Aaron White

(originally published on Medium)

At the beginning of 2010, I bought a Withings Scale, which turned out to be pretty awesome, because now I have half-a-decade’s worth of weight and body-fat data to examine.

I spent the majority of this summer traveling & re-focusing on my health, and was curious what my weight’s trend-line looked like, so I dug it up. With a tiny bit of annotation, what’s most obvious is this: my work’s impact on me isn’t limited to just my mental health, stress impacts my body in a very real and directly measurable way.

(Lowest, 156 lbs. at time of the marathon, highest 188)

The un-annotated & green areas are periods of unstructured travel & consulting, experimenting with new sports. The red areas are periods of consistent weight-gain, and happen to coincide directly with periods of intense work-focus. (One spike of note: my startup, Boundless, was sued in March of 2012, and you can see the outsized-effect it had on my weight)

Interestingly, I’ve intuitively described the difference in stress between entrepreneuriship and venture investing as follows: “Startups are extreme in their highs, but as extreme in their lows. Venture investing operates over a subtle background of more-constant stress.” Looks like the data supports that articulation.

There is of course debate as to whether sustained stress causes weight gain, or merely changes in stress. Whatever the ‘norm’ may be, my data is clear: work = weight gain. (I am fortunate, however, that my fluctuating weight is within relatively tight bounds)

(originally posted on Medium)

Or the story about Helen Keller, the Kudzu, Babe Ruth, David Copperfield, & Your Startup. 

The Power of Stories

As a child I believed logical arguments were enough to convince anyone of anything. You just needed enough time to explain them in painstaking, rational detail, and others would listen and understand.

As an adult, I know the world operates on story first, and logic second. The truth only matters for good stories, and most people don’t know how to tell good stories.

The difference in story-telling ability is massive; a poorly told story might bore the dinner table, a well-told story starts wars, create nations, and (one day!) colonizes mars. Behold the power of words: you make a bunch of sounds or symbols, and someone else reprioritizes their time & energy… woah.

The story of your company is a major, major piece of what “it” is, throughout its entire life — in fact, it’s the only thing “it” is in the very beginning, and that story, that “it”, is how you recruit employees, convince customers to give you a shot, and secure funding. Investors & smart hires will always do appropriate diligence before investing money & time, but they won’t bother doing that any diligience at all unless they are excited about your story. You can’t hand people a dry plan and expect them to “grok” the genius of your opportunity the same way you do. Generating excitement in others solely rests on you and the power of your story.

So this post is about story telling, and specifically about the 4 types of stories you’ll need to be able to tell well when fundraising for your company- but all of them are useful for recruiting, internal alignment, business development, and beyond. The pen (keyboard? thumb? Siri?) is mightier than the sword, so don’t neglect the narrative.

Let’s take a seat, it’s story time.

Helen Keller & The Hero’s Journey

When Helen Keller was only a year-and-a-half old, illness left her blind & deaf, and her prospects for communication looked grim. Six years later, in 1886, her parents found & called upon Anne Sullivan, an experienced teacher of the blind, to help a 7-year old Helen learn to communicate in terms of names and letters. Teaching Helen was immensely challenging, and when it seemed like she might never learn, Anne spelled “water” on Helen’s hand while running it under cool water. In that moment, language and naming ‘clicked’ for Helen.

18 years later, Helen graduated from Radcliffe (now a part of Harvard) as the first deaf/blind person with a Bachelor of Arts. She became a prolific writer (12 books, while you & I struggle with 1 email or 1 blog post!) She became a lecturer. She was a political activist fighting for those with disabilities, for women’s suffrage, for birth-control, for peace.

Helen Keller was a hero.

In fact, her life follows the “Hero’s Journey” wonderfully, and if you’re not familiar with the concept, you can see the arc here:

At its core, the Hero’s Journey is about venturing from the known into the unknown, and with a bit of help & digging deep, learning something critical to conquer your challenge, and then sharing that revelation with world for broader transformation.

Who better to advocate for the capability of the disabled than Helen Keller, who not only triumphed & demonstrated communication-competency, but mastery of communication in all its forms?

Being told factually that blind/deaf individuals are capable of writing & lecturing isn’t nearly as powerful and moving as the Hero’s Journey of Helen Keller. In the same way, you and your startup are your own “Hero’s Journey” and are much more compelling when framed in that narrative. Investors are looking for the “why you?” “what makes you so special?” “what hard-fought secret have you learned?” — don’t share the insight, tell the story.

Exempli gratia: Slack.

