Author: Mike P. Lewis

Celebrity Voicemails

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While reading the highly entertaining mailbag by Bill Simmons, i read this from one of his readers:

Recently, Morgan Freeman came to my town to help celebrate the opening of one of his restaurants, Pig ‘N Whistle BBQ. He came around and greeted every table and talked with each guest, and everyone was getting their picture taken with him. I had a stroke of genius, though, and had my phone out. When Mr. Freeman reached our table, I asked if he would be so kind as to record a message for me. He said yes. Now I have this on my cell: “This is actor Morgan Freeman, Barnz is away from his phone right now but leave a message and he will call you back, I hope … I hope.” Is there a better choice for voicemail and a specific person to leave it?
— Barnz, Fayettesville, Ark.

That’s truly amazing.  Of course Bill provided a few that he’d rather see:

2. Jack Nicholson: “This is Jack Nicholson. Bill isn’t home right now. You’re entitled to leave a message for him. Just know that I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain where he is, especially to someone who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said ‘thank you’ and went on your way. Either way, I don’t give a DAMN what you think you’re entitled to!!!”

3. Al Pacino: “Hi, this is Al Pacino. I don’t know where Bill is right now. But I do know this. Life is just a game of inches. I am still willing to fight and die for that inch because that is what LIVING is!!! The six inches in front of your face!!!!! Now I can’t make you leave a message. You gotta do it. So wait for the beep.”

4. Buffalo Bill (from Silence of the Lambs): “This is Jame Gumb answering Bill’s cell phone. Bill’s not here. (Long pause.) Is this a great big fat person?”

It’s pretty funny – can you think of  anything better?

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Ben Affleck Man-o-logues

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I just overheard someone ripping on Ben Affleck.  Say what you will about him – with JLo and Gigli he doesn’t have much wiggle room – but he does have 3 of the better monologues in the past 15 years. They are:

The job interview of Good Will Hunting:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hWIr9_noRo]

The middle of Boiler Room:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8JkSEvyFhM]

The end of Chasing Amy:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XfJY5QR3Lc]

I personally like the interview the best. He also has made (adapted and directed) the best Boston movie I know of in Gone Baby Gone. The Departed is great but Baby is better and more boston-ish.

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Thoughts on URL shorteners

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Image representing bit.ly as depicted in Crunc...

This week there was lots of buzz around Bit.ly, a URL shortener company from Beatworks that raised 2 million dollars.  Betaworks is an incubator started by John Borthwick who i had the priveldge of working with at AOL.   Bit.ly is pretty sweet. Check out the things it can do for you:

  • It uses a cookie to remember the last 15 links you’ve shortened and displays that history on the home page when you visit
  • It allows you to set up a custom URL ending for your link.
  • It automatically creates 3 thumbnails for every page you save a link to.
  • It saves a cached copy forever of every page you shorten a link to, on Amazon‘s S3 storage (processing is done on EC2, as well, so uptime looks good).
  • It tracks click-through numbers and referrers so you can see what kind of traffic your shortcut got and from where.
  • There’s a simple API for adding Bit.ly functionality to any other web app
  • It uses Reuter’s Calais to determine the general category and specific subjects of all the pages its users create shortcuts to.
  • All the data, including traffic data and thumbnails, is easily accessible by XML and JSON feeds.

That’s pretty slick indeed.  I think it’s interesting to see that investors see a service that helps developers and others garner more value from the web as a legitmate business. I’m presonally not sure where the business is in there.

An interesting post i read related to this is Delicious Joshua Schachter’s blog post about URL shorteners.  As he states, there are 3 people involved in shortening: (1) the site the link refers to, (2) the site/service  – the transit – containing the shortened URL, and (3) the user clicking on the shortened URL.  In his view, ALL are harmed from this service.  As he states:

The transit’s main problem with these systems is that a link that used to be transparent is now opaque and requires a lookup operation. From my past experience with Delicious, I know that a huge proportion of shortened links are just a disguise for spam, so examining the expanded URL is a necessary step. The transit has to hit every shortened link to get at the underlying link and hope that it doesn’t get throttled. It also has to log and store every redirect it ever sees.

The site where the link points to has milder problems. It’s possible that the redirection steps steals search juice. It certainly makes it harder to track down links to the published site if the publisher ever needs to reach their authors. And the publisher may lose information about the source of its traffic.

But the biggest burden falls on the clicker, the person who follows the links. The extra layer of indirection slows down browsing with additional DNS lookups and server hits. A new and potentially unreliable middleman now sits between the link and its destination. And the long-term archivability of the hyperlink now depends on the health of a third party. The shortener may decide a link is a Terms Of Service violation and delete it. If the shortener accidentally erases a database, forgets to renew its domain, or just disappears, the link will break. If a top-level domain changes its policy on commercial use, the link will break. If the shortener gets hacked, every link becomes a potential phishing attack.

