Dave Knox's Tumblr

My main blog is at HardKnoxLife.com. This Tumblr is where I share short bursts of inspiration. I am the Chief Marketing Officer at Rockfish, Co-Founder of The Brandery and a Partner in Rockfish Brand Ventures.

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Read it now - Predicting the Turn - by CMO Dave Knox details the high-stakes game between blue chips and startups. http://thndr.me/liZnMQ

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“But it takes courage and energy to go forward. It means risking something to try something new… maybe putting budget at stake, your team at stake, your good name at stake. You don’t get an engraved invitation to seize an opportunity that others don’t see. You have to grab it. It’s what we marketers do. We make the now more valuable. We make the future happen. One crazy act at a time.”

What Two CMOs Can Learn From Each Other http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimstengel/2014/12/01/what-two-cmos-can-learn-from-each-other/

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“My advice to digital marketers is to trial lots of products and find the ones that make the cash register ring. There is no room for nice-to-haves. The only thing entrepreneurs want is a shot to earn your business. They ultimately need you to be successful for their companies to be successful.”

Via @NeerajVC at http://chiefmartec.com/2014/11/active-vc-marketing-technology/

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“It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable. To begin with, it usually seems unreasonable. It seems the height of unreason to suppose the earth was round instead of flat, or that it moved instead of the sun, or that objects required a force to stop them when in motion, instead of a force to keep them moving, and so on. A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others. Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits.”

Published for the First Time: a 1959 Essay by Isaac Asimov on Creativity | MIT Technology Review http://www.technologyreview.com/view/531911/isaac-asimov-asks-how-do-people-get-new-ideas/

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If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.

Ed Catmull of Pixar in Creativity, Inc

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“Product lies at the intersection of business, design and engineering. It is your role to educate business people about design and engineering, engineers about business and design, designers about engineering and business.”

Love what you build. Build what you love. — Medium

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Listen to your users more than the press. Don’t get sucked into the gravity hole between you and your competition. Ruthlessly run your own path, not someone else’s.

Play by your own rules. — Work & Education — Medium

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“When the Pony Express came along, it really reshaped society to be able to move things around fairly reliably at that speed, which was measured in many days. The U.S. Postal Service—growing partly out of the Pony Express and having it be even more reliable and starting to shorten the time—really did change society again. FedEx overnight delivery has absolutely changed the world again. We’re starting to see same-day service actually change the world. Why would we think that the next 10x—being able to get something in just a minute or two—wouldn’t change the world?”

Inside Google’s Secret Drone-Delivery Program

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Startups are the embodiment of risk. Big enterprises, by their very structure and nature, often try to avoid risk because dramatic changes can feel like abandoning a successful formula.

Target pledges to act more like a start-up

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For (target customer) Who (statement of need or opportunity), (Product name) is a (product category) That (statement of key benefit). Unlike (competing alternative) (Product name)(statement of primary differentiation). Using this framework, you can explain your product or service in as plain of English as possible.

Positioning Your Startup is Vital — Here’s How to Nail It

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While only one of the Fortune 50 (Google itself) uses Google’s email software, 92% of a recent class of Silicon Valley startups do. And 60% of mid size companies like Twitter, Dropbox, Box, Airbnb, Square, Uber, and Etsy use Google. So what do you think happens when these companies reach the Fortune 500? And what happens to Microsoft?

http://qz.com/243321/google-is-stealing-away-microsofts-future-corporate-customers/

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Today, I define Pinterest as a place where people can go to get ideas for any project or interest in their life. And as you encounter great ideas and discover new things that you didn’t even know were out there, you can pin them and make them part of your life through our system of boards. Best of all, as you’re creating a board on Pinterest, other people can get inspiration from your ideas, so there’s this cycle where what you’re creating for yourself also helps other people make their lives. I think of it as a kind of utility. People use it to save and organize things for later. And then it turns out that integral to saving things is discovering new things.

What Is Pinterest A Database of Intentions.

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And Pinterest is just getting started. They’ve got 30 billion pins now, half of them in the last six months. They’ve got 750 million boards. A full 75 percent of their traffic comes from mobile devices, and according to researchers, they’re the top traffic source to retailers’ websites and an important secondary source after Facebook for some media sites, like Buzzfeed.

What Is Pinterest A Database of Intentions.

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My contention is that Pinterest is one of the four ways that people find things on the Internet. The default, of course, is Googling (or—fine, Microsoft—Binging). For real-time searches, there is Twitter. For people or entities, there’s Facebook. But if what you want to find are things, objects, then Pinterest is the way to go.

What Is Pinterest A Database of Intentions.

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The person doing the introducing is spending some social capital when making the introduction. So you don’t want to embarass them. - @davidlee

More on Biz Dev Intros... • David Lee

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One of the biggest questions in the retail/consumer/shopping industrial complex is this: Will any of these new mobile payment or automated service projects really stick, or will they just drive people crazy? Last week, I think I saw the beginning of the answer. At Disney.

t.co/LXUjAOHp9f

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For this is the truth that we are now facing. For all of its democratizing power, the Internet, in its current form, has simply replaced the old boss with a new boss. And these new bosses have market power that, in time, will be vastly larger than that of the old boss. So, as an investor, when you see a dominant market power emerge, you should start asking yourself “what will undo that market power?” And you should start investing in that.

Platform Monopolies