Here is the overview of the course and event. Gory details can be found here.

I’m super excited to be part of the crew (along with Bootup Entrepreneurial Society) bringing the Startup Lessons Learned conference to town via simulcast this Friday April 23rd. For those of you who don’t know, the Lean Startup movement (a derivative of lean manufacturing) was kicked off by Eric Ries, formerly of Imvu. It has blossomed in a very short time into a global movement of entrepreneurs interested in how to build fast-cycle, highly iterative startups that learn fast and minimize wasted effort.

More information on the event is below.

• REGISTRATION: http://sllyvrsimulcast.eventbrite.com/
• PRICE: $25 (regular on-site SF price = $695USD so that’s a 96.5% discount not counting the savings in travel costs.)
• SIMULCAST LOCATION: Bootup Entrepreneurial Society, 3rd floor, 163 W. Hastings St., Suite 200.

Startup Lessons Learned, San Francisco (via simulcast to Vancouver)

Startup Lessons Learned is the first event designed to unite those interested in what it takes to succeed in building a lean startup. The goal for this event is to give practitioners and students of the lean startup methodology the opportunity to hear insights from leaders in embracing and deploying the core principles of the lean startup methodology. The day-long event will feature a mix of panels and talks focused on the key challenges and issues that technical and market-facing people at startups need to understand in order to succeed in building successful lean startups.

Confirmed Speakers and Participating Mentors:

• Eric Ries, The Lean Startup (@ericries)
• Kent Beck, Three Rivers Institute (@kentbeck)
• Steve Blank (@sgblank)
• Randy Komisar, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
• Andrew Chen, Futuristic Play (@andrew_chen)
• David Weekly, PB Works (@dweekly)
• Hiten Shah, KISSmetrics (@hnshah)
• Cindy Alvarez, KISSmetrics (@cindyalvarez)
• Ethan Bloch, Flowtown (@ebloch)
• Timothy Fitz, IMVU (@TimohtyFitz)
• Drew Houston, Dropbox (@drewhouston)
• Ash Maurya, WiredReach (@ashmaurya)
• Dave McClure (@davemcclure)
• Sean Ellis (@seanellis)
• Laura Klein (@lauraklein)
• Damon Horowitz, Aardvark / Google (@iamnottweeting)
• Max Ventilla, Aardvark / Google (@ventilla)
• Brant Cooper (@brantcooper)
• Clara Shih, Hearsay Labs (@clarashih)
• Manuel Rosso (@manuelrosso)
• Rashmi Sinha (@rashmi)
• Dan Martell, Flowtown (@danmartell)
• Brett Durrett, IMVU
• James Birchler, IMVU
• Andres Glusman, Meetup (@glusman)

Agenda

• 8 AM – 9:00 Registration
• 9:00 – 9:30 AM Welcome
  *Eric Ries, Host, Startup Lessons Learned
• 9:30 AM – 10:20 AM Build Keynote: “To Agility, and Beyond”
  * Kent Beck, Three Rivers Institute
• 10:20 AM – 10:40 AM Continuous Deployment Case Study: WiredReach
  *Ash Maurya, WiredReach
• 10:40 AM – 11:00 AM Agile Development Case Study: Grockit
  *Farb Nivi, Grockit
• 11:00 AM – 11:30 AM Case Study: “But Does it Scale?”
  * Tim Fitz, James Birchler, and Brett Durrett, IMVU
• 11:30 PM – 12:15 PM But What about Design? Minimum Desirable Product
  *Andrew Chen (Futuristic Play), Laura Klein, Dave McClure, Rashmi Sinha
• 12:15 AM – 1:15 PM Lunch
• 1:15 – 2:00 PM Conversation: Getting to Plan B
  * Randy Komisar, KPCB
• 2:00 PM – 2:20 PM Minimum Viable Product Case Study: Aardvark
  *Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz, Google (Aardvark)
• 2:20 PM – 2:40 PM Pivot Case Study: Flowtown
  *Dan Martell and Ethan Bloch, Flowtown
• 2:40 PM – 3:00 PM Pivot Case Study: KISSmetrics
  *Hiten Shah, KISSmetrics
• 3:00 PM – 3:30 PM Afternoon Break
• 3:30 PM – 4:15 PM Customer Development 2.0
  *Steve Blank
• 4:15 PM – 4:35 PM Is Customer Development Marketing? Food on the Table Case Study
  *Manuel Rosso, Food on the Table
• 4:35 PM – 4:55 PM Customer Development Case Study: Dropbox
  *Drew Houston, Dropbox
• 4:55 PM – 5:15 PM Customer Development Case Study: PB Works
  *David Weekly, PBworks
• 5:15 PM – 6:00 PM Customer Development Panel
  *Cindy Alvarez, Brant Cooper, Sean Ellis, Matt Johnson

