How to Change the World

Christmas Gift Idea

Thankfully, Craig M. and Carla D. pointed out Kiva gift certificates. Your recipient can go online and select an entrepreneur to support. When the loan is repaid, the process starts again. What a great idea for Christmas gifts.

The Mother of Name Change Reports

Continuing on the theme of naming companies, you should read “Company Naming Changes 2006” by Strategic Name Development. 1,900 name changes occurred last year. The company has identified nine categories of name changes:

1. Dog Eat Dog (34%)
   
2. Too Big or Too Little (29%)
   
3. Build on the Brand (Building on a Strong Brand) (5%)
   
4. Quick Makeover (14%)
   
5. U-Turn (8%)
   
6. User-Friendly Naming (4%)
   
7. Buying Into the Club (3%)
   
8. Rebuild, Restructure and Rename (2%)
   
9. Spinning Off Into The Unknown (1%)

My favorite is “Center for Minority Educational Affairs” becoming “Center for Multicultural Equity and Access.” Three is a lot to learn from this report if you’re changing your company’s name and undertaking rebranding.

The Six Lessons of Kiva

Stanford Magazine has a terrific article about Kiva called “Small Change, Big Payoff” by Cynthia Haven. This is the story of how Matt and Jessica Jackely Flannery created it to enable people to make micro loans to entrepreneurs around the world.

The results are awesome: more than 123,000 people have loaned more than $12.4 million to 18,000 entrepreneurs. In fact, there so many lenders that there’s are individual limits so that everyone can make a loan. The process involves reading a short profile about each entrepreneur and then deciding which to fund. From beginning to end, you can make a loan in under five minutes if you’re a slow typist. Lenders do not earn interest though the micro-finance organizations that helped Kiva find the entrepreneur does. Entrepreneurs pay 99.67 percent of the loans.

Here are some lessons that any entrepreneur can learn from the Kiva phenomenon:

1. Create meaningful partnerships. Most entrepreneurs create partnerships to impress investors, journalists, customers, and parents. Hence, most partnership as bull shiitake. The best test of a partnership is whether its existence requires that you change numbers in a spreadsheet. No changes = b.s. partnership. In the case of Kiva, it has sixty seven partnerships with micro-finance organizations. It is these organizations that provide the “leads” for lenders to fund.

   Also, Kiva has partnerships with PayPal (free transactions), Google (free traffic) as well as with Yahoo!, Micorosft, MySpace, and YouTube. As you can imagine, these kinds of partnerships do make you reboot Excel.

2. Catalyze and support evangelism. Like Apple, Harley-Davidson, and Tivo, evangelism starts with a great product, and Kiva has one. When you have a great product, then evangelists will appear, and Kiva has 250 active volunteers—what I would label “evangelists.” Kiva has really institutionalized evangelism if you ask me.

3. Find a business model. You’d be surprised how many people wave their hands or avoid the topic of business model completely. Kiva’s model is a minimum $2.50 voluntary fee that lenders pay when checking out their “shopping cart.” If I understand this right: lenders receive no interest and pay a voluntary fee to Kiva in order to loan money. And you thought Google had a great business model—wow, as Wayne and Garth said, “We’re not worthy.”

4. “Bank” on unproven people. What would the ideal background be of the founder of Kiva? Investment banker from Goldman, Sachs? Vice president of the World Bank? Vice president of the Peace Corp? Vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation? Partner at McKinsey? How about temporary administrative assistant at the Stanford Business School? Because that’s how Jessica started her quest. The spark that lit the fire was a speech by Muhammed Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

5. Focus on free marketing. Kiva launched in 2005 with seven businesses in Uganda. The first “marketing” was sending out an email to the wedding invitation list of Jessica and Matt. All seven businesses were funded in a weekend. Then the Daily Kos picked up their story from a hacked together press release. Then PBS’s Frontline covered the organization and loan volume went from $3,000 to $30,000 over night. No road show. No Demo. No TechCrunch 40.

6. Ignore the naysayers. The Flannerys got a lot of advice that you can’t send money around the Internet without government approval; that Kiva couldn’t scale beyond a few African villages; that a non-profit couldn’t offer an investment product; and that it would violate SEC regulations as well as the Patriot Act. Besides this, Kiva was a no-brainer. :-)

Yup, there’s a lot any entrepreneur can learn from the Kiva story. More importantly, why don’t you go to its web site and make a loan? You could co-invest with me in Chhorn Yan, mother of six in Cambodia, who needs capital to expand her home-based, offline grocery store. One way to look at this is we could fund one Webvan or 800,000 Chhorn Yans.

