Nathaniel Whittemore @nlwinsf-blog - Tumblr Blog

4 Startup Categories Redefining How Brands Do Business (Partnered Report 33)

Startups are redefining how brands do business in so many different ways. This peek inside the Partnered Network discusses four categories of disruption & exemplary startups:

Payments (Coinbase)

Influencer marketing (Sumpto)

Location-aware retail (Sonic Notify)

Partnership payment support (FastPay)

NLW's Best Dance Tracks Of The Year 2012

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

-Aldous Huxley

Dance music exploded into my life in 2011. It was the soundtrack to a newly discovered, less serious and more in-the-moment part of my personality; a euphoric side of myself that wanted to get lost in, rather than constantly try to understand and analyze, the moment. My connection with it coincided with a larger explosion of dance across the spectrum of American popular music - the amount of ink that has been spilt exploring the new dominance of dance in 2012 is significant.

For me, the reasons seem obvious. Kids today (including those of us discovering that being kids doesn't necessarily end in your 20s and 30s) have grown up in an era in which the rapid changes of technology both model and enable our particular mode of cultural creation and interaction. We experiment, remix, and iterate, never sitting still, and always wanting more, wanting new. At our best, we strive constantly to become a better version of ourselves and to create a better version of the world. We tend not to find our way to contentment easily, and certainly, we have a hard time sitting still.

No genre better fits this way of being than today's dance music. Avicii's "Levels" was the biggest hit of..well, fucking ever…and certainly of 2011. Avicii's great, but I'm a hardcore, punk, and metal kid at heart, and Skrillex and his ilk have always been more my jam. Indeed, that melodic heavy womp was my gateway into the genre. I remember, one night in November of last year, noticing people tweeting about a Youtube video that had the words Skrillex and Avicii and Levels all together. I was, suffice it to say, excited.

The video was a grainy phone capture of a Skrillex show in Sheffield in the UK. He says "Literally, I was a little bit late because I was just upstairs finishing this song. You're the first to hear it." It was the first ever drop of his remix of "Levels." It was finished in a hotel room 5 minutes before it was performed for the first time. Within 6 hours, the video was on Youtube and kids like me were watching it. Within a day, bedroom producers had reconstructed it to the best of their ability, and some were already remixing it. It would be months by the time it was formally released, and by then it was already familiar to anyone who cared to pay attention.

For all the bad of our modern era - the haste, and chaos, and confusion, and disruption, and scary unknown of the future, dance music represents the best; it models the best of our expanded opportunity for creativity, and collaboration, and synchronicity, and the elevation of the human spirit through shared experience.

I've been thinking about this music list all year. Below is my list of the top tracks of 2012. It's stupidly long, due entirely to the fact that I've spent a stupidly large percentage of my year paying attention. When it comes to rankings, I think that as bullshit as rankings inherently are, the top part of this list - let's say the top 25 at least where I've actually described why a song is where it is - reflect two things: first, what I see as important trends from the last year; and second, what I loved most. The fun thing about creating a list is that it is ultimately as much about telling your story as any other.

Debate, disagree, digest. And dance. Whatever you do, just.fucking.dance.

*A note on methodology: Believe it or not, I really thought a lot about these rankings, especially at the top. Step one was I went through all of my Hype Machine favorites, Shazams, and RDIO collection to pull out the tracks I loved. For each, I gave it a rough ranking (top 20, top 50, top 100, etc). Then, I went through and figured out my top 10 or 15. These were based on two factors: 1) their significance to the genre/demonstration of important trends and 2) how much I liked them. After that, I pretty much just went down the listed and slotted things in where I liked them best. It's definitely me - as in, it's real heavy on the heavy, and real light on the straight house. Sorry Afrojack.

*A note on tracks: some of these are remixes that simply aren't available on RDIO & Spotify. In those cases, I've embedded a Soundcloud file of the song.

RDIO playlist: http://rd.io/x/QBwGL14M2w

Spotify playlist: http://open.spotify.com/user/nlwhittemore/playlist/28ng9anPIR4UD7r38NeM0E

Full list after the jump.

#musc #lists #2012 #recap #skrillex #dada life #zedd #spectrum #alesso #ingrosso #calvin harris #sweet nothing #rl grime #swedish house mafia #kill paris #madeon #major lazer

SOMA Is A Preview Of The Future Of Great Product Brands

SOMA is a new approach to home water filtration, started by a collection of social and technology entrepreneurs. In just 9 short days, they exceeded their $100,000 Kickstarter fundraising goal. Any one who wants to know what a great product brand looks like in the future needs to be paying attention.

For many, brand is a four-letter word; a tool of marketers for deceiving, selling, and taking advantage of the worst impulses of mass consumer culture. And in the context of an approach to capitalism which has for decades embraced the mantra of faster, cheaper, crappier, the skepticism is understandable.

At their best, however, brands are vehicles for simplifying the complicated stories of people, organizations, and companies in ways that invite others to join those stories. Apple’s logos and advertisements aren’t just tools for marketing; they’re attempts to capture a worldview that celebrates creativity as the pinnacle of human achievement. Red Bull’s sponsorship of crazy, adrenaline-fueled events aren’t just lusting after social media shares, but are designed to create tangible examples of the sort of ridiculous, experimental, and ultimately fantastically fun life they imagine Red Bull being a part of.

In the last 20 years, both product and information saturation have reached new levels. The generation that grew up with the internet had more consumer choices than any generation before it, as well as dramatically more advertising and marketing messages thrown at it. One of the consequences has been a higher level of skepticism about marketing, and a greater desire to affiliate with companies that they believe are authentic in their desire to create real value in the world.

In the future, brands will be competing in a marketplace where consumers simply expect more of companies. So what did SOMA do right?

1. Problem selection

The entrepreneurs behind SOMA didn’t just want to build a big company. They didn’t want to just make money. If they were going to spend their limited time on earth building something, they wanted it to be meaningful. They wanted it to be important.

Water, the resource at the very center of all organic life, seemed like an appropriate place to start. The industry for home filtration was full of tired products and tired ideas, and the founders believed they could bring not only better filtration methods, but more beauty in the actual product experience.

What’s more, a home water system created a starting point to use the company to launch a broader conversation about access to the water around the globe. From the very beginning the company has been building partnerships with water focused nonprofits like charity:water, to ensure that they are a force for good in the world.

2. Approach

SOMA is the type of company that, in the past, might have decided to simply dress up some old filtration methods, produce everything cheaply in some far-flung corner of the globe, and then dress it all up with great marketing.

Instead, they’re thinking about every detail – from which filtration systems match a great consumer experience with a great environmental experience to which eco-friendly companies to work with to produce the glass carafes that the filters will live in.

A huge part of brand is coherence, and SOMA’s meticulous approach to making the product in the absolute best way – for consumers and for the world – reinforces their story as a company that is striving to be the absolute best it can be.

3. Community

The founders of SOMA are successful entrepreneurs, and it would have been easy for them to take an “if you build it, they will come,” approach to launching and distributing their next-gen water filters.

Instead, they’ve invested an incredible amount in rallying their community – anchored in the networks they’re a part of such as Summit Series and Sandbox Network – to help them build momentum and tell the story. This rallying has included in person demos of the various carafe designs in San Francisco, highly-intentional digital community curation to share news and excitement about launch progress, and the active recruitment of their friends to tell the SOMA story through their own eyes.

The net result is a powerful handful of influencers who believe in the SOMA story, and who are going to share their personalized version of that story with the communities of people who care about what they have to say.

The point is this: SOMA’s brand isn’t just a new approach to water filtration, but a new approach to business that is more authentic and intentional, and which believes that the best long-term financial strategy is to be the absolute best version of their company that they can be.

Check out the campaign here: http://bit.ly/somawater

Our Very Own Eden

But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open.

-John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Ideas, once uttered, sometimes acquire the force of destiny.

Since quiet beginnings as a small weekend gathering in the Utah mountains to much louder entrance to the public eye as an epic entrepreneur cruise, people have asked just exactly what is Summit?

To some, it is an event – a time each year for being reconnected, reenergized, reinspired, and reawakened to the incredible opportunities our world affords. To others, it is a community – an emotional and intellectual homebase that makes it feel less crazy to believe that in spite of all obstacles, one can make a dent in the universe.

