Having observed and in some cases successfully predicted the changes of the past decade, here are my predictions for the major changes in the coming decade:

• Pervasive urban high speed (1.5Mbps to 10Mbps) mobile bandwidth such as what Sprint is doing with 4G/WiMax. The current ~1Mbps 3G network – offering the speed I had on my Covad SDSL line in 2000 – is not anywhere near fast enough for todays internet and is – as evidenced by the numerous complains about AT&T’s network – the limiting factor for a lot of the mobile internet. The limited bandwidth also dictates engineering decisions when developing for mobile hence the apps – instead of  browser based services – for the iPhone. Like Fred, I’m excited about mobile – and Android in particular but until we see higher speed connectivity, it will remain a bad version of the Internet.
• We do NOT all migrate to one mobile device. The keyboard and hand feel of a Blackberry makes it ergonomically suited to do certain things that the iPhone’s larger touch screen simply cannot do. The gating factor here is NOT technology but rather the human body and the hand in particular. I used the Verizon Droid and it’s too much of a compromise: typing on it is nowhere near as good as typing on the Blackberry and browsing on it is not quite as good as the iPhone. I believe that it will remain hard or impossible to create a device that is both great for typing and as good for browsing as the iPhone is. For those who need to type and browse on a mobile device, two devices will likely be the norm – everyone else will choose the application that is most important for them and choose a device based on that. I have an iPod touch and a Blackberry – since email is my most important application and the iPhone is basically not a typing device – no matter what Apple fanboys may claim – I put up with the lousy Blackberry browser in order to benefit from the better hand feel.
• Handheld computers will increase 30% in size and at least double their screen resolution – it’s hard to overstate the importance of screen resolution. An iPod that has 30% more surface area but twice the resolution is worth the size tradeoff.
• Mobile computing has its limits – like so many technology fads – and there have been many – the early adopters who are vocal get really excited about the new thing while it’s novel only to leave the latest and greatest thing behind when the novelty has passed – RSS and push technologies are but two of the examples that stand out in my memory. Mobile computing, while clearly far more substantive than other fads of the moment, is in that euphoria period. If you have not used a desktop PC or Mac with a 30″ monitor, you should – it will be hard to use anything smaller afterwards. As the monitor on our wall (currently called a TV) starts to serve double duty – both lean forward and lean back UI experiences – a larger portion of the population will have access to very high resolution screens. The mobile device is nice but 2000+ horizontal pixels, 100Mbps+, and a real keyboard and mouse blows the iPhone out of the water. Unless I have to, I don’t use my mobile device (Blackberry and iPod Touch) – it’s not nearly as good as a laptop or a desktop.
• Mobile computing hardware commoditizes. An incredibly powerful desktop PC has less than 500 dollar of parts in it so why does an Apple iPod Touch cost 200 to 400? There is a reason why Apple has such amazing margins. Apple has set a great example – but not a standard – for others – notably Google – to copy and copy it they will. Google has a huge incentive to commoditize the complement – they benefit when more people use mobile computing so they want to bring the cost of mobile computing down. Apple needs to sell devices to make money – Google does not.  It will get interesting when Google dramatically lowers the price of an Android device that is nearly as good as the iPhone/iPod touch. With the Droid they’ve gottten very close to doing that. Apple’s margins are going to be compressed. It’s hard to get excited about shorting Steve Jobs but I believe that on the backs of the incompetence of the risk averse corporate cultures of Nokia, Motorola and Microsoft, Apple has built a temporary advantage that will disappear over the next two to four years as others – Google in particular – race to copy them. For mobile computing to go really mainstream (billions of users not 10s of millions) the device needs to be 50 dollars, not 200 to 400 – and I believe Google Android is going to make it happen with a great OS that any hardware manufacturer can use. Expect 50 dollar Android devices by early 2012. Amazon and Google will partner to make a seamless digital content buying experience that is as good as what Apple offers with iTunes.
• Mobile device-specific apps lose their importance and are replaced by simpler and better standards for web browsers on mobile devices. The mobile browser standard will also be able to deal with off-line scenarios though off-line scenarios will be fewer and further between as mobile data networks improve. For the likes of Yelp to have to write not only for the PC based browser but also an app for the iPhone, Blackberry (with the myriad versions BB OS and hardware levels) and Android makes no sense. We are supposed to be getting away from device dependent development and we will. A core advantage of the iPhone – the early lead in apps derivative from the broad adoption of their first to market innovative device – wanes. Blackberry and Google both benefit from eliminating that Apple advantage and will invest heavily in doing so. It becomes harder for Apple to maintain an advantage with more innovative – and better looking – hardware though it’s very hard to bet against Steve Jobs. If Steve’s health issues recur, all bets are off and Apple could lose 10s of billions in capitalization much faster than is conceivable today. With a mobile computer replacement cycle of two years or less, it does not take long for someone else to come along and take Apple’s share. I find it hard to forget that the first Mac that I had in 84 was supplanted by a Windows PC. Apple’s design and pricing arrogance (but not its constantly failing hardware) has been it’s advantage so far but will be a liability in the years to come.
• Voice and data will not be sold separately on landline internet connections or on mobile devices - packets are packets and they won’t be priced differently. My iPod touch – connected to WiMax or WiFi – will do just fine as a phone and why should I have to buy my minutes from the mobile DATA network.
