Roger von Oech is the author a classic book about innovation called A Whack on the Side of the Head. Believe it or not, this is the twenty-fifth anniversay of the book. When I was young(er), this book was the rage for the personal-computer generation in Silicon Valley. Join me on Sun's site for an interview of Roger. In it he discusses twenty-five years of innovation and provides advice to today's newfangled Web 2.0 companies. Click here for the interview.
PARC was the center of the universe for the development of many personal computer and Internet technologies. For example: Ethernet, laser printing, personal computer (Alto), graphical user interface, and object-oriented programming. Maybe “center of the universe” is an exageration, but at the very least, it’s one of the main trees as you can see by downloading this diagram or looking at this timeline. I recently got a tour of the company, and these are my photos.
The architect designed the outside of the building to blend into the foothills because Palo Alto residents didn’t want see buildings.
There are many large patios for employees to hang out on.
A solar connector that PARC researchers designed.
This is the “typical” desk of a PARC researcher: six monitors, three for a Macintosh and three for a Windows machine.
The “typical” keyboard of PARC researcher.
This little patch of orange paint is the original color of the walls. The theory was that orange fosters innovative thinking.
Almost every office has a window. There are also several garden areas like this one to provide a Zen-ish atmosphere.
This is the robotics lab.
I had the impression that PARC was all about software and design, but there’s a lot of power tools for fabrication.
This is the PARC gym which includes an on-site nurse.
This is the cafeteria.
Herman Miller furniture, pre Dotcom days.
The friendly staff of the corporate libary.
Looking for any of my books. They told me they were checked out. :-)
The library did have Founders at Work—because it wasn’t checked out. :-)
The first Kindle?
The first labtop?
The first PDA?
The first iPod?
The first LAN?
This is what it looks like to speak at PARC.
Now that you’re a nanotechnology expert, here’s the next trend to study: Free. This is a video of Chris Anderson discussing his next book. Chris is the editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail. Kudos to whoever at Nokia decided to put this keynote online for the rest of us. And kudos to Core77 for finding it via Nova.
Batelle Memorial Institute recently completed a report called "Productive Nanosystems: A Technology Roadmap." It's a complete analysis of this world-changing technology.
I introduced you to Matt May in January. He’s the author of The Elegant Solution
Shortcutting. Leaping to solutions in an instinctive way or intuitive way—i.e. the “blink” method of problem-solving—seldom leads to an elegant solution because deeper, hidden causes don’t get addressed. Watch CSI and House: first they collect the evidence, then diagnose, and then solve. It’s never the guy or the disease you initially suspect.
Blindspots. Blindspots are the umbrella term for assumptions, biases, and mindsets that we cannot see through or around. Our brain does a lot of “filling in” for us because it’s a pattern maker and recognizer. Ths cn b hrd fr ppl t cmprhnd, hwvr, mst cn ndrstntd ths sntnc wth lttl prblm. But clear thinking involves more than simply filling in spaces in words.
Not Invented Here (N.I.H.). NIH means that you refuse to consider solutions that are from external sources. It means “If we didn’t come up with it, it won’t work. It is of no use.” Next time you’re waiting for an elevator, watch someone walk up and hit the button even though it’s already lit. We often don’t trust others’ solutions!
Satisficing. Ever wonder why some solutions lack inspiration, imagination, and originality? It’s because by nature we satisfice—satisfy plus suffice. We glom on to what’s easy and stop looking for the optimal solution. What’s the least number of “sticks” you need to move to make this Roman numeral equation correct? XI + I = X If you answered anything but zero, you satisficed. Look at it upside down.
Downgrading. Downgrading is the close cousin of satisficing but with a twist: a formal revision of the goal or situation. Reason? No one likes to fail. Result? We fall short of the killer app, so we pick the one that allows us to declare victory. Next time you’re playing hockey or football, try winning the game by hitting the outside of the post or taking the ball down to the one-yard line.
Complicating. Why do we overthink, complicate, and add cost? And why do we ALL do it so intuitively, naturally, and (here’s the killer) consistently? Answer: we’re hardwired that way. Our brains are designed to drive hoarding, storing, accumulating, and collecting-type behavior. We are by nature “do more/add on” types. Don’t believe it? Watch the customers at Costco or Sam’s Club buy thirty-six rolls of toilet paper.
Stifling. We do naturally do the “Yeah, but..” dance in which we stifle, dismiss, and second-guess ideas. It’s ideacide, pure and simple. And it’s not just others’ ideas we stifle; we often do it to our own and kick ourselves later when someone else “steals” our great idea. Remember how Decca Records rejected the Beatles? “Guitar bands are on the way out.”
The last one is the deadliest of the sinful seven. Because it is the most destructive. It’s the hallmark of the bozos!
Scott Berkun worked on the Internet explorer team at Microsoft from 1994-1999. He is the author of a recently released book called The Myths of Innovation
In his most recent book he explores (or, more accurately, “explodes”) the romantic notions of how innovation occurs. Join me in this Q and A session as he explains the real world of innovation.
Question: How long does it take in the real world—as opposed to the world of retroactive journalism—for an “epiphany” to occur?
Answer: An epiphany is the tip of the creative iceberg, and all epiphanies are grounded in work. If you take any magic moment of discovery from history and wander backwards in time you’ll find dozens of smaller observations, inquiries, mistakes, and comedies that occured to make the epiphany possible. All the great inventors knew this—and typically they downplayed the magic moments. But we all love exciting stories—Newton getting hit by an apple or people with chocolate and peanut butter colliding in hallways—are just more fun to think about. A movie called “watch Einstein stare at his chalkboard for 90 minutes” wouldn’t go over well with most people.
Answer: Most people want history to explain how we got here, not to teach them how to change the future. To serve that end, popular histories are told in heroic, logical narratives: they made a transistor, which led to the chip, which create the possibility for the PC, and on it goes forever. But of course if you asked William Shockey (transistor) or Steve Wozniak (PC) how obvious their ideas and successes were, you’ll hear very different stories about chaos, uncertainty and feeling the odds were against them.
If we believe things are uncertain for innovators in the present, we have to remember things were just as uncertain for people in the past. That’s a big goal of the book: to use amazing tales of innovation history as tools for those trying to do it now.
Question: Are innovators born or made?
Answer: Both. Take Mozart. Yes, he had an amazing capacity for musical composition, but he also was born in a country at the center of the music world, had a father who was a music teacher, and was forced to practice for hours every day before he started the equivalent of kindergarten. I researched the history of many geniuses and creators and always find a wide range of factors, some under their control and some not, that made their achievements possible.
Question: What the toughest challenge that an innovator faces?
Answer: It’s different for every innovator, but the one that crushes many is how bored the rest of the world was by their ideas. Finding support, whether emotional, financial, or intellectual, for a big new idea is very hard and depends on skills that have nothing to do with intellectual prowess or creative ability. That’s a killer for many would-be geniuses: they have to spend way more time persuading and convincing others as they do inventing, and they don’t have the skills or emotional endurance for it.