Stuart Butterfield had a vision for a non-violent MMO, and founded Tiny Speck to bring that vision to life. Team assembled, they set to work building tools, and building the game. Years later, they enthusiastically released their baby, “Glitch”, to the world, and though the game earned some following, it wasn’t enough. Tiny Speck decided to sunset Glitch and began winding down its operations. However, in a great moment of insight, Stuart & team realized the chat platform they had developed to support more productive game-development was a product that could help any team be more productive. Thus, Slack was born in the companies darkest hour, and now Slack’s team is bringing a new platform for team productivity to the world.

Interestingly, Stuart’s previous project Flickr was born from a previous failure at making the game. The poor guy just wants to make games and keeps accidentally changing the way the world communicates. A nice account of Stuart’s story is here.

The Kudzu & Disruption

Evolution is a fascinating thing to study. Understanding that species not only evolve against their environment, but how their environment co-evolves simultaneously against them, I find intriguing. Did the humming bird’s beak evolve & lengthen to get at a long-flowered plant’s nectar, or did some plant have the opportunity to evolve in length in order to keep pollinating-inefficient bees out, because the a primordial humming-bird was there to provide a substitute?

When you look at a biological ecosystem, the creatures in it have spent thousands & thousands of years co-evolving against one another in a careful dance. The same metaphor is true for modern, ‘legacy’ businesses — most businesses that exist today have co-evolved against one another in a careful dance of suppliers, distributors, competitors, and partners.

Enter the Kudzu.

Co-evolution in an ecosystem is a beautiful and importantly a relatively stable thing. But what happens when you transplant an organism from one ecosystem into another? Three things:

Likely, it will be brutally selected against (i.e.: die)

Occasionally it will find a niche & join the careful co-evolution dance.

But sometimes… sometimes it DOMINATES the ecosystem and changes the waltz to a salsa.

This is an invasive species. It’s alien to the ecosystem, doesn’t know the dance-steps and doesn’t care, because none of the native-organisms had any chance to evolve meaningful defenses against it. It dances the salsa while flustered waltzers leave the ballroom floor (read: they die).

The Kudzu is a salsa-dancing plant, native to a colder salsa-dancing Chinese ecosystem. And while the Kudzu is naturally fast-growing (up to a foot a day), and can kill existing vegetation by growing right over it & shading it out, this isn’t a problem when the Chinese winter beats it back each year, keeping it in check relative to other plants it salsa-dances with.

Then, also in the 1880s, some clever American entrepreneurs decided to market a “fast growing, shade generating” plant to the overly warm citizens living the waltz-dancing climate of the south-eastern United States. Flash forward 100 years: now listed as a noxious weed, the Kudzu is found as far north as NYC and Nova Scotia Canada, and covers 7.5 million acres of land.

The Kudzu, and other invasive species, are disruptive technologies — the ecosystem it was introduced into didn’t stand a chance against it, because they never had a chance to co-evolve against it- and so it runs rampant. In contrast to the heroism of Helen Keller, your startup’s story also needs to demonstrate its Kudzu-like invasiveness, how no incumbents are adapted, nor could any adapt fast enough. Are you aggregating & leveraging a competitive data-set none will be able to reproduce? Are you bringing an army of algorithm authors to attack a sleep non-technical industry? Are you able to achieve pricing 10x better than incumbents due to unfair cost advantages? Etc, etc, etc. While stories of ‘disruption’ are numerous, real disruption stories look like invasive species stories.

My favorite recent disruption story is, somewhat predictably, Uber’s story. Uber was born from a simple desire, “why can’t I just use my phone to tap-summon a taxi?” and a brilliant insight: tap-summoning black-cars skirts the laws that prevent non-taxis from picking up people on the street. Since the tap-summon is a “pre-arrangement”, no laws have been broken.

So what happens when a singular silicon valley tech/UX/data-driven/mobile focused company invades a progress-sleepy/frustrating/dirty-money-driven/waving-into-the-air based taxi industry that is horribly fragmented not only nationally but per-city and could never recreate the experience or market liquidity of an aggregated (and far superior) offering from Uber? Well, the un-adapted /un-adaptable industry fights the only way they can (litigating) while the rest of us cheaply & happily zip from place to place, and the tech-Kudzu that is Uber is valued in the tens of billions.

Be the Kudzu.

Babe Ruth & The Called Shot

Babe Ruth is an American baseball player famous for his larger than life personality, and larger than life talent. He played for the New York Yankees between 1920 and 1934. In 1932, when the Yankees made it to the world series, and Babe Ruth stepped up to the plate as batter, he was met with lemon throwing and jeers from hostile fans. With two strikes (three and you’re out) Babe Ruth pointed straight down the field. The pitch was thrown, he swung the bat, and hit a home run exactly in the direction he had pointed, and that moment became famous as the “Babe Ruth called shot”.