The truth is that it is these things, and more. But it is anchored by something deeper.

Roger Martin is a professor at the University of Toronto who researches the traits of exceptional leaders. In a speech at the Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurship in 2009, he advanced that the single most prominent trait among great leaders is that, when presented a choice with two undesirable alternatives, they rejected the premise of the question.

Summit contains within it a rejection of old, tired norms: a rejection of the false dichotomy between making money and having an impact; a rejection of the idea of career as constrained to a single company, or even a single industry; a rejection of the choice between success as financial security and prestige and success as happiness.

Indeed, the idea at the very center of Summit is a new idea of success. This idea of success is about each of us finding our true north - that passionate pursuit that keeps us up late, gets us up early and the story of which comes pouring off our tongues in torrents of barely controlled excitement. This idea of success is about surrounding that passion with a complete life – full of partners, friends, conspirators and lovers; full of experiments and adventures. This idea of success is about knowing we are unfinished, and constantly striving.

Today, Summit announced that they’re creating a permanent home for that idea in the mountains of Utah.

The Eden project has been swirling for months, as the Summit team has slowly brought their community into their vision for a space for retreat, for play, for contemplation and for creation. Forbes and TechCrunch have many of the details.

Spaces, like ceremonies, are symbols that make tangible ideas that might otherwise flit away like ghosts in the mist. This is why we have temples, churches, and shrines.

Summit’s new home in Eden gives physical life to their way of seeing. It’s a way of looking at the world that has changed the way many of those in the community look at their lives.

Today’s first public announcement was remarkable not just because of the beauty of Eden or the staggering scope of the vision, but because of the way members of the community chose to share it.

Facebook, Twitter, and Path were full of messages, yes, of excitement, and yes, of congratulations. But much more, they were filled with messages of gratitude for the gift of finding so many people who made them feel more alive and who inspired them to reach for more - gratitude for a future that is different and more full of possibility for Summit, and the community it represents, being in it.

The difference between dream and vision is usually contained in the spark of a single moment, as hungry eyes meet and agree that the weight of possibility has instead become the first flicker of inevitability.

Summit’s new home in Eden is a space for those moments, and it is nearly impossible to imagine all the good that might come of it.

How You Know You’re An Adult: The Last Days Of LCD Soundsystem

Last night was the one-night-only movie theater screening of the rockumentary about LCD Soundsystems last few days and final concert at Madison Square Garden.

While it is a dicey business to create hierarchies of greatness in art, it still seems as though there is broad consensus that some artists are just on a different plane. It’s kind of like major league sports: even though the talent required to get there in the first place makes every professional athlete other-worldy relative to the average person, there are All Stars that make the mass of their peers look nearly like amateurs.

LCD Soundsystem always felt like one of those bands to me. For those of us coming of age in the 00s, they defined the intersection between indie rock and dance music that would come to shape so much of the music that we’ve listened to for the last five years. What’s more, they – like great artists tend to do – came to symbolize not just their art but the distinct and fleeting of moment of culture that surrounded it.

For my friends, it all started with “Losing My Edge,” 7 minutes and 53 seconds of pure sex with some of the smartestly ironic lyrics we’d ever heard.

It was 2002, and here we were, wondering just what it meant to be young growing up in George Bush’s post-September 11th new millennium America. The internet crash had already happened, but who among us gave a shit about stocks? The fact was our lives, even then, were happening online.

Whatever our culture was going to be was still just being shaped, even if the architecture was already in place. Even then though, we had a lust to find something that was real and authentic and powerful. Something that could carve through the noise and bullshit of advertising that surrounded us; something that could stand out from the silly rhetoric of the triumphalist 1990s or the increasingly stupid jingoism of the pre-Iraq 2000s.

I know that, whatever was the case for my generation, I had no goddamn idea who I was going to be in late 2002/early 2003. I had just gotten to Northwestern. My heart had been broken for the first (but not the last – this is life, remember?) time, and I was just starting to fall in love with being in college. Not the parties, or the classes, or anything like that - just the sitting around thinking and talking and dreaming with people who were completely happy to do the same.

“Losing My Edge” started to make it around my friends, released as a single three years before it made it onto an album. This distribution was strangely prophetic, and would become the standard way of dance music 10 years later.

The song was an ironic choice for a generational anthem, as it basically was a created when LCD frontman James Murphy freaked out at the fact that kids 15 years younger than him were playing the same obscure cuts he was in DJ sets, using the internet to access and appropriate music that had nothing to do with their lived musical experience. He called it “borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s.”

But what’s a Millennial if not a person who can take a criticism and somehow turn it into a positive? When he called us “internet seekers” it just kind of fit. And the way he described that search was just so spot on:

“I hear you're buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real…

I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables.

I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars.”

For my friends and I, that paradox hit the sweet spot of the low-grade existential hum we couldn’t turn off and LCD became not just a band but a cultural touchstone.

Over the next 10 years, the music landscape changed in many ways that were preceded by LCD Soundsystem. In the middle of the decade we got a wave of dance-rock bands, and while most of them came and went, the influence of dance in mainstream music just absolutely exploded. LCD was always ahead of that curve, never self-consciously trying to combine genres but simply being James Murphy’s vehicle for soulful songs that happened to bounce.

In that period, LCD put out two additional full-length albums, plus a totally contiguous 45 minute track designed to be the soundtrack of a run. Tracks from those albums like “All My Friends” reached new heights of fame, becoming anthems for people far beyond the group of ironic hipsters who “Losing My Edge” had hit so hard a half-decade earlier.

We got older too. The Iraq war faded into the Obama years. We graduated from college. We got our first taste of trying to align passion with real life outside of the comfortable embrace of the university system – a battle that’s ongoing but one with regard to which I feel pretty okay about our progress. We started listening to dubstep. So. Much. Fucking. Dubstep.

People have a tendency to use art to bookend eras and to try to capture the spirit of distinct periods of time. What goes into making a moment feel like something distinct is so immensely complex that trying to explain it in words just feels stupid and inevitably underwhelming. Music, on the other hand, is like sonic gestalt. The right song, the right album, the right band becomes emotionally woven into our experience, and serves as a starting point for remembering everything else.

When James Murphy announced that LCD Soundsystem would be calling it quits in February of 2011, it felt like the end of an era. Not so much an era in music, but an era in my generation. We were 28 now, and if we didn’t feel that different than we had when we were 18, the truth was, we were. That idle speculation about our culture and purpose that had so endeared us to this weird rock band had much more profound implications now. Who we decided we were, what we decided we wanted to achieve…all of it actually mattered now – to us as individuals and to the world which we had more and more power to shape.

One of the most profound shifts from youth to adulthood is realizing that all things end. People– including James Murphy himself, probably– will wonder forever if it was crazy for the band to call it quits on such a high. But they did, and with the decision ended their time at the forefront of our musical and cultural consciousness.

When they named "All My Friends" the #2 song of the 00s, Pitchfork wrote that ""All My Friends" survives the high-wire act of growing mature without getting boring..."

As we enter into whatever version of adulthood we’re about to create, LCD Soundsystem will always have a place in the cultural canon of the decade that so shaped us. I’m never going to be able to hear “Losing My Edge” without being immediately back in Chapin Hall, sitting on a shitty dorm bed bullshitting with friends about things we barely had any idea of what we’re talking about. I’ll think about those quiet moments before I became an entrepreneur, or a venture capitalist, or a writer, or anything really, and just was young me.

I don’t know if James Murphy was right to call it quits, or what the obligation of artists to their fans is. But I know that those memories are treasures, and I don’t really know that one can ask a lot more from music or the people that make it than that ability to call them back with just a few simple notes.

Me and my dumb friends in 2003/2004:

edeani

Nathaniel Whittemore

La Quinta, 2012

nlwinsf-blog

Not a new essay, but great author shot from Ike.

How A Casette Tape I Got For Valentine's Day In 1994 Shaped Every Day Of My Life Since

A few weeks back, a friend I was chatting with made an interesting assertion. He suggested that every one has some musician or band that is the foundation and genesis for their subsequent taste. No matter how diverse a person's taste becomes, he suggested, there was some common ancestor that shaped their taste.