This event is intended for people on the front line of delivering products. If you are a start-up founder, an employee engaged in customer or product development role at a company of any stage, or someone at a large company looking to bring the lean startup methodology to your company, we encourage you to attend the event.

Local Simulcasts

For those outside of the Bay Area, we will be offering simulcasts of the event. Official simulcast hosts can be found below – make sure to sign up using one of the links below:

Africa

• Cape Town, South Africa http://sllconf-capetown.eventbrite.com

Asia

• Tokyo, Japan http://startuplessonslearnedtokyosimulcast.eventbrite.com

Europe

• Barcelona, Spain http://www.eventbrite.com/event/638921030
• Birmingham, UK http://sll-birmingham-uk.eventbrite.com/
• Bucharest, Romania http://sllconf-bucharest.eventbrite.com/
• Budapest, Hungary http://sllbudapest.eventbrite.com
• Cambridge, UK http://startuplessonslearnedcam.eventbrite.com/
• Copenhagen, Denmark http://sllconf2010copenhagen.eventbrite.com/
• Delft, Netherlands http://sllconf-delft.eventbrite.com/
• Edinburgh, Scotland http://www.eventbrite.com/myevent?eid=652392323
• Gothenburg, Sweden http://gotsllconf.eventbrite.com/
• London, UK http://www.meetup.com/agile-entrepreneurship/calendar/12944310/
• Madrid, Spain http://www.eventbrite.com/event/640820712
• Munich, Germany http://www.eventbrite.com/event/650629049
• Timisoara, Romania http://www.meetup.com/The-Timisoara-Agile-Software-Meetup-Group/
• Vienna, Austria http://at.amiando.com/sllconfstream.html

North America

• Atlanta, GA http://atlantasll.eventbrite.com/
• Austin, TX http://www.meetup.com/Austin-Lean-Startup-Circle/calendar/13090413/
• Boise, Idaho http://sllconf-boise.eventbrite.com/
• Boston, MA http://www.meetup.com/Lean-Startup-Circle-Boston/calendar/13093640/
• Boston/Cambridge, MA http://dplc-lessons.eventbrite.com
• Boulder, CO http://sllconf-boulder.eventbrite.com/
• Chicago, IL http://www.meetup.com/Chicago-Lean-Startup-Circle/calendar/13056515/
• Cleveland, OH http://startuplessonslearneduniversitycircle.eventbrite.com/
• Cleveland, OH http://sllsimulcastcleveland.eventbrite.com
• Grand Rapids, MI http://startupgr.eventbrite.com
• Los Angeles, CA http://www.meetup.com/Los-Angeles-Lean-Startup-Circle/calendar/13082783/
• Monterrey, NL México http://www.eventbrite.com/event/654293008
• Montreal, QC Canada Chttp://leanstartupmontreal.eventbrite.com
• New York, NY http://dplny-lessons.eventbrite.com/
• New York, NY http://www.meetup.com/lean-startup/calendar/13102326/
• New York, NY http://sllnyc.eventbrite.com
• Omaha, NE http://sllconf-omaha.eventbrite.com/
• Providence, RI http://sllconfprovidence.eventbrite.com
• Provo, UT http://wsg-lsc.eventbrite.com/
• Raleigh, NC http://www.meetup.com/lsc-rtp/calendar/13161035/
• Redmond, WA http://www.eventbrite.com/event/648075411
• San Juan, Puerto Rico http://startups.eventbrite.com/
• Toronto, CA http://startuplessons-toronto.eventbrite.com
• Twin Cities, MN http://www.meetup.com/Twin-Cities-Lean-Startup-Circle/calendar/12849312/
• Vancouver, BC Canada http://sllyvrsimulcast.eventbrite.com/
• Washington DC http://www.meetup.com/DC-Lean-Startup-Circle/calendar/13068744/

