Hyperpublic
My “Golden Syndicate” & 4 Free Passes to Medieval Times for Your Great Employee #5
Lately I’ve had a few people ask me who are the most valuable investors in our syndicate at Hyperpublic. My first answer, before I get into specifics tends to be as follows:
“Entrepreneurs tend to overestimate the impact that their early investors will have on day to day operations of their startups. Especially relative to the impact of their early hires.”
Here’s the secret truth of a seed round syndicate: once you close your round, you get a big pile of money and then it is almost 100% on you to make a success of your startup. That’s a bit of hyperbole, but you get the point.
Even as we grow at Hyperpublic from our initial two (Doug and I) to hopefully 5.5 (if we get there on someone we’ve been getting to know for the last month), the impact of this 5th team member will be 500% more important to the ultimate trajectory of our company than any single investor has been or will be to the ultimate outcome of HP. The reason: because investors are there to enhance your team’s internal efforts, but they can only amplify the momentum, good decisions, and execution that you are generating from within your core team.
This may sound strange for me to say, as I myself am an active seed investor at Lerer Ventures, but I thought it worth debunking the myth that a “golden syndicate” is capable of getting an early stage startup to the promised land. I think of our investors at Hyperpublic, at least at this point in our development, as extensions of our core team. My job as CEO is to channel their domain expertise and experience into actionable efforts within our core team, but without an amazing group of people putting their blood and sweat behind our investors’ domain expertise and guidance, our amazing syndicate would be valueless.
So this is all to say, nobody is going to build value for your startup like your team. Bring in the best investors as you can, but understand that 99% of the work is going to get done by full time employees. Success rests not on the shoulders of your syndicate, but squarely on the shoulders of your team.
P.S. I’ll write tomorrow about all the amazing things our investors have done to help grow Hyperpublic, and also maybe I’ll cover the value we’ve added to our portfolio companies at LV, but I don’t think there’s an experienced investor on earth who will place their own impact in the same stratosphere as that of the early teams that they’ve backed.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )Was Your Decision to Read This Conscious?
A few weeks ago, I went through the psychotic effort of mapping my attention across all facets of life. This was not an analysis of how I spend my time, but rather an attempt at examining what facets of life capture the most mindshare. Not surprisingly professional subject matter dominates my attention at this juncture in my life, you can see the graph below for the ugly details.
Within each bucket outlined below, I went one level deeper. For example within Love, I estimated the attention I spent on searching vs. acting vs. indulging vs. analyzing, or within Professional I mapped the thought devoted to recruiting vs. administrative vs. distribution vs. product vision, etc. I’ll spare you the graphs for all 9 verticals and summarize by telling you that my life is pretty imbalanced right now, with more mindshare dedicated to Twitter than communication with my family (who I love and talk to all the time) and more attention devoted to administrative tasks for Hyperpublic than to discovery of love. Buy me a beer and I’ll share all the data if your interested. At each point within these 9 buckets where I felt I was spending a greater amount of attention than was consistent with my philosophical ideals (or concept of what I should be focused on), I circled the line-item and drew an arrow with an action I could take to directly increase or decrease this subject’s allocation in my mind. This experiment was an effort of life optimization.
Again not surprisingly, what became clear immediately, was that I wanted to add more attention to almost every bucket and almost every line item within each bucket. I found myself trading 1/10 of a percent of attention here for 1/10 of a percent there, without a whole lot of margin to work with (e.g. many facets of my life are close to optimized in terms of attention). The one glaring area where I found a large pocket of attention to steal and sprinkle on all the needy buckets and line items was actually in what I’ve defined as Unfocussed Attention. Unfocussed Attention is the state in which you are not actively deciding where to focus, but rather passively taking in stimulus and allowing it to route your attention in whatever direction it chooses. I’ve graphed the breakout of my unfocussed attention below.
You can see that nearly 70% of the time where my focus sputters, and I turn to some source of stimulus to “route” my attention passively, the channel for that stimulus is a mobile or web application. Products like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Instagram, and Foursquare all serve as routers, pushing my attention without my having to make an active decision. Television is the most prevalent example of this passive consumption/attention allocation, but more and more frequently mobile products are filling the blank spaces in our focus and our day with content that drives us in unconscious directions.
When I think about the mobile products that achieve everyday usage and “Homescreen real estate,” they almost categorically possess the attribute of attention routing. They provide a stream of constantly refreshing data/content that can serve up to the consumer a new object/concept/thought to focus on in moments without one. Andrew Kortina at Venmo once used the phrase “hacking my brain” to refer to the changeable nature of our thought patterns, and to borrow his phrase, I have hacked my brain with simple rules to redistribute my unfocussed attention toward the facets of my life more deserving of that thought. Everytime I have the seemingly physiological impulse to reach into my pocket and pull out my phone to check one of these attention routing services, I have trained myself to holster the iPhone, and then spend that moment focused on one of the many line items with a red circle that indicates “in need of more.” I am not swearing off these services (I still use them regularly), but rather only engaging in them when I have consciously decided to engage.
