TechVenture… human adventure.

Remarks delivered at the TechVenture conference. December 6, 2011. Hard Rock Cafe, Universal Studios, Orlando.

[The audio is here: techventure2011]

On December 17, 2010, Mohammad Bouazizi, a 26 year-old street vendor in Tunisia, was harassed, beaten, and humiliated by police for selling vegetables in the street without a permit, which is a euphemistic way of saying he failed to bribe the right people.

Shortly after this utterly dehumanizing incident, in which his entire stock of produce was taken and his pushcart – his only source of income – ransacked, Bouzizi, in an act of protest against mindless government brutality and corruption, doused himself in gasoline and set himself aflame.

The story of Bouazizi’s self-immolation and martyrdom became a rallying cry for the Arab world, a rallying cry quite naturally carried on the fastest and most efficient communications substrate available: Twitter, Facebook, and various blogs. It became the a call to action that ignited a series of revolutions and uprisings that became the Arab Spring also known as the Arab Awakening, a veritable tsunami of human bravery and courage and sacrifice that toppled decades of dictatorial rule in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, and also rewrote the equations of the balance of power in Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen, and almost every country throughout the middle east.

Here at home, the Occupy Wall Street movement, which started in New York City but has since blossomed into a massive global act of peaceful protest against corruption, drew direct inspiration from the Arab Spring, and ultimately, from Mohammad Bouazizi. 

And whether you agree with any or all of these events or you are repulsed by them, you have to admit that they only truly exist in their present hyper-accelerated form because of the internet.

These events might have happened without the internet, but surely not as explosively. When humans communicate, revolutions happen. Humanity, like the internet, treats censorship and oppression as an error condition, and routes around it.

Each and every one of these clashes has met with violent resistance from the governments who lay claim to the right to make the rules for the people they ostensibly serve.

And in each and every case, the government has attempted to quash these uprisings by doing one thing: shutting down the internet. Kill the lines of communication, cut off the bloodflow, and you starve the tumor. Or so the theory goes.

I grew up in Bangor Maine, and I first set foot in the city of Orlando in the Spring of 1985, at more or less the same the time future produce salesman Mohammad Bouazizi would have been celebrating his first birthday. In 1985 I was a freshman majoring in computer science at the University of Maine, and for a couple of years I had already been an avid user of an obscure computing resource that we did not yet call the internet.

And what was cool about the obscure computing resource that we did not yet call the internet in 1985 was that you could use it to send text messages.  You could chat with people on it.  Just like on facebook or your cell phone today you could type in:

message brent@maine.edu hey dude, djeet yet?

And I could reply:

 message sender@wherever.edu nope, let’s sgweet!

And thereby lunch and fellowship would occur.

But an even cooler thing about the obscure computing resource that we did not yet call the internet in 1985 was that you could use it to send text messages to just about anyone, on just about any computing system attached to it.  Like some folks were attached to it down the road from here in Orlando in the computer science department at the University of Central Florida.

Look, if you’re too terribly much under the age of 35 you have no idea what personal communications media were like in 1985, but we were pretty much blind, deaf, and mute, OK?  I mean, you couldn’t just pick up the phone in Bangor, Maine and call someone in Orlando, Florida without incurring something called “long distance charges,” which, I assure you, were prohibitively expensive for a college freshman in 1985. The kind of computing power you and I are now carrying in our pockets was then only available to an anointed class of high priests who knew how to cast the spells and perform the arcane rituals designed to operate it and to cleans it of evil spirits from within the inner sanctums of massive rooms filled with refrigerator sized boxes of computing equipment… and their climate control systems.

So the ability to sit down at an 80×24 green screen terminal at the University of Maine and type out a message that would instantly appear on someone’s 80×24 green screen terminal at the University of Central Florida was the epitome of cool, in 1985, ok? I mean it was the apotheosis of cool.

And my first collegiate spring break in 1985 was spent on Daytona Beach hanging out with some UCF students, the entire tenure of my friendship with whom up until that point had been comprised entirely of a series of green text messages carried over the obscure computing resource we did not yet call the internet.

I may be the first bona fide example of true friendship forged and intermediated entirely over a digital substrate. I may be the first guy who ever got a date on the internet.

So what do Mohammad Bouazizi and I have in common…? 

Nothing. Ok? Nothing.

He’s the very definition of a hero, and I, back in 1985, I’m just a dude looking for a party.

I could never flambé myself for the cause, ok, I mean, let me just get that out there right now; if you’re looking for a martyr, I am not your huckleberry, ok?  I am not in Mohammed Bouazizi’s league.

What we have in common, is that we didn’t need the internet to achieve anything.  But it sure helped.

Mohammed Bouazizi didn’t need the internet to ignite the Jasmine Revolution and the Arab Spring. 

He needed a gas can and a match. 

I didn’t need the internet to find my way to a bitchin’ spring break experience.But in each of those cases, the internet sure did help.