• Extreme high speed (100Mbps+) landline internet dominates. Verizon with FiOS has an early lead and will likely come to be seen as having been very prescient. The existing cable networks are going to be crushed by unicast video. The FiOS network will be able to keep up without a problem. We have Cogent 100Mbps Internet access at the office in NYC (for $1000/month) and it is a total game changer relative to my – quite fast – Time Warner cable modem.
• Twisted pair copper phone networks (traditional plain old telephone service (POTS)) will be largely – but not entirely – phased out. Landline voice will continue to exist but will run over VoIP and the VoIP does not run on a twisted copper pair infrastructure. Phone companies that don’t invest in an infrastructure able to handle all forms of high speed IP traffic lose to their competitors who do.
• Unicast video ala AppleTV, Cable TV video on demand, Hulu and NetFlix on demand instead of broadcast where certain shows are shown at certain times. The DVR market is largely dead by the end of the decade having been replaced by unicast video on demand. It’s about to get much easier to watch video downloaded off of the Internet on your TV in lean back mode.
  • Microsoft figures out how to leverage the broad deployment of the Xbox
• Professional content remains extremely important, particularly in video. Creating bad video is very easy  - those who are good at creating something worth watching will continue to be paid for making it though not as much as they used to and as consumers we will be willing to pay for it (via watching ads or direct payment). The fact that the distribution mechanism has changed does not change the fact that skill is needed to produce high quality content. No, user generated content (UGC) does not take over the world. It remains important but more and more it coexists with – and comments on – that which is produced by experts. Have you made your way through reviews in Yelp lately? Here is how it goes: “I loved it, I hated it, I loved it, I hated it”. I’m obviously putting my money and my time where my mouth is on this one because after reading 20 reviews on most any UGC site – with the exception of Amazon’s reviews on specific consumer electronics and on some books – I’m typically more confused – and more tired – than when I started and when I speak with the normal people I encounter (normal here is defined as not working in Silicon Valley and not a major contributor to a UGC site) I hear the same thing. How did Paul Kedrosky choose which dishwasher to buy? He went to Consumer Reports. And contrary to what Paul thinks he experienced, it was not a search issue but rather a content issue – deserving of a post onto itself.
• We rely on editors more and more to help us navigate through the noise. Those editors will use new mediums such as Twitter and Facebook to disseminate their insight but the role of the editor will be similar to what it has always been – to make it less work to find interesting things. The world is obviously not going to regress to the three network TV stations of old but the few are still going to produce content for the many. As it is, my Facebook and Twitter feed is already a 90/5 balance – 90%+ of the content I see in it is produced by fewer than 5% of the people I’m connected to. I expect this to further polarize as the novelty of these new platforms starts to wear off over the coming one to three years.
• We see massive upheaval - we are in the 2nd inning of Internet innovation with the critical 2nd to 7th innings to be played during the coming decade. The Internet has only been a mainstream consumer service in the US for 3 to 5 years depending on how you are counting. Take a look at Michael Arrington’s end of 2005 summary of apps he could not live without – does it surprise you how many of those sites are not particularly important just four years later?
• Social is important but has its limits - Social online is actually not that new - electronic communications mediums have been social since they were first invented. In fact, long before the browser came along and started to popularize the Internet, those who were online in some way were using things like BBS and chat rooms. We will find that the 30 to 70 year olds of 2020 are about as social online as the average 30 year old is today (today’s 30 year olds grew up with the Internet). Unless you are hyper social, under 25, or live in Silicon Valley or New York, you won’t check in at a bar with FourSquare or its ilk – you will just go up to the bar and order a beer. The Internet will, thankfully, not replace the real world. Contrary to what Fred believes there is to learn from the (decidely offline) San Telmo market in Buenos Aires for the online world, I think there is relatively little to learn because they are dissimilar experiences. Going to a mall or a market is social experience in that it is a way to interact with others by being in their presence. It can be a largely passive social activity while still being social. The web requires active social engagement to create a social environment because there is no equivalent to the offline scenario of being around other people without engaging with them. If you and I are both on Amazon but don’t interact with each other, we don’t engage with each other – the end. If we are both at the farmers market on Union Square, we do engage with each other even without interacting with each other. The majority of commerce on the web will remain a non social experience.
• Learning from the young – particularly when it comes to the social Internet – has its limits - kids 10 to 25 are in a unique phase of life. They have limited responsibilities and are in a highly social part of their life. As people age, real life starts to intrude – friends move away, the responsibilities of taking care of their own kids (and parents) takes up more and more time, and work becomes more taxing. Look to those who are currently 24 to 28 to see how their internet usage behavior changes over the coming five years. I expect that in 10 years, those who are currently 24 will behave a lot like today’s 34 year olds (most of whom were early adopters of the internet having gone to college when the browser first came onto the scene). I’m reminded that even though Apple always focused their Mac marketing on the young with the expectation that the young would eventually become the old and take their Mac’s with them, it never worked. Young people don’t become older people with the behaviors of their youth – they become older people. You can’t understand the older people of 2020 by looking at the youth of today.
• Email is not dead – email is not going away, far from it – it’s here to stay.
• Entrepreneurs will not learn to be be very weary of early adopter behavior as an indicator for figuring out what to build - what works for an early adopter like Michael Arrington may well not work at all for a mainstream consumer.

