Go Big Always – Productivity

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November 17th, 2009

August 24th, 2009

Numbers we track in our online/offline life

The antiquated, “eyeball” media model is screwing with our online behavior.

I had a fun brainstorming session recently with Pierre Omidyar (@pierre). One of the things we talked about was how social software’s design has impacted freindss how we behave online. The metrics companies choose to put in front of us are really meaningful since people optimize their behavior around those numbers.

In the consumer space–because most companies decide to follow Google into “free” land– they fall trap to optimizing for the dusty, century-old media business model: get a ton of viral, sticky eyeballs, then sell ad space.

Number of friends, is the metric on big kitchen sink networks like Facebook, Myspace, etc. On Twitter it’s number of followers. And you can see the resulting behavior every day. As soon as someone joins Facebook, it’s a race to add as many friends to cart as possible to get that number up. Just look at Follow Friday. There are even applications developed to help you game your Follower numbers, so you can quickly achieve the status of 23,083 meaningless followers.

Here’s why Friending and Following doesn’t work

Besides not actually being part of an environment tailor made around meaningful connections, the other reason that Friending, Following and other social number don’t work is that no one wants to give you negative feeback. Sure, Robert Scoble stopped following 106,000 people but most of us don’t want to unfriend, unfollow, or unanything that would send a negative message to someone else. So, while we focus on driving our social numbers up as high as possible, those numbers end up being meaningless. They don’t reflect reality. In real life people come in and out of our life. People we vouch for at one point, we can’t vouch for at another point. Our friends change. People we want to meet change. Because the kitchen-sink networks optimize their numbers around mass-use in order to sell advertising, they can’t solve this problem.

The numbers we track in our online/offline life

After my conversation with Pierre, it got me thinking about the numbers we track in our online and offline life. Since, Blackbox Republic is focused on fusing online/offline realities together, arriving at measurements that help enable meaningful relationships has been at the forefront of our development. The chart below is a visual representation of the delta between how we currently account for our online and offline social. As you can see, it’s pretty huge. I’d be interested on your ideas on how to bridge it more effectively.

socialnumbers

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Posted in Productivity

August 11th, 2009

7 Comments

10 things not in Blackbox Republic

1. Labels

One of our Founding members told me that “labels create drama,” and we agree. If there’s one thing we’ve overwhelmingly and consistently heard is that sexpositive people don’t want to be labeled. They don’t want checkboxes, or to live inside someone else’s rules. So inside Blackbox Republic you won’t find yourself having to put yourself in buckets. If you want to label yourself, fine. Do it. But we don’t make you.

Sometimes you don’t know how to fit in until you break out. — Michael Baczynski

labels

2. Profiles

Profiles are tired, old snapshots of us. The web is littered with them. Our public profiles are strewn everywhere like super-ego mini-marts. None of them are accurate. It’s the public, professional or dating us. Over and over. Who cares what your favorite movies are or where you went to high school.

profileszz

3. Lookie-loos, tourists & creeps

Chris Rock once said that if a bullet costs five thousand dollars, there would be no innocent bystanders. When someone got shot, you’d know it was for a damn good reason. Since our members will pay to be there, they’re there for a good reason. Combined with our vouching system, that means that the tourists, creeps and lookie-loos will troll their usual haunts but not find a home in the Republic.

toury

4. Hang ups

Sex-positive people don’t have an issue with their own sexuality or that of others. Odds are, if you are that comfortable with yourself, you don’t get over-heated about too much. In my experience, sex-positive folks have less overall hangups. If you can be open and accepting of the intimate parts of your and others’ life, you’re open to a lot.

issues

5. Censorship

Blackbox Republic is a place for unbound self-expression. A place to explore your alter-egos. We’ve joined a ton of sites in the last few months and are surprised how heavy handed and micro-managed their administration is. There are member agreements that force you to agree to never name another competing website. The Admins delete, edit, and/or move member’s content. No doubt, dating and sex sites are used to a lot of bad behavior by their very definition.

censor

6. Store

There are millions of storefronts all over the web. The last thing you’ll find in Blackbox Republic are more shopping carts. There are no product directories, or browsing the isles.