Technology rarely creates behaviors with intrinsic value or normative force. Technology accelerates and magnifies human behavior. We come to technology with all of our pathologies and our intricacies, our sacred and our profane, and technology puts those things on an express train to the future. The internet is where we connect with the rest of the world. Technology gives us unprecedented power to examine and redefine all that we are.

And what we are discovering is that we are one people. One global people. There is no them. It’s all just us. We’re all in this together.

We are not the 99%.  We are the 100%.

The only things that matter in human existence are human relationships.

We’re each here for such a brief period. The toys we collect don’t matter. The very concept of money is losing its legitimacy with every passing year. The things in our lives are all so much window dressing.

What’s left? What’s left are human relationships and the love with which you fill them. When you love your fellow human, you do not casually spray him with pepper spray, or shoot a can of tear gas at his head. When you love your fellow man, you do not humiliate him to the point where self-immolation is the better option.

For you entrepreneurs, your technologies will win if they help people communicate, and love, and relate, or at least get through the tedious parts of their lives more efficiently and more quickly so they can get on with the good parts, the lovely parts, like family and friends and love.

Look, we’re human beings. Before angry birds, we played games with balls and sticks. Without text messages, we flirted live and in person. Without the internet, the oppressed have sought liberty and hatched plots to achieve it in smoky cafes and back alleys.

Big give us a little technology to move those things along a little more effectively, a little more efficiently, and you don’t just change the world.You save it.

One of the last things Mohammad Bouazizi did before he died is write a love letter to his mother. To make sure she got it, he wrote it on Facebook.

Help righteous people make love and (sometimes) war, and you’re not just a game-changer.

You’re a goddamn savior.

Thank you.

Playful Detachment

Is this seat saved?

So I’m sitting in a movie theater and this guy comes up to me and says, “Excuse me, is this seat saved?”

And I say, “Well if Thomas Aquinas reasoned that even animals have no souls… how can an inanimate object like a chair expect to attain eternal salvation!?”

And he says, “No I mean is anyone sitting there?”

And I said, “Ah…! Ambiguity. The Devil’s volleyball.”

Ambiguity. The Devil’s volleyball.

The universe is ambiguous and inexact, so stop looking for bright lines or you’ll miss the show. Reality is not digital, it’s analogue. Your life is not deterministic, it’s stochastic.

You and I and everything else in the universe are made of elementary particles that don’t so much exist as they are sort of just probable to exist.

If a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

No. It doesn’t fall in the first place.

Reality itself doesn’t actually crystallize into existence until we observe it.

It’s not present, it’s only probable.

And when we look away, the universe turns back into a smudge.

The universe actually works like this, and we have no idea why.

We see it as through a glass darkly.

For now we see as through a glass darkly — 1 Corinthians 13:12

In the original Greek translation of Paul’s letter to Corinth, the word used is not “darkly,” it’s “en ainigmati” meaning “like a riddle.”

I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumors, but even the apostle Paul new that life is a bit of a practical joke with no punch line.

Tika – Howlo

Here are two non-English words, “Tika” and “Howlo.” One of these words means pointy, and the other means round or curvy.

This is not a trick question, just go with your gut, and raise your hand if you think Tika means pointy and Howlo means curvy.

Thanks. Here’s the thing. These words don’t exist. I made them up.

What manner of trickery is afoot that we can instinctively agree on the meanings of nonexistent words!?

“In the beginning was the Word” – John 1:1

Word, yo.

Did God cast a spell by spelling the Word to create the universe?

Are we in the cast of some grand performance?

If I am in this cast, do I have top billing or am I listed as “second middle-aged man.”

cogito ergo sum

Do I exist?

In 1644 Rene Descartes reasoned that I exist because I can think about my existence.

But maybe I just think I’m thinking?

For bear in mind that Decartes also said, “If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”

It’s all quite amazing.

Look, the road to death begins at birth and the path from the one to the other is beset on all sides by a veritable symphony of the grandest of miracles.

You are a little blob of the universe that thinks it thinks, for god sakes!

The two-slit experiment

If you shine a light at a card with 2 slits in it, what you see on the wall behind the card is a set of light and dark stripes. The dark stripes appear because photons move in wave patterns, so the photons passing through one slit interfere with those passing through the other slit to either reinforce each other or cancel each other out, just like waves on water.

The thing is, you get the same interference pattern, the same stripes, even when you only shoot a single photon at a time at the slits.

Even when there is nothing there to interfere with it, the photon acts as though there is.

The conventional explanation is that the photon actually passes through both slits at once and interferes with itself.

Are you kidding me? (Here’s a great video explaining this phenomenon.)

It’s ok to be amazed.

You see, we’re given only hints of the great rip-roaring carnival happening just beyond the edge of what science can confidently reveal.

It’s as though in our lives we’re made to play a game without knowing the rules.

How can you play when you can’t even work out whether you’re actually thinking?

