More than a tweet, less than a blog. @vonsydow-blog - Tumblr Blog

When you ask for the time, some people tell you how to build a watch. Others tell you how to build a Swiss Village.

Kellblog

The most transformative analytics startups are no longer being built in the analytics or "big data" space, but rather use analytics technology to provide solutions to specific, mission critical business problems.

Me

Startup life is not only glamorous, but also healthy.

The answer to “Why?” is “because why the fuck else would you even want to be alive but to do things as well as you can?”. Now: let’s do this.

https://medium.com/@stewart/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c59524d650d

#startups

The same information, the same statistics, are available to all of us. If we all use them in the same way we’ll all end up in the same place.

Bill Bernbach

#advertising #bernbach #creativity #data

I have found that reputation is the magnet that brings opportunities to you time and time again. I have found that being nice builds your reputation. I have found that leaving money on the table, and being generous, pays dividends.

Fred Wilson

#business #startups

You’ll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.

DFW

#DFW #quote

Ads aren't bad in themselves. It's just the attitude. We all have to go to the store, we all have to have groceries, but there's a way to sell you things to make the exchange more of a human one.

Bill Murray, of all people, in a Reddit Q&A, of all places.

The problem with television is that people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen. The average American family hasn’t time for it, it will never be a serious competitor to radio broadcasting.

The New York Times in 1939, by way of Dave Trott.

#experts

Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the human voice over wires, as may be done with dots and dashes of Morse code, and that were it possible the thing would be of no practical value.

1865 Boston Newspaper, by way of Dave Trott

#experts

One of the things that I felt working on each of these is that we never looked at numbers or metrics in the abstract -- total page views, logged in accounts, etc, but we always talked about users. More specifically, what they were doing and why they were doing it.

Josh Elman on the only metric that matter.

He said advertising had become dishonest, boring, insulting. Worse, it didn’t sell anything to anybody.

Mary Wells on Bill Bernbach on advertising in the 60's. Sounds like we're back where we started.

If I were a media outlet, instead of calling on an advertising agency, I would do everything possible to cut them out, to figure out a way around that.

http://digiday.com/publishers/publishers-restore-faith-2014/

#publishers #revenue

Re: Advertising that looks like content

There's been lots of talk in the online advertising and publishing world recently about the rise of so called "native ads". The other day Digiday did a feature on Monocle's ideas on the subject, hyping their implementation of this concept like it was the second coming of Adwords.

Tyler Brûlé (founder, editor-in-chief), being the sensible media mogul that he is, rightly downplays any illusions of genius and innovation on their behalf. In fact, they're just doing what they've been doing since launching their first print magazine.

Aka "Advertorials".

Rather than jumping on the "native ad" bandwagon, Brûlé also insists on calling the units for what they are, "advertorials" - ads created by Monocle's editorial team (the design part at least) to make ads look and feel like editorial content.

Adver-torial. Not only a catchier name, but self-explanatory, proven effective and - in Monocle's case at least - very valuable to consumers.

#native #advertising #monocle

The strategy makes the advertising right. The execution makes it great.

Dave Trott.

Don’t hand out print-outs of your slides. They don’t work without you there.

Seth Godin

I saw Bill Gurley say that you can only make money by being right about something that most people think is wrong. His logic was that you can't make money by being wrong. And you can't make money by being right about something everyone else knows. So you have to be right about something that most people think is wrong. [..] So many folks in the venture capital business are sheep that just want to follow the herd. They are momentum investors purchasing highly illquid investments. That is a recipe for disaster. Momentum investing works in highly liquid markets (sometimes). From what I can tell, it almost never works in private markets.

Fred Wilson on the connection between public ridicule and the potential returns. The first paragraph accurately defines the different between amazing companies and me too companies. The second paragraph nails the difference between amazing investors and the rest of the herd.

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