Those all sound hairy, although it seems that Bit.ly has taken care of the some of the problems of the site disappearing by caching the page.  Even still, is the additional metrics provided by Bit.ly worth the loss of SEO juice?  It will be interesting to see how services like this begin to change the linking landscape and whether their services of providing accurate gauges of what’s “hot” are useful

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Go narrow and do 1 thing well

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I did an interview last night for USC business school where i was asked a lot of questions about Qloud and its beginnings.  Questions like “What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs? What have you learned?”  Well here goes…

i often hear people talk about “doing something big.”  While I admire their desire to change the world, i find it interesting that quite often the companies that do end up changing the world started as small passion projects/startups.  And the business model they find is usually nowhere in sight at the beginning.  Some examples:

  • Facebook started as a Harvard-specific tool to get people to better interact with each other.  After it worked well for Harvard, it expanded to the Ivy’s (and Duke & Stanford), then slowly to other schools and eventually everyone.  That wasn’t it’s original goal.  They just wanted to make it easy for people to hook up – i mean, connect
  • Craigslist started as an email list to share functions, jobs and stuff in San Francisco.  They sat in an office and got emailed tips as to what was going on.  They then added some comments and emailed it out and eventually just posted it to a web site.
  • The Google guys were in grad school and staring at some big servers they had.  One idea they wanted to try was to index the entire web.  Once they did that, they then had to brainstorm as to what they could do.  They never started with the desire to dominate web advertising.  Larry Page Speech
Kathy Sierra at SXSW

This thought of doing something you believe in and are passionate about regardless of the size really hit home for me when i heard Kathy Sierra’s keynote at SXSW this year. She had 16 points on how to make breakthroughs happen.  Point #15 was Don’t mistake narrow for shallow. She pointed at hyper-focused blogs like Passive Aggressive Notes and the “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks as mastering a very tiny sliver of the internet. But you could point to the 3 i mention above (Facebook, Craigslist, and Google) as examples of companies that started narrow and gradually expanded to be game-changers.

When thinking about companies, i think it’s important people try new ideas and things they are passionate about. You’re going to be working 24 hours a day 7 days a week on one idea, so you have to love it. Or as Tim O’Reilly says Work on Stuff That Matters.  It’s clear that startups don’t have all the answers when they begin so at least you can start with something you’re willing to continuously think about.

I was again struck with this thought this morning when i read Clay Shirky’s great post about newspaper and the change they are going through.  He too talks about Craigslist saying:

Imagine, in 1996, asking some net-savvy soul to expound on the potential of craigslist, then a year old and not yet incorporated. The answer you’d almost certainly have gotten would be extrapolation: “Mailing lists can be powerful tools”, “Social effects are intertwining with digital networks”, blah blah blah. What no one would have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened: craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it. Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.

So, my advice to aspiring entreprenuers is – (a) focus o  something you love; (b) don’t focus on changing the world but rather focus on doing something, one thing, extremely well.  If you execute on those 2 points, it’s easy to expand into something more powerful and profitable.

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Raising Money Suggestions

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Travis party
Image by pescatello via Flickr

This is a great post done by my boy Travis Kalanick who is one of the most kick-ass entreprenuers out there. He kept RedSwoosh alive from 2001-2008 before he sold to Akamai.  There are quite a few tough years in there but he completely scrapped it out and rocked it.  His post outlines what every entreprenuer needs to know when raising money.  Check it out here.

One part i liked talks about bringing the passion, saying:

Passion/Chrisma is the X-factor. It separates the men from the boys in fundraising. If you’re doing a startup, you’re trying to change the world, you’ve kicked your cushy job to the curb, you’ve had Ramen noodles for breakfast lunch and dinner as far as you can remember, and maybe you’ve moved back in with the ‘rents. You’ve definitely got the passion…why else would you be doing this? Don’t be afraid to show it. Every pitch could be your last one (i.e. the dude across the table writes you a check!), know that… give it your all… listen to some music that pumps you up before you get into the meeting, think about all of the great shit you’re doing and could do.

My favorite music to listen to is this speech by Al Pacino.  I find it really motivating – and it got the job done when i was pounding the pavement in Palo Alto. Click here to listen:  Inches are Everywhere!