At first I didn't really buy it. My taste in music is so fuckingoddamn weird that I couldn't imagine their being a single ancestor. What combined my love of extreme hardcore metal, shitty fist-pumping European house, and country pop? But here we are in a universe where gravity and electromagnetism were once the same thing, so maybe I just needed to think harder.

I started by trying to identify the common characteristics of music I loved that spanned genres. Great melodies were absolutely consistent. Even in my heaviest metal period, I loved bands like Slipknot and System Of A Down that combined screaming with singing the most (thank god I grew up in that 3-4 year period where "nu-metal" was a thing, huh?). A combination of lighting fast verses with great big break-downs also seemed to come up a lot - from the straight edge east coast hardcore that made me wear electric tape X's on my hands in middle school to the Skrillex-ified dubstep that I literally can't get enough of now. Sonically and lyrically, I had a little penchant for the emo nostalgia. Okay. I was getting closer.

I then tried to think about what I didn't really listen to, even though I didn't necessarily dislike it. Rock of all genres? Nope, had that. Electronic music? Would you like trance or drum'n'bass today? Country? Bluegrass? Classical? Bollywood? South African ecstatic Mbira recordings from the mid 20th century? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes please.

But hip-hop? Rap? Not so much. Sure I can throw down with a like Jay or Ye on occasion, but it's never first in line. Interesting.

Finally, I went on to Rdio - the social music streaming service. I looked at what was on "Heavy Rotation" across all of my friends. Living in San Francisco with what I would argue is a pretty hip group of friends, it was sort of what you'd expect - brilliant orchestral indie-electro (M83), atmospheric underground electronica for long entrepreneurial workdays (Tycho), lo fi indie hipster cred (Girls), a hip hop act so we get points for being diverse and cultured (J Dilla).

Then, I noticed that I could switch and see what was on heavy rotation just on *my* Rdio. Oh boy.

Instead of looking like a 27 year old professional San Francisco pseudo-hipster, my heavy rotation looks like a bunch of 16 year old girls with duct tape wallets, lip rings, and pretend angst (cause really their parents love them and support this phase they're going through) took over the Macbook. Because on my Rdio, apparently, there is only one thing on heavy rotation:

Pop. Punk.

Forever the Sickest Kids. Fall Out Boy. Chunk! No Captain Chunk! Over and over and over and over and over again.

Then, like an expensive breakthrough in therapy, it hit me. I was transported back to late 1993 early 1994. I was in 4th grade then, and coming off of a 3rd grade year where my older friends (For some reason, I was always friends with the older kids) had gotten me way into gangsta rap. That year we had passed around tapes of all the latest, dopest shit: "Slam" by Onyx, "Regulate" by Warren G (Holy EFF Regulate by Warren G), and of course, Snoop's seminal "Doggystyle" (which, by the way, was a term that I had no idea referred to something other than Snoop Doggy Dogg's musical style).

It was a little tough to be into that genre as a 9 year old. Representative story: I'm at the local mall record store. My mom has gone into Macy's or whatever gross mom store was right next to it and had, against all parental rules, left me to browse the tape racks. I had saved some allowance and was ready to rock out with a fresh new tape that had all the tracks - with ALL the swears - rather than just the ones I had been fast enough to record the second half of when they came on Jammin 94.5.

I grabbed Doggstyle and walked confidently to the counter to check out, at which point the 29 year old store manager looked at me like I was fully and completely insane, and politely informed me that he was just not able to let a kid who was probably still wearing Thundercats underwear buy an album whose cover prominently featured cartoon titties larger than my head.

But I was an adaptable kid, and moved undeterred to my plan B: House Of Pain's "Jump Around." I was foiled again, as it had that same damn "Parental Advisory" tag (thanks a lot, Tipper Gore), and ended up taking home Tag Team's "Whomp There It Is." Talk about can't get no satisfaction.

Regardless of these difficulties, I began 4th grade confident about my musical selection and looking forward to what the next school year of awesome rap would bring. Every Saturday, I got up early and walked down to my friend James' house to watch MTV's Top 20 Countdown (this was when Music Television still played music). We'd wait through all the stupid Boyz II Men pop hits for the occasional killer rap joint, busting out our bling like only 9 year olds from Maine could. Then one week, it happened.

A video from a group I had never heard of started. Four great big chords from a guitar that sounded like nothing I had ever heard, a hi hat count in, and then a melody I instantly wanted to sing - I was hooked. I mean, it was like the hand of God reached down and held me in the seat, letting this manna from heaven wash over my ears and forever change what I wanted from a song. The video was just a set of dudes walking through a city at night but I was spellbound.

Over the next few weeks, that song shot up the charts, and with every position it gained, it pushed my former love of rap further and further from my brain. My weekly pilgrimage down the street to James' took on new meaning as I waited for the inevitable, and when that song - Green Day's "When I Come Around" - hit number one, the world changed forever. A few weeks later, it was pushed back down by some shitty Madonna comeback track, but it didn't matter: the change in me was complete and my destiny was forever altered.

A few weeks later, after much prodding, my mom bought me the full album - Dookie - for Valentine's Day. In addition to the awesome pop punk longing on "When I Come Around," I got the blistering neurosis of "Basket Case," the weird sexuality of "All By Myself," and the 'you're not the only one who's nuts' of "Longview." And with "She," I first felt how a song could be more than a song, but a declaration to the universe that you. will. not. be. controlled.

She...

She's figured out

All her doubts were someone else's point of view

Waking up this time

To smash the silence with the brick of self-control

Soon, it wasn't just Green Day that was changing me, but Offspring "Self-Esteem," Smashing Pumpkins "Bullet With Butterfly Wings," and Nirvana. Oh my god, Nirvana. My first AOL screenname was KurtCFreak. Within a couple years, I had dug into industrial - Nine Inch Nails "Closer" and of course, the epochal "Antichrist Superstar" by Marilyn Manson. By 1997/1998 I was bridging into metal and even heavier hardcore, listening to everything from Limp Bizkit to Hatebreed, and listening to the third wave of awesome ska like Less Than Jake. This was the period where I had frequent flyer miles to the Warped Tour and Ozzfest.

Music, for me, was and is a place where emotion was given life and power to shape the world; a place where I could find common cause in the midst of growing up in a world where I often felt insane because of how different things seemed and felt to me from the friends and people I knew around me. This is music's great power. When something made by people far away, who we've never met, seems to tell our story, it makes us feel connected to something bigger than ourselves.

In the nearly 18 years since I got that Green Day tape, nearly every thing in my life has changed. For example, I am 27 now where I was 9 then. But literally every day since that day, I have had some experience where a song lets me get outside of the tiny skull-sized kingdom in my brain and transports me somewhere else, or else allows me to be in the moment as I never quite can left to the incessant banter of my own mind. In retrospect, it is no surprise that - whether it was New Found Glory, or Fall Out Boy, or Forever The Sickest Kids, I have always had some Green Day-esque band at the top of the queue, to harken back to that Original Liberation.

#green day #music #culture #growing up #youth #1990s

In The Future, Learning Will Begin At The End

Here's an experience that every aspiring guitarist has had: After weeks of anticipation, full of mirror air jam sessions and dreams of stadium solos, you buy your first busted guitar - almost certainly a Stratocaster or Les Paul knock off. You find an instructor and begin lessons, starting slowly with learning about notes and chords.

But pretty soon, you - as much as you hate to admit it - get a little bored, and start to spend less and less time trying to learn note names and the difference between a sharp and a seventh. Instead, you head to the wide chaotic world of the internet, where tab sites do away with all of theory and just tell you where to put your damn fingers to rock out. Within minutes, you're pounding along to Green Day (or Forever The Sickest Kids, depending on your era), pushing your practice amp to the limit, and reveling in the majesty of your own badassitude.

This is the Pop Punk Power Chord Model of Learning.

The principal is simple: people learn new skills because of the things they can do once they have that skill. The faster they get to do those things - even if they totally suck at them - the more likely to stay engaged with the learning process they are.

