Author: Mike P. Lewis

Greatest Proposal Ever

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Here is a guy by the name of Corey Goldfeder who used Back to the Future to propose to his girlfriend in one of the most creative and unique ever imagined.

Goldfeder’s plan was pretty intricate. First, he spent 15 hours using a digital camera, a make-shift green screen and a 30-day free trial of Pinnacle Studio software to edit himself into Back to the Future as Marty during a scene opposite Doc Brown. He then spent a few minutes talking to Doc, as himself, about whether or not he should propose, cleverly working Doc’s real responses from the movie into their conversation.  That would have been enough for most people.

But then Corey continued. He then convinced his girlfriend that there was a Michael J. Fox retrospective taking place at a theater downtown where they were screening Back to the Future. In cahoots with the theater, they put up signage out front making it look like the event and screening were indeed real, and Goldfeder snagged about 20 friends to show up as audience members. He then showed up with his gal, the lights went down, Back to the Future began as planned, and then when they got to the selected scene Marty McFly was instantly replaced by Corey Goldfeder, who, after a little chit chat with Doc, turned it over to himself to do the actual proposal. And of course she said yes.

The video is private right now for some reason, but you can watch part of it on Fox News (fast forward to 1:35):

This is incredible.  Not only for the amount of time but for the subject matter too.  Back To The Future is one of the all time classics.  It’s great.  I would love to somehow incorporate it into my wedding.  Here’s a pic of the couple:

Microsoft vs. Apple

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There’s been lots of talk about how Apple’s market cap is about to equal Microsoft’s.  People love to discuss this because of the battle the two companies have fought over the past 3 decades.  Microsoft famously beat out Apple for PC dominance in the 80’s and 90’s by being open while Apple remained stubbornly closed.  Today, many people look at the Android/iPhone battle in the same light: one company with a superior product (Apple) and another that may be less polished but open to be used on other people’s hardware (Google’s Android)

I’ve heard quite often over the past year how Apple is crazy to go down the same path again.  However, i read a good summary today by Mark Sigal on O’Reilly’s blog about why this isn’t the case.  His five main points are:

  1. Retail Distribution: During the PC Wars, everything came down to distribution and presence on limited retail shelf space. To be successful, you had to be on the shelves of retailers like ComputerLand, CompUSA, Circuit City, Office Depot and MicroAge. Given the wide variety of hardware OEMs making Wintel-based PCs, both shelf-space for Macs and the technical know-how to sell them were severely limited, making a differentiation story like Apple’s a hard sell. Today, Apple Stores drive a superior environment for consumers to experience hardware hands-on and get educated about the full breadth of Apple products. An aside, this is a consumer touch point that Google absolutely lacks.
  2. Pricing overhang: A primary reason for Apple’s crushing defeat by Microsoft was Apple’s misguided notion that it could charge grossly higher dollars for Mac products than Windows-based PC offerings. Contrast this with the present, where Apple is consistent in their assertion and awareness that it cannot and will not leave pricing overhang (i.e. a sufficient pricing gap between its products and the competition). This avoids the past dynamic where consumers saw picking Apple products as an either/or decision, in terms of price vs premier experience. iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad all have followed this course.
  3. Developer ecosystem: It is a truism that in platform plays he who wins the hearts and minds of developers, wins the war. In the PC era, Apple forgot this, bungling badly by launching and abandoning technology initiatives, co-opting and competing with their developers and routinely missed promised milestones. By contrast, Microsoft provided clear delineation points for developers, integrated core technologies across all products, and made sure developer tools readily supported these core initiatives. No less, Microsoft excelled at ensuring that the ecosystem made money. Lesson learned, Apple is moving on to the 4.0 stage of its mobile platform, has consistently hit promised milestones, has done yeomen’s work on evangelizing key technologies within the platform (and third-party developer creations – “There’s an app for that”), and developed multiple ways for developers to monetize their products. No less, they have offered 100 percent distribution to 85 million iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads, and one-click monetization via same. Nested in every one of these devices is a giant vending machine that is bottomless and never closes. By contrast, Google has taught consumers to expect free, the Android Market is hobbled by poor discovery and clunky, inconsistent monetization workflows. Most damning, despite touted high-volume third-party applications, there are (seemingly) no breakout third-party developer successes, despite Android being around two-thirds as long as the iPhone platform.
  4. Consumer technology adoption: During the PC era, large enterprises essentially dictated the industry winners by virtue of standardizing on a given vendor or type of solution. This created a winner-takes-all dynamic, inasmuch as consumers would ultimately buy the same solutions that had been blessed by large enterprises. By virtue of its conservative nature (remember the motto, “No ever got fired for buying IBM”?), staid Microsoft always felt like a safer choice than crazy Apple. And besides, accounting could solicit bids from multiple hardware vendors, which they liked. By contrast, today’s breakthrough adoption begins in the consumer realm and filters back to enterprises, not the other way around.
  5. Microsoft-like resilience: I remember too well the Microsoft mantra “Embrace-Extend-Extinguish,” which basically meant that any segment worth owning Microsoft would ultimately dominate by the 3.0 version of its competing product.  They were ruthless in squeezing the lifeblood out of competitors through any means necessary. But, give Microsoft full props for manifesting an unyielding resilience to keep working its product offering and market assault until victory was at hand. Considering Apple’s rise from the ashes to re-create a very profitable Mac business — the dominance it has created with iPod and iTunes; the powerhouse iPhone and iPhone platform and the ambitious, and already well-regarded iPad — does anyone wonder about Apple’s resilience? By contrast, Google remains almost completely dependent upon search and advertising, despite launching so many new product offerings and seriously pursuing M&A over the past several years. Arguably, Google’s famously loosely coupled structure leads to a lot of seeds being planted, but so too, it seems to a less than laser-like focus on seeing those seeds to cultivation and full harvest. It begs the question, “Can a tiger change its stripes?”