How to Name a Name

I enjoy the process of coming up with a name for a company or product, and the fact that so many domains are taken makes it more challenging and enjoyable. (My latest, greatest is Muchobene.) Halfagain Marketing posted an article called “What’s my name?” which is a very useful list of naming tips. For example, it mentions two online tools that I had never heard of: More Words and Word Lab Tools.

I’ve covered naming three times in the past (almost as many times as Truemors!) in case you’re interested: The Name Game, Trademark Tips for Your Web App, and A Study of the Pros and Cons of Company Names. By the way, I wish someone would create—hopefully it’s available already, and I don’t know about it—a site where I could enter a word in English and simultaneously get the translation in several languages like Japanese, Hawaiian, Hebrew, French, German, Spanish, and Latin. This would be very useful for coming up with names.

Update: Michael Kreppein pointed out (thanks!) that Dictionary.com provides multiple translations at the bottom of a word’s page—I seldom scroll down that far, so I didn’t remember this. Still need Hawaiian and Japanese in English characters, though.

23andme Party

After a very short while, hearing about the nth social-media, video-sharing, or user-generated-content startup gets boring. After all, you can only listen to so many “unique” ideas if you know what I mean. Luckily, once a year or so, I hear about a company that is truly different, and tonight I attended the friends and family “spit party” of one such company: 23andme.

Never attended a spit party? Neither had I. Here are a few photos from the event.

Clever t-shirt slogan although it probably scares the Dickens out of some people to provide their DNA.

Like any good Silicon Valley party, computers were a focal point. The 23andme process starts with placing an order on a computer. It costs about $999, but party attendees got a discount.

Then you went into the “spit room.” Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell were there providing their spit, but their handlers wouldn’t let me take a picture. I found this ironical: Giving DNA was okay but not a picture. I’m pretty sure Herb Brooks wouldn’t have minded.

This is the “spit kit.” The company should call it iSpit and hope that Apple doesn’t sue them.

Then a kind man who didn’t have a handler allowed me to take a picture of him spitting. It would be just my luck that he’s a Nobel Prize winner. I do wonder how the company will do in Singapore where spitting in public is illegal.

You know what they say: “There’s nothing like a good spit at the end of the day.”

These are the co-founders of the company: Linda Avey (left) and Anne Wojcicki (right). Esther Dyson is also a director plus there are a boatload of PhDs and MDs who are collaborators and advisors. And my buddy Mia.

Here’s what the company does: You sign up for the exam via the 23andme’s website. When you receive your “spit kit,” you do your thing and send it back to 23andme. Then 23andme extracts your DNA, chops it up, copies it, and washes it over the Illumina HumanHap550+ BeadChip (Illumina could use some help naming its products). This chip reads 550,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) plus another 30,000 SNPs in a custom-designed set.

The end result is a determination of your genotype. Then you can begin your “personal journey of genetic discovery” which means you learn about your origin and explore the implications of your genotype. You can also “connect genetically with friends, family, and others across the globe.” (I think this marketing-speak for “swap spit,” and I hope this is as close to “social networking” as the company gets.)

I suppose the $1,000 question is whether I took the test. The answer is that I didn’t, and here’s why: If the test reveals that I’m Canadian and not Japanese, then I cannot blame my genetic makeup for my lack of hockey ability. :-)

I hope the company does well. Conservatively speaking, if it gets just 1% of the spit in the world, it will be huge.

Amazon Announced Kindle

Today Amazon announced its foray into selling hardware with a data service. The device is called “Kindle,” and it represents a daring move for an “online bookstore.” You’re going to see two kinds of reviews: bad ones from people who haven’t used it and good ones from people who have. It’s that kind of product—plus Jeff Bezos’s reality-distortion field isn’t as large as Steve Jobs’s. I have used it and if someone gave me a choice of receiving an iPhone or a Kindle, I’d pick the Kindle. Here are the reasons I like it so much:

• No computer required. Hooking up to, or synching with, a computer in any manner isn’t required. From my perspective, the ease-of-use of Bluetooth is a myth, and half the time a USB connection doesn’t work. Frankly, docking is for losers. You don’t even need to own a computer to use a Kindle. For light computer users (or for a heavy computer user on vacation), a Kindle can replace a laptop.

