Compare Joost and Hulu. Which one is more compelling?
Joost came out first, generated a bunch of buzz, and has a novel/interesting user interface. It’s also technically interesting, using peer-to-peer for distribution.
In contrast, Hulu came later and has a decent, sort-of-generic UI, but works entirely through the Web (no client, no peer-to-peer).
Why is Hulu so compelling? It’s content: they have stuff people actually want to watch.
A while back, my friend George (all names changed) hired someone who previously worked for Fred, another friend. Unfortunately, the hire didn’t work out and left in a few months. Later, Fred said something like, “Yes, George called me for a reference, and I gave him Really Big Hints to not hire him!”
I’ve written previously on hiring. Within the hiring process, a set of deep, well-done reference checks is absolutely critical. You can spend hours with someone in multiple meetings, but there’s no substitute for talking to a previous manager, peer, or report who’s worked closely with the candidate.
In a reference call, you’re (a) validating the Good Stuff the candidate has already told you, and (b) looking for things that you haven’t been told but should know. We’re all human, each with our share of imperfections. But most folks don’t spend enough time digging for those imperfections. It’s tricky, because social norms, psychology, and liability concerns make it hard for most people to “say anything bad” about a candidate.
Your job, when doing a reference check, is to dig deep, and to make it safe & OK for the reference to tell you what you need to know.
I find Wikipedia fascinating. Anyone can edit — how could that possibly work?
Of course, there’s been a lot of discussion and debate about the accuracy of Wikipedia articles. I think Wikipedia is pretty accurate, if you look a sort of content average over the long term. Inaccuracies in any given article will get corrected by the crowd over time (but with new inaccuracies added). In other words, any given article has “inaccuracy noise” over time, around a mean (or accurate) “value”.
I think democracies work like Wikipedia articles. At any given instant, something’s “inaccurate” (e.g. broken, dysfunctional, etc.), but the system works pretty well if you consider the average results over time. It’s the wisdom of crowds at work.
So the question is: how much of a content cleanup will the 2008 elections be? (And that’s as political as I’m going to get in this blog).
A common provision in venture funding agreements (it’s usually in the term sheet) is that the company pays the investor’s legal bill. It’s annoying, but quite typical.
Let’s say you’re raising a $1m round, and have to pay the investor’s $25k legal bill. So, in effect, you’re raising only $975k, but you’re giving up $1m worth of the company to get it. Why doesn’t the investor just give you $975 and pay their own expenses?
By passing the expense through the company (by investing first, then having the company pay), the investor is getting additional equity for the expense, or equivalently, a small discount on the pre-money valuation (about 2.5% in the example above). For this reason, investors are generally incented to pass as much company-related expense as they can through the company.
In most cases, the amount reimbursed by the company can be capped. (And a low cap can help keep the investor focused on keeping the investment terms simple and the legal bill reasonable).
Well this is interesting:
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts says it will become the first health insurer to participate in Google Health, a medical records initiative by the online search engine.(from this article).
(I’m an HMO Blue of MA subscriber.)
I’ve wondered for a while why, with all of the technology available, someone hasn’t finally figured out how to make health care and health insurance more efficient. Check this out to keep yourself fit. (And I’m sorry to say that I’ve developed a small set of forms my family uses to streamline replies to incoming HMO paperwork).
I’ve got mixed feelings about Google handling medical records, but if they can help stop my HMO premiums from going up 10-25%/year, I’m interested in learning more.
Well, I’ve now got three decent options for video on demand: Hulu, iTunes movie rentals, and the Netflix/Roku set-top box (which just arrived a few days ago).
Hulu is free, ad-supported, with mostly TV content. Netflix’s “watch instantly” has old-run DVD content (movies and TV shows) with no ads, free for existing subscribers. And iTunes has newer movies and content for a pay-per-view (err, “rental”) model.
I think we now officially have a competitive market for on-demand TV and movie content.
I’m starting to choose (or avoid) hotels based on the broadband speed.
Between Web apps (like Gmail) and streaming-only content (like Hulu), hotels with crappy bandwidth are downright painful.
I was cleaning last weekend, and came across my college 12Mhz PC/AT. It has a 40Mb Seagate hard drive ($425, new!) and monochrome Hercules graphics. We used that computer into the late 90s; eventually, it’s sole purpose was to run DOS Quicken. We still miss that version — it was fast, minimalist, focused, and did the job very well. If they had added Internet statement downloads, we’d probably still be using it.
Now, Quicken drives me nuts — we’ve “upgraded” a few times, only because Intuit has stopped supporting our old versions. Rarely have we gotten any features we actually want; usually all I get is Kellie’s (justified) complaining about learning a new UI.
This is the core problem with the old software model: the publisher is incented to keep selling you new versions, even if you don’t really need them. I’m still using Office 2000, and in my view, it’s “feature complete”. Office 2008 doesn’t have anything I need or want.
Adobe’s PhotoShop Elements is the worst offender: I bought 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 an then gave up. In successive versions, there were few new features, lots of gratuitous UI redesign, and in some cases, features taken out!
Subscription models are the future, clearly.
At Google, executive chef Josef Desimone scrambled cruelty-free eggs by the truckload. Now Facebook has hired him to replace steam-heated trays of takeout with the kind of free food Googlers are used to. For engineers, Facebook is the new dreamland, and a company cafeteria is the kind of perk they’ve come to expect.(from: Facebook hires away Google’s top chef [Josef Desimone] )
Am I alone in feeling that this is a really ominous sign, it’s all gotten way out of whack, and is going to come crashing down?
Great products rarely come about through committee design. I’ve never seen it myself — behind every great product, there’s always been one or two obsessed people.
And it’s not enough just to be obsessed, you’ve got to be obsessed about details. Most people can’t or won’t get into the details.
From time to time, I send feedback to friends about their products and Web sites, some of it really really specific. One recent one was about date selection from a calendar: on a two-month-wide pop-up, they could have optimized the “end” date selection a bit better based on a chosen “start” date, when the start date was at or near a month boundary.
Are you rolling your eyes yet?
This is how great products happen, one little bit of obsessed detail at a time.