This has nothing to do with anything, but the dunks that Blake Griffin was throwing down tonight were incroyable. Check this:
Author: Mike P. Lewis
Two Videos
I’ve seen some interesting videos of the past weeks that i thought i’d share.
The first video is a kids Middel School football game. Watch this video and keep in mind that the coach and team planned this play for whenever there was a penalty against his team. The plan was that when his team got a 5 yard penalty, he would start yelling that it is actually a 10 yard penalty. He’d yell really loud. That’s what’s happening when this video starts. Watch away:
This guy wrote the following statement and then submitted a video. It’s fantastic:
As a kid growing up in a time where mutants reigned supreme in the city and lasers accompanied by wailing guitars were standard, I felt that a homage was required. What better way to show your love for such a thing than a polygonal unicorn emerging from the hood of a countach. I paid my dues.
Steve Jobs: Designer First, CEO Second
I recently read a great interview by John Scully where he talks about Steve Jobs. Scully was CEO of Apple for almost a decade. It’s just a great read. For anyone in the tech business, this is a story about our times about a man who more than anyone else has invented products that impact our lives.
Here are some good quotes:
The time that I first met Jobs, which was over 25 years ago, he was putting together the same first principles that I call the Steve Jobs methodology of how to build great products.
Steve from the moment I met him always loved beautiful products, especially hardware. He came to my house and he was fascinated because I had special hinges and locks designed for doors. I had studied as an industrial designer and the thing that connected Steve and me was industrial design. It wasn’t computing.
On Steve jobs being a minimalist:
What makes Steve’s methodology different from everyone else’s is that he always believed the most important decisions you make are not the things you do – but the things that you decide not to do. He’s a minimalist.
I remember going into Steve’s house and he had almost no furniture in it. He just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed. He just didn’t believe in having lots of things around but he was incredibly careful in what he selected. The same thing was true with Apple. Here’s someone who starts with the user experience, who believes that industrial design shouldn’t be compared to what other people were doing with technology products but it should be compared to people were doing with jewelry… Go back to my lock example, and hinges and a door with beautiful brass, finely machined, mechanical devices. And I think that reflects everything that I have ever seen that Steve has touched.
Look at his apartment back then:
Steve on org structures:
The other thing about Steve was that he did not respect large organizations. He felt that they were bureaucratic and ineffective. He would basically call them “bozos.” That was his term for organizations that he didn’t respect.
The Mac team they were all in one building and they eventually got to one hundred people. Steve had a rule that there could never be more than one hundred people on the Mac team. So if you wanted to add someone you had to take someone out. And the thinking was a typical Steve Jobs observation: “I can’t remember more than a hundred first names so I only want to be around people that I know personally. So if it gets bigger than a hundred people, it will force us to go to a different organization structure where I can’t work that way. The way I like to work is where I touch everything.”
At his core, Steve is a designer:
The thing that separated Steve Jobs from other people like Bill Gates — Bill was brilliant too — but Bill was never interested in great taste. He was always interested in being able to dominate a market. He would put out whatever he had to put out there to own that space. Steve would never do that. Steve believed in perfection. Steve was willing to take extraordinary chances in trying new product areas but it was always from the vantage point of being a designer. So when I think about different kinds of CEOs — CEOs who are great leaders, CEOs who are great turnaround artists, great deal negotiators, great people motivators — but the great skill that Steve has is he’s a great designer. Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing.
More stories:
An anecdotal story, a friend of mine was at meetings at Apple and Microsoft on the same day and this was in the last year, so this was recently. He went into the Apple meeting (he’s a vendor for Apple) and when he went into the meeting at Apple as soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking because the designers are the most respected people in the organization. Everyone knows the designers speak for Steve because they have direct reporting to him. It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO.
Later in the day he was at Microsoft. When he went into the Microsoft meeting, everybody was talking and then the meeting starts and no designers ever walk into the room. All the technical people are sitting there trying to add their ideas of what ought to be in the design. That’s a recipe for disaster.