Question: Where do inventors and innovators get their ideas?
Answer: I teach a creative thinking course at the University of Washington, and the foundation is that ideas are combinations of other ideas. People who earn the label “creative” are really just people who come up with more combinations of ideas, find interesting ones faster, and are willing to try them out. The problem is most schools and organizations train us out of the habits.
Question: Why do innovators face such rejection and negativity?
Answer: It’s human nature—we protect ourselves from change. We like to think we’re progressive, but every wave of innovation has been much slower than we’re told. The telegraph, the telephone, the PC, and the internet all took decades to develop from ideas into things ordinary people used. As a species we’re threatened by change and it takes a long time to convince people to change their behavior, or part with their money.
Question: How do you know if you have a seemingly stupid idea according to the “experts” that will succeed or a stupid idea that is truly stupid?
Answer: Don’t shoot me, but the answer is we can’t know. Not for certain. That’s where all the fun and misery comes in. Many stupid ideas have been successful and many great ideas have died on the vine and that’s because success hinges on factors outside of our control.
The best bet is to be an experimenter, a tinkerer—to learn to try out ideas cheaply and quickly and to get out there with people instead of fantasizing in ivory towers. Experience with real people trumps expert analysis much of the time. Innovation is a practice—a set of habits—and it involves making lots of mistakes and being willing to learn from them.
Question: If you were a venture capitalist, what would your investment thesis be?
Answer: Two parts: neither is original, but they borne out by history. One is portfolio. Invest knowing most ventures, even good ones, fail, and distribute risk on some spectrum (e.g. 1/3 very high risk, 1/3 high risk, 1/3 moderate risk). Sometimes seemingly small, low risk/reward innovations have big impacts and it’s a mistake to only make big bets.
The other idea is people: I’d invest in people more than ideas or business plans—though those are important of course. A great entrepreneur who won’t give up and will keep growing and learning is gold. It’s a tiny percentage of entrepreneurs who have any real success the first few times out—3M, Ford, Flickr were all second or third efforts. I’d also give millions of dollars to authors of recent books on innovation with the word Myth in the title. The future is really in their hands.
Question: What are the primary determinants of the speed of adoption of innovation?
Answer: The classic research on the topic is Diffusion of Innovation by Rogers, which defines factors that hold up well today. The surprise to us is that they’re all sociological: based on people’s perception of value and their fear of risks—which often has little to do with our view of how amazing a particular technology is. Smarter innovators know this and pay attention from day one to who they are designing for and how to design the website or product in a way that supports their feelings and beliefs.
Question: What’s more important: problem definition or problem solving?
Answer: Problem definition is definitely under-rated, but they’re both important. New ideas often come from asking new questions and being a creative question asker. We fixate on solutions and popular literature focuses on creative people as being solvers, but often the creativity is in reformulating a problem so that it’s easier to solve. Einstein and Edison were notorious problem definers: they defined the problem differently than everyone else and that’s what led to their success.
Question: Why don’t the best ideas win?
Answer: One reason is because the best idea doesn’t exist. Depending on your point of view, there’s a different best idea or best choice for a particular problem. I’m certain that they guys who made telegraphs didn’t think the telephone was all that good an idea, but it ended their livelihood. So many stories of progress gone wrong are about arrogance of perception: what one person thinks is the right path—often the path most profitable to them— isn’t what another, more influential group of people thought.
Question: Is innovation more likely to come from young people or old people? Or is age simply not a factor?
Answer: Innovation is difficult, risky work, and the older you are, the greater the odds you’ll realize this is the case. That explanation works best. Beethoven didn’t write his nineth symphony until late in his life, so we know many creatives stay creative no matter how old they are. But their willingness to endure all the stresses and challenges of bringing an idea to the world diminishes. They understand the costs better from the life experience. The young don’t know what their is to fear, have stronger urges to prove themselves, and have fewer commitments—for example, children and mortgages. These factors that make it easier to try crazy things.
I’ll be speaking at the Salesforce Developer Conference on Monday. This is a free event. I learned something recently: Salesforce.com is really a software-as-service “platform” that has applicability beyond “salesforce automation.” Ergo, this conference is also for software entrepreneurs. Hope to see you there.
Check out a blog called Trendsspotting. It’s written by Taly Weiss, a social psychologist who runs a market research firm in Israel. She’s recently wrote about a bunch of interesting topics including:
Self testing the degree of hardcore Web 2.0 usage.
Crocs. (There are two pairs of Crocs in the Kawasaki family!)
Influence of MySpace and YouTube on shopping.
The posting that you’ll enjoy the most “proves” that bloggers are egotists. :-) Between Trendsspotting and TrendHunter, you’d have trends covered. (Trendsspotting focuses on psychological studies; Trendhunter focuses on products and services.)
Note that the word “I” isn’t used in this posting! :-)
I love the Internet because I wake up every day and discover something cool. Today’s discovery is TrendHunter, a site that recruits people around the world to spot trends. Here are some examples:
Condom testers needed in the UK—mum’s the word or shaken, not stirred?
Portraits made of chewing gum—giving a whole new meaning to “stickiness”
Roboboyfriend—does your boyfriend have WiFi built in?
Inflatable church—it will last longer than most celebrity marriages
Fantasy coffins—why spend eternity in a pine box?
Airbus 350 with a BMW-designed interior—I just hope they don’t put an iDrive in the cockpit
Nude duvet covers—for the man who has nothing
Some of the stuff is so weird that I thought that it had to be created by someone Japanese (yes, I can say that), but it’s a good Canadian who’s behind it all. I don’t see why this site shouldn’t be as popular as TechCrunch, Engadet, and Boing Boing and Gizmodo.
Addendum: Check out Springwise for a “daily fix of entrepreneurial ideas.” Thanks to Mark Newman of HireVue.
This is a follow-up to the posting of March 14th based on a new book called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Also, this diagram explains the differences between the two mindsets. It’s great—but that’s not surprising because Nigel Holmes created it.
Thanks to Randy W. Blackford, adjunct instructor of the Psychology & Communication Departments of Messiah College for bringing them to my attention.
More TED Talks are now online—though not the ones from this year. The last time I blogged about TED Talks, I made that claim that Majora Carter was as good as Steve Jobs and that created a controversy.
One of my favorites is Richard St. John’s. It’s from 2005, but it’s still highly relevant. He gives a great definition to CRAP. The quality of these videos is so high that you will be thanking BMW for sponsoring them and won’t mind the BMW ad in the beginning.
(Thanks to Bill Meade for pointing out these videos.)
If you manage any people or if you are a parent (which is a form of managing people), drop everything and read The Effort Effect. This is an article about Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck. It examines her thirty-year study of why some some people excel and others don’t. (Hint: the answer is not “God-given talent.”)
The article postulates that people have two kinds of mindsets: growth or fixed. People with the growth mindset view life as a series of challenges and opportunities for improving. People with a fixed mindset believe that they are “set” as either good or bad. The issue is that the good ones believe they don’t have to work hard, and the bad ones believe that working hard won’t change anything.