Oceania

• Syndey, Australia https://s.eventarc.com/event/view/597/entry/startup-lessons-learned-simulcast-conference
• Wellington, New Zealand http://www.meetup.com/Lean-Startup-Wellington/calendar/12624714/

South America

• Belo Horizonte, Brazil http://sllconf-bhz.eventbrite.com/
• Buenos Aires, Argentina http://buenosairessll.eventbrite.com/
• Florianópolis, SC, Brazil http://www.meetup.com/Floripa-Startups/calendar/13090194/
• Santiago, Chile http://sllsantiago.eventbrite.com

I’m quite excited about the work that Boyd Cohen and his wife Elizabeth Obendiente and the team are doing and happy to see that they’re getting the coverage they deserve. They have a great article written about them on Care2.com’s site. You can read the article here. In it you can learn all about how they are helping Latin Americans build cleaner community-centered kilns that help clean up the air, prevent health issues, and also return funds to the village from the sale of the carbon credits. It’s slow but necessary work.

Speakers include: Eric Ries (founder of the lean startup movement), Dave McClure (the foul-mouthed, opinionated, and obnoxiously right-most-of-the-time angel), the KISS metrics team, Randy Komisar (VC/angel with Kleiner Perkins and author of my favourite book on venture capital – The Monk and the Riddle), Steve Blank (who recently wrote a fantastic blog post called “No Plan Survives First Contact With Customers” and many others. This is a top-tier collection of speakers.

This is going to be a kick-in-the-ass day that is going to make any startup entrepreneur rethink their entire business approach.So if you’re sick of limping along building your business 10 users at a time or “working to get the app just right before we launch”, get yourself and your team down to this event.

Sign up HERE. This event is $700USD in person. We’re providing the simulcast here for $50 FREE. Do it. You won’t regret it. And you’ll get to hang out and meet a bunch of other startup entrepreneurs who are all building their ventures. Great place to connect with like-minded folks.

Congratulations to everybody who came out. Check out the full race report.

Note: Blue the dog and I didn’t do the 50, we did our own custom length of 24k and ended up at Delaney’s for a mocha to warm up from the rain and wind!

I just heard today that you’re gone. Sorry to hear that mate. I enjoyed working out with you at Crossfit Vancouver. We called you “Nutts” for short because you were a big dumb-ass, always clowning around, but you always worked your ass off too.  We were sad to see you go but knew you had to go find something important to do with your life.

I like the official photo. You cleaned up nice. I noticed that you managed to sneak in that sly grin of yours even on an official pic.

Good luck where ever you are Andy. I know your crew in the military and your family and your crossfit family will miss you.

The CBC article is below:

CBC News – British Columbia – Military procession to honour B.C. soldier killed in Afghanistan.

I thought it seemed appropriate to write Jeffrey a good-bye note here. I couldn’t write it yesterday as I had too many things going on in my head so here it is:

-

Dear Jeffrey:

Well, that damned cancer finally caught you. That’s rotten. I knew something was up when I saw MCB’s facebook posting a couple of days ago and then Jeff Clavier’s comment yesterday. Of course that led me to the lovely “Goodbye Jeffrey” post that your family posted on your blog which was really just perfect. I’ve never met Jessy, Brittany, or Mac but since they were your family, they must be cool. I’m sending them my hugs from afar.

Reading the comments over on that blog post made me think back to when I met you and the various interactions I have had with you over the past few years. I’m not sure if you remember but you and I first met in January 2007. I had just posted a blog post about wikis and you had responded, thoughtfully and with gratefulness for the positive comments and for the criticisms that would make your company better. I remember meeting you shortly thereafter at some industry event and as we both skimmed each other’s name tags and recognition registered on both of our faces, we both lit up as we remembered our recent exchange. I remember that moment so clearly. I remember thinking as we spoke, “this one is different.” You spoke passionately about Atlassian but also about music and blogging and building businesses and connecting people. I wasn’t meeting The President of Atlassian, I was meeting Jeffrey Walker, renaissance man, who played music, blogged, hacked, and was also the leader of a great little startup company.