I carry around both an iPhone and a Droid so I’m witness the battle every day when i pull both out and decide which to make a call or text on.   They are both good phones.  The Android phones get refreshed every month when a new manufacturer comes out with the latest, whereas i have to wait a year for each new iPhone.  That said, the iPhone is better and because of points 1-5 above, i suspect Apple will clean house for at least a few more years.

Online Journalism Conf: Traditionalists vs. Pioneers

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I went to the International Symposium on Online Journalism this past Friday and Saturday.  There were a variety of speakers at this conference.  I noticed that there were three types of participants.   There were:
  1. Traditionalists
  2. Journalists
  3. Pioneers looking for new ways to publish.
The current revenue model in publishing is changing and the traditionalists resent this.  Newspapers and print media, which once had a good business model, are now losing money.  This one change has dramatic impact on journalism and media.   Some speakers, such as Jim Moroney at the Dallas Morning News, are enamored the newspaper structure.  In his speech on Friday, he mentioned that it costs him $36 million a year to staff his newsroom and he’ll look for every way possible to pay for this, from raising prices to charging for specific pieces of content.  He specifically said that he won’t shrink the staff nor use citizen journalism.  This strikes me as stubborn and destined to fail.  First, people – especially younger audiences – don’t want to pay for content and asking them to do so will just alienate them.  Other traditionalists such as Jim O’Shea are moving journalism into the non-profit realm.  Maybe this is the best place for hard-core journalism, because as Jim stated, advertising will supply only 5% of Chicago News Coop revenue.
On the other end of the spectrum there are the pioneers that are embracing the Internet. The web is proving to be best at interactivity. It’s not a place to simply replicate the written word of newspapers and magazines.  The sites that win are sites that embrace the social or interactive nature of the web.  The first speaker of the conference, Steven Kydd at Demand Media, is one of the pioneers.  While it’s debatable whether it’s journalism, Demand Media is discovering new business opportunities by interacting with the web and with writers and creating new opportunities from the crumbling media businesses.  David Cohn at Spot.us is another looking to create a media business around the interactivity of the web by creating a platform to crowdsourcing funding and sourcing of news stories.  New media will be interactive and vibrant.  Several great panelists such as Cindy Royal on Friday Jan Schaffer on Saturday understand this and gave great talks of how they are showing us new methods of journalism that actually work.

Last.fm Will Be a Charts Site

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There was an announcement today from Last.fm that read:

CBS-owned (NYSE: CBS) social music discovery and radio service Last.fm announced on Tuesday that it is discontinuing the on-demand song streaming service on its website, which had been available for the past two years in the U.S., U.K. and Germany, and will no longer host music videos.

What, Last.fm didn’t like paying tons of cash to have people play music for free? That’s amazing! Of course they cancelled this. They were offering free services which grew traffic but not monetizing those users at all. Not surprisingly someone asked why their offered the freebies. The release continued to read:

The company also said a number of new digital music services will now support “scrobbling” of tracks to users’ Last.fm charts. They include Spotify, The Hype Machine, MOG, We7 and Vevo.

This is the only reason i know of that people use Last.fm. People want to know what their most popular track is and it’s interesting to see what are the most played tracks. Where does this lead? It leads to last.fm being the Neilsons or Comscore or Billboard of the future. This site will tell us what’s popular and by who. In my mind, this is the future they have.  I wonder if CBS is regretting paying $280 million in cash for them.

Into the Fire: Startup Life

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There is an ancient Chinese story of an old master potter who attempted to develop a new glaze for his porcelain vases. It became the central focus of his life. Everyday he tended the flames of his kilns to a white heat, controlling the temperature to an exact degree. Every day he experimented with the chemistry of the glazes he applied, but still he could not achieve the beauty he desired and imagined was possible in a glaze. Finally, having tried everything he decided his meaningful life was over and walked into the molten heat of the fully fired kiln. When his assistants opened up the kiln and took out the vases, they found the glaze on the vases the most exquisite they had ever encountered. The master himself had disappeared into his creations.

Working within a company so long, it’s easy to see how your blood and bone can become part of the product and ultimately make something truly unique.  Giving a company your all, walking into the fire is both painful and pretty romantic.   The poet, David Whyte talks about this proverb, saying:

Work is the very fire where we are baked to perfection, and like the master of the fire itself, we add the essential ingredient and fulfillment when we walk into the flames ourselves and fuel the transformation of ordinary, everyday forms into the exquisite and the rare.