This is not the way most of our formal learning systems are set up. Instead of quickly and meaningfully introducing people to the value of having a particular domain of knowledge or skill set, most formal curriculums are organized in a linear fashion which progresses slowly from unit of learning to unit of learning without paying attention to context or giving people the payoff of engaging with the outcomes of the skills being taught.

There are two major problems with this organization of learning. The first is that is fails to contextualize why one would want to learn. The point of learning grammar isn't just to look like you're in the top half of the population on online dating sites, but to be able to convey and capture meaning and nuance in the pursuit of understanding ideas. (Okay, fine, it can be both). The point of learning science and math isn't to improve your scores on problem sets, but to be able to interact with and modify the natural world to achieve incredible things.

The second problem is that it's not clear that a rigidly linear approach to learning is the most effective. While it is true that every knowledge domain has foundational ideas and skills necessary to working with more advanced topics, we underestimate the value of throwing people into more advanced work that better reflects the real authentic use case of their knowledge, and we underestimate people's capacity to struggle and work backwards to unlock concepts they don't yet understand.

More and more, the old linear model of learning is being challenged in both formal and informal settings. Charter schools like San Diego's marquee High Tech High - which has a 100% college acceptance rate - are shining examples of the opportunity of project-based learning, in which students learn new concepts in the context of applying that knowledge to the real-world (for example, instead of learning physics through book-problems about rockets, they actually build rockets).

In web-based education platforms, there is a major shift in traditional linear education to learning in which the tutorials are the lessons. The dominant modality for self-taught learners of creative software platforms like the Adobe Creative Suite or music-production software like Ableton Live is one in which learners forgo sequential formal lesson packages for Youtube-delivered tutorials from practitioners explaining how to do the things one wants to do with the software in the real world. This means for example that instead of walking through dozens of mini-tutorials about every intricacy of the software before ever having used it, learners instead jump straight into eArtrash's Dubstep tutorial and work backwards, figuring out the software by manipulating in the same ways that they would if they actually knew what they were doing.

This authentic, non-simulatated, asynchronous apprentice style learning is beginning to find its way into the core design of online education platforms. Our portfolio company Verbling, for example, enables on-demand video chatting for native speakers trying to learn each other's language. In the code learning space, companies like Bloc and Codecademy are try to break down the distance between learning objects and real-world objects, organizing learning so that people are producing real products from their very first session.

In the next few years, more and more of the next generation of skills education will move online, and the lines between informal and formal learning will increasingly blur. As this happens, we'll see more and more learning platforms inverting the paradigm of linear learning, starting with authentic experiences that allow learners to engage with the outcome of that learning right away.

(Any resemblance between my seventh-grade self and the kid in the photo above is STRICTLY intentional)

#learning #education #music #pop punk

The Most Important Economic Trend Is The (Re)emergence Of The Entrepreneurial Small Business

Cyberoptix Tie Lab founder & maker in chief, Bethany Shorb

It's election season, which means flame wars, broken promises, and skull-numbing cable new commentary. It also means an endless parade of paeans to capital-S capital-B Small Business. Democrats and Republicans alike anchor economic policy (at least for the sake of stump speeches) on providing the right climate for small business, which, as they love to tell you, is the heart of America.

Yet for the last half-century or more, "small business" has been fundamentally changing. The emergence first of big box stores and mega retailers and later internet-driven e-commerce platforms gave shoppers options to buy the things they needed with greater selection, cheaper prices, and ultimately greater convenience. In this climate, local business has been preserved largely by brand equity - the joy that a unique experience and different feel of a local establishment can provide and the esprit de corps that they have with small business owners who seem an awful lot like them. Even this, however, has not been able to change the fact that being a small business has gotten progressively harder, not easier.

Today, however, what we know as small business is undergoing a seismic shift, and the consequences have implications for the entire structure of economic productivity and wealth creation in this country. Emerging is a new class of entrepreneurial small business that is proactively taking advantage of rather than simply reacting to new internet technology. These businesses are using a new world of transaction, marketing, distribution, financing, and soon materials creation platforms to reactivate a thriving entrepreneurial sector.

The Shifts:

Four main shifts characterize this sector: Local to global(ly enabled); distributor to creator; accessible & affordable uniqueness and novelty, and a new class of collaborative consumption businesses.

Local to Globaba(ly Enabled): The classic small business of American lore was the corner store, the barber, the baker; your town's version of the person that every other town had, as well. What's happening now is that small business entrepreneurs are blowing up proximity as a constraining factor for defining their markets. Cyberoptix Tie Lab, an unbelievably awesome screen-printed tie studio out of Detroit, doesn't just have to sell to Detroit, but can find kids like me in San Francisco who like the idea of whiskey labels or turntables on their formal wear.

Distributor to Creator: It used to be that a huge portion of small business was simply about providing distribution for other (larger) company's products. With the explosion of proximity as a constraint, the small business entrepreneurs who are creators have a much greater ability to discover and define economically viable markets, creating momentum towards creation. While it has gotten harder to be a distributor (competing with big box stores or online retailers), or even a service provider (competing with low cost national and global chains), it has gotten easier to be a creator.

Accessible & Affordable Uniqueness and Novelty: As it has gotten easier to acquire the things that everyone has, and harder and harder to find truly differentiated consumption experiences, there is a growing premium on uniqueness and novelty. The emergence of a new class of product-creation small businesses is speaking to this need.

A New Class of Collaborative Consumption Businesses: Markets were born to allow people to trade the things they had a surplus of for the things they had a shortage of. In the last two years, there has been an explosion of businesses - led famously by Airbnb - who are re-imaging the kind of resources people can share their excess supply of, from space to baby clothes to time to help with dog care.

The Enabling Landscape:

The landscape that has enabled this shift includes new platforms for distribution, marketing, transactions, financing, resource sharing, materials creation, and curation.

Distribution: There is a new class of platforms that have made it radically easier for the new class of small business entrepreneurs to connect with the markets of buyers who like the particular things they're created. Etsy, for example, has greatly expanded the ability of craftspeople to connect with buyers, creating the worlds greatest distributed craft fair and making what was once hard to make more than a hobby a viable business-creation opportunity.

Marketing: The platforms that have reshaped marketing for big business have also reshaped marketing for small business. Twitter and Facebook allow makers and creators to communicate with their fans and buyers like never before, enabling the distributed nature of the new small business entrepreneurship to preserve some of the feel of local even between people far away.

Transactions: For people selling things on the web, there is an ever-improving set of transaction platforms (the first and most famous being PayPal) that make it easier to collect dollars. In the last couple years, even more of the innovation has been around mobile and physical payments. Square is now being used by more than a million sellers around the country, including every seller at every craft fair I've been to for the last year.

Funding: Most of the businesses in this new class of entrepreneurial small business don't aspire to venture-backable scale. At the same time, small business loans have not been redesigned for this new generation of companies. Luckily, an emerging class of new funding platforms - particularly crowdfunding platforms - have emerged to fill the gap. Perhaps the best known is Kickstarter, which helps people fund creative products as well as new products by giving friends, family, and other interested parties the ability to contribute small dollars. This has effectively become the go-to pre-sales platform for small product companies.

Resource Sharing: When eBay launched in the 1990s, it brought garage sales online and forever changed how people bought and sold used items. The generation of collaborative consumption and resource sharing emerging today - led by Airbnb - is transforming not only the scale at which people access surplus resources, but fundamentally changing the nature of the resources they have access to.

Materials Creation: We're at the cusp of affordable 3D printing technology. As that comes online and becomes economical at an individual consumer level, we'll see more and more new small businesses being created on top of the platform of 3D printing.

Curation: Finally, as this market expands, it will get harder for the average consumer to quickly wade through the products being created by the new generation of entrepreneurial small businesses. In response, we will see the emergence of curation companies whose whole job is to surface the absolute best. Fab.com is the first platform to show the potential of next generation creator curation, and its runaway success (from gay social network to pivoted curated design marketplace on a $100m revenue run rate inside a year) portends great things for the field as a whole.

