z on life

Where will all of these Facebook and other platform app developers go when the hooplah subsides, existing viral channels get blown out, and the economics no longer make sense? Here are some first guesses (in order of least to most risk):

1) Long vacations

Likely, a lot of these guys have made more money more quickly than ever before and they’re enjoying it. At the end of the day, unless you’re Max Levchin sitting on top of an application empire, these things are lifestyle businesses, but the expendable cash flow could be healthy enough to sit back and relax for a bit until the next gold rush comes along.

2) Big tech companies

I’m not sure if I have personally heard of any app developers jumping into the stable corporate world yet, but the option will always be there for them. Companies like Google would love to have some of the best, self-starting, creative tech people in their circles to revitalize things, but can the developers ever get excited inside these painfully slow beauracracies?

3) Top tier app companies

Obviously, developers are getting sucked into these big players like Slide from all angles. They are swallowed up with less than healthy buyouts of their apps, but get the stability of work and the chance to leverage the huge arsenal of resources and cross-selling opportunities. Aside from the buyouts themselves, I don’t know what the compensation structure is inside these entities, but it can’t be as rewarding (since it is certainly not as risky) as going at it alone. At some point, if not immediately, these economics won’t make sense and app developers will want their control back and be sick of working to make their bosses’ pockets deep.

4) Small-scale developer rollups

It is common lately to see these individual developers or mini-teams banding together against the big guns. Andrew wrote a nice short post about that last month about why it’s almost impossible to compete over the long haul in this space. This to me seems like a futile compromise on the parts of the developers. Working at Slide has its career perks and stability. Going at it alone has exciting bursts of revenue and mini-fame. Is there longevity to this middle ground position that doesn’t really have the pros of either?

5) Full-fledged startups

So I’ve been skeptical enough about the first four possibilities that I think the fifth is where these developers will head, into the true non-platform-dependent startup world. Economically, founding or getting in early on something potentially huge makes much more long-term sense than even the best Facebook apps and they still get the excitement of building something quickly (just not quite as fast end-to-end).

On the plus side, these developers will have great DNA for the startup world and particularly consumer internet. They understand rapid development and scaling, user psychology, incentives, interactions, and every trick in the book to pump page views, click-throughs, and all the revenue drivers. Their creativity and prowess could be great in the startup world.

The challenge for these guys is understanding how to go big, and fast, without the training wheels of Facebook. Googlers who release products in the Google Pack might make really cool things, but what happens to their distribution when you take away the automatic deployment? What happens when you take a Microsoft developer’s Windows Update away (ok, that would never happen, but think about it)? Similarly, the cold, hard world of starting from the ground up will be an excellent challenge, and one that these guys should be eager to step up to.

It will be cool to see what interesting things spring up when these app developers realize their career path is not sustainable or no longer so economically or socially lucrative and begin to go off the platforms. Many will fail, but some may succeed and we as users of the Internet will probably get some very cool web products as a result. But again, that same question remains. Will these guys who are used to immediate growth leveraging existing social graphs be able to persevere in a world where good viral is something only earned with lots of hard work, statistics, reporting, attention to detail, and countless steps of iteration?

The most useful thing I have learned in my whole process of startups, and maybe even life for that matter, is the importance of the phrase “know what you don’t know”.

It is crucial to learn everything you can from everyone in your life, be it friends, family, engineers, venture capitalists, or complete strangers. Being able to learn means you know what you need to look for from each these interactions. Knowing what you need to look for means knowing what you don’t know. You should go into every interaction knowing exactly what new information you can extract. This isn’t selfish, it is merely efficient learning. Besides, you probably have lots of cool stuff to offer in return.

When people don’t know what they don’t know, they are bound to fail again and again. Unfortunately, this happens all the time, especially to those who are young or inexperienced. I have been definitely been guilty of it too, so I’m no exception. Knowing what you don’t know keeps you searching with tunnel vision, and if that great idea or strategy isn’t directly in front of you, you’re never going to hit it. From the perspective of success over a long period of time (let’s say, a career), this is so dangerous. It’s a recipe for having a long, tough, excruciating string of failures.