mall

7. Ads

Don’t we get assaulted with ads enough in our public life? As innovative as the web is supposed to be, it’s really just the same old media model of “free” to get the eyeballs and sell ads. You won’t find that inside Blackbox Republic.

ads

8. Public life

Blackbox Republic is a private community. That means it’s not for prying eyes, search engines, or career-ending accidents. Your life is our secret.

public

9. Boring people

Ours is a creative, right-brained crowd. You can bet that since everyone who’s there is serious about being there and as everyone is sex-positive, that there will be no shortage of amazing people. You won’t find depressing newsfeeds, get poked, have a drink thrown at you or get caught up in a Vampire contest.

boring

10. Only sex

Blackbox Republic is a community where–yes–sex will happen. So will friends, dating, and marriage. It’s about your whole personal life, not just your sex life.

sex

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Posted in Productivity

July 19th, 2009

8 Comments

Why risk being eaten?

At one point I blogged about “What it takes to Go Big.”

I’ve learned a lot since that post. Especially about bravery. By bravery, I mean, pulling away from the crowd to face serious danger or pain. It’s one of those things, like most, that’s easy to armchair quarterback from the pack, but until you’ve done it– professionally or personally– you can only pretend to know it.

New companies face this every hour. The rest of the market says, “stop. you will get eaten.” You must be crazy, you will fail, close, never make it. Sometimes other companies even try to attack, to try to stop you. The same thing can be said personally, when you pull yourself away from your group. They wonder what’s wrong with you, question you and try to pull you back to the norm.

You know those helicopter shots of herds of animals on the Discovery Channel?

As soon as you see one of those animals veer off, you think, “that’s the one that will die.” And you’re right. The company or person who veers off, risks everything. They’re a pinata for us to beat. And everyone loves candy. But breakthroughs come from ignoring that inner voice. The one that tells you to stay home on the couch. That tells you to lean back on your skis.

stop

Below is one of my favorite blog comments. It was from Brent Britton in response to What it takes to Go Big. It’s amazingly well-written:

We’re stuck with some evolutionary baggage. We come from schools of fish and herds of animals for whom sameness is a survival skill and standing out from the crowd gets you eaten. So we have evolved a pleasure response to our own conformity. Fitting in to our peer group evokes a sense of comfort. Somewhere deep within our brains lies machinery that makes us really dig flocking.

Choosing to innovate requires overcoming the visceral desire to just sit down, shut up, and accept the status quo like everyone else.

Evolutionary disdain for radical behavior works outwardly too; we instinctively fear and loathe the behavior of our peers when it runs too far afield of the norm. And we have no qualms about letting them know it. This kinship-based weirdness suppressor is an evolutionary backup to keep us in line if we can’t self regulate as individuals. When people have too many different ideas, we think they’re crazy and we tell them so. Witness the very epithet “mad scientist.” Heck, witness how any group of teens treats a nonconforming peer. When Fulton proposed the steamboat, they called it Fulton’s Folly and they said it would never work. After all, why put a steam engine on boats when we’ve got reliable, centuries-old sails and oars? I have no doubt that when the first of our kind tried rubbing two sticks together in an effort to make fire, the rest of us stood around making fun of him and probably suggesting he was in league with Lucifer. We cannot conceive of our own place in a world that is marked by the change that innovations represent. Just ask the 19th century oarsmen that Fulton’s incredibly useful steam engine put out of work.

To innovate successfully, you’ve got to ignore the slings and arrows of critics. You’ve got to get yourself spending time around people who appreciate weirdness and smartness and who value new ideas because they are new. You’ve got to remember that pretty much everyone who ever said it couldn’t be done…about anything… was wrong.

My advice? Avoid lizardry. Yes, you’ve got this paleocortex in the back of your head insistently pumping out the signal that you are a fearful little ball of nerves just desperately trying to avoid getting eaten (because your paleocortex knows that you are crunchy and good with soy sauce). But for several hundred thousand years you and the rest of your kind have been toying with how to use this other rather nifty hunk of jelly right behind your forehead. The highly organized electrochemical potentials in your cerebral cortex have paved the way for all sorts of useful skills, such as choosing whether or not to supersize it, for example.