The Next Great (Investment) Opportunity

I believe that in the next few years, we'll see not only more and more of these entrepreneurial small businesses coming online, but an explosion in the set of services tailored to them. These services will not only serve the ecosystem of companies that exists currently, but add additional momentum to new company creation. Etsy didn't just serve people selling their crafts; they made it more viable for people to even consider selling their crafts. Put simply, these services will not just capture but create the market.

The single most exciting opportunity to me is a more robust and diversified funding ecosystem. If I had $50 million dollars right now, I would create an entrepreneurial small business loan with a venture capital heart. Small dollar amounts, expansion and startup capital, better terms for the lender for riskier investments, but caps on the amount of upside captured by the financier versus the entrepreneur, deep partnerships with the curators and distribution platforms to help lend energy towards success. This would enable an incredible amount of entrepreneurial energy, and make an incredible amount of money, so if you or your friends have some a milli or two to share, feel free to ping me.

The implications of the emergence of this economy are profound. If the economics of modernity is about trying to capture the productive elements of creative destruction while minimizing the pain and suffering of change, these shifts represent a transformational opportunity to unlock creativity and capacity everywhere.

Note: There is an entirely separate class of small businesses around food where the trends have looked different, and where the differentiated quality of hyper-local has commanded a consumer premium. In a later post, I'll explore how these two momentums are interacting with one another.

#collaborative consumption #economic trends #fab.com #small business #creators #creative descruction #economy #economics #cyberoptix #tie lab #airbnb #etsy #craft #small business loans #venture capital #bethany shorb

Why Soundcloud Is The Most Interesting Startup In The World, And Why 2012 Is The Year of Music Startups

Yesterday, Techcrunch broke the news that Soundcloud had raised a new Series B round of $50m dollars, led by Kleiner Perkins, at something like a $200m valuation. This is an awesome bet for KPCB, because Soundcloud is the most interesting startup in the world, and further suggests that 2012 is the year of the music startup.

As I was writing my top ten trends to shape VC in 2012 post, one of the predictions that just missed the list was that in 2012, music startups will achieve platform levels that allows for a totally different level of dynamism and robustness in the startup ecosystem. This platform-ization will come across every part of the music experience:

Access to major label tracks: Spotify's big announcement from a few weeks back was the opening of their platform API to allow 3rd party developers to build apps on top of their repository of tracks. This will create big new opportunities for music discovery, sharing, integration, etc.

Access to concert information: There are a number of players pushing hard in this space, but Songkick seems to be opening a lead in the on-demand concert information segment. If they (or one of their competitors) consolidate their lead and become a platform, there are tons of apps - from ticketing to video sales to merch and beyond - that could be built on top.

Band social media engagement: Facebook has replaced Myspace as the go-to place for musicians, aided by tools like BandPage that are making it easier than ever for musicians to engage and interact with their fans in real time.

Music education: I'm not sure you'll see a pure platform winner in the music learning space in 2012 (or ever), but there are an increasing number of awesome apps pushing music ed into the next century. I'm biased, but I think our portfolio company Chromatik will become the standard way that bands, choirs and other groups of musicians learn music together.

In this landscape then, what makes Soundcloud so different and so special?

The promise of the generation of the social internet that started in mid-2000s was a fundamental shift from consumption to creation. It's easy to forget that not that many years ago, the only way we interacted with things online was to read them, see them, watch them, or listen to them, with no ability to share them, remix them, or create our own versions of things like them.

Soundcloud often says that it intends to do for sound what Youtube did for video. In a world where startups are constantly making "we're the x for y" analogies, it's important to recognize just how profound that could be. Youtube is not just the platform that launched a thousand memes. It is the platform that enabled Warhol's 15 minutes of fame prophecy to be truer for a larger number of people than ever before; the platform that saved the music video, and changed how talent is discovered; the platform that enabled for totally new forms of activism like the "It Gets Better" series; and on and on and on. It is the platform that lived up to the meritocratic promise of the internet and blurred the line between professional and amateur more than any before it.

Soundcloud's promise to do the same for sound that Youtube did for video comes at a moment in which we are undergoing a fundamental shift in how we engage with music. The two factors that define this shift are 1) the lowered cost of consumption of music and 2) the lowered cost of creation of music.

The lowered cost of consumption of music began with Napster (followed by Kazaa and the dozens of other music downloading tools that grew up in its wake), was aided incrementally by iTunes (which, if still on a pay-per-song model, made a breadth of music available that no individual record store could ever match), and is coming to completion in the era of Spotify (which I desperately hope buys Rdio instead of just driving them out of business and steals their UI). The result is that it's dramatically easier to experiment with new artists to find things you like, diversifying the palette's of listeners in a way that simply wasn't viable before.

The lowered cost of creation of music has been driven by the relentless improvement of both the software and hardware used to perform and create music. Even a decade ago, the only option for most bands to record music was saving their pennies for expensive studio time. Now anyone with a Mac and a mic can record and mix high quality tracks.

In no genre has this shift been more apparent than in electronic music, which is growing, diversifying, and remixing itself so fast as to make the pace of innovation in every genre look tortoise-like. A few weeks ago, Skrillex (the 23 year old conquering hero of dubstep) was working on a remix of a track by Avicii (the 21 year old super hero of big European house). He finished it on his laptop in his hotel room, causing him to be a couple minutes late to his gig downstairs in Sheffield, England. He played the track for the crowd just a few minutes later, and within hours, a video of it was up on Youtube, and quickly thereafter making the rounds on the music blogs. By the next day, amateur DJs had created bootleg versions of it by imitating the sounds they heard with their own copies of Massive - a tool for making synthesizer sounds. And just a couple weeks after that, it was formally released on Avicii's remix single of the track.

2011 was the year electronic music ate the world. Hip hop and pop music came to be dominated by European house producers (think Pitbull's "Tonight (Give Me Everything)" - produced by Afrojack, Rihanna's "We Found Love" produced by Calvin Harris, and, um, everything by Guetta). Heavy music became both influenced by (see Korn's most recent album, all produced with extreme electronic producers like Excision, Downlink, and Noisa) and supplanted in the favor of 15 year olds by the drop of dubstep, led by Skrillex (who recently garnered 5 Grammy nominations, including "Best New Artist" - a first for an electronic musician).

Part of this popularity can be explained in how well electronic music - in its creation, consumption, fast evolution, youthful energy, and fundamentally collaborative creation - reflects the Zeitgeist of this remix era. It is no surprise that Soundcloud's early traction was with electronic musicians and producers, who flocked to it both as a utility to upload everything from new tracks to full sets and playlists, as well as a social vehicle to build fan repertoires and share their music with the world.

As a set of code, Soundcloud is the best utility for sharing audio with the world of people and I'm sure that as it grows it won't just be music that is shared there. As a cultural artifact, however, it captures something much more profound: the transition of music from a world of highly-controlled, highly-produced, professional acts, to a world of explosive creativity, genre blending, experimentation, and just-a-minute-ago-amateur superherodom.

The point is that Soundcloud is not simply housing and sharing sounds, but liberating sound from millions of creative minds around the world. I can't wait to see what they do with this new injection of resources, and even more, I can't wait to see what the next generation of kids late-night recording for-the-love-of-it do with the platform next.

#soundcloud #alexander jung #summit series #Soundcloud #startups #venture capital #2012 #music startups #trends

Flying Cars, Mega Funds, and Bubbles: The Ten Trends That Will Shape Venture Capital in 2012 [Part 2]

Yesterday, I published the first half of a list of trends that I believe will shape venture investing in the upcoming year. Here's the second half of that list.

6. There will be more new alternatives to venture financing for different types of businesses

The trends towards entrepreneurship across the country is a reflection of both a structural shift in the economics of wealth creation and capture, and a generational prerogative towards creativity, dynamism, flexibility and collaboration. We're at the tip of the iceberg for what the next generation of entrepreneurship looks like. The internet, still itself in its infancy, is creating the architecture for dozens of new types of entrepreneurship (eBay, Airbnb, Etsy). What's more, new technology like 3D printing is likely to unleash a totally new era of physical product entrepreneurs. Not all of these companies will make sense for venture backing, but many of them will still need risky capital that small business loans won't be able to cover. One promising shift to help these companies is the growth of crowdfunding. Kickstarter had a monster year, tripling traffic according to Quantcast up to 3 million visitors per month and becoming an essential element of both fundraising and marketing for creative products and cultural artifacts. A slate of crowdfunding bills have been working through Congress and the Senate and would relax restrictions on average citizens making small investments in new companies. In 2012, I think we'll see experiments with new funding apparatuses that channel the supply of small risk dollars with the demand of more aligned funding for the next generation of product companies and small businesses.