You’re a wave.

Most of the matter in your body is exchanged every few years. (Truthish, but a matter of some debate.)

Just chemically you’ve got atoms switching between molecules, molecules breaking up and becoming waste… at the molecular level you are a boiling soup of frenetic activity.

You’re not separate and apart from this world. You’re a wave that passes through it, picking up bits of it here, shedding other bits there.

con spirare
To conspire – con spirare – to breathe together.

Some of the air leaving my lungs as I speak is infused with microscopic cellular material from within me, which is wafting through the air and finding its way into your lungs.

And if we were to look very closely right now, we would probably find a few fragments of my DNA in your bloodstream.

I wonder how that will affect you.

in spirare

So as we conspire or breathe together, with inevitably breathe into each other, we inspire each other.

We are one. Ours is the world and we are the world and everything that’s in it.

Thou art God. – Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (also 1 Kings 18:36, 1 Chronicles 17:26, Psalm 86:10, Psalm 90:2, and Acts 4:24)

Our own tightest chains and heaviest burdens are we.

When I endorse playful detachment, what I am talking about is detachment from fear, and loathing, and worry.

I’m advocating playful detachment from failure. From fear of failure.

Have no fear.

Don’t sweat it man. It’s all just quarks and gluons.

You are a puzzle, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a bag of skin.

Your existence is a frickin miracle and full of eloquent mystery. A real cliffhanger. A real barnburner.

Without mystery there would be no use for our God-given curiosity. You see, because the world is replete with ambiguity and uncertainty and that’s what makes it exquisitely beautiful.

Either way it’s a miracle.

G. K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at a dragon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don’t.

Don’t wait for permission.

If you’ve got something interesting you want to do or try, don’t wait, do it now. As long as you’re not hurting anyone and you’re generally operating within the bounds of ethics, there is nothing on this blue earth that is standing in your way.

This is your show.

You’re the star and the director and the screenwriter and the grip and the gaffer and the best boy.

Merrily merrily merrily merrily…

When I speak of playful detachment, I mean detachment from certainty, from the expectation that there should be certainty.

For the only certainty is that you seem to be here.

So wake up every day thankful for the banquet that’s been set before you, and, well… eat, man.

Ambiguity.

So what’s the punch line?

A grizzly bear walks into a saloon with a bandage wrapped around the end of his arm and he says, “I’m looking for the man who shot my paw…”

So what’s the punch line?

The punch line is that it’s all punch line.

All the way down to the Devil’s volleyball court.

Thank you.

Elements of an Executive Summary for Startups

An executive summary is often the first document potential investors see about your company. Think of it as a 1-3 page advertisement for your company to investors. Its purpose is to cause the investor to want to learn more about the opportunity. It should contain no trade secrets or confidential information.


Here’s what I look for in an executive summary.

1. intro: A one-sentence description of the business. Describe what the business does to make money. This should pop. It’s like a magazine cover that makes me desperately need to pick up the magazine to learn more. It should inform and tantalize at the same time.
   
2. the problem: Your customers have a problem to which you are the solution. What is the problem that you solve for your customers? What are they missing or wanting that you provide? Hopefully this is a big problem that a lot of people have, not just a few.
   
3. the solution: Describe your business plainly and clearly. Do not leave me in suspense. Just tell me what you do, how you do it, and why you do it.
   
4. the others: Who are your competition? What makes you better than your competition? Why will people stop buying from your competition and start buying from you? Why do you win?
   
5. the message: How are you going to address your audience? How do you promote, advertize, market, and sell your product or service? How do customers find you?
   
6. the people: Who are you and what makes you qualified to do this? You are going to be asking someone to write you a check with the expectation that you will treat their money with love and respect and that you will generate a healthy return on investment. Why should they trust you to do these things?
   
7. the story thus far: What have you accomplished? What milestones have you hit? What is the state of things in the company?
   
8. the ask: How much money do you need and what are you going to spend it on? What does the company’s performance look like over time as you spend that money? A pro forma spreadsheet is useful here.

That’s it. Good luck!

Is Reality Real?

A dear friend turned me on to this mind-bending post about why we’re all just AI’s running around a virtual world, a Matrix, if you will. Brains in a vat. I alluded to this possibility in my remarks delivered to open the Internet Technology Summit last June.

The basic argument goes: if we can create AI, then we are probably AI that someone else created.

I am beguiled by the beauty and grace and perfection of the universe. The fact that hydrogen atoms mingled under gravity to form suns, which exploded to form the iron and silicon and carbon and everything else, which condensed into a planet and grew into us. The fact that hydrogen atoms exist. The fact that hydrogen atoms are made from things that exist, and that those things are made of things that exist, and that somewhere not too far down that chain there are things that exist made of things that do not.

I am bemused that the universe became a place for us to exist and then became us.