And also to decide whether or not to actually give voice to the signals coming out of your lizard brain or push through them to become the star you are, star.

Your evolutionary fears are but a subset of the whispering winds luffing through your sails. Choose to ignore them and boldly go.

whack1

In starting Blackbox Republic, I remember our PR Agency asking me if I was ready for all the personal and professional attacks I’d receive. They warned me that all the vocal nuts, from the Conservative Right to Joe Blow, would shake their evangelical sticks at me, call everyting I’m doing into question and yell foul. I told them what I’ll tell you. I believe, like they believe. Just in something different. I can’t think of anything better to do than to break through. To start something meaningful. To find your tribe-mates, your “company.” No matter how small or big. Eaten or not.

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Posted in Productivity

July 14th, 2009

19 Comments

Out of Stealth: Welcome to Blackbox Republic

Social Nicheworking is the next big thing.

What’s a social nichework? It’s (a) choosing a target market and (b) building social software that’s tailored for them. “Social networking” is a technology meant for everyone. Social nicheworking software, isn’t. And there’s a pretty big chance that the first niche we’re building for, isn’t for you.

Blackbox Republic: Where do we (some of us) put our personal life?

Here comes the part where I lose some of you. Maybe even most of you.

Why? Because I’m going to say the word, “sex.” Worse, I’m going to keep talking about it. The #2 question: What’s Blackbox Republic? Easy. It’s a membership-based online/offline community for sex positive people to share their personal lives.

The #1 question is: What’s sex positive? No matter what I say at this point, a lot of you will hear “internet sex site.” Or porn. Or a hookup site. And I’m cool with that. Rock on with your giggly, bad self. You don’t need to get it.

For the rest of you open to the idea, “sex positive” means sexuality isn’t, and shouldn’t be, a big issue. By that I mean, you live your life being completely open about who you are. Even at the most intimate levels. And you like to connect with other people like that, too. If you’re sex positive, you’re a right-brained, creative person who doesn’t live life by someone else’s checklist. I think April’s post and video does a good job outlining the addressable market. The only thing I’d add to her post is that you can be happily married or 75yrs old or straight, bi, gay, poly, chocolate or mango and still be sex positive. Simply, sex positive is love positive.

So, why did I pick it? Simple answer: I believe in the sex positive community. I’m a part of it.

This is a picture taken the moment the company started.

This is the Temple at Burning Man. It’s an amazing structure covered in hand-written prayers. As April and I sat there, we watched people and talked about the event. We spent most of our time talking about relationships, and how different they were at the event compared to the daily world.

Genesis We realized that two big things were happening:

1. People made meaningful connections.

When people spend $200-$300 on a ticket, $2,000 on an RV, tons of money on food, clothes, and spend a ton of time getting there, they’re buying a journey. They are there for the experience. They know many things will happen. But they want to be around people like them, around the freedom of expression, and around the connected whole. You can’t tell who’s a CEO or Janitor, there is no materialism, or agendas. Besides Second Life (which was also inspired by Burning Man), we couldn’t think of another place online that was focused on having a journey vs focusing on the end-results.

2. The “Margarita Moment”

The other thing that was inspiring was just how much the giving mentality at Burning Man connected everyone. One day, April and I were on an art car in the middle of the hot, open desert and a man on a bicycle rode up and asked us if we’d like a frozen margarita. He poured us one and then drove off. It was the perfect gift at the perfect time and we didn’t ask or have to do anything for it to happen. We call it the “Margarita Moment.” We actually even took a picture of it.

gifting

The drive home was 17 hours. We talked about online relationships the whole time.

The big questions we asked was why couldn’t something like Burning Man be available for everyone all the time ? When we finally got back we looked at where meaningful relationships and gifting currently occurred. And we looked for a place that united the sex positive community.