7. There will be more consolidation around multi-stage mega funds

There is a quiet cull in venture land right now, in which the pressure from below of super angels is combining with subpar historic returns for all but the very top tier of venture funds and general global economic insecurity to make it harder and harder for venture firms to raise limited partner dollars. As this shakes out, more and more of the big institution dollars interested in the class will try to work there way towards the top performers. I think that as that happens, more funds will aspire toward the multi-stage mega fund model that Andreessen Horowitz has been loudly building in the last couple years. These funds will range from early deals to later stage mezzanine funding to even, perhaps, private equity style acquisitions and turn arounds. Basically, as more of the dollars for the class head to the smartest investors, those investors will feel empowered to experiment with non-traditional approaches to value capture. some of them will flop, but some of them will stick, reshaping the next generation of venture investing in the process.

8. Whatever "bubble" there is will dissipate slightly and change, but it won't pop

Regardless of your position on whether it constitutes a bubble or not, it is undeniably true that valuations (particularly in Silicon Valley) have been on the rise for the past couple years. Part of this is here to stay, and simply reflects the decreased cost of starting up and increased power of founders. Part of it is driven by a particular investment thesis that says that all that matters is getting in the best deals, regardless of class. The part of it that will change is the over-exuberance of the increased valuations that incubators warrant. I think a small handful (including the obvious Y Combinator and Techstars) will continue to command significantly premium valuations, and I think some of the pack now (Excelerate Labs in Chicago and Dreamit Ventures in Philly, for example) could rise to even more prominence. But I think that the general inflationary pressure that incubators have had on pricing will ease off a bit. I think this will be compounded by the perceived difficulty of companies to get Series A dollars in. So in short, I think valuations will remain higher, but their high peaks will be reserved for a very specific company profile.

9. The Founders Fund view of venture is going to get more and more resonant

2011 saw the Founders Fund come out swinging. Peter Thiel was in the news every other week for some initiative he was launching or funding (including notably the 20 Under 20 Fellowship) and Sean Parker burst back into public prominence in a major way, as well. But even more than either of those guys individually, the Fund articulated a raison d'etre that was clear, compelling, and provocative. Right now, their home page reads "We wanted flying cars. We got 140 characters." The quote comes from the manifesto they published this year titled "What Happened To The Future?" which basically argues that venture capital has lost its way in a world of apps and needs to get back to making big, structural, economy shifting bets. The notion has struck a chord with many in Silicon Valley, and I think that in 2012 we'll see a lot more oxygen sucked up by company founders trying crazy-big, nutty-sounding things. With a new $625 million fund just closed, Founders Fund will be in a position to fund much of that activity.

10. We're entering the era of the VC-mogul, and the face of venture investing will continue to reorient towards the Young Turks of the Valley & Alley

The Doerrs, Moritzs, and old guard of Silicon Valley investors are still extremely influential, but it is undeniable that the last half decade has seen the rise of a whole new class of Young Turk investors who are dominating the conversation and creating huge gravitational pull around themselves for young entrepreneurs. These are people like Reid Hoffman, Paul Graham, Dave McClure, Chris Sacca, Fred Wilson, Chris Dixon, Ben Lerer, Josh Kushner, Naval Ravikant, Dave Morin, and Shervin Pishevar who are not just investing, but experimenting with new structures for investing, new approaches to building deal flow, and generally reshaping the industry in their image. Many of these investors have a certain mogul quality, in which their investing is just one part of a broad portfolio of engagement with startups - that engagement ranging from actual operational roles to political involvement to nonprofit leadership and beyond. Beyond this crew, there is a whole slew of 20-something and 30-something entrepreneurs who have had some success and are starting to dip their toes into investing. Like the rest of Gen Y, this cohort feels alive when it has its hands in lots of pots and can make connections across industry borders, and over the next five years I expect to see this influence spread across the landscape of startup financing.

#founders fund #shervin pishevar #sean parker #peter thiel #andreessen horowitz #flying cars #venture capital #vc #investing #angel investing #silicon valley #silicon alley #nyc #nyc startups #crowdfunding #lifestyle business

The Ten Trends That Will Shape Venture Capital In 2012 [Part 1]

Sean Parker (Founders Fund) and Shervin Pishevar (Menlo Ventures) at Le Web.

Nothing says the end of December like prognostications for the new year. In 2011, the breakneck pace of early stage investing continued to grow, with new market segments like "collaborative consumption" (think "Airbnb for...") and box-mail services (Birchbox, Blissmo, Trunk Club) tickling the fancy of investors. NYC continued its rise, and between Groupon, LinkedIn, and Zynga, 2011 will be remembered as the year that the tech IPO got its swagger (or at least pulse) back. So what's in store in 2012?

In no particular order, here are ten trends that will shape venture capital in the coming year:

1. Differentiation will be the name of the LP fundraising game, and VCs will get more aggressive about seeking out international opportunities

Investing internationally is a double-edged sword for VCs. On the one hand, emerging startup markets offer fresh terrain in which to scoop the biggest and most interesting deals at more reasonable valuations than in the US. On the other, investing internationally is hard. Understanding not only legal but cultural differences takes time and work; understanding differences in the market opportunity takes work. Still, as companies like recent TC Disrupt winner Shaker continue to push foreign-born startups into the limelight, and as more dollars try to press into the very top tier of firms and VCs feel increased pressure from LPs to differentiate themselves, creating strategies around frontier markets is going to become more and more appealing.

2. There will be massive competition for the most promising companies in areas where software hasn't yet eaten an obvious and important industry (such as politics, pets, and education)

Maybe the most read startup content of the year was Marc Andreessen's essay "Why Software is Eating the World," published in the Wall Street Journal. The point of the piece was simply that it was only a matter of time software and internet services had disrupted every single industry and activity space on the planet. 2012 will be a year in which you see intense competition among investors to get into deals in companies in spaces where software has still had only modest influence (at least relative to the opportunity). Three of my top bets for the industries where this will happen:

Politics - as much as we like to talk about how much social media changed politics in 2008, there is so much more opportunity. It's already happening, with companies like Electionear are poised to completely change field organizing for campaigns, and Change.org - a company having immense influence shifting day-to-day policy in business and government - is quietly becoming an 8 figure revenue company.

Pets - the lack of activity in the pet space is insane. $10 billion spent on pet supplies, $3.5 on per services, and nearly $500m on pet insurance. These are big, big markets with highly inelastic demand and very little in the way of great startups. This will change. Check out Dogvacay for an example of how.

Education - Education is more than 8% of our annual GDP. More than a trillion dollar US (and about 3x that worldwide) industry, with an incredible flowering of innovative for-profit companies building products and services that engage with formal learning as its currently constituted as well as shifting the nature of formal learning all together. 2011 definitely saw an uptick in general VC interest in the space (a notable example is Greylock & Benchmark's co-led 15m investment in social learning platform Edmodo), but 2012 will be the year when investors flock in.

3. New York will carve out even more mindshare with young entrepreneurs

New York continues its ass-kicking entrepreneurial ascent. It's no longer just Foursquare - but a whole host of companies - from Tumblr to Etsy to Kickstarter to Skillshare and beyond - that are making the Big Apple home. Warby Parker has exploded on to the scene as one of the most talked about startups in the world. General Assembly (in the LearnCapital portfolio) is one of the coolest startup spaces in the world and their startup education programs are second to none. Union Square Ventures continues to command incredible mindshare among early stage entrepreneurs, and Lerer Ventures and Thrive Capital are quickly becoming sought after by entrepreneurs on both coasts. In 2012, I think you'll see more and more startups on the West Coast carving out space in their rounds for NYC investors. What's more, I think you'll see continued gravitational pull towards the city for young entrepreneurs trying to decide where to base their companies.