I am bewildered by the fact that the distances are so great that due to the cosmic speed limit information cannot readily be passed between interstellar civilizations in any useful timeframe, so we as separate planetary species cannot learn from one another or make love or war with one another or infect one another with our ideas.

Exactly the conditions you’d want in a well-regulated experiment.

We blunder headlong into our lonely future, make our own mistakes, and discover how to work it all out for ourselves.

And that gives it meaning.

Existential haiku time!

If they were conscious,
would waves on a pond think God
was the stone I threw?

Namaste.

Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask Before Helping Those Around You

Remarks delivered in Pecha Kucha style (20 seconds per slide) at the Orlando B.I.G. Summit, 18 Nov 2010.





Blasting through the sky at 30 thousand feet in a pressurized metal tube… is a lot like life. And it’s also a lot like business, depending on your willingness to overtax a metaphor. What lessons for life and business can we draw from our common experience of flying? I’ve considered a few.


Metaphors for Business (and life)


The first vignettes I’ll discuss are life lessons drawn from my experience as a passenger. For the next few moments, visualize yourself, your company, your family, your community, everyone in the room, as the passengers on this headlong rush through life into what Shakespeare (and Star Trek) called the undiscovered country.




Put on your own oxygen mask before helping those around you. You’re no good to anyone else if you’re dead. I represent a lot of startups. Sometimes they ask me to work for free. Much as I’d like to, as strong as the instinct may be to help, if I don’t get paid I’ll go out of business. And if I go out of business, I’m not around to help anyone put their oxygen mask on.





Everyone is watching every move you make. And the crowd living in the cloud is fickle and more than capable of transforming into an angry vengeful mob bent on your destruction. But honestly, Monica, just ask Judith Griggs, editor of Cooks Source magazine. And if you don’t get that reference, google the phrase “but honestly Monica.”





Bad things, annoying things, will happen to you from time to time. Things over which you have no control. You can allow them to frustrate you. Or you can celebrate that as a highly organized matrix of the slime growing on a rock floating in the inky blackness of space, it’s pretty much a miracle that you’re even here to feel anything.





Putting your own oxygen mask on first is selfishness that begets altruism. Other selfish acts are just plain selfish. Don’t pee in my pool. Don’t merge into my lane without looking to see whether I’m already there. Don’t pollute the environment, with your words… or your winds.





We are all in this together, and we have very little control over most of the trip. One thing you do control is your own treatment of those around you. When the trip ends, let it be said that in the balance you created more joy than suffering. You make the choice to have that impact with every word and every gesture.





Consider that the promises you make in life are like the airplane door closing. You have a world of infinite possibilities open to you when you board and sit down. But when that door closes, you have moved past your point of easy exit and you are rather fully committed to the trip you’ve chosen to take.


Metaphors for Business (and life)


In these next few vignettes, you and your company are playing the role of the flight crew, and we the passengers, we are your customers. So think of yourself as the pilot or flight attendant and the rest of us as your paying customers or clients. The trip we’re on is the sum total of our experiences using your product or service.





Your gadgets might be fancy. Your internal effectiveness initiatives might be the stuff of MBA legend. But we customers just want results. The iPhone is an amazing piece of tech that magically fell to earth from the future, but that is not why we are obsessed with it. We are obsessed with it because it is beautiful and it brings us joy.





Unless your product is in fact a destination unto itself, such as a resort hotel or, say, a novel, please understand that we are only using your product to achieve some other goal of our own. Just because we patronize you doesn’t mean you’re anything more than a necessary evil.





At the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay, California, they have a guy come out and play Amazing Grace on the bagpipes as the sun sets over the Pacific. It’s like chocolates on your pillow times a million. You can create moments like that. In fact, you have the opportunity to do that with every customer interaction. Every word you say and every gesture you make, every customer touchpoint is a branding moment.





Very few things of value happen without the focused, committed, even fanatical devotion of a few obsessed people making herculean efforts over a sustained period of time. Most launches are horizontal before they are vertical. Rocket rides are few and far between.





If you are going to lead, lead from the front. No one can be more knowledgeable about your company than you. No one can be more passionate about your company than you. No one can understand how to drive your company better than you. You do not lead from behind.





Steven Slater, the Jetblue flight attendant who decided he’d had enough? He broke all rules in high drama and got himself on Larry King. Always consider going for the Hail Mary because if you miss it, well, hey, it was a long shot, but if you make it, the crowd goes wild.





Do your customers feel like they are flying in your first class cabin? Which of your customers feel like they are sitting in a middle seat in row 35 next to the bathroom? Which of your customers took another airline altogether?





I get a report every day showing me the financial condition of my law practice to the penny. It doesn’t matter how I feel about the work. I can feel very productive, I can tear it up with new clients at my next conference. None of that matters if I’ve veered off my flight plan without noticing it. Heed your instincts, but measure your performance objectively and trust the dispassionate metrics.