She recently released a book called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
To provide a further taste of the article and her work, here is a sidebar from the article called “What Do We Tell the Kids?” I took the liberty of adding [employee] to show the relevance of this article to business.
You have a bright child [employee], and you want her to succeed. You should tell her how smart she is, right?
That’s what 85 percent of the parents Dweck surveyed said. Her research on fifth graders shows otherwise. Labels, even though positive, can be harmful. They may instill a fixed mind-set and all the baggage that goes with it, from performance anxiety to a tendency to give up quickly. Well-meaning words can sap children’s [employee’s] motivation and enjoyment of learning and undermine their performance. While Dweck’s study focused on intelligence praise, she says her conclusions hold true for all talents and abilities.
Here are Dweck’s tips from Mindset:
Listen to what you say to your kids [employees], with an ear toward the messages you’re sending about mind-set.
Instead of praising children’s [employee’s] intelligence or talent, focus on the processes they used.
Example: “That homework was so long and involved. I really admire the way you concentrated and finished it.”
Example: “That picture has so many beautiful colors. Tell me about them.”
Example: “You put so much thought into that essay. It really makes me think about Shakespeare in a new way.”
When your child [employee] messes up, give constructive criticism—feedback that helps the child [employee] understand how to fix the problem, rather than labeling or excusing the child.
Pay attention to the goals you set for your children [employees]; having innate talent is not a goal, but expanding skills and knowledge is.
Don’t worry about praising your children [employees] for their inherent goodness, though. It’s important for children [employees] to learn they’re basically good and that their parents love them unconditionally, Dweck says. “The problem arises when parents praise children [employees] in a way that makes them feel that they’re good and love-worthy only when they behave in particular ways that please the parents.”
Here’s some food for thought: perhaps this explains the inexorable march toward mediocrity of many (temporarily) great companies. Let’s say a startup is hot. It ships something great, and it achieves success. Thus, it’s able to attract the best, brightest, and most talented. These people have been told they’re the best since childhood. Indeed, being hired by the hot company is “proof” that they are the A and A+ players; in fact, the company is so hot that it can out-recruit Google and Microsoft.
Unfortunately, they develop a fixed mindset that they’re the most talented, and they think that continued success is a right. Problems arise because pure talent only works as long as the going is easy. Furthermore, they don’t take risks because failure would harm their image of being the best, brightest, and most talented. When they do fail, they deny it or attribute it to anything but their shortcomings.
And this is the beginning of the end.
Dr. Moira Gunn of TechNation interviewed Dr. Dweck on 3/14/06. Thanks to TomL for pointing this out.
“How Not to Talk to Your Kids” by Po Bronson is another interesting read. Thanks to Tim Ludwig for this.
On Monday, March 19th at 11:00 am Pacific Time, I will be speaking on The Art of Innovation at the Microsoft Small Business Summit. This is a FREE online event that lasts for five days. There are approximately fifty eight sessions designed to provide small business owners with strategic insights from experts in business and technology.
Topics include managing finances, sales and marketing, customer retention, and computer security. According to Microsoft, it is the largest virtual event for small business ever presented in the United States. You can register online for my keynote and any of the other fifty eight sessions. Hope you can make it!
This is a picture of my copy of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days
As you can see, it’s a gold mine for great stories about entrepreneurship. Here is a list of some of my favorites. The major lesson: Entrepreneurship is all about tactics, hootspah, not knowing that things are not done “this way,” and making do with not enough money. You’ll LOL at points and wonder if a better title would not have been Flounders at Work.
Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) on how he decided whether to tell venture capitalists the real idea he wanted to get funded. “If they passed the litmus test of not rejecting us for the wrong reasons and said, ‘OK, we don’t mind that you’re young, we don’t mind that you don’t have management experience, only when they would start poking holes in the actual idea would we share the Hotmail idea with them.”
Woz (Apple). “All the best things I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, and (b) not having done it before, ever.”
Mitch Kapor (Lotus Development) on how much money he asked for from Sevin-Rosen. “I think I said probably $2 to $3 million. We had nothing. We hand an early-stage under-development spreadsheet, and me and Jon Sachs. So that was the biggest number I felt I could ask for without being totally absurd.”
Evan Williams (Blogger.com) on how he raised money to buy more servers. “We posted it on our website, and it said, ‘Hey, we know Blogger is really slow. It’s because we need more hardware. We don’t have the money to buy it, so give us money, and we will buy more hardware and we’ll make Blogger faster.’”
Tim Brady (Yahoo!). “The funniest thing I can remember was when there was a huge storm in May of ‘95, and the power grid went down for a few days. We had to go rent a power generator and take turns filling it with diesel fuel for 4 days. 24/7. We were laughing, ‘How many pages to the gallon today?’”
Mike Lazaridis (Research in Motion) on the importance of recruiting students. “’…What’s important to me are the signs on the back of the building.’ Of course, everyone recoiled from that. I explained to them, ‘I don’t really care if anyone else knows where the building is. All I want is the students to know where the building is.’”
Mike Ramsay (Tivo): “I remember one weekend, we took the entire company, what was about 60 people at the time, and we divvied them up and went to all the Fry’s stores in the Bay Area, because they were selling at Fry’s. We set up demo stations and the employees were giving demos. It was great because almost everybody had no experience of what it’s really like to sell in a retail store.”
Paul Graham (Viaweb): “Neither of us knew how to write Windows software, and we didn’t want to learn. It seemed like this huge steaming turd that was best avoided. So the main thing we thought when we first had the idea of doing web-based applications was, ‘Thank God we don’t have to write software on Windows.’”
On raising money: “The advice I would give is to avoid it. I would say spend as little as you can because every dollar of the investors’ money you get will be taken out of your ass…”
Catarina Fake (Flickr): “So Flickr started off as a feature. It wasn’t really a product. It was kind of IM in which you could drag and drop photos onto people’s desktops and show them what you were looking at.”
Brewster Kahle (Thinking Machines): “The blessing of Thinking Machines and the curse of Thinking Machines was that it had a lot of money. If you have a lot of money, then you can be detached from people that are going to pay you in the future.”
Chuck Geshke (Adobe) on the reaction of the spouses of Xerox execs to a demonstration of PARC technology in 1977: “They loved this stuff. They sat down and played with the mouse, they changed a few things on the screen, they hit the print button and it looked the same on paper as it did on the screen. They said, ‘Wow, this is really cool. This would really change an office if it had this technology.’”
[This is why you should always listen to your wife. And if you’re a woman, you should never listen to your husband.]
Ann Winblad (Open Systems). “So I get in front of these 60 or 70 guys and these guys are probably all in their 50s and I’m in my 20s, and we had a ‘blue light special,’ where we said, ‘If you give me a check today for $10,000, you can have unlimited rights to one of our modules.’ …I went home with, I think, like 12 or 15 of these $10,000 checks in my purse.”