Microsoft hires some of the smartest people in the world. They are known for their incredibly challenging test they put people through to get hired. It’s not an issue of people being smart and talented. It’s that design at Apple is at the highest level of the organization, led by Steve personally. Design at other companies is not there. It is buried down in the bureaucracy somewhere
On being chosen as CEO over Jobs:
Looking back, it was a big mistake that I was ever hired as CEO. I was not the first choice that Steve wanted to be the CEO. He was the first choice, but the board wasn’t prepared to make him CEO when he was 25, 26 years old.
They exhausted all of the obvious high-tech candidates to be CEO… Ultimately, David Rockefeller, who was a shareholder in Apple, said let’s try a different industry and let’s go to the top head hunter in the United States who isn’t in high tech: Gerry Roche.
They went and recruited me. I came in not knowing anything about computers. The idea was that Steve and I were going to work as partners. He would be the technical person and I would be the marketing person.
The reason why I said it was a mistake to have hired me as CEO was Steve always wanted to be CEO. It would have been much more honest if the board had said, “Let’s figure out a way for him to be CEO. You could focus on the stuff that you bring and he focuses on the stuff he brings.”
Remember, he was the chairman of the board, the largest shareholder and he ran the Macintosh division, so he was above me and below me. It was a little bit of a façade and my guess is that we never would have had the breakup if the board had done a better job of thinking through not just how do we get a CEO to come and join the company that Steve will approve of, but how do we make sure that we create a situation where this thing is going to be successful over time?
My sense is that when Steve left (in 1986, after the board rejected his bid to replace Sculley as CEO) I still didn’t know very much about computers.
My decision was first to fix the company, but I didn’t know how to fix companies and to get it back to be successful again.
All the stuff we did then were all his ideas. I understood his methodology. We never changed it. So we didn’t license the products. We focused on industrial design. We actually built up our own in-house design organization, which they have to this day. We developed the PowerBook… We developed QuickTime. All these things were built around Steve’s philosophy… It was all about sales and marketing and the evolution of the products.
All the design ideas were clearly Steve’s. The one who should really be given credit for all that stuff while I was there is really Steve.
And there’s more. As i said, it’s just a great read.
The Killers have gone the way of M. Night Shyamalan
We were discussing today what the new large rock band of America is. Who is the new U2? Some made a convincing argument for Kings of Leon. I was thinking that I had hoped it would have been The Killers after their awesome debut of Hot Fuss and their severely underrated Sam’s Town. However, two crappy albums later it looks like the best is behind us for them.
It then struck me that this is exactly how I feel about M. Night Shyamalan. Let me explain:
Legendary Debut Album, Hot Fuss, and Debut Movie, The Sixth Sense
M. Night’s The Sixth Sense was a monster of a movie. Not only one of the most quotable movies of the year (“I see dead people”) but also just a great film. So good it was nominated for six academy awards, including Best Picture. Similarly, the debut album by The Killers, Hot Fuss, was a bombshell of an album. It had five songs that will be played on rock radio stations for the next 50 years in “Somebody Told Me”, “Mr. Brightside”, “All These Things That I’ve Done” and “Smile Like You Mean It”. It was #1 on the charts for 50 weeks and won the Grammy for Best Rock Album. Both the movie and album killed it. Great start to both of their careers.
Strong Underrated Second Effort in Album, Sam’s Town, and Movie, Unbreakable
The film Unbreakable was released to generally positives reviews. Some people loved it (Tarantino placed it on his top 20 list of films released since 1992) but most thought it was inferior to Sixth Sense. It grossed $250 million worldwide and has a cult following of users who are often heard clamoring for a sequel. The album Sam’s Town was a great effort. It has three great songs in “When You Were Young,” “The River is Wild,” and “Sam’s Town”. Like Unbreakable to Sixth Sense, the album was nowhere near the smash hit of Hot Fuss but went to #2 on the charts and sold 1.2 million albums.