I regret that we never got to spend a lot of time along the way although we would cross paths at the various enterprise 2.0 conferences and I would always feel like I was catching up with the old friend I never really made, if that makes any sense. I was always happy to see you anywhere we met up because you were just so darned friendly and authentic in the way you communicated and connected. I got to know you through your writing more than time spent together and then our paths diverged for a long while. When they reconnected, I learned about all of your trials with cancer and the impact that your writing had had on so many others. That prompted our final brief email discussion about this last round and how you were heading into it the same way you had the others, head held high, nice clothes on, new sunglasses on the head, and guitar in hand. And yes, that picture of you in the hospital in your cool new shirt and sunglasses does make you look bad-ass. I love it.

Then in a blink you were gone and we’re all now trying to figure out what that means and what to do with the hole you have left in so many different communities: your family, your Atlassian family, the greater Atlassian community, the Enterprise 2.0 community, the blogging community, the music community, and the entrepreneurial community. I know you will be missed in all of them.

Well, I for one am done with mourning and am moving on to celebrating and acting. You’ll be with me when I’m attending a conference and talking to my 200th (or 500th!) person and I remember that the most important thing I can do is be authentic and interested in them and in the world around us. I’ll also think of you when I continue to work on things I love with people whose company I enjoy,  and I will think of you when I put that work down for the day to go spend time doing other things I love to do like my sports and playing outside, remembering that work and family and creativity and friends all need to be blended together, just like your life and your blog.

Jeffrey, we didn’t spend enough time together but I want you to know that you had an impact from afar and that I’ll miss you and not forget you. I expect that where ever you are, you’re getting to play on an even larger stage, hack the universe and not just computers, and continue to build community. With any luck you’re up on some stage, jamming with the greats.

Rock on brother.

Part 1
Part 2

I have been thinking about this a lot as I’m currently living in Canada, but working with two clients in the U.S. For the most part, because so many teams are distributed, including their client’s teams, there is no “there” to go to, even if I did want to fly somewhere. The only way to have a “there” is if we all meet in the middle somewhere. So I might as well live in the country side surrounded by fresh air, mountains, stream, squirrels, and birds or go live in Costa Rica for a month as be in an office park in Silicon Valley. I have to say…I’m all for this.

Cool talk. Worth watching. Great job Seth. Good tribe-finding and leading yourself!

Image via Wikipedia

Wow. I went to see MILK tonight at the Castro Theatre on Castro Street in San Francisco tonight. What an incredibly well done and powerful movie. It tells the story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the United States.

It was incredible to be at ground zero for this story, in the same Castro Theatre that you see in the movie, to walk out the door to walk up the street where these events took place and where 30,000-40,000 people marched in silent vigil the night that Harvey Milk and George Moscone were murdered.

Given that it is Thanksgiving, I choose to use today to give thanks to those who have come before me in the gay community who have fought and struggled and been beaten and disrespected and who continued to hold their heads high, claim their place in the world, and say, “we will not be quiet and we will not go along to get along.”

Here we are thirty years later and the instead of Anita Bryant trying to take away civil rights, we now have the Church of the Latter Day Saints spending money and influencing voting to take away marriage rights from gays. Milk fought Prop 6. We just lost Prop 8. The names will change, and the battles will continue because as Martin Luther King said: “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

So for Thanksgiving today, I’m going to say thanks to those people who have fought and who continue to fight. I’m going to thank all the people who came before me who have made it easy for those who came later to be truly themselves in the world.  I came out in the 1990′s. It was very easy for me because of the struggles of those people in the past. I know that my life would have been very different had I been born a few years earlier and I owe you all a debt of gratitude I can never repay. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

My time at Business Objects has finally come to a close. It was an awesome two years, with a lot of learning. I met a lot of extremely talented people there and through my association with the company. I was feeling the entrepreneurial urge again so i decided to throw myself back out of the perceived safety of the corporate life and back into the chaotic startup world.  I have been out for two weeks so far and couldn’t be happier. I feel like I’m “home”.

Now that I’m out, I’m taking on a few different projects. I’m working with a group called Hinchcliffe and Company. They are a leading Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 consulting, training, advisory, and media firm headed by Dion Hinchcliffe. I am joined by a top-tier team that is seeding the company and it our goal to ramp up this company very quickly. I will predominantly work in the corporate training, enterprise consulting, and startup advisory area – helping startups with their business planning, go-to-market planning, technology strategy, and/or sustainability practices.