James Hong (Hot or Not) on his first beta site. “My dad was the first person that ever saw Hot or Not besides Jim and me, and he got addicted to it! Here’s my dad, a 60-year-old retired Chinese guy who, as my father, is supposed to be asexual, and he’s saying, ‘She’s hot. This one’s not hot at all.’”
On using his parents to moderate the pictures: “I originally had my parents moderating since they were retired, and after a few days I asked my dad how it was going. He said, ‘Oh, it’s really interesting. Mom saw a picture of a guy and a girl and another girl and they were doing…’ So I told Jim, ‘Dude, my parents can’t do this any more. They’re looking at porn all day.’”
On his newfound dating success with hot women: “All of a sudden Hot or Not happened, and I was starting to date all these attractive women. I got a taste of it, and I realized that looks don’t make up for a good personality. Many of these girls were annoying. They were fun to hang out with, but I couldn’t have a conversation with them.”
[IMHO, James is the funniest person in the book.]
James Currier (Tickle). “When we started the company, we wanted to change the world, and we had all these tests on the site to help people with their lives. We had the anxiety test, the parenting, relationship, and communications tests. And no one came. …’Let’s do a test for what kind of breed of dog you are.’ …We put it online and 8 days later we had a million people trying to enter our site.”
Mena Trott (Six Apart) on early meetings with the current CEO of the company, Barak Berkowitz. “Barak said, ‘That’s great for a niche or personal lifestyle business, but we’re not interested in investing in that.’ At first we thought, ‘Who is this asshole? Why is he saying that to us?’”
These are just a few nuggets. The whole mine
This is the MP3 version (52,715K) of the CommunityNext founders panel in case you want to listen, as opposed to watch, it. Also, you’ll probably find this presentation by Threadless to be quite interesting. This Chicago-based online retailer solicits t-shirt designs from its community and then sells them. Rumor has it that the company’s sales volume is in the tens of millions. Here’s the MP3 version (41,782K) of the presentation too.
Video credit: the video of the founders and Threadless were shot by Luxvibes.
At the CommunityNext conference I moderated this panel with the founders of six very successful web properties:
Akash Garg of hi5
Sean Suhl of Suicide Girls
Max Levchin of Slide
James Hong of HotorNot
Markus Frind of PlentyofFish
Drew Curtis of Fark
This is the most amusing panel that I’ve ever moderated, and the speakers defied many conventions of tech entrepreneurship—in particular the ones that venture capitalists believe are “proven.” If you’d like to learn how these companies became successful without “proven teams, proven technology, and proven business models,” you’ll love this video.
Here’s a little factoid that blew my mind: both Fark and PlentyofFish have only one employee!
The Kauffman Foundation is launching EntrepreneurshipWeek USA from February 23rd to March 3rd. The theme is “What’s Your Big Idea? Take it On!” There will be educational programs around the country. Stanford is embracing this program in a big way starting with the kickoff event on Saturday. The schedule for the week is packed with interesting sessions:
2/24 Saturday
OPENING CEREMONY & LAUNCH PARTY, 4:00-6:00 PM, William R. Hewlett Teaching Center, Room 200, Host: Stanford Entrepreneurship Network, Join the National Kickoff of EntrepreneurshipWeek USA with President Hennessy, Carl Schramm, and Steve Jurvetson. Festivities include audience prizes and the unveiling of the campus-wide Innovation Challenge competition.
2/25 Sunday
SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP: MAKE A DIFFERENCE, 3:00-5:00 PM, Wallenberg Learning Theater, Wallenberg Hall, Hosts: Center for Social Innovation, Graduate School of Business, and Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship Program. Hear leading funders discuss ways to support social ventures, and attend a fair showcasing early-stage social ventures from around the world.
2/26 Monday
INTERNATIONAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP: TRAILBLAZERS IN CHINA, 4:00-6:00 PM, Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall, Hosts: Stanford Project on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) and Asia-Pacific Student Entrepreneurship Society (ASES). Think global. Meet Stanford entrepreneurs breaking ground in China’s dynamic high-technology industries, from mobile to Web 2.0. Hear their advice, meet in groups, and network over Chinese appetizers.
2/27 Tuesday
ENTREPRENEURSHIP MIXER, 5:00-7:00 PM, Lower Arbuckle Lounge, Graduate School of Business, Host: Graduate School of Business. Network with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, students, and other members of the entrepreneurial community.
2/28 Wednesday
DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar Series: THE ROLE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN SOLVING WORLD PROBLEMS, 4:30-6:00 PM, William R. Hewlett Teaching Center, Room 200, Hosts: Stanford Technology Ventures Program and Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students (BASES). Hear a panel of Stanford University leaders and successful entrepreneurs discuss approaches to solving major world problems related to energy, health sciences, and international security.
STANFORD TECHNOLOGY SHOWCASE AND RECEPTION, 6:00-7:30 PM, D. Packard Electrical Engineering Building Atrium, Host: Office of Technology Licensing. Network at a reception following the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar and see products developed from technologies licensed from Stanford.
3/01 Thursday
BASES START-UP JOB FAIR, 10:00-4:00 PM, White Plaza, Host: Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students (BASES). Explore job opportunities with over 100 startups representing a wide range of industries, from Web 2.0 to clean energy. Raffle prizes will be given away throughout the event.
INTERVIEW: SILICON VALLEY’S FAVORITE F-WORD – FAILURE, 5:30-6:30 PM, Wallenberg Learning Theater, Wallenberg Hall, Host: Stanford Graduate Program in Journalism. Listen to Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology Ventures share his provocative views on risk-taking, failure and success in this live interview with journalism professor Ann Grimes, formerly of The Wall Street Journal.
3/02 Friday
GREEN IS THE NEW RED, WHITE, AND BLUE, Presentation by Thomas Friedman, Author, The World is Flat, 1:00-2:30 PM, Memorial Auditorium, Host: Energy Crossroads Consortium. Hear renowned author and columnist Thomas Friedman address the strategic role of sustainability and conservation for the U.S. and world at large. President Hennessy will give the introduction.
VENTURE CAPITAL SPEED-DATING, 3:30-6:30 PM, Wallenberg Learning Theater, Wallenberg Hall, Host: Asia-Pacific Student Entrepreneurship Society (ASES). Students, pitch your business idea to Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Apply in advance for opportunities to give three-minute pitches and receive feedback. The networking reception at 5:30 PM is open to all members of the Stanford community.
3/03 Saturday
ENTREPRENEURSHIP WEEK CLOSING CEREMONY, 4:00-5:30 PM, William R. Hewlett Teaching Center, Room 200, Host: Stanford Entrepreneurship Network. Watch an entertaining showcase of the Innovation Challenge results. Prizes will be awarded to teams that make the most money, generate the most social value, are the most creative, and have the biggest flop.
There’s also an interesting pitch contest. If you’re eighteen to twenty-five years old, all you have to do is submit a two-minute video. In this video, you should explain your answer to this question: What product or service would you offer to help reduce America’s dependency on oil and other fossil fuels?