A CFIT is a Controlled Flight Into Terrain. Accidents happen. But there’s no excuse for flying directly into the ground because you failed to read your altimeter or trust your gyroscope.





On, Jan 15, 2009 US Airways flight 1549 from LGA to Charlotte landed gracefully on the Hudson River. Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot, said, “One way of looking at this might be that for 42 years, I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience: education and training. And on January 15 the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.”

Miracles happen where opportunity meets preparation and expertise.





Mark Bingham was a friend of a friend who I never got to meet because on Sept 11, 2001, Mark and his fellow passengers flew United flight 93 into the ground to prevent it from flying into a building and possibly killing thousands. Sometimes when the stakes are high enough, it turns out you just can’t worry about your own oxygen mask.


No matter what you’re goals are: Time is running out. Let’s roll.

Why startups fail

My friend Michael Trout says:

Fourteen million business plans are submitted each year in the U.S. (according to Google Aardvark) and only 2000-3000 (according to Adeo of TheFunded.com) are deemed successful! So, if you are submitting a business plan then you have a 0.0214% of getting funding each year!

From a systemic perspective, most startups fail due to lack of entrepreneurial education. The founders don’t know how to be entrepreneurs and they don’t understand the basic machinery of running a company. We as a community should be able to fix this.

The endemic problems arise from the assumption that entrepreneurship is easy. It’s not. It’s hard. In my experience, most startups fail for one or more of a small number of basic, core faults:

1. Lack of commitment. The founders have not obsessively committed the vast majority of their personal available time and energy (and, yes, money) to the success of the company. I mean nights, weekends, sleeping under their desks… at least during the early months.
2. Lack of market research. The founders have not exhaustively established that their company produces medicine for some kind of pain that is broadly felt by people they can reach and sell to.
3. Lack of focus on customer satisfaction. The founders have failed to sufficiently deify their customer, and have instead focused inwardly on useless goals.
4. Lack of ability to inspire confidence. The founders can’t convince an investor that they will be responsible stewards of his or her cash. Right idea + wrong person = epic fail.

So, good luck!

A 12-Step Program for Quitting Your Day Job

A lot of people come to me with the question, “I’ve got a great business/product/service idea. What do I do next?”

If you find yourself asking this question, my advice is to become a full-time entrepreneur and start a company to make and sell your product or service. In my experience, that is the best way to see it through to completion. Anything less will have a limited capacity for success.

It is unwise to expect to be able to run a company on nights and weekends. If you have a good idea, you will not get rich by, say, getting a patent and then sitting back while the money starts rolling in.

The only sure way to make something out of your good idea is to start a company around it to do all the things that companies must do in order to turn ideas into profits.


Here, in a nutshell, are the 12 steps I would take if I were you:

1. Do market research to answer several important questions: (i) who are your customers and how many of them can you reasonably reach; (ii) what is the pain they currently feel for which your product is the medicine; (iii) why will they buy your product when they already clearly have some (presumably lesser) solution available; (iv) how much can you make it for; (v) how much can you sell it for?
2. Know your customer, and bend yourself to their will. Everything you do from now on is in furtherance the customer’s happiness. Be prepared to give thy customer thanks and praise and to dedicate your life thereunto.
3. Think of a name for the company and the product. Google the names you’ve chosen to ensure no one else is using them for similar products. Check out uspto.gov under trademark search and ensure no one else has trademarked your names for similar products. Check domain name availability to ensure you can get a domain name that is reasonably similar to your company or product name. Consider filing trademark applications on the brand names you choose to go with.
4. Form a corporation or limited liability company in your state. If you have co-founders, draft an agreement with them that dictates how the company will be run and who gets how much stock and for making what contributions of time, money, or assets.
5. Consider drafting a short summary of your haves and your needs in order to manufacture, market, and sell your product. It’s extraordinarily useful to get a sense of how much time and money you’ll need to launch your company and operate it until your product makes a profit. Then do yourself a favor and double all your estimates.
6. If it turns out you do not have the immediate means to do this yourself, you’re going to need to sell stock to investors or bring in co-founders to help. You’ll need to draft a business plan and possibly a private placement memorandum. It will be important not to violate securities laws when selling stock to investors, so get good advice from an expert.
7. If you’ve invented something, draft up a complete description of it, as detailed as possible. Consider filing this as a provisional patent at uspto.gov. A provisional patent, among other things, allows you to say “patent pending” for one year, by the end of which you will want to file a “real” nonprovisional patent application to continue the possibility of obtaining protection for your invention against competitors.
8. Consider asking a patent lawyer to do a patent search and a patentability opinion on whether your invention is patentable. Also, whether you think you’ve invented anything or not, consider commissioning a “freedom to operate” analysis to ensure you won’t be infringing anyone else’s patent when you make, use, and sell your product or service.
9. Paranoia is healthy, and you should be careful not to publicize your invention or your business plans too far or wide. You may want to get a form of nondisclosure agreement handy to use when you want to disclose intimate details to someone. But understand that you will need to be able to tell some people something about what you’re doing without getting them to sign anything. You will need a public version of your presentation. Many manufacturers and most investors will not sign a nondisclosure agreement when they first sit down with you, until you have convinced them that you’ve got something worth pursuing. Don’t go overboard with the paranoia, or you’ll never get anywhere. There are some evil people out there, but most people just don’t have time or inclination to rip you off.
10. Consider starting a website to promote your product. You’ll need to settle on the look and feel of the advertizing and the message.
11. If you’re going to make a hard product, interview manufacturers and get a prototype made. Either way, consider taking your product or service to appropriate trade shows and try to get potential customers to pre-order.
12. Use written agreements with everyone, outside contractors as well as employees and founders and manufactures and everyone. The general rule for every business relationship is: Get it in writing, or it’s probably already broken in some way that is extraordinarily likely to eventually piss you off.