You can see some of our sites here:

Main site: http://www.hinchcliffeandco.com
Training: http://web20university.com
Media: http://enterprise2tvshow.com

This will also give me the time and flexibility to work on some other business, technology, and sustainability related projects that I have been wanting to work on for a while as well as to build out my speaking engagements and writing and blogging.

Some people ask me how I tie this all together? I explain it like this. I have come to the conclusion that it is my mission to use business and technology to create a better world. That includes Web 2.0 (bringing a social aspect to computing and to business) or Sustainability (bringing a social and ecological aspect to business).

In my new role(s), I will be doing all of that – sustainability, web 2.0, business building. I have the best “job” in the world! Because I get to work with entrepreneurs, BE an entrepreneur, and work with people who want to change the world for the better.

It’s going to be a crazy and fun year – I can sense it already!

My new contact information is: troy at hinchcliffeandco dot com. My cell hasn’t changed: 604-551-8275 (Vancouver). Drop me a note if we haven’t spoken in a while and we’ll catch up!

Have a great 2007 everybody!

Sibylle threw me out of the short distance group, so Blue and I joined the tail end of the long course team. Thankfully Doug was at the end doing sweep. Then I stopped to wait for Doug…and lost the group entirely. So I joined up with Ryan and Ellie…and we got lost. We backtracked and found Craig who led us….onto the short course.

Finally we intercepted the Long Coursers, lost Ryan and Ellie to the LC team and Craig, Blue and I ran on through the night in relative solitude enveloped in fog. When Craig and I were almost done the course, I was attacked by a pack of coyotes that ripped at my flesh. One by one, I beat them off me, and ran to catch up with Craig. [Update: Apparently somebody at the party spread rumours that there were no coyotes and that in fact I tripped into a prickle bush that tore up my leg and hands after doing my business in the bush - the nerve of some people!]

The run ended about 1h 30 min later back at William Griffin, and was followed by a quick trip to soak in the hot tub at Harry Jerome. Lo and behold, the hot tub was out of order. Or they saw us coming all covered in mud and decided to put the sign up to stop us from muddying up their hot tub!

So, never a group to be daunted by such a thing, we created a game of six person, four ball murderball in the pool, much to the dismay of the lone swimmer in Lane 1 who we seemed to graze more often than he wanted.

Murderball was followed by a fantastic potluck at Ean and Sibylle’s place. Unfortunately it looked like it was full swing when I had to hoof it back to get to bed so that I could get up early for a ride with a buddy.

Thanks for the great evening everybody!

• Day 1
• Enterprise 2.0
• SMB Session
• Launch Pad
• Keynote with Eric Schmidt
• Joi Ito on Worlds of Warcraft
• Ben Trott of Six Apart, talking about Vox
• Discussion with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. (Washington Post) and Barry Diller (IAC)
• Day 2:
• A Conversation with Jeff Bezos
• A Conversation with Bruce Chizen, Adobe.com
• Net Neutrality Debate with Vint Cerf and Robert Pepper
• Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker on the State of the Internet
• Fedex’s CIO talks about logistics
• Microsoft’s Debra Chrapaty “It’s all about the infrastructure”
• Korea’s MySpace Challenger: CyWorld Revealed
• Enterprise 2.0 mashups, with Marc Benioff
• Jeff Jonas explains how to give your company a Brain
• Don Tapscott discusses Wikinomics – his new theory of the global plant floor
  
• Meet Ning
• What GoDaddy knows, with Bob Parsons
• A Conversation with Ray Ozzie
• Day 3:
• The Database in the sky, with MySQL
• Yahoo! Technology Preview
• Disruption & Opportunity: Venture Capital
• From the eBay Labs
• Alumni Report: How did 2005s Launchpad companies do?
• Harnessing Collective Intelligence
• My Summary of the Summit

[My notes and analysis in this square brackets.]