1. The perpetual, public Facebook reunion

stage-fb2

When I got back from the event, my friends began tagging pictures of me wearing a tutu and goofing off at Burning Man and I found them a while later all over my Facebook profile mixed in with my work pictures. I don’t know about you, but I barely know all my “friends” on Facebook and Twitter. Oh, and true story, this week, my electrician friended me on Facebook.

2. Dating sites: People as produce

cc2

Who would know how to develop online relationships better than the dating industry? That’s the next thing we looked at. Unfortunately, we found a market that was 15 years old and suffering from massive idea bankruptcy. The notion of whipping out your credit card to pay for a chemistry test, love, a date, sex is totally broken. Most of these sites (which I’ll show you soon), treat people like produce. You’re meat. And people are shopping you. The whole thing is a carry over from newspaper personals and needs to die.

3. Gifting at ‘ye old online vendors

onlinestores What does eCommerce have to do with this, you ask? Well, it was the only thing to look at for online gifting. And in doing so, it struck us that it, too, is remnants of a 15 year old post online-gold rush era. To gift someone, you have to leave the online social situation, drive your computer over to an online store, get a username, password, verify email, find crap, add it to your cart, call your friend up, get their address (as if you’re not sending them something), etc etc. It’s very unlike the Margarita Moment. There’s nothing social or gift-like about it.

The Perfect storm

This “add to cart,” transactional online reality dominates the web and is need of a makeover. The fact that (1) there weren’t any Social Nicheworking software companies (2) there wasn’t a trusted place for sex-positive people to share their personal life and (3) the online relationship market was a mess made this the perfect storm for Blackbox Republic to be formed. We raised $1M from angels in the sex-positive community with very little effort.

socialnicheworking

So, now it’s time to go big in a completely different way.

Change your feed readers, this blog is no long about Enterprise 2.0. It’s now about creating a new category: Social Nicheworking. You can bet I’ll be talking about what we’re building solve all of this. I look forward to taking some of you on that journey and to opening up conversations with a completely new set of people as well.

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Posted in Productivity

March 19th, 2009

6 Comments

SAP missing the boat (you sunk my battleship?)

The Old Brain

20 years ago, the brain of an organization was at the process level. But now business process is a commodity. Core processes are like the lights on your car. You used to touch them but now they just happen all by themselves. ERP has now moved into being the circulatory system of organizations. Depending on which analyst you listen to, it’s a $30B industry that’s not expanding.

The Slipping Boat

SAP built a multi-billion dollar business building out a process factory. They own the core processes that run business. They will always be there. But the process system is tapped. Information workers (I call them “social workers”) are now operating farther and father from the processes. Instead of a few people touching ERP, a ton of people are touching Social Business Software and doing their work in it. SAP increasingly just happens magically in the backend (like the lights coming on in your car).

The New Brain

The new brain now touches everyone at an organization. But not just them, it also reaches out and touches a company’s partners and customers. While SAP contemplates it’s circulatory system and uses it as the framework to push into extremities and other systems like CRM (sensory system) or SCM (digestive system), it’s hugely missing out on how to capture the new brain.

A New Battleship

It’s not too late, though SAP needs to recognize this and they’re letting huge assets go all over the organization that have been trying to drive this new growth (like Steve Mann, who CIO wrote about today). If I were them, I’d look hard at their acquisition of Business Objects and aggressively push those folks to help steer them in the right direction. This should help them at least begin to tap into the brain (or the stem) and capture a whole new set of SAP users and a ton of money.

So, the $50 Billion question for SAP: Will you aggressively pursue a new growth strategy or stay the course?

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Posted in Productivity

March 10th, 2009

13 Comments

Jive launches the next big enterprise application category

When was the last time enterprise software was interesting?

For half of you, the answer is “never.” For some it might have been when CRM finally grew up in the late 90s. Others, maybe when email came to work. Remember that? It was around the time when only people on CompuServe accounts could email each other. And it was a consumer app. You’d email with friends. Then everyone started talking about using email at work. Some were excited you could instantly get information from one person to many people. Some were worried email would unleash hell on earth. Regardless, when it came to work, it touched absolutely everyone at the company and changed the way they worked.