At this point the expectations were off the charts. Both had done a legendary album/film and a really really good one. That’s 2 for 2. I couldn’t wait for what was next.
And that’s exactly when the wheels came off. After the strong start and solid followup, both the Killers and M. Night dabbled in mediocrity for a number of years. M. Night made Signs, The Village and Lady In The Water. None of these were terrible. None of them were that good either. Similarly, The Killers released Day & Age which has a catchy single in “Human.” It isn’t good but isn’t bad either.
It’s the present where both of them descend into crap. M. Night’s latest film, The Last Airbender, was a total debacle. Nobody went to see it. It received 6% on Rotten Tomatoes. Similarly, the lead singer of The Killers, Brandon Flowers, came out with a new album this year called Flamingo where the best review of it by BBC Music said, “there’s a slight feeling of blandness about the whole thing”
It’s too bad. I liked both of them. I guess we can only hope that they both regain their old form eventually.
Kids These Days
I was driving through Boulder yesterday and CU is in session. Driving past the students is always a highlight of my day. Here’s a guy we say yesterday:
I love the blue socks, the blue sunglasses, and the blue backpack. Just a glorious getup.
My Own Personal Newspaper
I’ve long thought about how the newspaper industry is changing (especially because my new startup is targeted towards the publishing industry) and this past week i found something really amazing interesting.
Let me start by saying that i find my feeds (both Facebook and Twitter) way more interesting than any website I read. I typically get all my news from Google Reader where i’ve imported all the sites and feeds that i’m interested in. This is a great way to quickly process information but it doesn’t give me any information from other sites (obviously). The great part of Twitter and Facebook is that my friends provide links from all around the web.
So, while at BlogWorld last week i learned about Paper.li which creates a personal newspaper based on your Twitter feed. My personal paper is here. It looks at all the links submitted by your Twitter friends, see what those stories are and creates a paper of those stories. It also knows the categories of those links so it creates a Sports and Technology section for you. For instance, this morning my Paper.li has this Business section:
This is similar to what the company Flipboard is doing – although that’s only an iPad app. The beauty of this is that it’s taking my feed, which has all the information i want, and placing it in the format that i want – as a nice webpage where i don’t have to click through each link to consume them. It’s eliminating links and making my life prettier and easier. What a great way to start a morning
Everything is a Remix
I just saw a great video that breaks down Led Zepplin and how many of their tracks were stolen from other tracks. While interesting, it makes the larger point which i completely agree with that “everything is a remix” today and it always has been. Taking previously created content and altering it to make something similar but also original and unique is what art’s all about.
Over the past few years, i’ve grown to love the music mashup which is when a DJ takes two or more (sometime a dozen) songs and mixes them all together to create a new song. Some of my favorites have U2+a rap song, an instrumental with Star Wars soundtrack, and 80’s classic with Jay-Z (links to all songs are below). I’ve noticed a few things: (a) that listening to these tracks is totally different than listening to the original, even though they sound extremely similar; (b) the best music mashups have a classic rock backbone and then from another tune faster lyrics on top of it.
Mashups and remixes of all kind are all over. I’m seeing it in TV shows, for instance in The O.C. where they did an episode just like the Spider Man movie or when Avatar recycles the plot from Dances With Wolves. Everyone has biases and influences so it’s rare to find something truly original. Even when copying though, you are creating something new. When Twitter launched, people thought it was just a copy of the News Feed application that was just one part of Facebook ,but it’s grown into something completely different than Facebook. I always thought a cool movie idea would be an entire movie and narrative but every lined used is from another film. Some lines are famous, and others wouldn’t be as recognizable. I think it’s a cool thought.