• Google remains dominant in search but search becomes marginally less important. As Internet brands and the consumer Internet mature, we will direct navigate to more and more sites or direct nav to a site via Google [Nikon D700 Amazon]. This already happens with a few select brands like Amazon, NewEgg (if you are a computer geek), Ebay, Zappos and others. My expectation is that as the Internet matures, each sector – books, electronics, computer parts, etc. – is going to have one to three well known brands in it.
• SEO will go the way of spam – spam used to be something that was front of mind – the spammers did it because there was money in it and consumers suffered. Today, spam is largely – but not entirely – under control even though domains – like the Oyster.com domain – get massive amounts of spam (about 99% of the email to the oyster.com domain is spam). I expect that the opportunities to spam search engines with various SEO tactics will largely go away and success in search will be closely related to success with real customers. Those who create value for real customers will do well in search and it will be hard to find exceptions where sites win in search despite offering limited or undifferentiated value to consumers. Basically, Google – or whoever beats them – will be better than the spammers at figuring out what is content and what is spam. The basics of SEO – such as making your site crawlable by search engines – will be well understood by most anyone building a website. Everything you need to know about SEO will be readily available – as it basically already is – from Matt Cutts or whoever is doing his job at Google.
• The Yellow Pages and 800Free411 go out of business entirely. You don’t need to call 411 (free or not) if you are near a computer and with mobile computing we will basically always have a computer nearby. To the extent that free411 is needed, it will be voice based search function that Google or Microsoft provide.
• The price of Windows and Office get cut in half as a result of competitive pressure from Google.
• New York City becomes more relevant in the consumer web - there is less and less reason to build consumer Internet companies in Silicon Valley.  New York City’s abundance of media talent, smart ambitious people (particularly young ones), proximity to educational institutions, and dynamic diverse lifestyle options will – for the consumer Internet talent – give the valley a run for its money. If you were serious about the the consumer web in 2000, you had to be in Silicon Valley (not even San Francisco) because that’s where the engineers who could build your site were located.  The list of New York based consumer Internet companies and personalities continues to expand from a significant base. Naming just a few of the existing players around which the community builds.
  • Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures - one of the most successful early stage Internet investors anywhere and a prolific blogger. Perhaps the best known VC blog anywhere, Fred has gotten his success the old fashioned way – he worked for it. He’s a real mensch to boot.
  • Chris Dixon and Hunch - with Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, Chris is the co-founder of Hunch. He is an outspoken blogger and booster of the NYC startup community.
  • Google/DoubleClick
  • Etsy
  • IAC
  • Founders Club
  • MeetUp
  • DonorsChoose
  • Erik Schonfeld - TechCrunch
  • Old media – old media has finally started to understand the Internet and old media – what’s left of it anyway – is based in New York City. The historical east coast/west coast divide with technology understanding and know-how on the west coast and content on the east coast will go away with the east coast folks understanding technology as a distribution mechanism the same way they understood paper and printing press tech. It will have taken them 5 to 10 years longer than the west coast to get with the program but this is a long game.
  • New York Magazine – what magazine has done a better job getting online than NYmag.com?
  • Venture firms that focus on the space. It’s impossible to compete with the Valley on this one but New York is getting better though the financial activity in the city is still predominantly hedge funds and banks, not the early stage venture capital that is needed. A few of the larger and more active investors with a local presence:
    • Bain Capital Ventures
    • Union Square Ventures
    • Bessemer
    • Spark
    • Founder Collective