As you saw, I’m tasked with the topic of failure— perhaps based on recent ValleyWag coverage. :-)
My favorite book about creativity is If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit. I recently read Hugh Macleod’s ChangeThis manifesto called
“How to be Creative,” and I think it’s as empowering as If You Want to Write.
Hugh is the guy behind Gapingvoid (“cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”). If you’re facing writer’s block, blogger’s block, programmer’s block, whoever’s block, I recommend that you read Hugh’s essay. It inspired me to truly begin to work on my next book...
My prediction for Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
By way of background, Chip Heath is a professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Heath taught at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. He received his B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M University and his Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford.
Dan Heath is a consultant at Duke Corporate Education. Before joining Duke CE, Dan had a fellowship at Harvard Business School, where he conducted field research and developed cases with several professors in the Entrepreneurial Management unit. Prior to Harvard Business School, Dan co-founded a company called Thinkwell in Austin, TX. Dan has an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a BA in the Plan II Honors Program from the University of Texas at Austin.
Answer: It’s genius...if only we’d thought of it earlier... [Whose fault is that? Dan should have given me the draft earlier.]
Malcolm Gladwell is one of our heroes, and of course we borrowed the “stickiness” terminology from The Tipping Point. Gladwell’s interest was in what makes certain trends likely to “tip.” In his chapter about stickiness, he talks a lot about the value of experimentation in educational shows, such as Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues. He’s absolutely right about the value of experimentation. But we think that you can know a lot, up front, about which ideas are more likely to succeed and fail because successful ideas share common traits. Our book digs into those traits and how you can put them to use in communicating your own ideas.
Question: What separates ideas that stick from those that don’t?
Answer: We spent lots of time researching sticky ideas—ideas that people understand, remember, and that change the way people think or behave. The ideas we studied ranged from the ludicrous to the profound, from urban legends (no, there is no kidney theft ring) to great scientific theories (yes, the land we walk around on does ride on giant tectonic plates and when they collide they cause mountain ranges and earthquakes). We found there were six principles (“SUCCES”) that link sticky ideas of all kinds. Sticky ideas won’t always have all six, but the more, the merrier.
For example, JFK’s idea to “put a man on the moon in a decade” had all six of them:
Simple A single, clear mission.
Unexpected A man on the moon? It seemed like science fiction at the time.
Concrete Success was defined so clearly—no one could quibble about man, moon, or decade.
Credible This was the President of the U.S. talking.
Emotional It appealed to the aspirations and pioneering instincts of an entire nation.
Story An astronaut overcomes great obstacles to achieve an amazing goal.
Working with my buddies at Electric Pulp, we created the Stickiness Aptitude Test (SAT). You can use it to determine how sticky your product or service will be.
Question: Your principles sound pretty basic. If these six principles were all it took to make a sticky idea, why aren’t there more brilliant ideas in the world?
Answer: Basic, yes, but not natural. That’s an important distinction. People tend to think that having a great idea is enough, and they think the communication part will come naturally. We are in deep denial about the difficulty of getting a thought out of our own heads and into the heads of others. It’s just not true that, “If you think it, it will stick.”
And that brings us to the villain of our book: The Curse of Knowledge. Lots of research in economics and psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in abstractions that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the lawyer in our own domain of expertise.
Here’s the great cruelty of the Curse of Knowledge: The better we get at generating great ideas—new insights and novel solutions—in our field of expertise, the more unnatural it becomes for us to communicate those ideas clearly. That’s why knowledge is a curse. But notice we said “unnatural,” not “impossible.” Experts just need to devote a little time to applying the basic principles of stickiness.
JFK dodged the Curse. If he’d been a modern-day politician or CEO, he’d probably have said, “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry, using our capacity for technological innovation to build a bridge towards humanity’s future.” That might have set a moon walk back fifteen years.
Question: Why has Windows stuck? It doesn’t appear to be simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, or involve stories.
Answer: It’s important to distinguish ideas and products. A fax is a product but not an idea. “Do unto others...” is an idea but not a product. We talk in our book about what makes ideas stick but we don’t want to claim that our framework describes everything you need to know about why products stick—or pop stars or dance crazes. Everyone has a mailbox, but it’s weird to say that mailboxes are an idea that has stuck.
Some parts of our idea framework may apply to Windows: In comparison to DOS, Windows was certainly simple and concrete, as had been the Macintosh and Xerox PARC graphical interfaces before it. Because of its association with IBM PCs, Windows also had more credibility—what are you going to trust for your business: an IBM PC or a Commodore 64? But let’s face it, Windows lives closer to the fax side of the continuum than the idea side.
By 1985 when the first version of Windows came out, IBM had the largest market share in PCs. Even back then people were starting to understand network effects: There was more software available for DOS and Windows machines, so people were more likely to be able to exchange files with coworkers, so they—and coworkers—tended to buy the same kind of computer. Network effects for products are powerful, but we don’t want to claim credit for them as part of our framework for ideas.
Zooming out, there *are* things that live at the intersection of ideas and products—in almost any branding opportunity, there’s a product and idea. High-end vodkas, for example, would probably be indistinguishable in a blind taste test as products, so when people prefer one, they’re preferring the idea promised by the brand. Our framework is more likely to apply to analyzing the ideas promised by different brands than the products that go along with them.
Question: Who’s in the Heath Hall of Stickness Fame?
Answer: JFK, of course, for his man on the moon idea. But that example is somewhat misleading because JFK is a president and a hero. It’s easy to think his idea was powerful because he was powerful. So in the book we discuss a lot of great ideas that come from relatively unknown heroes:
An elementary-school teacher who designed a shocking simulation that virtually cured prejudice in her students.
A small-town publisher who created the most successful local newspaper in America by focusing on a simple mission for 40+ years.
The leader of the team that developed the PalmPilot, who kept his team obsessive about design simplicity.
The Australian medical internist who figured out what caused stomach ulcers—and then faced the much larger challenge of convincing his colleagues that he was right. He was unknown at the time, but he isn’t any longer, and he won the Nobel Prize in Medicine last year.
The important point is this: You don’t need power or charm or resources to make a sticky idea. It’s not solely a JFK thing.
Question: Time and again, you hammer on simplicity and core, and yet your jacket copy says, “This is a book written for anyone who strives to craft messages that are memorable and lasting: teachers, businesspeople, journalists, ministers, and nonprofit leaders.” This sounds to me like you want to be Gladwell, Cialdini, Warren, and Drucker. Isn’t this a violation of your concepts?
Answer: Nope. Our book was written for a type of problem, not a type of person. The problem is this: When you have an important idea, how do you communicate it in a way that has impact? How do you construct a great idea? Teachers and businesspeople and ministers all have this problem in spades, so our book will help them—but only with this one problem! We’ve got absolutely nothing to say about long division or finance or salvation.
The cool thing, to us, is realizing that the idea-playbook is similar for these diverse sets of people. Good science lessons and good Hollywood movies both raise mysteries that cause people to *want* to listen until the mystery is resolved. Aesop’s Fables have survived over 2000 years because of their concrete examples, and if you want your business plan to survive more than 15 minutes, you’d better be concrete as well.