I’m pro-remix. I think more people should try it. Personally, I have a goal for myself over the next 12 months to actually create a music mashup of my own where i can actually use the tracks i enjoy the most to make something original. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Here are my favorite music mashups that i’ve posted on my music blog where i post one good song every weekday:
- Push The Button
- Callin’ for a great mashup
- 99 Balloons and Problems
- American Edit’s Broken Song
- Beatles Mashed Up
- KiD’s Prayer
- Pause for a Mashup
- Cure Mash
- Mashup Letterbomb
- Jay-Z Collision With Linkin Park
- My Sharona Mash
- Lady Tigra Mashup
The Social Network Movie
I saw the new film The Social Network this weekend and loved it. This was an interesting film for me. It was the first film where i knew or met many of the major characters.
- I’ve spent a good deal of time with Sean Parker. We’ve worked together (briefly at AOL). We’ve partied together when we both spent a week crashing at Spencer’s place in Hermosa. We’ve collaborated on a company together- my dad and I angel invested in Plaxo
- I’ve met with the Winklevoss twins. They came down to look at Ruckus in 2006 when they were still doing ConnectU
- Others i’ve only met once or seen indirectly, such as Dustin and Peter Thiel.
But, it’s safe to say that i know the cast of characters which made the film incredibly satisfying. Fincher and Sorkin nailed it as the characters in real life are very much how they are depicted.
The fact that this is a good movie can be attributed directly to Fincher and Sorkin. The writing and directing is phenomenal. Fincher takes his modern, slick style with awesome music and combines it with smart, quick dialogue. You’re forced to keep up. The result is great storytelling. A mediocre plot become fascinating because of them.
The interesting parts to me are:
The ethical scale. In the web industry, there’s a huge hacker culture where technology grit and talent is valued over rules. There are no rules. Zuckerberg completely embraces this and the Winklevoss twins are on the other end of the spectrum. Every other character is somewhere in the middle of this scale. I see this every day when i see and talk to programmers who are trying to do something unique and innovative. This is how Napster came to be. This is how Skype happened. It’s part of the web culture and i thought the film did a good job of showing the two types of people converging into the web business.
Sean Parker. He’s quite a character and I’ve had the pleasure of hanging with him a few times. He is just as the movie describes as he’s very charismatic and love parties, high fashion, models and going to trendy spots. But the film doesn’t do him justice in a couple of areas. First, he’s a social software genius. He understands better than others how to make a site social and gain millions of users. The movie makes him look like he totally mooched off Facebook. It should be noted that he’s responsible for some huge contributions such as the News Feed. In addition to the Peter Thiel money, he also helped with the Accel $10 million investment. These are huge things.
There’s also a class system matrix here. You have old money (Eduardo and Winklevoss), you have no money (Zuckerberg) and you have new money (Sean Parker and Peter Thiel). You have a kid with a chip on his shoulder making something extremely valuable. Those with old money and traditional business models in their head (Eduardo and The Twins) want it and want to fit this round peg into their square hole. The new money characters (Parker and Theil) know the true potential of Facebook, what it can accomplish, and that growing it now is the better strategy. This was a very real dynamic and in fact i wrote about it 18 months ago when everyone in the media was writing about how Facebook pageviews are worthless and how they won’t be able to monetize and the social network business as we know it isn’t nearly as valuable as we thought. It was all crap and it was because this is new unchartered waters.
The product is king. In the consumer internet business, the product on the page is the single most important thing. Making the user experience tight, fast, and easy is the difference between a successful site and one that nobody uses. This is why you can have two websites that do the exact same thing but one is a huge success and the other goes out of business (see the example between Mint and Wesebe). This is especially true with social networks where it’s a winner take all game. Network effects cause there to be one big site and lots of losers. Zuckerberg knows this. He intuitively understands the user experience. Facebook is a great experience. This is also why he discounts The Twins and their ambition. Just having an idea is only a small part of making a site and a business. He knows this, I know it and The Twins probably know this.
