Recap: HBS 2008 Entrepreneurship Conference

Today was the Harvard Business School's 2008 Entrepreneurship Conference: Life Outside the Box. Being in the neighborhood and feeling a bit daffy, I checked it out.

Wait a minute... they're IN boxes... and wearing suits.

Thanks to the Entrepreneurship Club for putting this event together!! Here's my assessment. Logistics - good. Speaker & keynote lineup - great. Keynotes - good. Panel topics - good. Panel moderation - mediocre. Schwag - good. Food - mediocre. And last but far from least, Networking - good.

The keynotes emphasized the need to be bold, take action, get your ass out and do stuff, and be prepared for people to think you are crazy or doing things wrong. I think it's a great message and I don't get tired of hearing it from successful people.

Ken Howery, co-founder of PayPal, gave a cool summary of how to find a good startup idea: it is at the intersection of two circles - (1) Good Ideas and (2) Ideas that People think are Bad Ideas. The intersection of these two circles basically are overlooked opportunities... great areas to move into. Of course, while (2) is easy to determine, (1) is not. But I think it's an accurate summary of what entrepreneurs who aren't strictly lucky might chalk part of their success up to.

The biggest "delta" (that's business school wimp talk for an area for improvement) was the panel moderation. In the three panels, the moderators, students and profs alike, gave mealy-mouthed introductions, asked spineless questions, and made no contributions in framing or summarizing what was said. They should take a lesson from James Schrager, or just listen to NPR a bit more. Modest improvements would have doubled the value of the panels.

BUT I was glad I went, despite my general dislike of sitting still and listening. And I met some cool people.

Are you a Guerrilla?

You?

As I mentioned before, Linkspank is going to be doing a public launch "soon." All kinds of exciting stuff is going to be involved in the launch.

If you are Linkspank Lover and you want to get involved with some guerrilla marketing, send us your address to receive a complimentary Linkspank Lover "Guerrilla Marketing" Kit with further instructions.

We plan to do something just like this. Without the public alarm and police involvement part.

It's a secret, so don't tell anyone about it.

Discourse on Fear

This will be a short post, not a discourse, but it's a topic that's been on my mind. This post comes from deep Inside Linkspank :-).

My thesis: fear is the greatest impediment to success. Learning to drive through your own fear is the ticket to achieving and being happy with your achievement.

Imagine this parable. A child is born afraid of nothing. Injuries, traumas, and rearing teach the child many valuable lessons of caution, so this child is lucky enough not get hit by a car while crossing the street and makes it to adulthood. But the adult has learned the lesson too well, being cautious of everything, and has forgotten the dreams and adventures experienced in childhood.

I think this parable may apply to many or all of us. I'm a fairly intrepid person, having turned down respectable job offers to start Linkspank, having hiked off into the jungle to get lost and have guns pointed at me by tribespeople. But I think that even the most fearless people have opportunities to push through their fear, try things that may fail, learn by doing rather than by thinking, improve by iteration rather than by design.

If you don't believe me, make a list of things that you don't do as often as you should, or that you've been planning to do but haven't gotten to, or just things you don't enjoy. Go through that list and ask yourself if there isn't a trace of fear holding you back from these things.

Luck is a huge factor in success. People try things without really knowing whether they will work, and circumstances and timing conspire to make the right ideas work. But taking a business to the next level will require being able to risk what you have achieved, and being prepared to follow your success with experiments.

I think the application of this principle can be subtle. Google is intrepid enough to test and launch many products, but rather cautious in allocating resources and brand capital to products outside of search and ads. Facebook has been bold in rolling out its apps environment (not to mention Project Beacon), but, on the other hand, the move to the apps environment may have been motivated by fear of what would happen from not doing it (not "growing fast enough").

There's the nugget of my thoughts. How deeply you ponder it is up to you - and your courage :-).

Planning for launch

Here are some of the prongs of the many-prong attack plan for a public launch coming soon. They are in random order.

- a "viral video" created by the Linkspank TV team is creating a "viral video". Also another episode of Linkspank TV itself.

- a (more complete) Facebook app and facebook group.

- outreach to current spankers, via The Monthly Spank, people who have pledged in the Spankathon, personal outreach to those who claim to love me.

- outreach to bloggers and a press release.

- a launch party (in Cambridge, MA - hopefully to be followed someday by others in other cities)

- some guerrilla stuff (stickers, little cards promoting the Spankathon)

- a new contest, possibly with some extra zazz and zaniness.

What do you think? Let me know.