Once you’ve got a great idea in your head—whether you’re in engineering or business or teaching—there are a handful of principles that will help you communicate it. That’s where our book comes in.
Question: Did Herb Kelleher “know” his core when the first Southwest Airlines flight took off?
We talk in the book about the importance of finding a simple message that expresses the core of your idea. Kelleher’s core is that Southwest is “THE low-fare airline.” Most entrepreneurs struggle for years to find a core message, but Kelleher started with his.
In fact, the original core idea fit on a cocktail napkin: An entrepreneur named Rollin King from San Antonio, Texas owned a small commuter air service and had the idea of creating a larger commuter service with bigger planes. In a conversation with Kelleher in a bar, he sketched out his idea on a napkin. The original napkin is framed in the boardroom of Southwest. On it is a triangle with the vertices labeled Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. The idea was to launch a commuter airline flying big planes between those three cities. The driving distance between the cities is about three to three and a half hours. Rollins and Kelleher knew people might decide to fly instead of drive if the fares could be made cheap enough to present an attractive alternative.
Of course, it took a long time to put the napkin into practice. The other airlines tied up Southwest in court battles for four years. But the Southwest story has a nice lesson for potential entrepreneurs, the Cocktail Napkin Test. Lots of entrepreneurs can tell you a dozen reasons that their product or service will transform the world. A good challenge for them would be to sort through the dozen reasons and pick the single most important one. It’s a worthy aspiration to paint a picture of the world that is simple enough and concrete enough to be sketched on a cocktail napkin.
Question: What is the relationship between stickiness and evangelism?
Answer: Evangelism has been one of your recurring themes over the years. As far back as The Macintosh Way you were arguing that the best partners are interested in the ideal of what you’re doing, not just the potential for making money. The people in it for the money bail when times get tough, the people in it for the ideal stick with you.
We have a similar theme in our book. There are two basic approaches to creating an emotional idea that makes people care—you can appeal to consequences (e.g., money) or you can appeal to identity. Consequences are not as important as we sometimes think. Political scientists find that voters don’t vote their personal pocketbook as much as they vote their identity—what’s good for us as Americans, or, more narrowly, for the other members of our religious or ethnic groups. Steve Jobs’ 1984 commercial cleverly appealed to identity—Macintosh true believers were striking a blow for liberation in an oppressive world filled with IBM’s big box machines.
But though identity is powerful, we often ignore it. When we predict what motivates others, we all tend to assume that everyone else is motivated by consequences. We tend to think that we, personally, are motivated by learning and service and and fulfillment, and others are motivated by bonuses. Research suggests that people tend to systematically neglect identity appeals. Bottom line, there’s less evangelism than there probably should be.
Question: Is there a point in a market where it’s impossible to make a new entrant stick? For example, how would you try to kick MySpace’s butt?
Answer: In the beginning, MySpace started as a better idea. At the time the leading social networking site was Friendster, founded by a former Netscape programmer, which assumed that being “social” was the ability to calculate the degrees of separation between you and someone else. On Friendster you couldn’t see the profile of anyone who was separated from you by too many degrees.
By contrast, MySpace started as a place to bond with others over emerging bands and music, an important source of identity. You could see everyone’s profile –you could easily meet strangers who shared your interest in Seaweed or the Bad Brains. Shared identity and hormones are a potent combination. Friendster, by contrast, tried to shut down “fakester” members that stood for shared interests or identities as opposed to real people.
At this point MySpace is a sticky product because of network effects—just like the QWERTY keyboard or Windows—so the idea of MySpace may not matter as much as the product. You have to be there because that’s where your friends are, just like you have to buy on eBay because that’s where the sellers are. But if something can unseat MySpace it might be a reverse of the basic identity appeal. MySpace is getting so mainstream it may be vulnerable to a rebellion strategy just like fashion products that lose their cachet when knock-offs show up in Tulsa strip malls. MySpace has a serious problem: People in their 40s have MySpace pages. That can’t be good and it might leave room for a hipper niche player.
Question: Can a slick marketer apply your principles and make a piece of crap stick—or does the intrinsic value ultimately decide stickiness?
Slick marketers are already using most of these principles. We wanted our book to serve as an equalizer. Because you’re right—instrinsic value counts. The slick marketing recipe is: Sticky communications about ideas with little intrinsic value. The social enterprise recipe is: Ideas with huge intrinsic value communicated with little stickiness. We wanted to even the arms-race.
The problem is that ideas with intrinsic value don’t always win. It’s not true that you only use 10% of your brain. Or that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made structure visible from space. And gum doesn’t take seven years to digest in your stomach. The world of ideas is unfair. Teachers and public health officials and legislators agonize over how to get their messages across, and meanwhile, dumb ideas, like urban legends, propagate with no advertising budgets and no authority figures supporting them.
We can bemoan the fact that dumb ideas win out. But we can also reverse-engineer them. We can figure out the principles that make them stick and teach them to people who have worthwhile messages. Slick marketers know a lot of these principles already. Urban legends have them baked in. But no one teaches engineers or entrepreneurs or chemistry professors how to make their ideas stick.
Question: What’s your advice to a product champion stuck in a large company who gets matrixed to death trying to implement your ideas?
Make people play on your turf by keeping things concrete. It is so much easier to bullshit with abstraction than with concrete examples. Don’t say, “I think we should devote more resources to evangelism among mid-market IT decision-makers.” Say, “Here’s a list of 500 IT decision-makers in the area around Salt Lake City. I want to invite them to a one-day conference on Sept 29. It will cost $60,000 to pull off. Who’s in?” Even if they disagree, it will be productive disagreement, anchored in reality.
In the book we tell about Melissa Studzinski, who joined General Mills as the brand manager of Hamburger Helper. She was twenty-eight years old. When she started she was given three huge binders full of sales and volume data, ad briefs, and marketing surveys. The data was too abstract to provide much intuition. Then she ran a program called “Fingertips” in which her team found Midwestern moms who would let General Mills employees barge into their homes and watch them cook. They wanted a concrete picture of their customer at their fingertips. What they found was that moms didn’t care about variety of flavors. This was a shocking insight within the company: previous generations of marketers and food scientists had created thirty flavors of Hamburger Helper!
On the other hand the moms did care about being able to find the same predictable flavor that their kids would actually eat. Using this concrete information, Studzinski’s team convinced people across General Mills to reduce the number of products. Costs went way down and sales went up. Who’s going to argue with Betty Jones in Wheaton who says she stopped using Hamburger Helper because she could never find the spaghetti flavor? That’s a very concrete example that convinced lots of people across a big bureaucracy to consider a different way of doing things.
Question: What does it mean if your book doesn’t become a bestseller?
Answer: It means we should have been born the Grisham brothers.
“Bestseller” does have a nice ring, so please do buy some books, but remember that a sticky idea is one that people understand, remember, and causes some change in the way they think or behave. So our failure story has nothing to do with sales. Our failure story is that people who buy our book do nothing different the next time they pitch an idea and they’ve forgotten what they read 3 months later. Erg, that would hurt.