The “Called Shot” is the epitome of execution- “this is what I’m going to do, watch me do it”, and the implied “I told you so”. Data can sometimes speak for itself, but when it’s part of a “called shot” story, it’s incredibly powerful. I’m not a sports guy by any stretch of the imagination, but here you & I are 80 years later reading/writing about someone who pointed his finger and swing a bat, that’s how emotionally impactful the called shot is — it burns a memory like little else.

Each financing you raise is to get to the next milestone, so when pitching your startup, some portion of your pitch should include a called shot. “We are raising this seed to go do X”…. then go do X.

Because then when you go back to the same capital market for your Series A, and say “We are raising this A to do Y” you’ll have a lot of folks leaning in. Even if you didn’t pitch a particular investor for your previous round, if you contextualize your raise around “Seed was designed to do X, we did X, Series A is designed to do Y” you’re showcasing your foresight and execution powerfully.

This data & execution framing technique isn’t limited to financings. Trying to recruit a co-founder or key-employee? Regularly update them on your plan, expectations, and show that you’re a predictable knock-it-out-of-the-park machine.

“Our vision is to be the world’s most consumer-centric company, where customers can come to find anything they want to buy online.” — Jeff Bezos

David Copperfield & Framing the Theory

If I wanted to do something bold, something big, something impossible like making the Statue of Liberty disappear and televising it— what would have to happen for you to believe I did that? Well certainly:

Not only would the TV cameras show it had disappeared, but

They would film in long, un-cut arcs free of trickery,

A credible live crowd would testify live at the truth of the spectacle,

Search lights would pass right through where the statue used to stand,

Helicopters circling with cameras would confirm the dissapearce from multiple perspectives,

and even radar would confirm the loss of a giant metal structure.

David Copperfield proposed, and dramatically executed the disappearance (and re-appareance) of the Statue of Liberty in 1983 to a live audience on Liberty Island, and live audiences around the world. This was more than just a called shot, and far more than sleight of hand, this was story telling of the grandest kind.

If a magician can convince people of the truth of the impossible, what you should be able to do around probability of the plausible?

Ultimately, your startup is a hypothesis you’ll build into a theory. “Because of insights A/B/C, if we build D/E/F, we’ll grow fast in markets J/K/L, and you’ll know we’re on the right path because of metrics that look like X/Y/Z.” You need to clearly frame your core hypothesis, and you need to frame the metrics & indicators that would confirm its deeper truth.

The point isn’t to emulate the friendly deceitfulness of magicians like David Copperfield, but to appreciate how much care they take in guiding the audience to understand the depth of their illusion, how to judge its execution, and how to appreciate the experience. Define your startup’s hypothesis, help others see the best way to appreciate it, explain the metrics by which they should judge your execution, and let them appreciate the results you have to date.

Be authentic, be believable, and take charge of the framing.

Go Forth & Story Tell

Never burden your audience- you should be so lucky to get the attention of someone smart, let alone someone masochistic enough to dig-in on something they don’t find exciting. If they are worth talking to, their attention is already valued at a premium, and they have plenty of options.

Moreover, why should others invest time & money into a poorly told story? If the founder of a startup isn’t their own opportunity’s best story-teller, who could possibly come to understand it better than they? And in the rare case that the listener might appreciate the genius buried beneath a cloudy, uninspiring story- does that same smart listener expect the budy world of talent and would-be customers would have the same patience that they have?

Be a hero, be the kudzu, call the shot, and frame the theory. Above all else, tell a good story.

(originally published on Medium)

The invisible made visible, a literal monster from the id. “Forbidden Planet”, 1956

Lurking behind our thin, rational facade is an impulsive demon. A demon that takes control of us, acts without thinking, and serves its own purposes regardless of the impact to our ultimate well-being.

That demon is your id.

Your id, your lizard-brain, your ‘animal’ impulses, that piece of you evolved in a context wildly different from the one in which you now live.

Our vast technology network, now held and ever-accessible in the palm of your hand, push-notifying for your attention wherever you go- that tech is the make-shift key that not only unlocks your inner-demon, but amplifies him & allows him to run your life unchecked & afoul.

This isn’t a new observation- it’s the central warning of 1956’s classic science-fiction film, “Forbidden Planet.” Explorers discover the remnants of an advanced alien civiliation (“the Krell”) & attempt to uncover its secrets while under attack from an invisible monster. The great reveal of the movie: the peaceful Krell created machinery so advanced it turned desire into matter. But even the most rational Krell were evolved from creatures less noble, and at the center of every Krell brain still hid a lizard-core, a place of base instinct… a place of pure id. The Krell’s machinery faithfully transformed even the darkest subcioncious impulse into a literal “monster from the id,” wiping one-another out. The explorers realize dramataically that the invisible monster they fight, is in fact themselves.