As an entrepreneur building a consumer facing mobile application, I am zeroed in on features that have the capacity to turn Hyperpublic into an attention routing application, but as a human being I feel slightly guilty about amplifying the unfocussed attention in the world. We should be so lucky to face this conundrum:)
P.S. We’ve been meeting with a handful of folks about leading our mobile development efforts, so now would be the time to say hello if that’s your fancy. Email: Jordan.cooper@gmail.com with “Mobile” in the subject line.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 6 so far )Online We’re Googling, Offline Still Stumbling
Last week my upstairs neighbors Deeva and Sophie invited me over for a home cooked meal. When I arrived at their house, I met their brother who was in town visiting from LA. He had previously lived in New York, and I asked him which he preferred. We talked about driving vs. walking, the people, the culture, and ultimately population density. I argued that the most amazing thing about living in this city (and cities in general) is that we are so closely surrounded by millions of people. He responded with an observation that I believe is quite common amongst New Yorkers and visitors. He said, “that’s true, it is amazing to be surrounded by so many people, and so much action, but that can also make this an extremely lonely and isolating place.” He made the point that in moments when you are not engaged in the boundless opportunity of NYC (whether that be through spending time with others, visiting interesting places, or discovering new things), you feel like you are somehow deficient relative to the life you could be experiencing.
I think what he was articulating was a broader and more general human reality, which is that there is a delta between an individual’s actual experience and what is possible. New York may magnify this phenomenon, but I believe this is the case no matter where you live. Life is not perfectly optimized. You miss opportunities, make decisions that return some value to you, but not the maximum possible value, and this is simply a part of life.
If we are missing everyday opportunity here in New York, and beyond, I would point to an unevolved system of physical world discovery and organization as the primary culprit. I look at the headway online applications have made in organizing and surfacing relevant online data, and they far exceed the tools we have to discover what surrounds us offline. Online I am efficient at finding the value I seek and want. Google has indexed almost everything I seek, and my online social graph fills in the blanks. With intent, there is not much I cannot find and engage with online.
Offline, my discovery and engagement is not nearly as advanced. I’m moving through my online life with Google-esque precision, while offline my discovery is barely more efficient than Stumbleupon (online channel surfing). I am stumbling upon people, places, and things based largely on physical proximity to my home, my office, and my gym, and to a lesser extent the physical proximity of my friends’ and family’s homes, offices, and gyms. Stumbling is great where there is no intent, where all we seek is passive exposure and stimulus as opposed to utility or any other type of value/action, but there is so much more that we can be extracting and experiencing from all that surrounds us physically. Products like Yelp, Craigslist, and Milo have made inroads in building a data layer on top of the objects in your physical world, but there is so much more work to be done. You see how with organization and indexing of these physical objects you are able to act on the places and things and people nearby, but your physical world is nowhere near searchable. Not yet at least.
I think a lot about the mission behind Hyperpublic. Why do I care about building a data layer on top of your physical and local world? Why should you care about building a data layer on top of your physical and local world? Why should we collectively pull together to add, organize and index this information about who and what surrounds us? Because I see a world where you will be able to navigate the experience outside your door with the same ease and efficiency as you move through the web. And when we collectively illuminate and demystify the opportunity that surrounds you, the delta between your experience and what is possible will shrink, and we will move away from isolation, slipping deeper into the fabric of our local, physical, and social environment.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )“Why We Shoot” (how smart phones are changing our concept of a “photo”)
I see a shift emerging in consumer mindset around the camera in mobile devices. Increasingly, whether through an app that takes control of the camera, or even more frequently within the existing photo app on smartphones, I see consumers using the camera not just as a means of photography in the traditional sense (snapping images for their aesthetic value), but also as a richer form of mobile data capture. Consumers are organically utilizing the camera to engage in more utility based applications where rather than typing to capture an observation or experience, they take a photo of an object that is not “photogenic” for lack of a better term.
I recently rented a short term apartment in another country, and rather than photocopying our passports, the proprietor of the flat simply snapped photos of our passports with their smart phone. Similarly, when my landlord leaves an invoice for rent at home, rather than write a note to my roommate, I just snap a photo of the invoice and email it to him. Evernote was an early pioneer in teaching users that the camera could be used to augment and support memory, and even my instagram feed comes not just with aesthetic vignettes that you would expect on a service like Flickr, but also images of objects which have a deeper or data “meaning” to them. Someone pushes a “screenshot” of their CallerID into my feed and it has no “photographic merit,” but the data that the image represents has a “meaning” that is captured and communicated through a mechanism with less friction than the user typing and tweeting “I never pick up calls from blocked numbers on Caller ID.”
The camera is increasingly becoming a means to capture digital information for record keeping, memory, organization, and communication of objects and data that lack aesthetically interesting qualities. I believe this year we will see a slew of applications that amplify this shift in the way consumers “think” about what a “photo” is and when/where in their life it occurs to them to capture one. I think this is going to a big year for applications that are pushing the limits of “why we shoot” and at least personally I am building and investing ahead of this storm. If you are interested in pushing these boundaries and want to help us build at Hyperpublic, we’ve got some interesting mobile development challenges ahead both from a UX and technical perspective. If you’re pushing these limits at your own startup (in some vertical other than local) I’d be interested in hearing about it and maybe even investing in you.
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