• Content flows. Content is pushed to you via the EVDO wireless network. (This is the data network that’s about four times faster than the one used on an iPhone.) Think of Kindle as a Blackberry for blogs, newspapers, and magazines. You get up in the morning, and all the content you want to read is there (see below). You might be thinking there’s a catch: “I’ll have to pay a monthly subscription for EVDO,” but it’s not true. The $400 includes permanent access and unlike WiFi connectivity, you don’t have to find a hotspot and sign in using a WiFi account.

• Content is king. Amazon has done a great job of lining up content from newspapers such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Le Monde; magazines such as Forbes, Fortune, Time, and Atlantic Monthly (but sadly, not Hockey News yet); and blogs such as TechCrunch, Scobleizer, Huffington Post, BoingBoing, Truemors (!), and Motley Fool. You have to pay for subscriptions, but you will not get on an airplane with nothing to read again. If you’re like me and load up on reading material before a flight, a Kindle (10.3 ounces) will save you several pounds of newspapers and magazines. Amazon has essentially create the “iTunes of documents” if you will.

• Battery life is good. Considering that content is always being pushed to it, I found that battery life was good—going a couple of days without charging. If I were more judicious and turned off wireless at night, it would have lasted much longer but that defeats the purpose of push technology. If wireless is turned off all the time, it will go about a week on a charge. And it charges up very quickly: about two hours. Oh yeah, the battery is replaceable—what a concept.

• The screen is perfectly readable. I was skeptical at first, but I had no issue with reading the pocket-book size screen, and I’m an old man who needs reading glasses. It’s not color, but I’d rather have a long battery life than color. Plus, most physical newspapers aren’t in color anyway. Some people will complain about how reading a book is easier than reading a screen, but some people complain about everything.

• There’s a real QWERTY keyboard. Call me old-fashioned but I like to feel keys go up and down as I type. If Amazon would include a basic email client, life would be really good. Even a Twitter client like Snitter would do the trick. But Amazon’s EVDO expenses might go through the ceiling if people used Kindles as laptops.

Will it replace printed books? Many people are going to opine about whether Kindle can replace a good ole printed book (and Amazon seems very focused on this topic too). Most will conclude that it won’t because of cost, requirement to recharge, dropability, and dunkability (ie, in water), and in these ways it won’t. But this is mostly true for novels and any book that you’d read once and not again. However, for reference books, Kindle kicks butt. For example, I would love to have the Chicago Manual of Style on Kindle, so I can search for rules in a much better way than referring to an index. You can roll your own by sending documents to your account, and they will appear on your Kindle.

There are only two things that I didn’t like about the Kindle. First, the bottom corners of the frame feel like they will poke holes in your palms. There is a carrying case, but reading shouldn’t be a religious experience. Second, there isn’t a page back button for your right hand. This is bad feng shui because there is one for your left hand.

Summary: If you want something that requires very little attention that will deliver your favorite newspapers, magazine, and blogs, you should definitely check out Kindle. Having reference books and documents handy is also quite valuable. Reading electronic versions of novels is cream. If nothing else, you have to admire Amazon for trying things that are as interesting as Kindle, S3, and Mechanical Turk.

Best Truemors Posting Yet

IMHO, this is the best truemor posted yet. It certainly is one way to change the world by fostering pride and empowerment.

Personal Branding MP3s Now Available

The recordings of the “A Brand You World - 2007 Global Telesummit” are now online as MP3s and iTunes Podcasts. It includes people like Jason Alba, Richard Bolles, and Andy Sernovitz. If you want to learn how to market yourself, check them out.

In Search of Inexperience

TechCrunch published a great guest post by Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin, called “Entrepreneur 2.0.” It inspired me to piggyback on his idea that investing in “serial entrepeneurs” who have already been successful might not be all that it’s cracked up to be and write this post.

Both our posts run counter to the theory that many entrepreneurs, wealthy from their previous smashing success but restless and too young to die (or become venture capitalists, which is roughly the same thing) are the best bets for the next big thing.