Someone dreamt that up in 1956 (kudos to you, writers!)

Back to 2015: Would you like cheap, gut-inflating chinese food delivered to where you stand… in under 5 seconds of tapping? Why not add libations delivered with equal ease? Slightly inebriated and upset: reach across space & time to speak (read: thumb-scribe) your mind to someone who has wronged you, regret for drunk-texting can wait until morning. Even then, you can console yourself by splurging thousands on luxury fashion, confirming the indulgent transaction by simply pressing your thumb over the small circle at the bottom of your phone, all financial hesitation set aside by easy credit. Never mind driving yourself deeper into debt, ignore it and satisfy the impulse to order the next plate of General Gao’s chicken instead.

Repeat.

The fundamental problem is that our well-meaning side is the slow-side of our mental machinery, while our impulsive animal side rapidly & frequently seizes on whatever it can, after it all, it evolved in a context of relative scarcity. Which is why we crave sweets & fats… because they were rarer historically. We consume such treats not in moderation but until they are gone, because that is what it used to take to survive. Over-supply was not a problem in the ancient world, but certainly a problem if you’re drunk-shopping at 7/11, or hungry-walking the aisles of Market Basket in 2015.

Information technology not only efficiently matches supply with demand in the palm of our hand, but increasingly jujitsus our minor vices (boredom, insecurity) into demand-generating opportunities. These desires, freshly heightened by rapidly evolving, data-driven marketing, can be satisfied instantly by equally scientifically developed products & funnels…. long before the rational mind can speak up and say “hey wait, woah there!”

Your mental machinery remains the same, meanwhile every product & marketing department the world ‘round is leveling up.

Worse still, the negative effects of id indulgement essentially compound: bad habits are more easily reinforced than good ones, quickly entrenched, and willpower erodes. The battle for self-control isn’t lost, but if we aren’t proactively fighting & improving, we should be aware we are actively losing by default.

I welcome technology that can keep up on the positive side of the arms-race, though by nature, the consumer markets (and thus capital ones) favor catering to the id. Therefore, the only remedy I’m aware of is to deliberately take control of your environment in greater measure than those who are paid to market directly to your id. Willpower itself is not the solution, we must erect automatic, high-friction walls to provide breathing room for our slower, rational-brains to work their magic, and automate proper decision making, removing as many opportunities for failure as we can.

The battle for control over our id will not easily be won back, and our collective well-being hangs on the outcome.

Addendum

Instead of waiting for the world to provide more productive tooling, I have tried employing various strategies to construct more id-barriers in my own life, a few of which are listed below:

Nutrition:

Deleting all my “food delivery” accounts to prevent eating poorly.

Owning neither a microwave or toaster, in effect forcing myself to eat fresher.

Never stocking any unhealthy snacks at all, no exceptions.

Pre-making healthy breakfasts on Sunday so I have no excuses during the week’s rushed mornings.

Buying weeks worth of pre-made paleo dinners so during my lowest energy point of the day (evenings), the right decision is the by default the easiest/fastest.

Time/Energy Management:

Not owning a TV to prevent time-wasting (or cable, or Netflix, etc)

Uninstalling social media apps from my iPhone (no more Snapchat, Tumblr, Instagram, etc).

Installing a Chrome extension to limit social-surfing to under 10 minutes per day.

Checking email in batches.

Daily meditation.

Daily goal-setting w/ social accountabiltiy via a “goals group”.

Finances:

Generally living as minimalist to keep financial & psychic ownership costs down.

Fully automating my finances all the way down to a weekly allowance (that hard-bounces) to prevent wasteful shopping.

Un-installing & deactivating on-demand/e-commerce *accounts* when consumption becomes subconscious or habitual.

Favoring predictability/automation of purchases over price-optimization.

Recommended Reading:

The Power of Habit

Willpower

Thinking Fast & Slow

Marshmallow Test

(originally posted on Medium)

While thousands of tourists in Split, Croatia were enjoying Mediterranean bliss, a progressive 1100 were gathered to strengthen the tech-ecosystem of Southeastern Europe, and 1 person, this author, ended up learning a life-lesson on the nature of time itself.

Shift Split just concluded its 4th annual conference last week, and I’m grateful & inspired to have been a part. I met with Shift’s founder, Ivan Burazin, while he was taking his company Codeanywhere through Techstars Boston. Following great conversation about startups, programming, and cloud trends, he invited me to speak at his conference. Excited as I was to accept, I had no idea what a home-town hero, hustler, and entrepreneur Ivan truly is. Shift began when Ivan returned from an Austrian conference wondering “why can’t we have one in Croatia?… why not?” After four years of doubling attendance, from all parts of the region and beyond, it’s amazing what a little vision can do.