4. Series A (and later) funds will grab more and more of the conversation and "cool" that has recently belonged to the angel investors

On the backs of a massive uptick in incubators and seed investors, the last couple years have seen a startup Cambrian explosion. 2012 will see more and more of those companies running out of cash and coming to the all important proving ground of Series A. As that happens, you'll see "the hot" funds become the coolest funds doing Series A and later deals with the most interesting companies. And my guess is that a lot of the investors that grab this attention won't be the Sequoia's and KPCB's, but the Lightbanks, Menlos, Founders Funds and Andreesseens. It will be interesting to see if and what impact any shift in "what's hot" when it comes to a VC trickles to people who have come into the field as angels in the last couple years. I wouldn't be surprised to see some of the better known solo angels or partners at seed funds jump to bigger firms.

5. E-commerce will be the investment vertical that looks the most different from the past couple years (and look out for the "We are the Fab.com of x..." analogies)

The past couple years have been the years of the flash deal sites, culminating with the Groupon IPO. And if some of the wind has gone out of the space's collective sails, it has and still commands incredible attention (not to mention revenue and investment dollars). 2012, however, will be about a fundamentally different type of e-commerce, anchored in quality and curation rather than discounts. Fab.com is for sure the poster boy of this - with tens of millions of new dollars in the bank, 100,000 orders a monthly and a nearly $100m revenue run rate already - but there will be many many more as online retailers try to move away from the feel of walking into a big box store or coupon flyer in a newspaper, and instead tap into the feel of walking into an awesome boutique where everything looks awesome.

Interested in the rest of the trends that will shape VC in the coming year? Check back in at the beginning of next week for part 2

The Fab.com Fundraising Lesson: Kill The Noise, Pitch the Numbers.

This post by Fab.com founder Jason Goldberg is phenomenally fucking brilliant.

Here's the gist of it: In their latest funding round, instead of the insane back-and-forth clusterf that is the venture funding process, they just let the data talk. The company picked the set of firms and partners they thought would be interesting and actually gave them access to all of their metrics. Like, everything. They asked the VCs to actually get to know the company and reach back out if they were interested.

What this did, effectively, is completely refine the pool to investors who understood exactly what was happening with the business and were excited about it. Then all the parties got to focus on actually finding a fit based on culture, team, and vision for the future. The result for Fab.com was that they got exactly what they want in an investor with an incredibly small amount of time (relative to normal) spent fundraising.

As an unbelievably great site with explosive growth, Fab.com had more of an ability to write its own ticket than most. That said, the lesson to just tie your pitch to data would be so well taken by any entrepreneur.

One of the worst sins a writer can commit is "burying the lede." This means obfuscating the main point they're trying to get across in a sea of exposition or language or general noise.

The lede in any venture pitch is the numbers. How are users growing, how is that growth accelerating, how is it driven, what does it cost to drive it, how many of them are converting, how many of them are coming back, how long are they staying, etc. etc. etc.

Companies have to *own* these numbers. I think most entrepreneurs worry that unless they're Facebook, sharing numbers will doom them. The truth is that one of the greatest strengths of good pitches we see is that the entrepreneurs know everything about the numbers. When they're good, they know why and how to build on top of them. When they're bad, they have plans for how to fix them. And in the real world, almost every interesting early company has both good and bad numbers.

Knowing numbers - even the ones you wish were better - inspires confidence because it shows investors that you get what you're doing. Don't get nervous. Don't bury the lede. Kill the noise. Pitch the numbers.

#fab.com #vc #pitch #advice

Greylock & Benchmark Bet Big on Social Learning with $15m Investment in Edmodo

This morning, social learning platform Edmodo announced $15m in new funding, co-led by Benchmark and Greylock. Matt Cohler from Benchmark and Reid Hoffman from Greylock will be joining Edmodo's board.

The deal is a huge one for the company and for our firm, LearnCapital. Reid Hoffman - the founder of LinkedIn and investor in everyone from Facebook to Zynga and beyond - and Matt Cohler - one of Facebook's first employees - are some of the most important entrepreneurs and investors in the rise of the social internet over the last five years. Their investment is not only an affirmation of how central the social experience can be for learning, but an affirmation of the growing venture community interest in next generation learning platforms.

Edmodo is a social learning network which gives teachers the ability to bring content from the web into a safe and secure communication platform for their classes. On the investment, Hoffman said: “Both Matt and I have seen networks grow spectacularly once they hit their tipping point. It’s clear to us that Edmodo is well on its way to becoming one of the key networks in our lives. Just as LinkedIn is the professional graph for work and Facebook is the social graph for your friends, Edmodo is the educational graph for learning. The graph provides the platform for teachers to bring selections of the web to the classroom…Edmodo is the third social graph network that Greylock has invested in, after Linkedin and Facebook.” (from TechCrunch)

The investment isn't just important for Edmodo or Learn, but a huge win for an educational technology space that is quickly maturing. This space is not a scary futuristic world in which teachers are replaces by machines and students are reduced to fact-reducing automatons, but a space in which technology gives teachers the resources to actually engage students with different learning styles; in which it becomes easier to hone in on specific problem areas, increasing student mastery and confidence; in which new vehicles for collaboration between parents, teachers and students become normal rather than exceptional; in which the cornucopia of information and knowledge beyond the classroom can find its way into the formal education experience, helping students understand why they're learning what they're learning. Ultimately, the new generation of education technology is about enabling our education system to live up to its promise of unleashing the talent and capacity of every student to do and achieve more.

The opportunities that come with this emerging world are what drive our firm to invest in learning technology, and we're glad to have Greylock and Benchmark join us in unlocking that vision. Congrats to the entire Edmodo team.

#edmodo #education #learncapital #reid hoffman #matt cohler #greylock #benchmark

The Eatery & Why Calorie Counting Is The Worst Weight Loss Strategy Ever

Oh calorie counting.

The first and worst refuge for would be weight losers. On the surface, it seems so simple. 3,500 calories burned equals a pound. Figure out your basal metabolic rate (the amount you burn during a day just existing), add in a workout, reduce calories in so that the numbers work out with a steady, predictable loss.

Except, in real life, it almost never works like this. First, people often have adaptable metabolisms that figure out how to reset how much the body burns as diets change. Second, we're at the beginning of an era where we are just discovering how much variation their is in how our individual bodies process different types of food. 1,500 calories for me may mean something fundamentally different than 1,500 calories for you.

And third, counting calories is both exceedingly hard and often a recipe for psychological disaster. Nothing like building an entire emotional edifice around knowing everything in when you're doing well and exactly how badly you cheated on a hard diet to lead a person towards binge eating disorder.

These are not just passive observations for me. I lost 150 pounds in college, gained a chunk of it back after college when I started drinking, and have recently lost another 80 to get back down to where I was in school. In the process, I've experimented with just about every approach, and done things that no doctor on the planet would recommend just to figure out what works. I've experienced both the thrill of achieving and also the absolute agony of heading in the wrong direction again. I've come to believe that approaches based, ultimately, on blacks-and-whites are not only doomed to fail, but wreak havoc on most peoples' psyches.

The bad news first: there are no shortcuts. It's the specifics of calories that are the problem - the fact that calories may not mean what they're supposed to mean for you - not the principal, which is that more burned than consumed equals weight loss. Ultimately, the only way to ensure you're losing weight is to figure out your set point balance between a regular sustainable diet and a sustainable work out schedule.

The good news: the behavior change required for weight loss and maintenance is, once over the initial catalytic hump, much more pleasant than extreme diets and intense regimens of calorie counting would have you believe. It's mostly about a regular awareness about the decisions that you're making, and the comfort of knowing the actual implications when you're making them.

I've been watching for the past few years to see if anyone would build an app in the personal health space that took this sort of approach. There are many apps for tracking your food and workouts - but all of them are about the scrupulous detailed data collection, rather than the big patterns.

Today, Massive Health is launching The Eatery, an app that is designed to help you figure out the big patterns in your eating. With The Eatery, you snap a photo of your meal and it helps you figure out where it fits on the scale of fat to fit - no calories involved. The calculus includes both the parts of the meal as well as the portion sizes. The app shows you the trends in your habits for the week and how you're looking week to week.