We have a specific measure of success for our book. We want to get emails from people who used techniques from our book to make their ideas stick. If we get a lot of those emails, we’re happy. If we don’t, we’ll keep studying ideas until we get it right. [To email Chip and Dan, use these: Chip Heath Dan Heath ]
Matthew E. May is the author of The Elegant Solution: Toyota’s Formula for Mastering Innovation.
ChangeThis, by the way, has a ton of great stuff. Click here to see what I mean. My Art of the Start manifesto is here.
Three of my buddies who are patent attorneys disagreed with my diatribe against patents as a key component of a startup’s defensibility. Being the open-minded Guy that I am, I offered to publish their counterpoint so that you can obtain a broader perspective of intellectual property issues for startups.
Patent law is currently a sea of chaos, and the net effect is that patents simply don’t pack the ooomph that they once did—particularly for startups. For example, the Supreme Court recently issued a decision in eBay vs. MercExchange that many people expect will change the value of patents for small companies that don’t actually make and sell a product.
In the wake of the Court’s decision in the eBay case, tech startups simply cannot count on their patents as an effective and efficient tool to shut down the Microsofts of the world. And that’s after you actually have a patent. Just getting to that point could take years...and years....and years.
Also, the application backlog at the Patent and Trademark Office is at an all time high. Current statistics show that the average patent application takes longer than thirty months from the date of filing to the date of issue. Factor in some of the higher backlogged tech areas such as web business and Internet business methods, and it will realistically be at least five years before the Patent Office even starts to examine your application.
We’ve even heard of delays up to and beyond ten years in certain technology areas. Your competition could run you over by then, and it’s more than likely we’ll all be onto Web 5.0 by the time you get the pretty ribbon copy of your patent.
We’re not changing our day jobs anytime soon though because patents still play an important role in building a defensible business—they’re just not the whole enchilada. In most cases, entrepreneurs need to avoid the knee-jerk reaction of “Patent Everything!” and should instead follow a carefully planned, comprehensive intellectual property strategy to achieve defensibility.
Here are a few tips about how to do this:
Put patents in the right place. Don’t mistake this post as a statement that patents aren’t important. They are. You just need to keep them in proper perspective, which is the underlying theme of Guy’s comments. Practically speaking, this means asking “Should we patent?” at the end of the invention management. Then consider these issues:
How are your competitors using patents? In some industries like biotech, pharma, and medical devices, you can’t get past Go without them.
Is your invention better protected as a trade secret? Trade secrets are any formula, pattern, machine, or process of manufacturing used in one’s business which may give the user an opportunity to obtain an advantage over its competitors who do not know it. The formula for Coca-Cola is an example.
Not all information can be kept as a trade secret. You need to be able to maintain the secrecy in-house—limiting access to the information—and your competitors can’t be in a position to reverse engineer your product/service and figure out how you did it. One drawback to trade secrets is that if one of your competitors later invents the same thing and obtains a patent, your “secret” use will not insulate you from patent infringement.
Could making the invention publicly and freely available create greater value for the company? Making source code and API publicly available might get you that all-important community support that can lead to life-sustaining critical mass and momentum.
Can placing the invention in the public domain by making a “defensive publication” work for you? A defensive publication is the publication—essentially donating it to the public domain of select inventions (inventions you don’t want to protect with patents or keep as trade secrets), information, and knowledge with the goal of preventing a later competitor from obtaining patent coverage on the exact same invention.
Many large corporations have used this tactic; for instance consider IBM’s Technical Disclosure Bulletin One evil variation of this strategy is to publish the document not in the U.S., but instead in Elbonia, Kazakhstan, or some other far corner of the earth with the intent of keeping it generally secret but “published” for the intent of “prior art” status under the Patent Act.
This won’t give you any rock solid rights, but it might prevent your competitor from obtaining protection on it. Keep in mind that this tactic truly is a donation, though. Once released, this genie can’t be put back in the bottle.
Look beyond the value in a legal action. When considering the role of patents in your overall strategy, remember that they can add value beyond just the ability to sue a competitor. This is the fundamental point that Guy missed. For instance:
Furnishing a key selling point: “patented technology.” (Whether it is justified is another issue, but it does have some value).
Blocking your competitors from getting patents which in turn keeps them from suing you.
Providing counter-offensive weapons: if you get sued at least you can counter-sue. The threat of a countersuit can prevent a suit or force settlement out of court.
Bluffing and strong-arming smaller competitors. They should know that paying you a nuisance value settlement to license the patent is cheaper than battling you in court.
Developing a portfolio of assets that may have value for future acquirers of your company who can afford to sue.
Consider the role that inventions will play in your business. Notice that we say “inventions” and not patents. Never forget that patents come second in this game. Think of the inventions and their role in your business first: Are they an important component of the value and growth of the company?
If inventions are important in any way, develop an efficient system for identifying and managing them. You should have well-designed invention disclosure forms, clearly designed processing systems, regular meetings for reviewing disclosures, and a cataloging meeting with your internal decision-makers at least once each year.
Get trademarks that are strong and protectable. If your trademarks aren’t protectable, go back to the drawing board. Steve previously wrote about this on think Vitamin’s site: Trademark Tips for Your Web App.
As you consider trademark strength, also look at domain name availability. Time after time we counsel folks who don’t spend enough time to find out if they actually can use a word or symbol. They just assume that it is okay to use.
Get the domain name. You cannot afford to lose this race. Be creative and find something that fits in with your branding strategy. And don’t forget typos and other obvious variant domains that people might accidentally enter when seeking you out. (Did you hear about Utube.com and Youtube.com?) Spending an extra nine bucks here and there on GoDaddy today might help you avoid needing to pay an attorney thousands of dollars later. Consider this domain-name “insurance.”
Develop an overall branding strategy for your trademarks, including your domain name. Many entrepreneurs simply wait too long to consider this important and incredibly valuable aspect of intellectual property. If you’re wondering about the importance and value of a solid brand, ask yourself this question: If I were starting a search company, how great would it be if I could call my company “Google”? Guess what: You can’t. Solid branding with appropriate protections creates significant value. Period.
Branding is as important as your technology is, and it sucks to have to rebrand everything twenty months into your corporate life just because you didn’t spend the time and money to get a legal opinion on the availability of a name.
The bottom line is that if your patent attorney tells you that you must patent everything without regard to the bigger picture, do yourself a favor and find a new one. A good patent attorney looks at the bigger picture and proposes a strategy—not a bunch of disparate tactics.
Patents aren’t the end-all answer to the defensibility question. And, yes, you might look clueless if you base your defensibility on nothing more than “We’ve got tons and tons of patents!” A strong intellectual property strategy designed in the context of the relevant industry can, however, give you defensibility.
About the authors:
Written by the patent attorneys at Rethink(IP): J. Matthew Buchanan, Douglas J. Sorocco, and Stephen M. Nipper. Matt, Doug and Steve also have a number of side projects including a legal jobs board and PatentFizz, a website designed to allow any person to submit any comment on an issued patent…anything from a simple, one line reference, to a piece of prior art, or a complete invalidity opinion.