But between startup pitches, speeches & beaches, sailing, wining, and dining, I ended up learning something more about time. Specifically:

Time well-spent is the time that moves wrong.

You’ve lost yourself in the “flow” of good work or great conversation and wonder where all the time went: time well-spent. When days feel as full as weeks, and you realize “that was only just yesterday!”, and time seems to have moved slower: time well-spent.

We know that habitual activity doesn’t register the same in our memory. You made that coffee, you dressed yourself, you commuted to work, but do you remember how specifically? Conciousness is perhaps a sort of shark, if it ceases to experience the novel, when life becomes habitual, it dies, or at least it goes into a sleep. Time passes, but nothing is noted. Days filled with empty-calorie, non-experiences.

After 6 days in Split, engaged in fascinating conversation, I write this wondering “where all that time went”. And even though I can distinctly remember the details & schedule of every day, I remember being baffled that I could have learned so much, experienced so much, met so many amazing people, “all in just this one day!” — time extremely well-spent.

The positives:

The device is very well designed, attractive, and with the right 'heft'

Amazon's Echo nails the living room voice recognition problem - it understands you immediately, at reasonable volumes, at reasonable distances, and responds perfectly promptly.

The voice synthesis is top-notch and very human.

Playing music, converting metrics, finding facts, adding items to your todo or shopping list seem to work very very well.

The negatives:

The types of questions you can ask it feel very limited as compared to Siri - lots of questions Siri can answer get punted as a "bing search to the echo [companion] app"

The companion app (at least on iOS) is a little wonky - it's partially a web-view, and it shows a tad too often

Alexa loves to talk about Prime - "Playing [Song] from Prime Music[tm]" - that's gonna get old quick

Advanced features require deeper Amazon echo-system buy-in ("Send a VoiceCast to your Amazon Fire Tablet!")

No ability (yet) to wire her into your other apps or home - it's Prime all the way

Minor grievance: It's Amazon! It's Echo! It's Alexa! Prime Music! Bing Search! She feels a little too brandy and not enough just "Alexa".

Quick thoughts:

Amazon has a very nice device that communicates surprisingly naturally - it's earned a spot in the living room. If Amazon isn't too dogmatic about forcing their Prime ecosystem NOW (as opposed to later) it feels as if this could be the point of control for a connected home.

Jeffy B: I encourage you to allow an ecosystem to build around the Echo, and use that to gain your foothold in a post-PC space you actually have a shot of being a major player in. 

Brad Pitt walks into a bar, and out with a super-model. Don't you want to know the cut of his suit?

MixPanel raises a $65MM inside-growth round at an $865MM valuation; awesome for them, their customers, and future customers - but with all the positive vibes around their pitch deck, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

Read our CEO @Suhail's new blog post & see the pitch deck that led to a $65M round and $865M valuation. http://t.co/dK3FBU5arm #funding

— Mixpanel (@mixpanel)

December 19, 2014

We'd like pay it forward to other startups who aren't sure how to get started as they go out to raise money for the first time.

Raising cash is done on some combination of team, vision, plan, and metrics. This deck is the quintessential growth deck - light on story, heavy on metrics, metrics that indicate great success and continued success. How does a deck for a $65MM growth raise for a 5 year old "profitable from the start" kind of company in anyway help entrepreneurs "raise for the first time"?

It doesn't.

But maybe we can understand the degree of success MixPanel must have to warrant such a great valuation?

When arguing about tech valuations, helpful that Mixpanel put its fundraising deck online. https://t.co/6dmy2KdrYL

— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans)

December 18, 2014

Except this is precisely unhelpful for arguing MixPanel's valuation because every juicy metric has been scrubbed out-  at best this means the raise was a "look at our metrics #micdrop" sort of raise - which is an awesome kind of raise to be sure- but useless for evaluating the valuation or educating others.

But maybe we missed something:

4/Mixpanel generates cash internally to fully fund continued expansion of its current business. Rather, Suhail has more ambitious goals.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca)

December 18, 2014

So the money isn't for growth it's for new products, and means the valuation is driven not just by metrics, but by plan & vision.... annnnnnd.... of which the deck is totally devoid (save two words: Sales & Finance). I'm 100% confident Suhail did a wonderful job explaining the broader opportunity - and likely had been doing so for his inside-investors in every board meeting leading up to this raise.

So there you have it, a calorie-free deck making the rounds that is neither instructive nor reflective of MixPanel's (very real, deserved) value by way of plans or metrics. The real lesson? Be Brad Pitt - not wrong, but not helpful. 