It’s an interesting analogy because in you can see that the potter, in disappearing into the kiln, he created something he loved and something truly special, but he also dies.  In doing his work he ceases to be a person that the rest of the world can interact with and relate to.

Such is the life of working on a startup

(thanks to Jerry Colonna for writing about this first)

Revisiting We Are The World

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When listening again to the classic We Are The World, i couldn’t help but think what a great song it is. It was written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and became the fastest selling American pop song single ever.

We Are The World (download here)

Some notes on the song:

  • Michael Jackson pretty much wrote the entire song himself.  Sure, Lionel was there but it’s mostly MJ’s work.
  • All the musician came from the American Music Awards.  All came in limousines except Bruce Springsteen who drove a pickup truck and parked it outside and paid for meter parking
  • There was a big sign listed above the studio with the words, “Leave your ego at the door.”
  • Prince bailed at the last minute because the organizer called him a creep (guess he didn’t see the sign)

ANyway, a good song to go back to and check out

Advice from creator/writer of Dilbert

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The following advice below the image is from Scott Adams, the creator and writer of the comic strip Dilbert.  I was talking with my sister about careers the other day and this sprung to mind.  It’s not a specific roadmap but something to keep in mind as you accrue experience.

Scott says….

If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

  1. Become the best at one specific thing.
  2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.


The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.

The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.


…Get a degree in business on top of your engineering degree, law degree, medical degree, science degree, or whatever. Suddenly you’re in charge, or maybe you’re starting your own company using your combined knowledge.


Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix…

It sounds like generic advice, but you’d be hard pressed to find any successful person who didn’t have about three skills in the top 25%.

The Wire in Schools

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There’s a good article in Slate about how the TV show The Wire is becoming a common item for professors to assign to college students.  Some schools have a whole course dedicated to it.  As many of you know, i’m a huge fan of the show and can understand why profs would use it.

One of the professors teaching a course on the show is the sociologist William Julius Wilson—his class, at Harvard, will be offered this fall.  He says,

Although The Wire is fiction, not a documentary, its depiction of [the] systemic urban inequality that constrains the lives of the urban poor is more poignant and compelling [than] that of any published study, including my own

That’s how badass the show is.  Anyone who hasn’t checked it out, should get into it.

Waking Sleeping Beauty

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I saw the movie Waking Sleeping Beauty a few weeks ago which takes a look at Disney’s Animation Studio from the years 1984, when it hit it’s lowest point after releasing The Black Cauldron (which got out-grossed by The Care Bears), to 1994 when it released it 4th straight mega blockbuster, The Lion King.

Disney Brass: Katzenberg, Roy Disney and Michael Eisner

In 1984 Disney’s animation studio was filled with old-timers and young eager newcomers such as Brad Bird, Jon Lasseter, and Tim Burton.  The old timers lacked the passion and the youngsters lacked the experience.  For years they were at an impasse and it resulted in really lame, tired movies.  Disney recognized this and hired Michael Eisner, Frank Wells and Jefferey Katzenberg.   The new brass didn’t immediately recognize the importance of animation, nor really understand it.  They did know that change was needed and went about the standard “weed, feed and seed” strategy that I’ve seen in my startup experience.  This is a technique of getting rid of the old/bad talent (weed), bringing in new hires (seed) and empowering those who have great ideas (feed).  It almost always works.

What makes the film interesting is that even though this is a documentary, the footage is all in the time period. There are no talking heads in 2009 telling us how it is.  It’s only interviews from the 80’s with all its hair, sytles and the culture.

The animation workers had to endure quite a bit from 1980 to 1988 when they produced their first hit in decades, The Little Mermaid.  Bringing in outside song writers for Mermaid proved to be a stroke of genius.  From that film they gained confidence and experience and then scored another massive hit with Aladin.  After Aladin, they immediately started working on Beauty and The Beast this time with some swagger.  When Beauty premiered at the NY Film Festival in draft form,  it received a standing ovation and went on to be one of the rare animated films to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.   After Beauty and The Beast, egos were looming large.  Eisner was jealous of Katzenberg for promoting himself as the head of the Animation studio and the animators all were getting agents, high salaries, and big heads.  Despite that, you could tell that they knew they had something special and they were able to rally together once more to score another major hit with Lion King – which shattered all major box office records at the time.  After the release of the Lion King, Frank Wells died, Katzenberg quit, and the animators fell under their own egotistical weight.

Lion King went out to be the largest grossing animated film of all time

I saw the film with the director/producer who worked at Disney during this entire period.  In his Q&A afterwards commented that everyone knew they were doing something special, but in the end you can’t keep a winning team together for too long – talented people just become too expensive.  In any industry or endeavor, you can’t keep a winning team together forever.  Think of the Red Sox, Shaq & Kobe, Microsoft, etc.

This is a fun film to watch.  It captures an amazing run of films we all know and love, and the turmoil, passion and business antics that went into making Disney a phenomenon.