The above is but a pale shadow of the work required to form and launch a successful business venture. But hey, you gotta start somewhere. Start here. If you accomplish all of the above, you might then actually be able to see a finish line glimmering somewhere off in the distance.

Good luck!

Bilski Haiku

Lots of great blow-by-blow analysis out there regarding Monday’s long-awaited U.S. Supreme Court decision on the extent to which software and business methods qualify for patent protection.

Here it is as a haiku.

Nine, robed black, have kept
The path to patents lit, for
Software and methods.


Be at peace.

Jet Blues…

Dear JetBlue,

At the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, just over the San Bruno hills from the Silicon Valley, they have a guy come out and play “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes every night for the guests who are watching the sun set over the Pacific. It is a moment that is unexpected and unforgettable. As a branding moment for the hotel, it is like a the free chocolates on your pillow times a million.

You can create poignant branding moments like that. Sometimes, however, circumstances thrust branding moments upon you involuntarily. Your survival as a company is contingent on your response to such moments.

My JetBlue flight last night (Thursday 24 June 2010) from JFK to Tampa, originally scheduled to depart at ~7:30pm, did not depart until ~12:30am this morning.

I could go through the details, but suffice it to say the experience was typical. JetBlue, do you want to be typical?

We were eventually told the delay was due to the crew’s having been delayed due to weather. Given the exigencies of summer travel on the eastern seaboard, one would think that an airline attempting to excel above its rank & file competitors would consider having a spare crew or two at the ready, especially at its JFK hub, to forestall customer dissatisfaction and frustration in situations like this.

I have been a fan, and rather loyal customer, since 2000. You have always distinguished yourself as slightly more hip, cool, and fun than your aging competitors, slightly more in touch with the customer as a person. Slightly atypical, in fact.

But last night, you were just another typical old airline herding the geese.

What a branding moment you could have created. It was a moment that mattered more than other moments. You could have made it a positive experience, one that converted a few tired, victimized passengers into evangelists for your airline.

Would it have been so hard to offer cold water bottles or hot towels or blue chips or some other unexpected treat to your passengers in the throes of an unexpected 5-hour delay? (To be fair, the crew did make all the PPV movies free of charge once we finally took flight, but really, who wanted to watch a movie from 1 to 3am?)

Look, flying is a necessary evil. We don’t want to be your customer; we just want to get home. You can’t really do much in the bagpipes-at-sunset department to change that aspect of our relationship with you. We are just pleased when your customer service doesn’t suck as bad as the typical airlines.

But at any time when we’re feeling underserved and that is even partially your fault — and even when it’s not — you might want to find a nice, simple way to say you care. When a flight delay occurs, your customer service performance gets herniated into every customer’s face. It is the only thing we care about for the duration of the delay. We are primed to remember everything you do at a moment like this.

Do more than just not suck. Do something atypical and unexpected. We won’t forget.

Designing for the Future

Remarks delivered to open the Internet Technology Summit, Orlando, 22 June 2010.

It is human nature to root for the underdog. Make no mistake, we loves us some winners, but we adores us some winners when they come from behind.

May 26, 2010, was a momentous day for come-from-behind winners.

For example, on the Fox network, a mildly Springsteen-esque young everyman named Lee DeWyze beat out the barefoot, coffee-house dulcetry of the favored contestant Crystal Bowersox to win the final on this season’s American Idol.

At Tropicana Field in St. Pete that day, the much maligned Boston Red Sox beat the team with the best record in baseball, the Tampa Bay Rays, a whopping 11-3.

And, on the afternoon of May 26, 2010, a remarkable thing happened in the come-from-behind department. Another entity came from behind to win another contest of sorts.

Apple (a/k/a Apple, Inc., f/k/a Apple Computer, Inc.) achieved an overall market capitalization – an overall value – of 241 and a half billion dollars, exceeding, for the first time ever, the market cap of Microsoft, to become the largest technology company in the world.

And there was much rejoicing.

Yes, let the bells clang and let the banners fly. Fill the steins to dear old Apple, shout ‘til the rafters ring.