In the spirit of bettering us all (and not just ending my pet-rant), let me point folks to one fund raising story that is truly useful, and extend massive props to Sir Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz who shares his deck & raise in a wonderful way:

@BenedictEvans the redacted numbers aren't helpful, though. Wish they'd done this: http://t.co/nxqXknzBjx

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish)

Entrepreneurs who tell stories well can explain complex ideas, attract amazing talent, close customers, create partners, and raise financing with relative ease. Those that can’t struggle at every turn.

Sometimes, the story is just too hard to tell - it may indicate a bad opportunity, one that is inherently too complex. Usually though, I find entrepreneurs haven’t invested enough in their story and story-telling capability .

“The narrative” is two-fold: the form and the delivery. Nailing both is fundamental to your endeavor’s success.

Form & Minimally Viable Pitch

I’d like to present a “minimally viable pitch”, a skeleton-outline for young entrepreneurs, or those in need of a new perspective on the pitch:

Dear would-be Co-Founder, Investor, Partner, etc.,

(The Stage) Here’s a giant market.

(The Opportunity) If you could just solve pain-point X, there is massive value creation/shift.

(The Reveal) Guess what? New tech/insight Y allows us do this.

(The Plan) Here’s the plan, it’s defensible.

(The Team) We’re the right team.

(The Close) Let’s do this together.

Sincerely, Entrepreneur.

Example, Uber:

On-demand transportation (taxis, livery) is a big market ($10B+).

It’s massively frustrating catching a cab & dealing with shenanigans around payment.

Uniquely, the smartphone changes that - we match supply to demand, in real-time and location-aware, creating a complete (& amazing) end-to-end experience.

We’re aggressively recruiting supply (drivers) & creating a modern transportation marketplace that is too robust to compete against.

We’re Garret & Travis, and between StumbleUpon & Red Swoosh we’ve created $100M worth of shareholder value, so while we know what we’re doing… we’re shooting for something far, far bigger.

Invest in us, or miss out on the biggest innovation in transportation since GPS and/or the combustion engine.

Example, Google:

This internet thing is massive and growing as online content continues to explode.

Because of this, search engines will ultimately beat curated portals, and if you can ensure the highest quality search results, you own the starting point of the web.

Turns out, humans have already encoded hints on quality into the web itself: if you weight a page by incoming links, you can understand what content is authoritative. This is a massively hard computational problem, but we’ve got a scalable algorithm that can do handle it.

We combine these two insights, creating the best search engine, and building a defensible data advantage that grows over time.

We’re from Stanford’s Computer Science program, and preternaturally smart.

We need at least 100k!

Example, Kwicr (a Venrock investment):

Large telecom & CDN companies exist to meet our growing internet-performance expectations.

But mobile has radically transformed how & where we consume content: our existing infrastructure was built to achieve performance in a wired context. When data crosses the wireless “last-mile”, spotty connections and congested wireless networks destroy those performance gains, frustrating users.

By using advanced network coding techniques coupled with a mobile-aware protocol, Kwicr can drastically improve the experience.

Deployed as an MDN (Mobile Delivery Network) and accompanying drop-in SDK, we make it trivially easy for developers & publishers to integrate this advanced technology. It won’t be long until Kwicr performance is the new mobile standard.

We are a startup & telecom veterans, as well as expert mathematicians - we were born to do this.

Meet your users expectations & improve your product - install the Kwicr beta today!

Breaking it Down

The order of the pitch is up for grabs, so long as it flows properly. However, each piece of the venture narrative is critical, so let’s see what happens if you miss one:

The Stage - Many times, ‘the stage’ is implicit & understood. Do I need to explain how large and meaningful the market for mobile devices is? However, you can convince someone on every other point and fail to excite them.

“Your plan to disrupt the mouse-trap market is flawless.” (but do I really want to shed blood, sweat, tears, and megabucks, fighting for a chance at a slice of 100M market?)

Better to choose a bigger, bolder market if you want to grab the attention of talent (and even protect your downside to some extent - land on the clouds, and all that).

The Opportunity - Articulating opportunity is a two-fold test. First, it demonstrates you understand the mind of buyers, and second it shows you’ve found a chink in the collective armor of the current offerings/competition. If you can’t show there’s something you can differentiate on that buyers/users care about, you haven’t found value you can capture.

“Social networks are big business, we’re building one exactly like Facebook, fund us!” (uhhhh, I think not - I hear they did that already)

The Reveal - Skip the reveal, and while you may have identified something worth exploring, you’ve only managed to communicate a wistful hope for the future.

“People hate to diet & exercise; wouldn’t it be great if it were easier?” (I’m with you 100%, buddy)

The Reveal is the disruption - it’s the gun you’ve brought to an unsuspecting knife-fight. To be sure, you can build a solid business without a disruption - but the venture-backed startup ecosystem is tuned for rapidly growing, out-sized wins. Find your gun.