Facebook Apps - Notifications, Clutter, and You

It's been in the news that Facebook is giving you tools to de-clutter your profile layout. Fine. (People who listen to the Linkspank blogs will recall that I was predicting this kind of thing a while ago.)

But the "clutter" of applications has been an issue for a few months and particularly with notifications.

Meanwhile, Linkspank is building its facebook app - The Real Version. In doing so, we've bumped up against the second issue: notifications.

Who can send a notification or email to whom within an app, and how? You'd think that's a pretty straightforward, important, basic question. Well, in fact this question has a non-straightforward, confusing, answer:

Holy crap.

(Note, it says confidential but at the page where I found it it appears to be pasted by the source.)

I give facebook a lot of credit for their willingness to take bold action to protect their user experience. The flip side is that the boldness has created that table. Wow.

People want to be able to play around and try games and applications. But they also want a simplified AND organized stream of communications. Not easy to do. This is part of why Linkspank is "sticking to its knitting" and will only build in features that touch the core idea and "ecosystem" at multiple points.

Anyway, regarding the facebook app, we'll be phasing it in starting on Monday hopefully.

What's Next

Some schemes underway:

A PUBLIC LAUNCH will be coming "soon", at a secret disclosed-just-before-it-happens date. There will be some bonus excitement timed to occur with the launch. Linkspank will go from being the web's best-kept secret to... something else.

A Facebook Application is coming soon. A linkspank app for facebook currently exists, but that was really just dipping our toe in the water. A "real" one, with sweet features, is coming soon.

The News Feed will be changed. I know that makes people nervous, because they love the news feed. Don't worry - it won't be deleted! Merely improved, to a slightly less generic, more informative format. It will make it easier to get spanky with your friends and track your spanks.

An amazing recommendation engine will appear. It will help connect people with the precise spanks they will love. It enrich your life. It will make your friends think you are a special genius. It will blow your mind.

Finally, more of the basics. We're always changing little things on the site. We know that your free time on the web is important time for you, and we want to try to make every little detail just nice.

Paradigm Shifts - Wikia Search is not one of them.

The news is talking about Wikia Search, a new search engine from Wikipedia, to be launched next week. The search engine is supposed to be able to challenge Google because the order of its search results will be based on how users rank results (which, in fact, is a method Google has been obviously experimenting with).

To me, this is an obvious example of operating within the current paradigm. "Search", as we know it, is not the end all and be all of what you want to do on the web! And in fact, it works perfectly well now with Google.

There are bigger problems out there. Try searching for "cool" or "interesting" on Google. You get some pretty un-cool, un-interesting results. It's funny, because a huge percentage of the time people spend online is spent looking for cool or interesting stuff. Search engines just aren't good at one of the major things we want to do online.

Now try searching for "cool" or "interesting" on Linkspank. I think we're on to something. :-)

My New Year's Resolution

2008 will be the year of the Linkspank.

My New Year's Resolution:
To work *no more* than 35 hours per week.

I'm back from a Christmas / New Year's vacation. It was the first real vacation I've taken since this time last year.

Good vacations make me feel like this.

For me, vacation is like exercise - it can be hard to get myself to do it, but afterwards I'm always glad I did it. I was pretty relentless this time around about not working. I slept copiously, feasted, watched many movies (including star wars II-VI, lots of The Office, cartoons and some Planet Earth), did some fun reading, a lot of yoga. And yes - I did go on Linkspank, but I kept it in moderation so that it would not blend into work :-).

So, I am forming some New Year's resolutions. I used to think they were stupid but two things changed my mind: first, since I'm coming off a vacation I've had time to think and get perspective; and second, in business school they taught me about the psychology of commitment and the power of making (and writing, even blogging) them. (If you write something, and especially if you make it public, you're more likely to do it.)

My new year's resolution:

To work no more than 35 hours per week.

It's important to me for many reasons. First, I believe it helps overall outcome of your work. I have had a good mix of experiences for my age, of working hard, not working, and being around other people working, many of whom are leaders in their fields. And from my experiences I'm convinced that, in most jobs, there is little worth doing by one person in 60 hours per week that can't be done in 35.

Moreover, working less keeps me nice and mellow, gives me time to pursue my hobbies and chill with the people I love, and additionally fuels the creativity and big ideas which I think are the start and stop of any entrepreneurship.

Finally, working a bit less will give me more time for spanking. And that is the most relaxing and stimulating way I know of taking a quick break, and staying in touch with out-of-town friends and family. :-).