When I interviewed at Jive

It was four years ago. I sat across the table from the founders while they explained their vision. They were convinced there would be–yet again–a big change in the way people would work with each other. And they had been at it for four years already, profitably and 100% bootstrapped. They had a forum product, a knowledge base, some open source instant messaging software and this vision. They believed that in the same way the open source community worked together or in the same way people openly worked with each other in Support communities, that all employees within companies would also work in this open, connected way. They had their sites on building the next big enterprise software company, not some built-to-flip startup.

You can imagine, since I go big always, that this was one of the big things that attracted me to Jive.

When Clearspace launched

It was after two years of heavy R&D. I remember calling tons of customers listened to their ideas, gathered requirements, and ultimately did a whole lot of visualizing of what a brand new, game-changing product would be like. In the end, it was a massive bet. Did we leave all our successful, profitable products in the dust and go with something new that didn’t even have a proxy in the market? That decision was made working closely with our customers who even sat through countless user accepting tests to help us arrive at something remarkable. I remember how excited we were when CNET broke the story on the cover of News.com. Clearspace was a massive hit. It attracted a whole new level of customers, employees, partners and ultimately Sequoia who invested in our company . They loved our vision and believed the enterprise software landscape was ready for a change, too.

Today the vision becomes reality

With today’s launch of Jive SBS 3.0, we launch two things: (1) the largest enterprise software category since ERP, CRM, and messaging combined, and (2) a brand new solution that finally brings the vision of uniting customers, partners, and employees together to change the way they work with each other.

With this release, Jive sets the course for the SBS category. You can read all about what’s new from our CEO, Dave Hersh. But let me share some other things that are or will be new (besides our product, company and website):

Social Capital

Ever been to a meeting when the CEO asks for the status of a project, initiative, the temperature of the company, the issues surrounding critical things? Those answers have always been a qualitative and a few people’s perspectives. With the SBS market, once companies have the know-how and the people connected, they can actually measure these things quantitatively. No more opinions, now it’s just facts. Expect a whole new set of management metrics, insight and productivity thanks to SBS.

Leadership

A social business needs new leadership, not the same old “managers.” Remember when you were the expert? Now you’re not. You’re part of a team. And you should be a good coach. Get ready to be outdated really fast unless you learn new skills.

Social Process and Decisions

Now that SBS is the new inbox and employees are doing their work in it everyday, companies need a new way to make critical decisions and reinvent more effective processes for competitive advantage.

Accountibility

No more hiding behind the success of others. No more hemorrhaging of people know-how when tens of thousands walk out the door (did you see that our government “forgot” how to make Trident missles?). No more taking the credit.

The toothpaste is out of the tube

Don’t believe that SBS is the biggest enterprise category in 15-20 years? No problem. With every new category, there’s always the naysayers. There’s always the other vendors who see it as sprinkles they can pepper their unrelated apps with. These are all the normal ingredients for disruption. Just look into the social web and then into the workplace and you tell me: Is SBS the next big enterprise category?

State Farm doesn’t want to connect people.

The antiquated, “eyeball” media model is screwing with our online behavior.

Here’s why Friending and Following doesn’t work

The numbers we track in our online/offline life

1. Labels

2. Profiles

3. Lookie-loos, tourists & creeps

4. Hang ups

5. Censorship

6. Store

7. Ads

8. Public life

9. Boring people

10. Only sex

At one point I blogged about “What it takes to Go Big.”

You know those helicopter shots of herds of animals on the Discovery Channel?

Social Nicheworking is the next big thing.

Blackbox Republic: Where do we (some of us) put our personal life?

This is a picture taken the moment the company started.

1. People made meaningful connections.

2. The “Margarita Moment”

The drive home was 17 hours. We talked about online relationships the whole time.

1. The perpetual, public Facebook reunion

2. Dating sites: People as produce

3. Gifting at ‘ye old online vendors

The Perfect storm

So, now it’s time to go big in a completely different way.

The Old Brain

The Slipping Boat

The New Brain

A New Battleship

When was the last time enterprise software was interesting?

When I interviewed at Jive

When Clearspace launched

Today the vision becomes reality

The toothpaste is out of the tube

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