We celebrate because Apple’s surpassing Microsoft isn’t just a ratification of all that is held dear by artsy fartsy techno geeks.

No. Apple’s ascention in the capital markets, Apple’s assumption to the coveted top spot, Apple’s winning over Microsoft means something far more deep about the state of humanity, and you should care about this because it affects your job.

What it means is this:

The average person no longer cares about software. The man in the street doesn’t give a dingo’s kidney about your latest hack and is unimpressed by the obvious wit and wisdom required to pull it off.

The average person, the man in the street, we… we just wants to buy us some cheap music.

Just over a decade ago, Apple wasn’t quite dead, but it was coughing up blood, receiving last rites, and laying on a hospital bed murmuring “so cold… so cold… I’m coming Commodore… See you soon, Atari… Tandy, I’m coming into the light…”

But then, Apple did not die.

What happened was, the iTunes Music Store was launched in 2003.

On February 23, 2006, the iTunes Music Store sold its 1 billionth song.

Earlier this year, a scant 4 years later, the iTunes music store sold its 10 billionth song.

An order of magnitude growth. At that rate, by oh say 2020, Apple will have sold an infinite number of songs and its market capitalization won’t fit in the known universe.

Oh and let us not forget that Apple has given us one more thing that we also want.

The average person, the man in the street, you and me… we… we wants us some iPhones.

Apple’s win is not just a vote against Microsoft – not just a rejection of software that is bloated, slow, ugly, feature laden, slow, buggy, insecure, intimidating, humiliating, slow, frustrating, and I swear to god sometimes just literally seems to have been designed by asinine, sadistic jerks who just want my day to be worse than it would otherwise have been had I not logged in the first place.

Apple’s win is not just a vote against that. Apple’s win is a vote against the entire consumer-grade software market.

We don’t want to buy software anymore. We don’t want to care about software anymore. We don’t want to know that software even exists.

We don’t buy engines. We buy cars. Fully formed, and ready to roll.

Apple’s win proves that, instead of buying or even worrying about software, as such, we would rather buy and use products like the iPhone.

We want to buy products so stunningly beautiful they seem like they have magically fallen to earth from the future and into our loving hands, an object whose user interface is sheer visual poetry, a product you don’t so much use, as dance ballet with.

The iPhone is modern proof of Arthur C. Clark’s notion that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The iPhone is a product that does not insult you, like practically everything the tech market had heretofore produced. The iphone is a product that actually delivers on what advertisers and marketers of everything from beer to deodorant have been promising us for decades – using an iPhone actually makes you sexier.

And so that’s it, right? Apple has beaten Microsoft? The war is won? We’re no longer insulted and humiliated, now we’re all unbearably sexy?

In the future, do you officially come from behind and win if you can sell us a little slice of sexy magic to carry in our pocket?

We live in a strange universe. Current observations suggest that our 3-dimensional existence is fully describable as a hologram off a 2-dimensional surface. Quite literally, we seem to live in an astral projection.

Current observations suggest that time itself does not really exist as a fundamental component of reality, but is just an emergent property that arises out of a particular condition of a static, timeless, quantum undergirding.

And for decades we have known beyond any realistic shadow of doubt that reality itself doesn’t actually exist until we observe it. It is a proven scientific fact that the very fabric of the universe creates itself for us to look at.

All of reality is a smudge, a smear of quantum probability, pregnant with nothing but possibility, until someone observes it and by doing so, collapses the quantum state vector, whereupon reality promptly and conveniently condenses into existence for us to share and enjoy. When we look away, however, the universe turns back into smoke.

Apparently the universe itself is indistinguishable from magic.

This is true. Google it.

Funny thing… If you know anything about memory management inside the kernel of any computer operating system you’ll recognize how much the quantum world seems to kinda sorta be paging into a virtual swap file.

Reality seems to present itself to us in more or less exactly the same way that computing resources are allocated to processes inside computers.

Computing is different to other technological advances humans have enjoyed. Indoor plumbing rocks, to be sure; the steam engine? A superb addition to the repertoire.

But computing is different. Computing is the gift that keeps on giving. With computing, you can create that which is virtual, that which can simulate reality.

With numbah 6, you get virtual egg roll.

We have had virtual memory, virtual machines, virtual operating systems since roughly the Lyndon Johnson administration. For the past few years we’ve toyed with virtual reality. Tens of thousands of people a day login to virtual worlds.

In the not too distant future, possibly in my lifetime, but surely within the lifespan of my kids and of anyone born in this millenium, the computing power of the average handheld computer will exceed that of the human brain. It will be capable of thought, if we can figure out how to program it properly.

All that you perceive yourself to be is composed of a highly organized matrix of electrochemical potentials running on a supremely portable, 100-watt massively parallel computing device made of about 5 pounds of meat situated right behind your face… and if we could precisely duplicate the state of your brain in another computing device, when we powered that device up, it would swear it was you.