“The best analogy I can think of is — have you ever heard of the Titanic Fallacy?” he asked. We hadn’t. “What was the critical flaw to the Titanic?” We tried to answer: Poor construction? Not enough life boats? Crashing into stuff? “A captain trying to set a world speed record through an iceberg field?” he said, shaking his head. “Even if the Titanic came in safely to New York Harbor, it was still doomed,” he said. “Twelve years earlier, two brothers invented the airplane.”

That being said, getting into the entrepreneurial life style is far easier when you are young and the way to become an experienced entrepreneurial person is to start early as an inexperienced one and then add 10,000 hours of hard work. You might not be successful before you are 30 but if you really love entrepreneurial endeavors, you’ll likely have had a lot of fun while  building a vast base of knowledge off of which to leverage in the coming years. The early years of entrepreneurship are not necessarily going to be years during which you get rich but just like a doctor has to put in their time in med school, residencies and fellowships before they become that world class neurosurgeon, the same is true for entrepreneurs.

And no, you can’t really get this experience working in a BigCo. The challenges of business in a BigCo are very different from the challenges of an early stage startup. If you want to be a great at entrepreneurship, you want to spend as much time as possible in the weeds of building startups. That being said, if you are going to choose between working in consulting or banking vs working at a BigCo product company like Google, Microsoft, Adobe or the like, it’s not even a decision.

Why is Free not free?

Despite the oddity of the editor of a money losing magazine continuing to offer overly simplistic theories about business, what is even more interesting is that Anderson’s latest book Free is not, in fact, free. Why is a book about how content wants to be free, for sale at Amazon for $21.59? Malcolm Gladwell did a nice job of tearing Anderson’s book to shreds and it’s hard to add much to that here but Gladwell failed to ask Anderson the simplest question of all: if you believe your own theory, why are you selling your book for money?

Why is Yahoo, an Internet media company, advertising on NYC bus stops?

It’s truly odd that Yahoo, a company that makes its money selling  trackable and measurable impressions on the web has chosen to forsake the uniquely measurable nature of the very advertising it sells its own customers for the side of a NYC bus stop. Yahoo! would no doubt argue that it’s commonplace for media companies to advertise in other media (it is – I’d guess that TV shows are one of the biggest buyers of NYC bus advertising) but it’s just too strange when one of the best known brands on the Internet chooses to spend its own dollars not on innovation and not on online advertising but on billboards and bus stands. Money would have to become extraordinarily cheap before I’d advertise an online product offline.

The job description is below and also viewable here

Fast-growing, Well captitalized startup looking for C/C++ developers

at Oyster Hotel Reviews

New York, NY 10011

Oyster Hotel Reviews — a fast-growing and well-capitalized start-up seeks extremely talented C/C++ developers to help revolutionize travel planning on the Internet. You must have
experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems, and you should be able to do so much faster than most competent people think possible. You should have a BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or the equivalent. Top-notch communication skills are essential. Familiarity with web development would be helpful, but is not necessary.

Oyster’s management includes Microsoft alumnus Eytan Seidman – formerly Director of Core Relevance on Live Search (now Bing.com) – and two highly accomplished serial entrepreneurs, Ariel Charytan and Elie Seidman. Our engineering team includes members who architected and scaled Microsoft’s search engine between 2003 and late 2007. They hold computer science degrees from Cornell University, University of Pennsylvania and Harvard.