Not knowing what you don’t know is like tweaking variables in an equation to find the local maximum. Knowing what you don’t know means you are going to throw that whole notion away and find new variables you can to use to find the global maximum. Think outside the box, and throw away all of the artificial constraints you’ve put on your thought processes.

When planning, strategizing, or thinking, here’s some questions to think about:

1. What concepts have I previously written off as ‘not-relevant’ to me?

2. Who would have a new outlook on this and why?
3. What about me or my experience is limiting how I look at things?
4. Are there any tangential skill-sets or knowledge that I can acquire?
5. Can I draw intuition from whole other areas, industries, genres?

If you adopt the “know what you don’t know” mindset, you go through extremely fast cycles of self-revision, become a wider/deeper thinker, and convey to others that you have put ego or image aside in exchange for great self-advancement. That’s the mark of someone who wants to win.

I can’t help but quote a great book written by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner called “Teaching as a Subversive Activity”, recommended by the wise Jared Kopf. Knowing what you don’t know is all about maximizing your ability to learn, and in this book they talk about the characteristics of learners. They say that good learners:

1. Have confidence in their ability to learn

2. Enjoy solving problems
3. Know exactly what is relevant to their survival
4. Rely on their own judgement to spot good and bad advice
5. Do not fear being wrong
6. Are not fast answerers
7. Are flexible
8. Have a profound respect for data and information
9. Do not need to have one irrevocable solution to a problem

It’s clear that many if not all of these things are drivers for or can be driven by knowing what you don’t know. Nice! I can rest easy knowing that someone who actually knows what they are talking about agrees with me.

So I am thinking about writing a series on what I’ve learned over the past 3 years of doing startups. That said, I wanted to give you guys a bit of an idea of what I’ve done in case you’re curious where I got this perspective, or if you’re deciding whether or not to listen to me.

Alright, here we go. Rewind to 2005. I am in school at Carnegie Mellon, 17 years old, finishing up my CS degree, and about to start my MBA the coming year. Even with the MBA, I thought it was pretty likely I would go to some sort of CS grad school, that is, until the entrepreneurial bug bit. It all started when a friend from CMU, Kyle Langworthy, approached me with an idea. We took it, ran with it, and I have never looked back. It’s been startups ever since.

Really quickly, in the 3 years since, I’ve done the following:

• Envivial - 3D virtual retail stores for interactive online shopping
• Eivod - P2P click-to-play on-demand video in the browser
• SlapVid - an innovative online video previewing experience
• Cloudant - super-fast multi-streaming home routers
• My Current Gig - going big in consumer internet (company TBA)

Envivial was my entry point with Kyle and Joe Damato where we learned the ropes, won some business plan competitions, and really ground out our first real startup experience. After that, Joe and I continued on to found Eivod with Wei An Wang and Bob DiMaggio where we built our first really technically hard product, one that got us into Y-Combinator. SlapVid was our product we launched in YC as a test platform for this P2P stuff and a great user experience on top of YouTube. When that didn’t quite work out, we turned P2P on its head, and used our networking expertise to make multi-streaming routers in Cloudant and pitched this at the YC demo day. After demo day, we decided it was best not to continue and it was back to the MBA, but only for a short time. Only 2 months later, I was swept out to the west coast into the current gig with Andrew Chen, Matt Rubens, and very soon thereafter Aman Gupta. Now we’re just cranking away.

Anyway, it’s been a dense few years of learning. In this time, I finished my CS degree and will get my MBA in a few weeks (assuming I pass, knock on wood). I’ve iterated on the startup experience, and learned an enormous amount about technology, building companies, and life in general. In the posts to come, I will discuss some of that learning.

PS: In hindsight, I realize the need to give mad props to Kyle for getting this ball rolling.