Yahoo! sponsored an event called “Hack Day” this weekend. Approximately 500 developers showed up and created fifty-four prototypes in a twenty-four hour period. Blip.tv has the demos here and here. The winner was called Blogging in Motion.
Yahoo! even brought in Beck to entertain the crowd on Friday night. (To be honest, I had never heard of Beck—why, I wondered, would Yahoo! bring in the CEO of a beer company to sing?)
Hack Day was well conceived and executed. The only thing that I found lacking was syrup in the soda fountains. :-) No one appreciates good marketing more than I do, and other companies could learn a lot from this event because it garnered:
Blog coverage. (It cost me $140 to go to HackDay because my kids and their friends played at a nearby Laser Quest while I went to the event. But I did get a free t-shirt with the underwhelming Hack Day logo.)
Talent—perhaps some engineers to hire.
Products—perhaps some goodies to enhance Yahoo!’s products and services
Buzz—perhaps most important of all, the implicit message that Yahoo! is cool and that Google isn’t the only game in town.
To get a feeling for the event, click here to see pictures.
Marten Mickos joined MySQL AB as CEO in 2001. Under his leadership, the company has grown from a startup to the second largest open source company and the fastest-growing database vendor in the world. Prior to MySQL, Mickos held multi-national CEO and senior executive positions in his native Finland. He holds a masters of science in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology.
Question: How do you make money with an Open Source product?
Answer: We start by not making money at all— but by making users. The vast community of MySQL users and developers is what drives our business.
Then we sell an enterprise offering to those who need to scale and cannot afford to fail. The enterprise offering consists of certified binaries, updates and upgrades, automated DBA services, 7x24 error resolution, etc. You pay by service level and the number of servers. No nonsense, no special math. Enterprise software buyers are tired of complex pricing models (per core, per cpu, per power unit, per user, per whatever the vendor feels like that day)—models that are still in use by the incumbents.
At MySQL we LOVE users who never pay us money. They are our evangelists. No marketing could do for us what a passionate MySQL user does when he tells his friends and colleagues about MySQL. Our success is based on having millions of evangelists around the world. Of course, they also help us develop the product and fix bugs.
And the few times that they say that they hate MySQL, that helps us too because complaints usually contain some good suggestion for improvement.
Question: What changes in the Open Source community’s attitude have you encountered since you decided “to build a company” around MySQL?
Answer: Interestingly, MySQL always was a company. When Monty and David started it in 1995 they made a commitment to open source and a commitment to commercial success at the same time. Monty and David didn’t build out the business themselves, but they did set the ambition.
So we have always been focused on marrying the best of business with the best of free and open source software. It is not an easy line to walk, but it is highly rewarding. A few times we have erred to one or the other side, and then we have corrected our course.
The great thing is that many open source supporters think it is fine that we make money. It makes them proud that open source can penetrate the corporate world.
Question: Do you compete head to head with Oracle or do you have different customers?
Most new companies and new projects within existing companies are choosing open source infrastructure such as the LAMP stack. We don’t see competition there.
We focus on the new applications and services that are being built for the online world: Web2.0, SaaS, and SOA but also new forms of datawarehouses and business apps. Our customers look for reliability, performance, scalability, and ease of deployment. They don’t look for overly complex products that take days or weeks to get going and cost thereafter.
That’s why YouTube, Craigslist, Flickr, Habbo Hotel, LiveJournal, Technorati, Second Life, Trulia, FeedBurner, and Right Now are our customers and not Oracle’s. We believe the market we have chosen is the fastest growing part of the DBMS market.
Question: What’s the biggest MySQL DB?
That’s like asking what’s the biggest Ferrari! What counts is performance and scalability. Omniture runs over 250 billion transactions per quarter on a farm of MySQL servers. Google uses MySQL for AdSense and AdWords. Other large installations include Wikipedia, Travelocity, Weather.com, etc. The databases can be hundreds of gigabytes. Sites run on hundreds of servers, some on thousands.
Question: What’s the weirdest use of MySQL?
I wish I knew! We were used in the earth unit for the Mars rover. The special effects of The Lord of the Rings were based on MySQL. HotorNot runs on MySQL. Even the Oracle FAQ runs on MySQL ().
Question: What’s the most “mission critical” use of MySQL?
Answer: I hope it doesn’t sound like megalomania, but so much of today’s online world runs on MySQL that it is difficult to pinpoint just one. Google and Yahoo run mission critical applications on MySQL. Nokia and Alcatel build mobile phone networks that run on MySQL. MySQL was used in various emergency systems during the tsunami in South East Asia and during hurricane Katrina.
Question: How does a company controls what’s happening to its product when the Open Source community is doing the programming and testing?
Answer: All successful open source products are governed by fairly small groups of long-term developers. That’s the case with Apache, Linux, JBoss, and others. The same applies to us, and in our case the majority of the developers are full-time employees of MySQL. This is the group that decides on the roadmap. In doing so, we need to listen very carefully to the broad community, because if we do not serve them well, they may fork our product or they may move over to some other database.
Question: Is Open Source hindering innovation because it’s one thing to debug an existing product but it’s another to design a new one?
Answer: On the contrary. I think the architecture of participation that is embedded in the open source philosophy is a superior innovation method. And it is not limited to software—look at Wikipedia. It just so happens that software developers were the first ones to adopt it in the modern world.
The simple fact that everything you create is open for scrutiny by anyone else is a strong incentive to produce good stuff from the start. And the meritocracy of open source leads to faster innovation and thereby better innovations. It is a Darwinian system where over time the best solutions will emerge.
Think about the market-leading DBMS company. They have 50,000 paid employees who are working hard to keep their product competitive. We have 50,000 product downloads per day. This means that 50,000 human beings who tinker with our product every day. These people have ideas, suggestions, praises, complaints and although not all of them send us emails every day, the good stuff tends to find its way to the core MySQL team. That’s how an open source project is more innovative and faster moving than a closed source team.
Question: Who fixes the most bugs?
Answer: Our own team. You can actually see the stats by going here where we completely openly list all our bugs and the people who work on them. We get bug fixes from commercial partners and from users and my hope is that they will one day fix more bugs than our own team. It just takes a long time to learn the internals.
As important as fixing bugs is to report them with sufficient detail. Because our code is open, users can file very specific bug reports where they point at the places where the bug is likely to be found. The value of this is enormous. Here is an example of a very useful bug report from a user.
Question: If MySQL ceased to exist as an organization, would MySQL the product continue?
Answer: Software continues to exist long after companies fall by the wayside. In the past, customers had to demand source code to be place in escrow. Today with open source, users are not locked into a single vendor or platform.
The MySQL source code is licensed under GPL so anyone can create a fork or pick up the torch at any time. Forking is very very rare, but it serves as a perfect method of keeping vendors honest. If MySQL were to develop the product in a stupid d