BRYCE DOT VC: The World is Your Parking Lot
In 1964 Phil Knight started selling shoes from the trunk of his car at local track meets. Each sale was to an individual. Each individual had a chance to engage with the man behind the brand, to hold the shoes in their hands, to ask questions and to transact right there in the parking lot…
…The parking lot level sets the playing field between large incumbents and scrappy startups. Neither can fake it when barriers to interaction and transaction are removed. This is more than a twitter account, a company blog or a trouble ticketing system. This is building durable communities of empowered employees and committed customers.
Grab your spot. Pop the trunk. Let’s go.
Source: brycedotvc
BRYCE DOT VC: Suffering As a Competitive Advantage
Starting companies is hard.
Building them into sustainable businesses over time is even harder.
Much has been postulated about why one founder flounders and the others emerge as the next Mark Zuckerberg. Some will attribute the difference to smarts, connections, or capital, but a new research report has me thinking it may be something that doesn’t fit into any of those aforementioned attributes.
The journal Pain recently published a report on pain perception which contrasted the dynamics of pain among endurance athletes, game sport athletes and none athletes. Alex Hutchinson summarizes some of the findings as follows:
While athletes showed increased pain tolerance, they didn’t show any difference in pain threshold (the level of stimulus at which they start perceiving pain). In other words, it’s not that athletes don’t feel pain — they feel it the same as everyone else, but they’ve learned to cope with or ignore it.
The findings about pain threshold vs. pain tolerance are consistent with the literature on chronic pain management. Exercise helps pain patients improve their quality of life, but doesn’t decrease the actual amount of pain they feel. They’re just able to tolerate it better.
Given I wield the hammer of entrepreneurship, I see a nail in their data. For instance, replace “athlete” with “founder” in the following paragraph.
Athletes are frequently exposed to unpleasant sensory experiences during their daily physical efforts, and high physical and psychological resistances must be overcome during competitions or very exhausting activities. However, athletes are forced to develop efficient pain-coping skills because of their systematic exposure to brief periods of intense pain. Therefore, pain coping is an integral part of athletic training, and coping skills are important features in the development of athletic character.
Despite the media’s glamorous portrails of celebrity founders, I think the ability to suffer through and tolerate pain after others give up, may be the single most important attribute in all of startupland.
Source: brycedotvc
BRYCE DOT VC: FDIC for Startups
…Which brings me back to the FDIC.
Seems there could/should be a neutral third party service which gives users and their data protection in the event that a startup fails or is purchased for talent. Startups could opt into, and promote their participation in a program like this offering peace of mind for potential users in the same way banks FDIC membership quells the fears of potential depositors.
THIS. 1000x THIS. needs. to. happen. Locker project, etc are other startups, so that’s a problem. objective, independent, possibly non-profit or government institution is a necessity. As a user of the interwebs, and especially of services like friendfeed pre facebook acquisition and delicious before yahoo’s shutdown threat, that concern over where all your hard—earned? aggregated? tagged?—data is going, or who is the new ruler of that data, is a little unnerving.
Source: brycedotvc
There’s an idea in the science-fiction community called steam-engine time, which is what people call it when suddenly twenty or thirty different writers produce stories about the same idea. It’s called steam-engine time because nobody knows why the steam engine happened when it did. Ptolemy demonstrated the mechanics of the steam engine, and there was nothing technically stopping the Romans from building big steam engines. They had little toy steam engines, and they had enough metalworking skill to build big steam tractors. It just never occurred to them to do it.
Source: theparisreview.org
Kickstarter is about cutting out the middleman.
It’s not about begging, it’s about delivering.
Bob Lefsetz, “Kickstarter”
An interesting rant (not yet up on his archives) on who should be taking advantage of the Kickstarter platform, and why the Pebble was so successful. Simply put: deliver.
Think about it this way: Flickr was about building the perfect album, Instagram was about taking out that oh-so-imperfect album out of the drawer & showing it to people. For non-believers: Instagram removed features to make sharing pics simple again.
from fr.anc.is
this is spot on, and it’s the big difference between Instagram and Hipstamatic or any of the other photo filter apps. Not just simplifying, but inspiring the experience of sharing—not just taking—the photo.
Put yourself out there and give yourself permission to suck. That’s not to say you should try to suck, but you have to give yourself permission to allow for the possibility of sucking. Without sucking, you’re never going to find your boundaries, and you’ll never push through those boundaries. That’s all it is. Constantly bumping into walls you do not think you can climb and then climbing until you get over them. There’s no mystery to it, no magic. It’s about dedication and constantly trying to improve.
Michael Ian Black’s advice for those attempting comedy & other creative pursuits, as told to The Rumpus (via sarahspy)
Good guy Michael.
(via msg)
Source: sarahspy
jryu:
Annie’s Inc., the organic food maker, soared on its stock market debut on Wednesday, rising 63.7 percent, to $31.11 a share, at its open. (via Annie’s Pops 64% on Debut - NYTimes.com)
“Consumer companies that have gone public in that period have risen 46.9 percent in value — more than any other sector”
Great news for consumer products companies, there’s that confidence baby!
(via caterpillarcowboy)
Source: The New York Times
This is wonderful. I couldn’t agree more with Alfred Hitchcock on his Definition of Happiness.
(via)
Hitchcock has a surprisingly spot-on explanation of what happiness means to him. From the tone of his films I wouldn’t have guessed he had this outlook.
Source: curiositycounts
Creativity is about connecting things. When you ask a creative person how they did something, they may feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.” - Steve Jobs.
Well said, Steve. Well said.
Caterpillar Cowboy: Here's how Tumblr could make $100M per year if they tried
I believe e-commerce can make Tumblr over $100M a year. I’ve shared my thoughts with the Tumblr team directly, but I figured I’d share it with all of you as well. It comes in two flavors: independent stores (bottom up) and retail partnerships (top down).
Independent stores are like Etsy,…
A very interesting idea indeed. And as the last line notes, the real question is why isn’t Tumblr already doing this? Especially for fashion, photography and art, this is an absolute no-brainer. The addictive quality of a simple stream/collage Tumblog (like Convoy, for instance) with great curation and aesthetic demands an instant purchase option. At least twice a day I come across something in those streams that I want to buy immediately…but outside the context of other beautiful photos, it’s suddenly less interesting. That’s the key, and it’s what Tumblr should be monetizing to high heaven.
Source: caterpillarcowboy
It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.
Source: brycedotvc
Sesame Street Augmented Reality Dolls Take AR to the Next Level (by minipcpro)
This is where we think play is headed. It’s not about animating the object itself with shoddy animatronics or speakers and LED lights. The future of play and any interaction that blends the physical and digital experiences is in the ability for the digital application to itself bring to life the physical object through a combination of fantastic storytelling and terrific technology. Currently, Augmented Reality is the tech being used, and it’s in its infancy. I’m not sure if that will be the way of the future, but I’m sure that in 3-5 years, finding that intersection will not only be the key, but the norm.
Source: youtube.com