The Plan - You found a big market, you understand it, and you’ve brought a gun.. well done. Now, all you need to do is go and win - you do know how to win, right? At this point, you need to convince your listener that there is a plausible path to success: a path that others can’t follow once they catch on to what you’re doing, that now is the time to pursue it or it will pass by, and the listener is qualified to be a meaningful participant. It’s possible to identify a disruptive opportunity that is too risky, too capital intensive, poorly timed, or plain indefensible - all of which lower the expected value of your success and make your opportunity less interesting.

The Team - Are you the right team and can you really deliver on this? If so, make sure you’ve done yourself every favor communicating it. If there are talent gaps you need to fill, show your self-awareness and include closing key hires in the plan. Nothing makes the universe (or venture capitalists) cry like a wonderful plan coming from the wrong team. We can’t easily solve for that, and you’ll rarely hear that kind of feedback from all but the most abrasive individuals.

The Close - You’re a dreamer, a thinker, a strategist, and a doer. But can you close? Because, if you can’t, you won’t be able to recruit, you won’t be able to finance your venture, and you won’t be able to sell customers. When you pitch, you’re a presenter. When you close, you’re an entrepreneur.

Delivery

A well-structured pitch can flop or soar on the strength of the presenter. Are you amiable? Do you speak clearly & confidently? Do you build dramatic tension? Do you exude credibility? Do you report your vision… or inspire? While there are entire books on the topic of delivery (and I’d certainly encourage the consumption of them), I’ve always enjoyed watching the presentations of powerful leaders. Practice crafting your pitch, and practice delivering it, and be prepared to iterate it ruthlessly.

More than Fundraising

Beyond financing, the story helps recruit employees, promoters, and customers - and if you invest in the story early and, just as importantly, maintain it as you learn & grow, you’ll have an effective call-to arms and roadmap to guide your venture.

Last year I went from skeptic to admirer, and ultimately fervent user of Snapchat. 

Yesterday's app update brings disappearing text conversations, and real-time video chat to the platform - and while I've struggled a bit to get it to work (no doubt some initial scaling challenges) when it does it's quite fun.

Snapchat is deepening a very meaningful position for itself in the world of messaging. Namely they nail "the now."

At first, self-destructing images seem like a gimmick, but as I argue in my link above, it creates real psychological "oomph" to every message, no matter how inane, that focuses user attention squarely on something that feels like it's happening right now; do not blink, you will miss this.

That differentiator (or 'gimmick' if you can possibly still be skeptical) has allowed Snapchat to achieve the kind of scale and network that grants real staying power.

I've had a few months downtime since I left Boundless, and go figure, I decided to spend most of my time meeting and helping other entrepreneurs. You'd think I was hooked. Well, I am, and so I'm excited to share that I've joined Venrock as a Vice President in the Cambridge office, working locally with Mike Tyrrell, to help make more investments in the Boston ecosystem.

I first met team Venrock when they invested in our Series A at Boundless; Mike joined our board, and it's been great getting to know him over the past year or so -  I jokingly called him the "rock": Mike is a stable, no non-sense, straight-shooter with deep experience, so when he offered me the opportunity to join team Venrock I considered it seriously. After thinking about the role, and meeting the rest of the investment team, I was blown away by the degree of aggregated-smarts - and totally convinced.

Ultimately, I love people, ideas, technology and learning - so I can't think of a better way to combine my passions than a job that enables me to meet smart entrepreneurs, learn about the their big ideas & novel technology, with the added bonus that perhaps Venrock can help them realize their vision for change. Win/win/win... so:

Dear Boston Entrepreneurs,

     I'm really looking forward to working with you! If nothing else, I pride myself on being approachable and helpful. Let's think big, and do great things together! 

Nothing unlocks your inner hacker like some friendly competition between friends. So when friend Brian Balfour threw down a Dots gauntlet with a high score of 479 I knew I had to end him. And not just him, but I wanted to shame ALL Dots competitors.

The first obvious strategy for dots is to only focus your efforts on forming squares, which eliminate all dots of the same color from the board, and tend to form new squares. That combined with smart use of the shrinker power-up puts you in a good place to strike around 350 to 400 consistently. (Yes, you'll most definitely have to purchase dots to be competitive)

The next step is to ruthlessly restart games until the starting board presents a good square or two, and then coldly abandon games where lady-luck doesn’t keep the chains flowing. When lady-luck runs out in an otherwise excellent game, that's when you deploy your 'expander' power-up. Finally, executing your games carefully is also immensely easier on an iPad. Now you can approach 500, but with considerable time investment.

So how was I able to score 928?

Simple, I cheated.