The Alumni Report – Web 2.0 Launches Revisited:

• Michael Tanne / Wink: he gave a very long demo
• Veoh Networks: YouTube except for high-resolution long videos. We have figured out how to store them in a distributed peer to peer way and deliver massive bandwidth on demand.
• Satish Dharmaraj: Great demo of Zimbra’s offline client that syncs to their server and gives the exact same interface whether online or offline (using the “work offline” feature in the browser.)
• Calcanis: sold Weblogs to AOL. Is trying to turn Netscape into a social media company like Digg
• [I wonder about the sense of taking a brand that has one known name and trying to turn it into something else. I don't get it. Same problem AOL is going to have trying to move from "makers of walled gardens" to "open standards media infrastructure company". It's hard to turn Volvo from "safety" to "sports car" in people's minds after 40 years of brand impressions.]
• Satish: We raised $15M. But we haven’t touched it yet. We’re veryb passionate about the business and think the exit will take care of itself.
• Dmitry: We have raised $4M and $12M in two rounds and we need a war chest to go after a very large space.
• Question: Do you all have a hiring problem?
• Dmitry: Yes, it’s very hard.
• Satish: For us, we are using a team who have worked together on startups already and who are doing another one. Calcanis: We don’t have a hard time finding developers. Go find the best developers who are already employed. If you have a star working for you that the developers can respect, then they’ll want to come and work for that person.
• Question: What did you screw up royally in the last year?
• Dmitry: We tried to solve the more difficult problem of huge bandwidth rather than consumer video. That cost us…1.65 Billion.
• Calcanis: I blogged about things at AOL that sucked like AOL Search. That pissed a lot of people off who got defensive about their stuff that sucked. I was used to being an entrepreneur who would “kill the enemies and take the hill” but AOL was like the Senate – “we talk everything through here”. I posted that AOL search sucked and that upset the execs and the team. I was used to a level of transparency and to finding out what sucked about my product so that we could make it “suck less” but that whole concept really didn’t wash at AOL.
• UPDATED: Calcanis has left AOL. Not much of a surprise given his comments.
• Question: Any advice on how to deal with how to prioritize once lots of opportunities start to find you?
• Calcanis: Cuban said: “remember what got you here. Blogs got you here, they’re profitable, keep driving on that and focus, focus, focus.” Parallel entrepreneurship doesn’t work well. Why have seven moderately successful #3 companies? Bill Gross has done it but he’s rare and he’s still having problems.
• Dmitry: We could take any one piece of our business and turn it into a whole other new business. Keeping focused is a constant challenge.
• Mark Tanne: replace “viral marketing” with “grassfire marketing” (:-)) If something is hot, it will tear across the internet. If you don’t get that response right off the bat, then it isn’t resonating. Great. Shut it down or adjust or do something else.
• [This supports the principles of rapid adaptation and mutation. I agree with this a lot. There was a comment from
  somebody at some point that when you build something on the net, it either resonates and takes off or it doesn't. Listen to that. Don't say, Well it's growing at 10%/month and that's pretty good. Bullshit. Use Skype as the measuring stick and watch how flat your curve REALLY is. If it's not a wildfire success, mutate quickly and watch the rate of change of the ramp, and if you're not getting hotter and hotter, keep mutating it, or kill it and move on.]

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

“What GoDaddy Knows” by Bob Parson, CEO of  Godaddy

• You need to be careful about who to listen to – like analysts who don’t understand basic business.
• www.bobparsons.com – he talked about why they filed for and then withdrew their S1 application to become a public company. It cost him $3M to realize that once he went public he would have to listen to the advice of a lot of people who had no clue about his business.
• “I met a lot of analysts who didn’t know the basics and who focused on short-term financials rather than on good solid business basics.”
• Here’s the lesson: “people love the convenience and speed of transacting business over the internet but when it comes to resolving problems and learning features, people much prefer to deal with other people.” 920 of our people are in customer support. But analysts would ask: when are you going to move your customers to self-service? Ummm. Never.
• Cashflow is WAY more important than paper profits.
• [I agree wholeheartedly with Parsons here and this is one of the top lessons I drill into the startups I work with. For a small company, cashflow is life & breath!!]
• We will have $340M revenue and cash of $50M (?) of cash flow ($1M free cashflow PER WEEK) so I think we’re doing okay.
• When it comes to promoting your company, everybody wants you to fall in line and offend nobody. That’s just the wrong idea. To be different you have to be polarizing.  Market analysts asked “when you go public, will you stop being so offensive?” Hah!!!!! So I found an offensive ad agency and forced them to make me an ad with a buxom brunette with Godaddy.com written across her chest. Their ads can be found here. We have been promoting our business with “GoDaddyesque ads” – which is now defined as: “somewhat tasteless and slightly inappropriate.” The biggest mistake you can make is to please everyone – particularly investment analysts. It’s much better to alienate 10% of your audience and have the other 90% pay attention.
• [There  have been multiple studies in the automotive industry that seem to show the same thing. Cars that polarized their audience into love/hate like the Beetle, the Mini, and other memorable cars, performed better than the average cars that people couldn't tell apart from each other. The summary lesson was: build interesting vehicles that people will either love or hate, don't try to please everybody.]

