and empowering the next generation of entrepreneurs— not purely about geography.

Omaha is absolutely on its way to becoming a major tech hub in 5-10 years, and BigOmaha is on its way to becoming a premiere conference. My ideas for next year’s event:

• make the conference more actionable. define a challenge we all should be thinking about and addressing (speakers, audience members, internet audience, etc.) Something like: the tech scene in the Midwest; how can we foster talent, investment and knowledge

• highlight more local companies

• hold a competition for best local startup, have a sponsor donate an awesome prize

• get more audience participation! It’d be great to have smaller break-off sessions for targeted discussions and sessions (how to get funded, how to brand your company, how to build and motivate a rockstar team, etc)

Midwest, I love you. If any of you come to SF, email me at melody@styleseat.com and I promise:

1. to buy you a drink
2. to help you any way I can: (people, good conversation)
3. to be impressed if you mention you got to the end of this crazy long blog post

I’m pondering taking this show on the road

Lately I’ve been thinking about taking my company abroad for a month or so. I’d like to head to a warm place, probably in South America and get our code on in a nice, isolated locale. Maybe with a beach.

Startups are about creativity and fulfillment. Using science, math and design to solve problems. Solving them well means constantly re-evaluating and changing perspective. Happiness is a key component to finding perspective, and beaches make people happy.

I won’t be surprised if this type of thing becomes commonplace for startups in the next few years. If you’re working 80 hour weeks you might as well be able to go surfing during your lunch break or explore a new culture on your day off.

Still chewing on it.

Formspring.me

I’ve held off on formspring for a really long time. Not because it doesn’t seem like an awesome site, but because 1) I’m not a celebrity, why would anyone want to ask me a question and 2) I’ll feel silly with a profile and no questions.

But the internet bandwagon is a terrible temptress and so the fear of missing out + a critical mass of other nobodies have given me the courage to try it out.

Some things I hate about it:

• The stream of “anonymous questions” leads me to believe that I’m talking to myself. I tweeted this recently and got the reassurance that I have at least one friend: http://www.formspring.me/melodymccloskey/q/360049253
• I feel vain using it. Because I have so few question askers I want to talk more with them. Y’all are asking great questions, I want to get down off this pedistal so we can have an actual conversation! (this is probably my own fault, that’s what blogs/conferences/facebook/real life is for)

Some things I love about it:

• Easy to use.
• It’s changing the way we interact. I get a shot at asking some pretty amazing people a question. This might actually happen because that’s the one purpose of the site. Several years ago hardly anyone had had access to folks doing awesome things. How awesome. Yay.
• It’s gratifying to have people ask you questions about things you’re doing. My company is the only thing I think about all day every day, talking about it and the experience is really fun. I’m not sure more than my mom wants to hear about it, but I’ll answer her “anonymous” questions all day
• I refresh the site more than once a day…it’s managed to bring an element of addictiveness which is valuable to understand as a person trying to build an awesome web site.

Have you checked it out? If so send me a link to your profile and your feedback so far. Or ask me a question! http://www.formspring.me/melodymccloskey