History of social networks and Exclusivity. For the casual viewer, i think the film might seem like Zuckerberg invented the modern day social network. This just isn’t true. Before Facebook there was Friendster, MySpace and half a dozen other social networks that had profiles and friend linkage. Facebook’s defining characteristic was it’s default privacy settings – it’s exclusivity. There’s an important scene in the film when Zuckerberg realizes that this is the idea behind the Harvard Connection and this idea makes social networks fun and more realistic. This exclusivity was Facebook’s major point of distinction for the first few years of its existence and it’s interesting that this one point was not his idea. Granted, he may have a better product sense than others and built a great site, but it was all founded on shady ground. Putting in the work and developing the actual product is 99% of a web business, but if the main difference between Facebook and every other social network is not something you came up with, then that’s a problem. And apparently that problem equals $65 million dollars. Seems like more than a fair trade
Startup Culture. I thought the film did a great job of displaying web and startup culture. Sure, it’s a group of people who don’t sleep but more importantly it’s a group of people who believe what they’re doing is the single most important thing on the planet. They dream of kingdoms and a world domination. Every feature they implement is a step in that direction which is why it’s ok to sacrifice social lives, money and sleep. You saw that allure in this film. That house in Palo Alto reminded me of the Fincher’s Fight Club house where another, different kind of cult was brewing only the one about Facebook was and is real. It happens every day in the valley and across the world with startups.
All in all, I thought it was a great film and found myself thinking and talking about it for days afterwards. You should check it out.
Fitbit App, Where Are You?
I love the Fitbit service. I’ve been using it now for 8 months.It’s a great little service that allows you to track your activity. The UI is also quite slick so entering in your weight and food is a snap. As with most things, i’ve found that the more I track it, the more I tend to improve in that area. So, the more i see how my activity rates are, the more active i become.
I have one main problem with the Fitbit. I don’t like carrying the bit. Sure it synchs easily but it’d be so much better if it was tied into a device that i’m carrying with me already such as my iPhone. Two huge advantages: my iPhone is always in my pocket and I have never mistakenly thrown it into the laundry. The fitbit device is so small. I know of a several people who have destroyed it by putting it in the wash.
So, fitbit, when can we expect the iPhone app? Even if it requires a hardware case to be around the phone, that’s fine with me. Just bring it on. Thanks
Congrats to the Twins
Well done twinkies!
The Twins dominated the Central Division in the first decade of the new century, winning or trying for the win in the division in seven of those ten years (’02, ’03, ’04, ’06, ’08, ’09, and ’10).
What gets me is that every year the critics pick the Twins to lose. Every year. Each spring i pick up Sports Illustrated to read about how the Twins don’t have the hitting or pitching to take the division and almost every year we prove them wrong.
This year we lost former AL MVP Justin Morneau for the entire season in June and still managed the best record in baseball for the second half of the year. It’s our adherence to fundamentals, an amazing farm system and good solid baseball that allows us to plug the gaps and pump out win after win after win.
Check out some of these quotes:
In 2006, the Twins won the division but were picked by most to finish 4th in our division. One quote:
Boy, I bet the Twins are wishing they hadn’t cut David Ortiz right about now. This team has almost as little pop as the Dodgers, if that’s at all possible. Shannon Stewart was a third-round pick in CBS Sportsline’s Bizarro draft. Tony Batista – did he even play last year? (Yes, in Japan – Ed.) – was a second round pick. Luis Castillo was a fifth-round pick. Kyle Lohse was an eighth-round pick. You get the idea. These guys are stiffs, which is a shame, because they have some nasty pitching.
In 2008, they were picked to finish last in their division. Instead they tied for first. NY Sports Day said,
“the loss of Hunter in the outfield seals the Twins’ last-place finish. “
and also in 2008, another quote:
Minnesota has a decent young core of players, led by Joe Mauer, Justin Morneau, Delmon Young and Michael Cuddyer. But it’s quite likely that the Twins will take a big step backward in 2008
In 2009 they won the division again and one preview said,
I honestly do not believe that Minnesota has enough offensively to compete for a division crown this season. It’s never good when there is prolonged talk about your leading hitter and starting catcher having potentially severe back problems in his early twenties.
All those being said, congratulations to the team. Once again they delivered and let’s hope they put the smack down on the Yankees this year in the playoffs.