We launched recently and have been written about in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Economist, USA Today and many others. You can read recent press the company has received here: http://www.oyster.com/about/in-the-news/

Requirements
• BS or MS degree or higher in Computer Science
• 3+ years of professional development experience in either C/C++ is a must.
• Experience in database programming
• Experience with web development
• Interest in working with other disciplines including customers (end users of the software you write) and product management
• Permanent legal right to work in the US

What we offer:
• 30” monitors and the best computers money can buy
• Full health care benefits
• Meaningful Equity/ Stock Options in a startup with a very bright future
• Friendly coworkers who are the best in their respective fields.
• Amazing server infrastructure with which you can do very unique things (details in the interview)

How to Apply:
Please submit your resume to jobs@oyster.com with “C++ Software Engineer” in the subject.

Interested?

jobs@oyster.com

I’m 35 and have been using the internet – in it’s various forms – since 1992, earlier if you count BBS. I’ve used email extensively since entering college. Email was then – and continues to be now – the medium I am most dependent on day in and day out. It has – by far – the best signal to noise ratio. Even though I selectively follow a small group of people – my Twitter feed is overwhelmingly noisy to the point where many days it’s not usable. My Facebook feed is far better but still nowhere near as relevant as email is.

Email is in no way dead. Once upon a time, people were saying that email would be killed off by IM. That did not happen. Email won’t be killed off by Twitter or Facebook. They are different mediums with different roles. Email will continue to be the most high value (low noise) medium we have other than face to face or phone communications. Remember the RSS craze? Remember Pointcast? Yep – didn’t think so.

• Getting the flywheel spinning – great companies are built by the marathon effort of being excellent every day and improving every day
• Get the right people on the bus - businesses are only as good as their people and the will to win those people have.

But as Chris Dixon points out in his excellent post today, you can’t just read the Collins books (or any other book for that matter) and become one of the truly great. Why? Because the part that Collins can’t sell you is insight and intuition. No book, focus group, spreadsheet or research study replaces the unique genius that is the insight to see what the future holds – to bring customers what you know they will want, not what they know to ask for.

As Chris mentions, one of the companies featured in Built to Last is Circuit City – a company that is now bankrupt. Circuit City was likely quite good at running an offline electronics retailer. But that turned out to be a skill of increasingly limited value. Along came the Internet, pervasive PCs, Amazon, Fed-Ex (inexpensive 2 day shipping), easy price comparison, and there went their business. Amazon is worth $41 billion and growing and the Circuit City store at 80th and Broadway in Manhattan has a store for-rent sign in the window.

As evidenced by the layoffs at Conde Nast (CN) this past week, the magazine business is facing the same problem. In a world of targeted and trackable marketing and distribution of content via servers and electrons on fiber, CN is a business built on untrackable generalized impressions in magazines, printing presses, trucks, paper stock decisions, and multi hundred thousand dollar photo shoots for covers. How long is it before the Conde Nast building at 4 Times Square has its own for rent sign in the window? It’s not a foregone conclusion that it will happen but it will take some aggressive changes on the part of an organization that has become wedded to a defunct business model to right a listing ship. The future of Conde Nast is far less Anna Wintour and Graydon Carter and far more Nick Denton – if not necessarily in the type and nature of content being produced (I enjoy VF), then certainly in the approach to management and strategy. But it won’t happen by cost cutting the old business model alone – as a board member of a prior company said to me once – “you can’t heat your house by burning the shingles off the roof”. No amount of cost cutting will save Conde Nast – instead they have to figure out a new way to exist and grow in a world that has changed. As Ariel said to me a few days ago “no amount of cost cutting would have saved the steam engine lines (boats) – they needed to learn how to fly planes instead”.

Of course, seeing the future is not enough – you also have to be able to create it as well. Saying “we should build a cool looking phone that surfs the internet well” is not useful unless you can also design it, build it, manufacture it, market it, etc. Vision without execution only ends with great grandkids saying “my grandfather should have bought Manhattan when it cost a dollar”. That’s where Collin’s books can be useful. But as Chris says, life is not fair – not everyone has insight and insight is what truly separates.

Over the years, I’ve given 100+ pitches to raise money and, as both a Venture Partner at a private equity (PE) fund and as an angel investor, have been pitched 100s of times. I’d guess that in 95% of the pitches I’ve received, the entrepreneur or executive forgets to start the pitch with the most fundamental thing of all: the problem they are trying to solve and whether or not people have (already) shown a tendency to pay for having that problem solved.

