Random: March 2008 Archives
Then I started thinking more about failure and how failure is a skill. People can learn to fail.
This last weekend Russ and I were snowboarding in Mammoth. He and I both fell a few times, but they weren't bad falls. Mostly because we had learned to fall.
Compare this to when we were learning how to snowboard. Each fall was painful. After a day of snowboarding we could barely walk.
But now, when we fall, we don't even come to a stop. We can pick ourselves up mid-fall and keep going.
In other words, we've learned to fail.
The same can be said for many of our affiliate marketing campaigns.
Here are my thoughts on the apps:
They suck.
I doubt they will do very well as far as building a user base. Unlike Visual Bookshelf, which Russell cited as a good example of a useful Facebook App, Amazon's apps are not useful. At least not to me and my intuition tells me not to very many others.
First, who cares what you are doing on Amazon? And probably, in a lot of cases, you don't want others to know what you're doing on Amazon.
Second, Facebook is not the place to display your wish list. In fact, you shouldn't display it anywhere. I think it's tacky, cheesy, snobbish.
A few days ago Brad Feld was in town speaking on a panel at
the IP & Entrepreneurship Symposium here at the Boalt School of Law at
The evening before the conference I emailed Brad and asked if he wanted to go on a run Friday morning before the conference. I won't lie, I felt a bit creepy/stalker-ish, but he emailed back and said yes.
Nothing like a 6 AM run through the streets of
"Thanks for reaching out", he said in response to my asking him to go on a run.
"Thanks for not calling the cops", I should have replied.
Anyway, the run lasted 48 minutes or so, as I gave him the
grand tour of
We had one of the most interesting and entertaining conversations I have had in a long time. We talked on so many different topics, ranging from the Web and entrepreneurship to foreign policy and American sentiment now and during the Vietnam War era.
There was never a dull moment and I was a bit sad when it had to end. Brad is an incredibly interesting and fun person; certainly atypical of other VCs I've met.
Thanks for reaching back, Brad.
That's what Tom Kelley said tonight at the Dean's Speaker Series here at Haas. I'll tie this quote back in, in just a bit.
His talk, based on what he calls the "Red Queen Effect" (derived from Alice Through the Looking Glass), can be summed up into this: businesses must constantly innovate. Not only that, but businesses must innovate faster and better than their competitors.
In his book The Ten Faces of Innovation, he outlines the various roles required for successful innovation within an organization. One of which he calls "The Anthropologist"--the people who go out and observe, looking for problems.
Many times these problems exist in plain site and most go on with their lives without noticing. Not the Anthropologists. They say, "What was that? What was that that I just saw?".
Kelley gives the example of a turn-style in an airport that enters into a train station. The problem is that these turn-styles are small, narrow and difficult to navigate with baggage. Being that it is a large international airport with a major rail line leading into a city, people have a lot of baggage.
With both hands full of baggage how do they insert their token to get through? They must drop the baggage, throw it over, pass it to their spouse, etc....Not exactly hassle-free.
The anthropologist saw the problem. The architects who built it didn't. From the administrators to the janitors who walk by this problem everyday, they all missed it.
So, the next time you see something with your anthropologist eyes and say "Hey what was that?", don't let anyone tell you it's nothing. You are the expert of your own experience.
By the way, this guy was an excellent speaker. See him if you have a chance.
View Bill Lennon's profile