As it turns out, pausing and un-pausing (by pressing the timer in the upper left) the game doesn’t effect the clock properly. In fact, you’re given ‘free time’ to examine the state of the board while it slides in and out. With epilepsy-inducing rapid fire of pause/un-pause, you remove all time spent thinking from counting against the clock, and only your deliberate hand motions to execute your choices count against you.

However, before you get your hopes of public glory too high, the smart folks at Betaworks (owner of Dots) recently (& thankfully!) became aware of this cheat and are now filtering out scores server-side that were achieved this way - expect more changes to the leader-board. (And what a shame, my mother would have been so proud)

Still, you can tweet & text your outsized score directly to friends if you're looking to upset them into pursuing some sisyphean pursuit.

Thanks, and until next 'hack'.

It's hard to imagine a time more intense or enjoyable than the last few years I've spent building Boundless with Ariel & team. We took a bold idea, partnered with bold investors, had the good fortune to assemble one of the smartest teams in Boston, and willed into existence an important and transformative education company - one that will continue to shape the landscape for a very long-time. And we’re on a tear, Boundless is now used by students at over half of US colleges. Our open textbooks were recently released under Creative Commons open licenses, and since then have helped over half a million people! 

There is a great irony in Boundless accomplishing so much so quickly. We have put in place an incredible team that is executing down our ambitious multi-year roadmap, and for the experimental & techie startup-er that is my core, this presents a challenge: what do you do when you've carefully & consistently hired amazing people who can really lead and scale each facet of the organization?

In this particular circumstance, and after careful consideration, I've decided to step down as CTO and my day-to-day work. I leave engineering running as it has already been for the last year: in the incredibly capable hands of our VP Engineering, Matt Hodgson. While I’ll certainly miss being a part of the daily energy in the office, I will continue to assist and advise the company strategically as both a member of the board, and as a passionate advocate for our team & our mission to dramatically improve the state of higher education in the US - there’s much to be done! 

This Intelligently class, run by Boundless's own Nick Ducoff, should not be missed. Nick is an incredible manager/operator/entrepreneur, and has taught us tons - building out a killer team, getting everyone on the same page, and executing down complex projects without missing a heartbeat, paradoxically hitting outrageous goals with reliable predictability. A great deal of his success comes down to his team management process - set goals, get aligned, be humane, and run like hell.

Boundless Engineering just cooked up an awesome internal change-log dashboard for the company. 

Gave a quick in office-presentation on how students should think about getting a job at a startup. Hope some of you find it useful! 

I have a theory: "He who controls the whiteboard controls the conversation." There's a certain level of implied command when you're standing in front of the room putting your ideas into writing, or real-time editing the thoughts of others (no matter how subtlety)

If you're an introvert, it may be extremely hard to combat this extrovert-controlled reality.

At Boundless, we do our best to make sure everyone is a capable "whiteboard warrior", allowing the best ideas to surface. The best way to ensure such equality, is by hiring folks who are comfortable communicators - one of the reasons we screen all candidates by asking them to give a full-team presentation. Can they hold the companies attention and make a point?

When I get to know someone, I make it a point to identify their superpower: what's the one thing they truly excel at? And once you know someone's singular, superlative-strength, great things can happen! Over the past few years, I've met and worked with some exceptional people. I'd like to share a few super-hero friends/colleagues & their powers with you:

Ariel Diaz: Vision

Ariel has strong, detailed, and vivid visions of how the world ought to be. This gives him exceptional perspective on what can-be, should-be, and what it will take to get there.

Brian Balfour: Insight

Brian has the uncanny ability to both actively and passively ingest large amounts of data, reflect privately for a while, and then drop some serious insight bombs that are truly mind-blowing.

Christopher O'Donnell: Product

Is there someone in Boston who is the spiritual successor to Steve Jobs? Tough to say, but if you asked me to cast my vote, I'd hand it too happily to Christopher. His no-BS, this-is-exactly-what-we-need-to attitude makes him a phenomenal product person

Patrick Campbell: Execution

The youngest in this list, Patrick's ability to STFU and GSD is inspiring. This guy just cranks, unabashedly and without hesitation. 

Chris Keller: Networking

Ever wonder how to network to someone who is important to you? Chances are Chris Keller already knows them, hang/vacations with them, and is more than ready to make a friendly intro; he's the best startup-connector I know.

Nick Ducoff: Management

TIme and time again, Nick has show the team at Boundless what exceptional management is truly about: recruiting, nurturing, planning & delivering. I can't imagine building our company without him.

Matt Hodgson: Making Stuff

Matt can build anything, and build it well. He sees past the nuance, past the unimportant, and cuts straight to the core of how software should be made. This allows him to skip to the chase on construction, and lead a team to conquering the heart of a problem, producing beautiful results along the way.

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