  

  (graphic courtesy of this article from the Creating Passionate Users blog)

• we let podcasters create their own ads for us – they’re weird and crazy and even a bit “off” but they’re specific to their audiences so in that way, they were perfect each and every time.
• FINAL MESSAGE: Don’t forget the fundamentals and be VERY careful who you listen to.
• [Dan Pena uses the phrase - "Don't listen to the morons" where "moron" is defined as anybody who hasn't done what you're trying to do - which is most people. I tend to agree with Pena on that point so I appreciated Parson's talk and thought it was the most grounded back-to-basics talk of the day. Thanks Bob!]

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]


The Global Plant Floor, by Don Tapscott, author of the new book Wikinomics

• Just now publishing “wikinomics” – a new book about how mass collaboration changes everything
• Available for pre-order now:
• First chapter is available here
  

• Carlotta Perez, historian, talks about all revolutions: excitement, bubble, bubble burst, actual deployment cycle. We’re now heading into the real period of the web finally.
• This is the biggest change to company structures, competition, and the way companies create value that has happened in the past hundred years!
• My company has done large $500M syndicated research projects to understand this stuff.
• I have been studying web 2.0 for six years now.
• Web 1.0: HTML; standard for presentation
• Web 2.0: web services; multimedia, geospatial, mobility, integration, “the thing”; it is becoming a platform for application building in its own right but is not a presentation layer.
• The act of putting stuff on the web is “programming” the machine.
• Enterprise 2.0 is about the economics of collaboration:
• Why do firms exist? Transaction costs; the cost of coordination to bring it all together to solve a problem. Otherwise, everything would be built by individuals. It’s cheaper to do things in the corporation than as a single person.
• We moved from industrial age corporations to the extended enterprise, to the business webs (think of the IT global supply chain web) and moving to “mass collaboration” – this is MUCH more than crowd-sourcing or social networking. Social networking is becoming a new form of production. Self-organization  What used to take millenia or centuries can now happen in years, months, or overnight.
• BMW’s X3 is built by Magna, a globally distributed group of manufacturers, not by BMW. This is about changing how BMW makes cars.
• Goldcorp: published his proprietary geo-data on the web and held a competition for $500K to see who could find gold on the property they owned. For $500K investment, he found $3.4B worth of gold. His market cap went up to $10B. He had all sorts of crazy responses from geologists, mathematicians, etc. and got crazy solutions.
• HOLY COW
• He acted globally; he shared his private data; he changed the game.
• Mass collaboration:
• Question: Could you create something other than an operating system with open source? Answer from Linus Torvalds: I don’t think there’s anything you couldn’t create.
• Red Hat: Linux; Spike source; open source applications are all good examples.
• Zopa.com: peer lending is mass collaboration where people help other people build their businesses.
• The California school board wants to open source and wikify all of their textbooks
• Cambrian House lets a group of people come up with innovative ideas, grade those ideas, narrow the list to the best ideas, build those ideas, and then Cambrian House sells that widget for you and you as the contributor or team, profit from it. Click here to see how it works. [WOW. Bizarre concept. I wonder...how good will it be at manufacturing. Or selling/distribution?]
• The Chinese motorcycle industry is an open source ecosystem
• Ideagoras: cooperative markets innovating in business (see chart below)
  

• Second Life: the REAL story is not that their currency is pegged to the USD but the product is entirely created by its customers (pro-sumer)
• So you could pro-sume clothing, mindstorm robots,
• Biotechs and pharmas could have owned gene patents but they collaborated instead.
• Mashups ecosystems will be collaboratively built on a massive scale
• IntelliOne: calculate the location of any cell phone over time (like watching traffic)
• Boeing – the Dreamliner has no spec. Companies collaborate together, build chunks of the plane and those chunks are snapped together like LEGO. [I don't buy that statement. You can't build a wing or a fuselage or a nav system or anything else without a specification / blueprint, particularly not if the parts are going to fit together like LEGO. It will be interesting to see how Tapscott covers this in his book.]
  

