StubHub Rocks
Brad put up a post last night about how tight StubHub is (see “StubHub Seriously Has Its Act Together“). I promised a post on my rockin’ StubHub experience buying tickets to Game 4 of the NLCS in “Jumping on the bandwagon” so here goes: The thing about specializing in a specific vertical is that if you get it right, the experience is worlds better than your generalist competitors. When StubHub was started conventional wisdom suggested that eBay had a lock on all things auction. But it turns out that there are plenty of very specific niches for which the eBay one-auction-fits-all model falls short. Ticket sales is clearly one of them. If you’ve ever tried to buy or sell tickets on an eBay auction you know exactly what I mean. Tickets to an event are a highly specialized good – every ticket is not the same (each seat is different and each venue is unique in its seat layout), events are time specific (i.e., they occur at a very specific date and time before which the ticket is valuable and after which the ticket has zero value), there are major logistical challenges with shipping around tickets and ensuring they get where the are supposed to get when they are supposed to get there, and there are significant challenges in dealing with last-minute purchases (transferring the ticket from a buyer to a seller hours or minutes before an event). …
October 23, 2007· 3 min read
“Everything just works”
On a recent trip to Chicago I had the chance to visit Dick Costolo, former CEO of FeedBurner and now proud employee of Google. Brad and I took Dick out to a congratulatory dinner. Before we went out Dick gave us a tour of Googleplex Chicago. As we walked around the impressively decked out office (200 inch screen in the presentation room? Wow!) he told us how smoothly the operations ran at Google. “Everything just works” he said, demonstrating the video conferencing system. On top of that, the systems in the Chicago office are exactly the same as the systems in every other office. Learn how to do something in Chicago and you know how to do it in Palo Alto, Boston or Munich. Most of the offices even have the same look and feel. While it may be a bit formulaic, it’s productive. And clearly Google is all about maximizing the productivity of its staff. That . . . as well as the fact that they actually had a working video conferencing system that required no IT staff to actually set up a video feed . . . is pretty impressive. …
October 18, 2007· 1 min read
Peripheral vision
One of the great challenges of business in general and smaller, fast growing businesses in particular is figuring out the balance between near term focus and long term vision. While all companies become slaves to the calendar (striving for quarterly sales targets, specific product release dates, etc.) too many never look up to see where they are really headed. I’m not talking about making sure you have the latest IDC report on your industry on your bedstand, I’m talking about having a meaningful understanding of your business, you competitors and spending real time focusing on how and where you are going to take your company. …
June 19, 2007· 2 min read
Patent sanity
Brad has a nice series running on patents which I’ve enjoyed a lot (I think the existing patent system is completely hosed, totally ineffective and open to blatant abuses of power – see this post from Jason for the perfect example). Well today, there’s a glimmer of hope that change may be on the way as the administration and it’s head patent policeman Jon Dudas announced the intent (note the gap between intent and action, but at least it’s a first step) to reform the patent system. While I generally like the idea of requiring patent filers to include more information on why their invention is ‘novel’ the gem for me in today’s announcement is the idea of opening up patents to more of a peer review. What a novel idea – have people who are actually in a particular field help determine whether an idea is truly novel and therefore patentable. In a system where the average patent is looked at by an examiner for about 7 hours before being approved (and where the default behavior seems to be “assume this is novel until proven definitively otherwise) far too many patents which are both obvious and not particularly original are being issued. …
June 6, 2007· 2 min read
$1
Would you work for $1? Here’s a few people who do.
May 10, 2007· 1 min read
Delivering bad news
Let’s say you have some bad news to deliver to your board/investors. For example, you lost a huge customer or your software has a major bug that’s going to set you back 6 months or your CFO just got arrested for cheating on his taxes, etc. Should you: Take out an advertisement in the Journal announcing this and then send out a note to your board with a link Rent one of those sign trucks and have it drive by your investors offices repeatedly Bury it deep inside a board book and hope no one notices it Don’t say anything – your investors/board are too involved in your business already and ask way too many questions as it is None of the above This won’t come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog, but my suggestion (strong preference, actually) is that the companies I work with be direct about news – good and bad. If you’re just before a board meeting, include the news in your CEO letter that prefaces the board material (see my post on running better board meetings for more detail). If you’re not, either call your board directly or send an email around updating everyone. Better yet – do both. …
February 13, 2007· 2 min read
Clarity
I was on a call recently where I had to ask someone 4 times to repeat what they were saying using more exact terms. It’s a major pet peeve of mine and so prevalent I’m losing my ability to be nice about it. Perhaps it’s a result of being a kinder, gentler society or maybe it’s just because we’ve all sat through too many PowerPoint presentations or maybe we’re all testing our political-speak skills, but whatever it is the result is the absolutely maddening trend of people not saying directly what they mean and forcing the rest of us to play 20 questions to tease it out of them. …
February 3, 2007· 1 min read
When you know it’s not right, it isn’t
_When you know it’s not right, it isn’t. _ A fellow board member said this to me the other day and I wrote it down as something I wanted to remind myself of every once in a while. She was referring to the human tendency to act slowly in the face of clear evidence and in particular to venture capitalists’ reluctance to be decisive. A good thought to ponder.
January 26, 2007· 1 min read
Quote of the day
“Successful people spend the majority of their time on major things. Unsuccessful people spend the majority of their time on minor things.” Relayed to me by my good friend Chris, who is dutifully following this advice…
October 3, 2006· 1 min read
Fire Fast
My last post generated a bit of harsh comment (a few on the site, but many more in private e-mail and on a few other sites that picked up the theme). Apparently I came off as pretty insensitive (perhaps ‘jerk’ would be an appropriate description) in how I described my approach to some of the “can I get 30 minutes of your time?” meetings that I seem to have a difficult time saying no to (note to commenters: I do see value in the meetings and as a general rule spending time getting to know as many people as possible. Hey – at least I TAKE the meetings . . .). Trying to roll with that theme, I’ve been thinking recently about how companies get rid of non-performers. I have a lot of visibility into the performance of most of the executive teams of the companies I work with and some visibility down the ranks. One thing I’ve observed over and over and over again is that companies tend not to fire fast enough. I understand that US employment law can make this difficult (I am NOT giving legal advice here, so don’t take this as such in any way shape or form), but regardless, companies tend to hold on to people too long. This is true both in terms of mass lay-offs and more disturbingly in the case of non-performers. This is true almost 100% of the time and often in the face of extraordinarily clear evidence that supports the decision to ask someone to leave. …
July 27, 2006· 2 min read