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Twitter Thoughts – More like MySpace than Facebook

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I spent a lot of time this weekend explaining Twitter to people.  People want to know not just what it is but why they should use it.  It’s confusing for people who have never tried it.  It’s so simple yet so confounding.  This chart explains the early stages well: twitter3

One thing i’ve noticed in my explanations is that Twitter is much more like MySpace than Facebook.  I also heard the term “egocasting” for the first time.  It makes sense. Both Facebook and MySpace are social networks but if you look at their architecture, you’ll see that Twitter is more like MySpace in that all profiles are public by default and it’s a place for sharing.

Let me explain more.  one of the strangest things i noticed during SXSW last week was that during panels, whenever someone asked a question, they came up to the microphone and (a) stated their name, (b) said their twitter handle, (c) asked their question.  Everyone did that.  It was amazing.  People at SXSW are entrepreneurs but more than promoting their company, they are there to promote themselves.  People are brands now more than ever and promoting yourself and your brand is more important now more than ever. Twitter lets you do that better than any other social tool.  Just like MySpace allowed bands to simply say, “hey go to www.myspace.com/pinkfloyd” users can say, “hey just go to twitter.com/pescatello to find out about me.”  It’s public, it’s just a URL and it will provide all the info you need to get to know someone.

Whether it’s good or bad that the popular tools of society are built to broadcast yourself out to the world is a good question.  Regardless of the answer, the fact is that Twitter is here and embraced and only go to grow in strength and adoption.  There’s a whole other post on why Twitter caught on. I do think it’s a good tool for our time and it combination of “egocasting,” easy mobile usage, and a great API have helped. I’d love to hear more about what you think. Please comment below

twitter

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I Love You, Man is just ok

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On

I Love You, Man is a pretty funny movie.  From what i can tell, everybody likes this movie but nobody thinks is great.  It’s just solid.  I would give it 6.5 or 7 out of 10.

loveyouman2

There seems to be a trend in movies where the comedy happens with the main character tries to say something cool like “fo-shizzle” and it comes out totally moronic and you feel bad for him.  This technique came on hard during Superbad when half the stuff Jonah and Michael Cera said while trying to be cool but were actually really dumb.  The trend continues in I Love You, Man when Paul Rudd tries so hard to be chill and laid back yet half the words that come out of his mouth don’t make sense.  It’s funny at first but i think it’s used too much. I think this all started from the movie Tommy Boy when Chris Farley‘s comebacks were incoherent (“your head has a thick candy shell”) and now, twenty years later, there’s an entire movie with it.

Another thing that i found interesting in this movie is the complete reversal of gender roles.  While Jason Segel‘s character (Sydney) is in some ways the stereotypical movie male – a total bachelor who refuses to grow up – the movie doesn’t stereotype his relationship with other males.  In fact, the opposite.  The men in this movie tend to have deep, heartfelt, emotionally deep conversations.  They talk about why they love people and why they are able or unable to open up to others.  The female conversation, on the other hand, is all locker-room talk and the objectification of men.  It doesn’t go as far as Mr. and Mrs. Smith but i still love how this movie flips the typical gender roles.

I wouldn’t let that keep you from the film as it’s pretty funny.  But i was hoping for something a bit more original.

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Edina Hockey

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Growing up in Edina, MN is a great experience.  One of the highlights of the year is the state hockey tournament. If Edina made (which we always did) we’d get the days of school off and everyone would go to the Xcel Center dressed up like maniacs and cheer like mad for the Hornet players.  Hockey there is huge and it doesn’t get any bigger than the state tourney.  You can imagine how happy i was to see Sports Illustrated do an article about this year’s team.

THE BOYS made a pledge, like many 13-year-olds do. No contract. No blood oath. Just a promise. In 2004, five eighth-graders from Edina, Minn., teammates in the youth hockey program, committed to the same dream. They would not merely win the state high school hockey championship someday. They would win it together, for Edina High.

It might not have been an extraordinary pledge in other sports, but in hockey, star players have the opportunity to leave high school for prep schools, junior leagues or the national development program in Ann Arbor, Mich. The idea of playing against better competition, developing more rapidly and enhancing their value to Division I schools or NHL scouts is too seductive for many boys to resist. Stay at your high school and you’ll go to your prom—but you might not go to the pros.

No matter: For kids steeped in Minnesota’s puck culture some things are more important. “My heroes [growing up] weren’t guys who played for the [NHL’s Minnesota] Wild,” says Edina’s Baker, 17, a defenseman who will play for Holy Cross next year. “They were guys who played at the high school.”

Damn straight.  High school hockey is ridiculously awesome.  Go Hornets

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Small Victories

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Some times just a little win during the day can give you the power to make it through the rest of the day. Or, check out this guy. Just winning one point was enough to celebrate. Hilarious

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNjXgS0_CWE]