• Enterprise 2.0 is causing a crisis of leadership!  It is the single largest change in corporate structure and operation in the past century.

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

A Conversation with Jeff Bezos, Amazon

• S3 and EC2 are storage and processing. They should not be very interesting. So why are people so excited?
• Because the time from concept to delivery has been collapsed. We removed server hosting, contract negotitation, server infrastructure, etc.
• We have removed the “muck”; You come up with an idea, you wade through the muck, and then eventually you get to working on the fun parts.
• And then when you come up with your NEXT idea you have to go through the muck all over again.
• up to 70% of your time, energy, and dollars for web-scale apps goes into undifferentiated, heavy lifting and “muck”
• We want to swap the 70/30 to 30/70 (undifferentiated muck / differentiated work that makes you stand out). That will free up 40% for more creativity and differentiation!
• Web scale computing should be elastic; fast; always on; rock solid; simple cost effective; pay per use.
• It is being used by Xerox Global Services (S3, Simple Queuing Service and E3), Second Life; PowerSet (Natural Language Search) – now using EC2 as their back-end infrastructure;
• Tagline: “We make muck…so you don’t have to.”
• “We have been a low-margin, high volume business with aggressive cost structures for 11 years. I feel that that is the best and most defensible model because it doesn’t have a soft underbelly that people can come after aggressively unless they’re as good at it as you. “
• [For a long time I have been trying to come to terms with conflicting approaches. I now see that Dan Pena's model (>80% margin or don't do it) is great when you're consolidating an industry and need to do cashflow lending to buy the companies you are acquiring. And given that his goal is to consolidate, aggregate, and then re-sell, that model makes sense. Bezos' approach (which is also the Dell / Wal-mart approach) is viable when the intention is to build the business up and keep it. I have to admit that I hadn't considered that operational excellence in minimizing margin could be a defensible strategy but it makes sense now.]
• Battelle: Why are you doing this? Bezos: We think this is a great business and we’re good at it. We have three businesses: consumer facing, seller facing business, developer facing business. The consumer/seller businesses drive our revenues. The developer facing business will one day have significant impact.
• [I'm surprised that Battelle would ask this question but as the emcee, it is his job to ask the obvious and/or painful questions. Maybe that's why he's asking it. It only makes sense that Amazon, having developed this core competency, would turn around and resell it. Jay Abraham has a long set of principles, one of which is, figure out what your company has become really good at from a practices, systems, and technologies perspective and turn around and resell THOSE in addition to your core business.]
• Fulfillment by Amazon is a very simple service. We have a global network of fulfillment services. You can ship something to us and we’ll receive it. We get it. We stow it. And then you can send more calls to us and when you do, we’ll pick those out and we’ll send those things to you. We’re giving pay by the drink, variable cost fulfillment to the marketplace.  This allows developers to use us by writing software, to treat this 10 million square foot network of fulfillment centers as a peripheral device like a printer.
• Battelle: Sun tried to do grid computing before and failed. You are succeeding right out of the gate. Why? Bezos: We have a policy of not talking about other companies. But I’ll talk about S3. We think that there are three reasons it is succeeding: it is pay-per-use, it is self-service, and it is VERY simple for people to work with.
• [The shadow space of that statement is that Sun's attempt was none of those things...which was true. It was heavy to implement, heavy to negotiate the contracts, and relative to S3 - very inflexible. S3 is to Sun's grid as Google's AdSense is to Doubleclick.]
• Battelle: what is your cost of power? Bezos: Our biggest costs are not power, servers, or people. The largest cost is the opportunity cost of not fully using our facilities. And the same goes for our customers. The rest of the world is building data centers that they’re only using on average 17% of the time. People are buying 747s and parking them 83% of the time! This doesn’t make any sense.
• [This goes to the heart of the Abraham principle above. Not only does this type of service mean that Amazon is running at near 100% asset efficiency (or more, since they're making money on them?), but their customers can run at near 100% capacity as well, rather than at 17%. Higher asset efficiency = higher shareholder value.
• [Mike Cannon-Brookes and I were joking that it would be fun to build a company and take it from concept to bizplan to website to goods to online ordering to application development to online fulfillment to peer-based service and support….in 24 hours. Sounds ridiculous but with the number and type of services now available, it would be do-able.