#george anders

Fiona Glenanne (Gabrielle Anwar), Jesse Porter (Coby Bell) & George Anders (Simon Kassianides)

Throughout the major U.S. tech hubs, whether Silicon Valley or Seattle, Boston or Austin, Tex., software companies are discovering that liberal arts thinking makes them stronger. Engineers may still command the biggest salaries, but at disruptive juggernauts such as Facebook and Uber, the war for talent has moved to nontechnical jobs, particularly sales and marketing. The more that audacious coders dream of changing the world, the more they need to fill their companies with social alchemists who can connect with customers–and make progress seem pleasant. [Forbes.com]

"Episode 26: What Tech Companies Should Consider When Hiring New Blood - Edtech Recap 8/2" by EdSurge On Air

Put away your black funeral suit, Eric Jackson – Google and Facebook are going to outlast both of us! My FORBES blogging colleague, Eric Jackson, has created quite a stir this week with a post asserting that current Web giants, notably Google and Facebook, could “completely disappear in the next five years.” Why? Eric’s alarmed by the big guys’ supposed stumbles in mastering the brave new world of the mobile smartphone. In Eric’s view, everything that Google and Facebook are good at – search, social, etc. – is about to succumb to the mobile revolution. As he sees it, the incumbents are trapped by their own size and inertia. They can’t get the hang of this latest tech transformation; they will succumb to the liability of obsolescence and perish in some digital tar pit. Unfortunately, Eric is holding his Map of the Future upside down, which has led him to march 180 degrees off course.  Take a closer look at the two starting points of his analysis. Then flip them around so they better describe what lies ahead. Specifically: * The rise of mobile isn’t a menace to the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon. It’s potentially the biggest windfall of their lives, because making money in mobile will be all about building a revolutionary new payments system. Banking in 20 years will be profoundly different from what it is today, and the companies that Eric decries are very likely to be the ones who win the most. * When disruptive innovation comes along, the big winners needn’t be the first movers. As economist David Teece explained in his landmark 1986 paper, “Profiting From Technological Innovation,” being able to win at marketing, distribution, manufacturing, customer support and other arenas often proves to be vastly more important to eventual business success than coming up with the big idea in the first place. Need proof? As Teece observes, RC Cola invented the first diet soda. RC Cola also was the first to put soda in a can. Does anyone drink RC Cola today? Not really. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo grabbed hold of that market and never let go. They were so much better at all the complementary skills such as distribution and marketing that they could afford to be a little late getting to the action. They were going to win anyway. Need another example? Who brought the first hand-held calculator to market? It wasn’t Hewlett-Packard or Texas Instruments, even though both made fortunes from their products. It was Bowmar Instruments, a company whose inventions won it a place in museums but not much else. Getting excited about a mobile pioneer such as Instagram is a bit like saluting RC Cola or Bowmar. Breakthrough ideas do have value, and America needs those pioneers. But much of the time, the big winners are the larger companies with muscle: fast followers who turn those ideas into products that work for hundreds of millions of customers. Facebook and Google are so big and so well-heeled that they can snap up dozens of interesting little companies with mobile-related offerings that look intriguing.  Some of those acquisitions will work; some won’t, but the ability of big companies to buy innovation from outside – and then connect it to an existing dynamo of sales and distribution — is very well established. To see what size and incumbency alone can accomplish in the tech sector, look at Microsoft. Leaving aside the Xbox, it’s been a long time since big, hulking Microsoft produced something that wowed the world. Yet Microsoft keeps making billions on its installed base. It keeps iterating catch-up products like its Bing search engine, until they become reasonably competitive. It sustains a market cap north of $200 billion. So the worst-case scenario for Google and Facebook is to become their generation’s equivalent of Microsoft. Brand sizzle would diminish. Price-earnings ratios would compress. Yet they would hardly be headed for oblivion. Even at half its current margins, Google’s search-and-targeted-ads combo would be one of the most valuable business products on the planet. Facebook’s 900 million users have already shown that they can’t quit the addictive service, no matter how hard they try. But the prospects of a mobile payments revolution make even that Microsoft-redux scenario far too gloomy. At a financial conference in Arizona last week, I was chatting with executives about a quiet transformation in our own spending habits. We still carry cash in our wallets – but it may sit there for weeks. The velocity of paper money is slowing to a trickle. Swiping plastic everywhere is a halfway stop toward an even-better way of handling everyday payments. Mobile phones are surely the centerpiece of the answer, and regardless of how many small companies create interesting building blocks for this new world, control is likely to end up in the hands of a half-dozen or so much larger players. They will be the ones with the distribution, security and other complementary assets needed to make mobile money work. Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider lays out an interesting case today for why Facebook could become a major player in this arena. Google already has its Android operating system, and its ambitions clearly aren’t over. Amazon is widely rumored to be working on its own phone, for possible launch by year-end. All these companies have unimaginably large numbers of registered users already in their fold. It’s easy to imagine ways they could build a financial payments system beyond anything that what Citigroup or Bank of America have brought us to date. Keep betting on mobile, Eric. Just remember that today’s Web leaders are uniquely well positioned to extend their edge in the years to come.

The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else

D’Angelo proposed that Facebook publish gnarly programming challenges and invite engineers anywhere to solve them. These wouldn’t be the superficial brainteasers that some companies used, like estimating the number of piano tuners in Chicago. Instead, Facebook’s website would issue multi-hour tests of coding prowess. With a bit of wit, these puzzles would find and deliver the right kind of people to the California startup.