As an entrepreneur, you become very close to your business concept and product or service. You live it and breathe it day  in and day out and it becomes a part of you to the point where you take for granted that it’s a major part of the universe. But the challenge that marketers have – and as a fundraiser, you are a marketer – is to remember that their audience does not think about that product 24/7. If you work for P&G and are marketing toothpaste, you have to develop marketing content that works on customers who don’t think about toothpaste for a living. If you are selling stock in your startup to an investor, remember that they don’t think about your business or the market you are in 24/7.

Even the most well-intentioned VC or angel might not have gotten a chance to read over your pitch before you arrive (there are pros and cons to sending one in advance – most of the time you won’t have gotten to a meeting without sending one). Even if they are a specialist on your market area (there are real advantages to pitching investors who specialize), they still won’t have all the context that you have  in your head.

Before rattling through ten slides about your execution to date, your latest press, what analysts say about the “hotness of the market,” the market background, competitors, and your personal history (there is an important exception on this one), spend two minutes to tell them what problem you believe is desperately in need of being solved. So desperate in fact that you’ve committed your time, energy and money to bringing this new solution to the world. Particularly for products sold to consumers, if the VC does not believe in the fundamental consumer insight you have (the problem you are trying to solve), there won’t be much to talk about. Guy Kawasaki has a good PowerPoint outline here.

The main caveat to all of this is that if you’re already an incredibly accomplished executive, product manager, or entrepreneur, start the pitch by telling the investor what you’ve already done. Don’t presume that the investor has done a lot of research on you in advance. They might have but don’t assume it. Whether knowingly or not, we always contextualize what we hear with who we are hearing it from. The receptivity of the potential investor to your pitch will vary a lot by what you’ve done before. If you are not particularly accomplished – yet – but have a great idea, then lead with your strong suit – the idea. And never ever lead with “my board of advisors is” – ninety-nine times out of one hundred it’s tacky and lacking substance and is the equivalent of name dropping the stars you saw on Rodeo Drive on your last trip to L.A. If Steve Jobs is personally reviewing your product decisions because he is your uncle, then by all means mention it. But unless that Board of Advisor member is very close to your business AND has invested a lot of money in it, don’t waste your time talking about it. More about Boards of Advisors in a later post.

So what’s the problem with revenue projections?

As most anyone who has been associated with a mid to large company has experienced, “the plan” (and beating it month over month) is a kind of sacrosanct concept. Management teams and executives spend weeks, if not months, a year putting together elaborate spreadsheets – with 10s, if not 100s of assumptions/variables – that attempt to project where key metrics like revenue and profitability will be in a quarter, a year or five.  Companies like GE were well regarded for always meeting or exceeding their projections and their stock price went up and up – consistently and predictably. Until they didn’t.

The problem with the revenue/profit/key metric projection business is that those metrics are lagging indicators. They are the effect – not the cause and you cannot control them directly. Companies that can control them directly are playing accounting games or worse. Managers and leaders who are rewarded based on their ability to predict the future – vs create the future – are being given huge incentives to either sandbag their numbers (create a number they know they can get above) or to play accounting games.

But yet misguided executives and boards at so many companies – and startups are not excluded from this – spend a large percentage of their board meeting time centered on the projections game. Why? Because it feels very official and very organized and disciplined and because it’s easy. It’s what you think business is supposed to look like. The professional manager CEO that the board hired to bring in “adult supervision” has his spreadsheet and his clipboard and presents well and confidently and the whole experience of being told what the future holds is very comforting which is fantastic since startups are inherently stressful and uncertain. For a VC board member who sits on 10 to 12 boards, he (it’s still rarely a she) can sleep well at night knowing that the CEO has got the numbers under control. Never mind that anyone can put any number they want into a financial model. “If sales go up 5% a quarter and costs come down 10% a quarter…” You get the point.

In a small company when the, needed, projections you sell yourself or your investors turn into a plan that needs to be hit month over month, quarter over quarter, you are subtly but surely creating strong incentives for the team to manage the results instead of the cause and also eliminating one of the major assets a smaller company has – it’s ability to react in near real time to the data it is collecting about how it’s plans are actually working. After all, reacting in real time means not hitting the short term plan.