I'm super intrigued to see how it works. It's success will depend on both people's adherence and the accuracy of the info, but the approach is more inline with what experience tells me will work than anything I've seen. If I could invest in them, I would.

#massive health #the eatery #calorie counting #weight loss

The New Swag: Dudes Finally Get Some Style, Courtesy of Startups

I had a moment about a month ago where I woke up, 27 years old, with a wardrobe consisting of a few ragged pairs of jeans, a motley collection of T-shirts picked up during political campaigns and conferences, and a whole array of clothes from the one designer I knew - and even that was only because they're from my hometown of Portland, Maine. The coolest thing I owned were the shoes they gave us at Summit Series.

While young Silicon Valley culture glorifies not-giving-a-shit-about-how-you-look, I've always found that meme a little tired. It's not the conscious rebellion of a group of people who have some fundamental moral qualm with dressing up, or who find wearing ties to be the act of a privileged over-class convinced of their own superiority. It's pretty much just about liking sweatpants and hoodies.

Which is fine, but every guy reaches a point in his life where he has to say "holy shit I look like an adolescent," and level up his threads.

Being that the only way I know how to solve any problem is turning to the internet, I turned to the internet. Turns out, the fashionistos of the ball-clad gender have been working overtime to redress the generally abhorrent state of male style, offering something different for everyone.

For the preternaturally hopeless dresser, there is Trunk Club. Building off of the trend towards box services - companies like Birchbox and Blissmo that send, physically in the mail, a regular set of something or other with an eye towards expanding their member's repertoires - Trunk Club connects members with personal stylists who select 10 items at a time - pants, shoes, jackets, shirts, sweaters, you name it - to send through the male. Members try everything on in the comfort of their own home, send back what they don't like, and only pay for what they keep.

For those gentlehommes that take an active interest in their style, but need a bit of curation and the occasional advice, 2011 has seen the launch of two amazing men's style marketplaces: Park & Bond and Mr. Porter. Park & Bond is the first full price regular e-retail entrant in the Gilt Group empire, while Mr Porter is the sibling of successful Net-A-Porter luxury fashion site for women. Both feature highly curated item selection and use high-quality content to help bring men into the experience of shopping and get style tips. Mr Porter sways slightly more luxury (read: expensive) than Park & Bond, but neither is a discount option.

Finally, for those bros who get totally in to looking good, and who need a find an outlet for their addiction that doesn't bankrupt them, there is Jackthreads. Jackthreads offers crazy discounts on cool dudes clothing - usually more casual the sites mentioned above - in a sort of flash sale model. The site is part of the Thrillist empire, and was their first foray into retail.

In addition to making me excited that I may not be doomed to look like a late 1990s nu-metal kid forever, these sites are fascinating to me from a startup trend perspective.

1. Intersecting online and offline. More and more, startups don't exist in a purely digital realm, but intersect the online and offline worlds. In the clothing space, Zappos was the pioneer who lowered the barriers to trying things on at home by making the free-shipping-both-ways thing the norm. These startups all build off of that, and with Trunk Club, add the new element of variety and exposure to new things. To my mind, this makes even more sense for guys - we, as a general rule, hate trying stuff on in stores - than for lady-folk.

2. Curation is the watchword of the moment. None of these sites are offering a value proposition about comprehensiveness. They're making a value proposition that more or less everything you see on the site kicks ass, and the only question is what type of ass you want to kick. They take different approaches to curation - the box versus simply the online store selection - but they're all selling style signal in a world of noise.

3. Startups beyond the valley. All of these companies are based outside of Silicon Valley. Trunk Club is in Chicago, while Mr. Porter, Park & Bond, and Jackthreads are all in New York. Maybe this is because those places tend to attract entrepreneurs that are more interested in guys style than the entrepreneurs in the Valley. Or maybe it's because the SV Hoodies union threw too many barriers to entry in their way out here. Either way, it's one more example of the diffusion of startup energy around the country.

4. Reimagining editorial content. The subtle but brilliant thing about the content approach of both Park & Bond and Mr. Porter is that, in situating the content experience underneath the buying experience, it better matches the male purchaser's priorities. The old magazine model of guy's style is content first, then buy. You buy a publication or read an article then go looking for the types of things it talked about. This only works for guys who are willing to think about style as having two separate phases of discovery and execution. In real life, most of us go to a website like Park & Bond because we need to buy something, period. It's not until we get there that we realize we have no idea what the fuck we're doing and need some assistance, which, of course these sites are happy to provide. By re-imagining the onboarding as "purchase mindset first, realizes self knows nothing, gets some help, then buys," these sites are making style shopping safe for the average guy.

5. Whatever the internet hasn't remade yet, it will. Online retail is already a significant industry. For women, $10.5b annually and growing at 11% per year. For men, significantly less but still significant at $4.5b and growing at 7% annually. Still, this is around 1/10th of the overall US clothing industry. The reason that major players like Gilt and Thrillist are getting into this space, and the reason that firms like US Venture Partners and Greycroft invested $11m in Trunk Club is the simple truth that whatever the internet hasn't remade yet, it will.

#park and bond #mr porter #style #fashion #guys style #guys fasion #trunk club #trends #startup #new york city #retail #online retail

The Verticalization of the Interest Graph, or, F Yeah I Want To Share Pictures Of My Shoes

Ask savvy investors in social platforms today, and they'll tell you that the new energy isn't around the social graph of people you know, but around the interest graph of things you care about.

The interest graph has been a hot topic of conversation in Silicon Valley since investors/advisors Naval Ravikant and Adam Rifkin wrote a piece for Techcrunch almost exactly a year ago called "Why Twitter is Massively Undervalued Compared to Facebook." In it, they basically made the argument that experts and influencers you don't know often have more influence over behavior (particularly when it comes to purchasing decisions) than friends. If Facebook is the anchor of social interaction with people we know in real life, Twitter is the anchor of social interaction with people we don't know, but whose opinions about particular things we're interested in we admire.

The challenge for entrepreneurs is that it's not enough to simply identify a graph; you have to create an action or interaction around it that people find compelling. Facebook didn't win just because it had your friends - it won because it figured out ways (first poking, then photos, then walls, then news feeds) to interact with friends that were richly satisfying (or at least captured a sufficient amount of sexual intrigue to get the ball rolling...see: poking and photos). And while Twitter has enabled a core set of interactions, they're embedded in a noisy system that requires a significant amount of customization (figuring out who to follow) to be rewarding.

One of my favorite bets on a new type of interest graph interaction is Today's Kicks.

Today's Kicks is an app that, pretty simply, allows you to post pictures of the shoes you're wearing today, get lauded for your style, and give props to other people with sweet shoes. The photos are posted to the app, to the web, and on Twitter. For people who don't give a shit about shoes (which is, admittedly, a decent sized chunk of people), this app might seem a little ridiculous. For people who love shoes - particularly sneakers - though, it's totally swag.

And guess what? There is a passionate community of people who love shoes. Sneakers are a huge part of urban culture, and one of the key ways people express personality and style.

What the crew behind Today's Kicks gets is that the internet was built on the backs of interest-aligned niche communities. The original internet was nothing but a set of niche communities who used message boards to talk about things that their real-life friends didn't necessarily care about. A few years later, real identity started to take the place of anonymity, and offline social connections became the organizing principal of the net. We're in a moment again, however, where people are remembering the thrill of connecting with new people on the basis of the things that they love.

Today's Kicks was built by a crew of NYC entrepreneurs including First Round Capital's Phin Barnes and my old Northwestern buddy Amanda Peyton, who loves the internet as much as anyone. While it's hard to tell if it will really take hold in the long run, what's clear to me is that:

1) There's certainly enough evidence that regular social photo sharing is a pretty promising thin edge to bet your wedge on.

2) The idea of creating hyper vertical sub-networks on top of the interest graph gets back to some of what made the internet grow up in the first place

3) The app makes me want to buy more shoes (which is both good for their product and creates an awesome and obvious monetization channel)

4) I really, really, really, really want the pit bull/awesome dog version of the app, which if they have any heart at all will be at the top of their development priorities list.

#interest graph #amanda peyton #first round capital #today's kicks #internet #internet culture #urban culture

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Nathaniel Whittemore