Superficially, it’s hard to fault this ”back the proven entrepreneur“ theory. For one thing, from a venture capitalist’s point of view, if you fund a serial entrepreneur and she succeeds, you “knew” that she was proven. If she fails, at least you backed someone for a good reason—that is, she was proven—so your limited partners shouldn’t get too bent out of shape.

That’s a lot better than backing a first-time entrepreneur who fails—then you are just stupid. (Also, if you back a first-time entrepeneur, and she’s successful, you take the credit: “It’s because of my hands-on coaching and guidance.”) But, just as Glenn wrote, if you think about it, great, world-changing companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Apple, eBay, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and YouTube were zero for three according to the official venture-capitalist spec sheet: Proven team, proven technology, and proven business model.

Hence, I would like to declare my support for Glenn’s perspective and help him make the case that second-time entrepreneurs are not necessarily the be-alls and end-alls.

• Serial entrepreneurs try to prove that their first success wasn’t a fluke. Rather than starting from the basis of technology (“isn’t this cool?”) or customers (“there must be a better way”), the reason for existence is “I’m going to prove that I’m talented.” This is a bull shiitake reason for starting company compared to solving people’s problems or changing the world.

• Serial entrepreneurs cannot distinguish between causation and correlation. The root cause of earlier success may have simply been blind, dumb luck, but few people realize this and even fewer will admit. Thus, they have the hollow arrogance of people who just got lucky instead of people who have been truly tested, and arrogance is a bad thing in entrepreneurs.

• Serial entrepreneurs are likely to use the same methods again. How can you fault them for using the same methods that made the successful the first time? For example, if they built a high-end computer the first time, they build a high-end computer the NeXt time. If they used dealers the first time, they use dealers the second time. If they gave everything away to get eyeballs and sold the company to a bigger, dumber, richer company, they try try that “business model again.”

• Serial entrepreneurs don’t (or can’t) work as hard. When you have a 5,000 square foot house, a second house in Montana, a car made by a company whose name ends in “i,” a spouse, and kids, attitudes change. Indeed, attitudes should change or people never grow up. However, it’s one thing to work to survive and another to work for fulfillment. They can say they’re just as hungry this time, but the point is that no one had to ask if they were hungry the first time.

• Serial entrepreneurs don’t get smacked around enough. Life is good as a serial entrepreneur: they walk in, tell people that their last company was sold for a bazillion dollars, and now they’re starting another one, and it’s a privilege and honor to invest. Who’s going to poke holes in their strategy when Sequioia, Kleiner Perkins, et al are issuing term sheets and ever lesser venture capitalist is sucking up? No one. And that’s too bad because they won’t get anyone checking their sanity.

• Serial entrepreneurs fill new, unfamiliar roles in their next companies. For example, in the first company the person was an engineer who became the vice-president of engineering who became the CTO. Just because you were good at writing designing chips doesn’t mean you’re CEO material in your next fabulous fabless chip company. As Glenn says in his post, “This means that what I used to be really good at — designing software — I don’t do as much of anymore, and what I never had to learn how to do — manage people – I now do all the time.”

• Serial entrepreneurs hire their buddies who were with them the first time. Thus, the entire founding team suffers from all the problems listed above. People who don’t know what they don’t know are few and far between, but a startup needs this kind of people to push the boundaries of what’s possible in what ways. Ignorance is not only bliss; it’s also empowering.

I once heard Mike Moritz of Sequoia explain what kind of entrepreneurs he wanted to invest in. I’m paraphrasing: “Guys under thirty who are building a product that they themselves want to use.” Amen, baby! I vote for two guys or gals in a garage who are an unproven team, unproven technology, and unproven market.

The Ten Commandments of Fake Steve Jobs

All hail Carleen Hawn because she has written a fabulously funny analysis of the management style of (Fake) Steve Jobs. It’s called the “Ten Commandments of Fake Steve Jobs”

1. Never let people know where they stand.

2. You don’t have to hire the best people.

3. Only promote stupid people.

4. Never tell people what is expected of them.

5. A manager should be inconsistent and unpredictable.

6. No praise. Ever.

7. Keep people’s spirits broken.

8. Throw tantrums.

9. Don’t speak to employees in elevators.

10. Start with the ad campaign.

I haven’t provided all the text that goes with each commandment so that you have to click through and read the whole posting in all its glory. Trust me, it’s worth it.