We just added a small new feature to Oyster.com. You can now search for a point of interest – say the Empire State Building – and we will show you hotels that are near it.

http://www.oyster.com/about/points-of-interest/

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Investments in innovation do not pay out in the current quarter. Typically, they don’t even pay out in the current year. If you care about your bonus this year, you are directly incented not to make investments in new inventions as you will incur the expense, but reap no profits. – Ben Horowitz

In his post “Why We Prefer Founding CEOs” Ben Horowitz, inadvertently, explains the root cause of Wall Street’s problems. Professional managers with short term outlooks and incentives tend to be far better at maximizing the profits of an existing business model than they are creating new business models and products. The innovation required to create the latter is significant and risky whereas maximizing short term revenue – while its own set of problems – tends to be not only lower risk but also what the professional manager is going to get paid on. If you make a lot of EBITDA/net income in the short term, you get a nice bonus for your contribution. But what if the right answer for the long term prosperity of the business was to forgo some of that short term profit (and therefore some short term compensation) and instead invest in innovation on things that might not work and if they do work, won’t pay off for a few years.

It’s a problem that afflicts many – but clearly not all – companies run by professional managers and particularly those with strong “pay me now” bonus cultures. It was blatantly in effect at the likes of Citi, Bear, Lehman, Morgan Stanley, AIG, Countrywide, WAMU, Merill (but likely not Goldman) during 2006 and 2007 when, despite tremendous evidence that their existing profit centers (creating mortgage related securities) were failing badly, they chose not to innovate on new business models (GS famously reversed course and went short) but rather to maximize their short term profits. In “The End of Wall Street“, Lowenstein gives some shocking [click to continue…]

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If “innovative” means – as it should – creating something that is beneficial, then the increasing popularity of secondary markets for private shares is the first “financial innovation” in a long time that actually deserves the title.

For entrepreneurs who don’t want to go public and don’t want to sell their business to create liquidity, this is a very healthy alternative and a much needed market.

http://www.pehub.com/71570/commoners-keep-overvaluing-facebook-twitter-tesla/

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I wrote this comment in response to an excellent post by Fred Wilson “From Hopes and Dreams to the Real Thing” I wrote this comment in the comments to his post but am reposting it here as well.

Some thoughts about the reality of entrepreneurship from my experience of the past 11 years living a mainly entrepreneurial life (and lifestyle):

I’ve lived the ups and downs and downs and ups of entrepreneurship and my experience has been that when you look back on those days when you were in the trenches fighting for survival, you’ll see them, through the lens of nostalgia, as the “good old days”. By contrast, scaling a fast growing startup that has found its market fit is stimulating and exciting but, at least for me, sits nowhere near as prominently in my minds list of proud moments.

My last entrepreneurial run went from 2000 to mid 2006 with a true “go to the light” near death experience throughout most of 2002. The business ultimately found its market fit and had a high growth phase from 2003 to 2005 (from 7 people to more than 200 during [click to continue…]

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UGC, LBS, media, meta search, NLP, aggregation, commerce, web 2.0… As industry insiders, we’ve all heard these labels ad nauseum. But customers don’t think in categories – they think in problems. Don’t worry about what other industry insiders label you, worry about problems you solve for customers.

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The details are details. They make the product. The connections, the connections, the connections. It will in the end be these details that give the product its life.

Charles Eames

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Please see the job description at

http://jobs.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?6689

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The iPad is NOT for you if:

• You are expecting it to be a smaller/lighter laptop
• You want a replacement for a specialized reading device like the Kindle
• A replacement for a mobile device like iPhone or Blackberry
• You type rapidly on a keyboard and will become very frustrated with being slow on a hard to hold, hard to type on iPad
• You are already very comfortable with a Mac or Windows full operating system; you will be very frustrated with how cumbersome the iPhone OS is relative to a real computer.
• Don’t already have a computer – you can’t startup an iPad without first connecting it to a computer (Windows or Mac). Yes, that’s ridiculous for a device this expensive.

The iPad is not:

• Easy to type on
• Easy to manipulate or engage with content on
• Mobile (at least not by the standards of iPhone or Blackberry)
• Ergonomic – it’s too heavy to hold for long with one hand, incapable of being held with two while you type and basically all around awkward.

At the current price, the iPad IS for: [click to continue…]

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Oyster is looking for sales and business development people. Please contact me if you are interested elie at oyster dot com and attach a resume and write a short note

Here is some of what we are looking for:

• Charming
• Likable
• Persuasive
• Deeply extroverted
• Articulate
• Loves networking
• Aggressive and ambitious
• Customer focused – the kind of person who answers every email and phone call before going home for the night.
• Customer service oriented
• Concise – no buzzworders please. Nothing is more annoying than someone who speaks – regardless of how eloquently – and delivers many words but no content.
• Presentable – will present well for the Oyster brand, particularly when speaking with advertisers or hoteliers. No one slick please.
• Smart – can understand the needs of the customer and help them become a better marketer as a result.
• Hard working – the sales and marketing team will run on a 9AM to ~8pm schedule 5+ days/week so this is not a job for everyone.
• Number of years of prior work experience – 1 to 6
• Willing to be assessed continuously – Understands that the sales and business development org is a quantitative metric driven  environment with the derivative potential (and likelihood) for high churn among those who don’t meet the highest standards of performance. For the right people, that metric driven assessment is a boon, for others it’s a nonstarter.
• Prior experiences preferred; not required for people who have tremendous aptitude but the ideal candidate has at least a few of these.
  • Has sold online advertising before
  • Has sold to tourism bureaus before
  • Understands the Internet. Can easily name 5 sites that they use frequently and explain what makes that site best in class (Google, amazon and any mail program does not count)
  • Have sold to hotels before – understand how hotels think about marketing and sales
  • Has sold something, anything really, before and liked it
  • Has worked in the hotel industry
  • Was an entrepreneur – even if their business was not successful, I’m still interested (for obvious reasons, it’s hard to hire the entrepreneurs who have been very successful)
  • Passionate about hotels – kind of obvious but worth stating.
• Locations
  • NYC – currently the most desirable
  • LA
  • SF
  • Miami
  • Vegas
  • Orlando

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