Just got home and discovered my dodocase arrived
Month: July 2010
Some thoughts on Flipboard and content owners
I’ve been playing around with Flipboard over the last few days.
I haven’t been able to link my twitter account yet but I’m guessing that will be resolved shortly. But I’ve been using it with other content sources so far and I think Flipboard is fantastic. Looks great and is a pleasure to use.
The question that has come up recently is whether Flipboard is doing something legal or not.
I’m thinking about something else when it comes to Flipboard and content owners. Namely:
-which content owners look at Flipboard and say to themselves, “this thing scares the daylights out of me” vs which ones say “I love it, my users love it and i need to get more of my content on Flipboard”. The latter are thinking this through correctly in my opinion. Get your content in front of users where they want it.
-When I first saw Flipboard, I thought, I would love to get Tumblr content on Flipboard. My Tumblr dashboard is filled with highly curated and beatuiful things and I want that on the iPad inside Flipboard.
-Dave Winer has a post about the need for authoring tools for content owners so they can optimize for things like Flipboard and any reading environment. I’d like to see that happen too.
-i’ve got this notion of verticle sections for Flipboard. for example, a NY Yankees tile or section could pull in multiple sources on that particular subject. Maybe it does that already?
Anyway, that’s all for now. More after I get Twitter working with Flipboard. But I could easily see myself getting addicted to this app.
Old 97’s – Five Years
Daryn turned me on to this new cover EP. I’m really enjoying @rhettmiller and the gang take on some great tunes. This one is an old David Bowie classic.
Wearing my new twitter tshirt
What will we see coming out of App Inventor? Probably lots of junk, but does that matter? In Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky talks about the “stupidest possible creative act,” which he associates with LOLcats. What Clay realizes, and what Google realizes, is that the “stupidest possible creative act” is much better than no creative act at all, or limiting creativity to a small elite. A world full of LOLcats is preferable to a world full of network sitcoms. The history of creativity is filled with lots of trash; but in a weird way, the trash enables the truly great creative works to come into being. You can’t have one without the other.
Matthew & The Atlas | I Will Remain
Yesterday, @david sent me a dm on twitter turning me on to Matthew & The Atlas. And I’m very happy he did that.
via david-noel:
Matthew & The Atlas | I Will Remain
Ian Hooper dropped four of Matthew’s tracks to my Spotify inbox and I Will Remain has been stuck on replay for an hour and is the stand-out track from his EP To The North which I just got it from iTunes. Hush hush, go and grab it.
By the way, Matthew releases via Communion Records, Mumford & Sons’ label.
A quality that I find hugely important but increasingly rare in people is the willingness to admit mistakes. Growing up I wasn’t really part of a culture in which mistakes are openly discussed and used as an opportunity to learn. For a long time, my own approach was therefore one of just moving on or trying to fix things without admitting to any mistakes (often compounding the initial mistake in the process). But as I started to manage people I came to realize that if you want them to try things and take risks you can’t have a culture that hides mistakes. Every mistake is an opportunity to learn and you don’t want to throw those away. So if you want that kind of culture you have to start with yourself and admit your mistakes. In a business setting a simple “I got this wrong” or a more emphatic “I screwed this up” is so direct and helpful that often it doesn’t even require an apology (unless someone got harmed)
Continuations: Admitting Mistakes
excellent.
Should a startup bring on a strategic investor?
A number of startups in our portfolio have considered taking an investment from a strategic customer. The idea is that the large company will care more about the relationship if they own a percentage of the startup company. The large company also feels better perhaps because they get upside if the startup becomes extremely valuable.
Simply put I’ve seen this play out in three different ways after such an investment:
-strategic partner is helpful
-not helpful
-painful
With financial investors the incentives are typically aligned with the founders.
But strategic customers that own equity in your startup have different interests. They care about their own company first as you would expect.
Few suggestions to keep in mind:
-put together an outline/termsheet of a business relationship you want with the strategic partner and make sure you both see the world the same way. Getting a business deal done along with an equity investment can be a good way to surface key sticking issues.
-consider what happens if the strategic partner terminates the business agreement over time but still owns equity in your company. This is a likely scenario to it’s important to think about that.
-Often times the strategic investor will want some type of blocking right, that is the ability to block a sale of your company. Their rationale: they don’t want to see your company being sold to a competitor. Blocking rights are either spelled out as such specifically or they ask for a softer version of this in a ROFR (right of first refusal). In reality a ROFR is just the same thing and I would not accept that. One way I’ve seen a startup navigate this clause is by narrowing the timing of such a blocking right to 6 months or 12 months. I’m not a fan of that either
-avoid having a strategic customer on your board of directors
-one way to give your strategic customer incentives in your business without selling them equity is by giving them performance based warrants. That way if they don’t deliver the goods they don’t own any equity.
-consider how this strategic investment will impact your ability to work with other strategic partners/customers.
–beware of the complicated deal
If the tone of this post suggests I’m not a big fan of strategic investments than I’ve done my job today. I’m really not.
So just be careful and keep your eyes wide open.