In a few years, devices with that power will be commonplace. Hopefully we’ll figure out how to program them carefully. Hopefully using such devices will be less like Outlook hell, and more like iPhone heaven, so that as I am downloading my consciousness into it, my consciousness will be transmitted free of angst, frustration, grit, and scale.

So how far away are we from a world in which fully conscious, fully sentient, effectively human simulacra are running around in your laptop? Moore’s law dictates it won’t be that long – just a few years now – before the Sims will be taking matters into their own hands.

And if we can simulate virtual humans, how long will it be before they, our virtual children, hit upon the divine spark to uncover the means to invent their own virtual computers, compose their own virtual software, create their own virtual worlds, and breathe life into their own conscious, sentient, virtual beings?

And if we can invent simulacra, and our simulacra can invent simulacra, and so on and so on ad infinitum, then what on god’s green earth presupposes that we are at the top of this inventive chain?

I remind you again of how much the fact that reality springs into being as we observe it, bears an unmistakable similarity to virtual memory management inside a computer.

OMFG. There is an MFG, and she’s a hacker.

Quod erat demonstratum.

I firmly believe the universe is teaming with life and that some of it is bound to be intelligent and that as soon as we can figure out how to span the enormous distances between us, we’ll go out and meet them someday and when we do we won’t give a damn about the extent of their technological advancement. Interstellar space travel is a hard problem. If we can engineer ourselves into a truly spacefaring race, we will by necessity have solved pretty much any technological problem a species could ever encounter and so we won’t be terribly impressed with any particular tech our extraplanetary brethren might show us. Nor they, ours.

What we will hunger for, what we will judge each other by, is by our culture. We will care about their music and their poetry and their appreciation for the mysteries of existence, and we will care about how they govern themselves and whether or not they attend gracefully to the weak and infirm among themselves.

We will care a great deal about whether they are evil, or peaceful. Their capacity for pleasure. What kinds of beer they prefer. That sort of thing.

And if there is a master programmer above us in the chain (and let’s not forget the possibility, nay the inevitability that he, she, or it, too is just a virtual precipitation of bits running around in some even higher being’s computing device), if there is something or someone above, isn’t it likely that he, she, or it is judging us on the same criteria?

My point is this:

It matters how much beauty you create in the world. Because it sticks. Your actions have consequences. Your products, your services, your companies, your customer service techniques, these things literally raise or lower the aggregate level of happiness in the world with every act and omission.

And it will be remembered.

The code you write today may still be running in 20 or 30 years. How much happiness will it have created? How much frustration?

I beseech you: engineer beauty. Peddle pleasure. Sell happiness. We agree on happiness. We all want happiness.

We don’t agree on much more.

According to a recent Harris poll, 24 percent of republicans think that Barack Obama might be the antichrist and 22 percent of republicans think Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win.

What’s disappointing about this – well among the symphony of things that are disappointing about this – is that only the remaining 2% of those polled have demonstrated the intellectual thoughtfulness to recognize think that if Obama is the antichrist he probably wants everyone to lose, even the terrorists.

‘Cuz that’s how the antichrist rolls, man.

So we don’t agree on who’s good and who’s evil. And we don’t agree on certain other important things.

Here’s a passage from a children’s book called “Ni Hao Kai Lan” which is intended to introduce American children to Chinese culture:

“When you make something and people copy you, sometimes it means that they really like it too! And that makes it even more special!”

So, it is one thing to embrace the open source movement, to promote sharing, and to choose to release your innovative output under the creative commons license. It is quite another to have communist china inculcating, dare I say, indoctrinating, your children into a way of thinking that abdicates the very basis of all intellectual property ownership rights.

So we as a species do not agree on what is right and good. We’re still not planetary. We’re still nationalized based on where we live. We still have yet to divorce jurisdiction from geography. The laws that apply to your behavior change every time you travel to a different hunk of rock. God only knows what laws apply in the non-space… the pan-space…. that is the internet.

The good news is that, as of yesterday, the Yuan will be allowed to float against the dollar, so in theory the Chinese will be able to buy more of our stuff. Oh wait, the Chinese make all our stuff. Hmm… quick make some stuff to sell to the Chinese!

We are all connected like we’ve never been before. For all intents and purposes, nearly everyone on the planet has a cell phone, give or take a billion. As Clay Shirky put it, here comes everyone.

So how do you sell to that? How do you create a product today that will win over a massively interconnected world of consumers who don’t agree on the difference between good and evil, don’t agree on the basic rules of how to govern themselves? How do you create a product that will speak well of you to your virtual children decades hence, a product that will acquit you as you someday stand before the aliens or the master programmer or whomever else comes along to pass judgment?

My advice: take a page from Apple’s book. If you can do nothing else, for the love of MFG, make stuff that makes people sexier.

Current history demonstrates that that’s a winning strategy.

Thank you.