Since small companies become big companies when they, first and foremost, excel at creating something that customers really want that they can’t get elsewhere, it’s critical to insure that management incentives are structured to encourage working on the cause of the numbers, not the effect. Further, it’s critical that the management structure acknowledges that trying to predict the future on a month by month or even quarter by quarter basis is a fools errand. When you consider that the effect of today’s actions (causes) don’t often show up in the results for months or years, this is particularly important to instill in a company’s culture very early on.

This does not contradict the importance of measuring the critical metrics in your business. Just be careful what you measure. Are you measuring the cause or the effect? Beware trying to manage the lagging indicators.

This is the world I’ve lived and learned in for the past ten years. My business partner Ariel and I have launched three startups in NYC since 1998, and we’ve worked in nearly every “startup neighborhood” (except Brooklyn). We’ve had some successes and some failures. We like to think we’ve learned a lot along the way and we’ve definitely had a lot of fun doing it. Startups, innovation, and creativity have seeped into our blood to the point where we could not imagine doing anything else or live a day without, in some way or another, thinking about our work.

Ariel and I founded our last startup, Epana, in 2000 and rode it from the end of the last bubble to a near bankruptcy in the fall of 2002 and through to a large profitable company with more than 400 employees by the end of 2005. We can’t say we’ve seen it all; who has, and who would want to (if in ten years I realize that I know no more than I know today, I’ll be deeply disappointed) but at Epana we saw and experienced a lot and we’re looking forward to telling some of the stories. We had to deal with challenges and opportunities in a multitude of disciplines including technology (making bleeding-edge technology not only work but scale), consumer branding, third-party distribution, a large company-owned sales force, general management, human resources, analytics, financing, and the dynamics of a venture-backed, board-of-directors-controlled company. I was the CEO, and left in mid-2006 to “pursue other opportunities” (more on that later), and Ariel was the COO. He left about a year and a half after me. In 2008, we put the band back together again—along with our third partner and my youngest brother, Eytan—and after working under wraps for nearly a year and a half, we recently launched Oyster Hotel Reviews.

We like to say that we’ve been to the gym for business and startups over the past 10+ years and this blog, among other things, will be about the lessons we’ve learned and things we’ve observed along that stressful, enjoyable, risky road.

Future posts will include the following topics and I’m, of course, open to suggestions. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. In no particular order:

• Execution is 99%, strategy is 1%
• Choose your market carefully
• An arrogant VC has been rude and obnoxious to your – admittedly terrible – business idea in a meeting. What should you do?
• What happens to your company if your VC investor goes out of business?
• VCs – generalist vs specialist?
• My advice – choose carefully whose advice you heed
• Why “hot markets” never are
• Overnight success in five years
• It’s not how much you raise – it’s how much you make
• Fire the bottom 10% – do it as respectfully as possible but do it
• Why big companies waste time with business planning and projections exercise
• Why valuation metrics other than profits are the lies you tell yourself
• The cost of the OS you use does not matter
• Leica M9 – The most beautiful camera ever
• Get an SSD and upgrade to Win7 – right now
• Athlete vs experience
• Hiring hit rate
• Democracy – the enemy in a startup
• Revenue solves all problems
• What resumes don’t tell you
• When hiring, look for attributes and capabilities more than experiences
• Hiring for a startup out of BigCo; extremely hard to do
• Do entrepreneurs make good VCs?
• Most VCs are clueless about making a startup successful yet VCs control a lot of companies. Should they?
• How to interview a VC before you let them become a shareholder
• When to raise money
• Are you building an asset or a Company or both?
• How much employee churn should you have in a startup?
• Why you should remove the average calculation from Excel
• Mercenary vs missionary
• Religious wars – Nikon vs Canon and Windows vs Mac
• Why (the right) layoffs are good for morale
• How open should you be?
• Why don’t you ever see James Simons (founder of uber successful Renaissance hedge fund) on CNBC?
• What do you do with really smart and productive employees who are not passionate about winning?
• Don’t chase the mythical “what a future investor will want to see” strategy
• How is the valuation of a company set in a negotiation with VCs?
• Companies are not charities. Companies that don’t make money are not worth anything. Simple, right?
• Why has Google invested billions into internet charity, YouTube? Would they do it over if they could?
• CEOs run companies. Boards run CEOs. Who runs the board?
• What kind of computer equipment should I buy myself and my team?
• The path is the point – are you having any fun?