Chris Maresca

The Hard Work of Social Media

I was just looking at a discussion about LinkedIn where someone called it useless.   I’ve been a LinkedIn user for years, basically since it was launched, so I’m more than a little biased about it’s utility.   However, I also recognize that quite a few people think it should be a magic bullet to a variety of problems, from lead generation to landing a new job.  Truth is, like most social networking/media sites, it’s hard work to get what you want out of it.

Nothing is a substitute for doing the hard work of face to face networking, but LinkedIn is hugely helpful in keeping up those relationships, particularly as people transition from one job to another.  It’s also extremely helpful in surfacing people in other industries and helping to setup face to face meetings in other regions you may be traveling to.

Ultimately, however, it’s like everything else, you get out of it what you put into it. Social media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) is particularly weird in the sense that it might take quite some effort (and time) to get out of what it promises.

It’s also important to remember that in some geographies like Silicon Valley, it’s pretty much a requirement to be on LinkedIn – in other places or verticals other than tech, it’s not as common or it may be another social media network.  In Europe, Bebo and Xing are much more used that LinkedIn – and Facebook is increasingly what people use to connect for business purposes.

As far as generating business from LinkedIn, it’s pretty clear that no single medium ‘generates business’, you have to work a broad front and each little bit increases your ability to ‘generate business’.

In the end, there is no magic bullet, it just comes down to hard, consistent work over a period of time, much like every other aspect of business.   In that sense, social media is no different.

What I look for in a pitch

Over the years, I’ve gotten many requests from people wanting help raising funds.   Most of the time, I find that they have failed to do their homework and that even the most basic elements are missing from their pitch.   I recently posted in a forum describing what I would look for in a pitch, so I thought I’d re-post it here, a bit cleaned up and expanded.

What I look for in a pitch

A pitch is several stories.  It’s the story about how you will successfully run your company if you get money and it’s much like a sales pitch.   But it’s not just your company’s story, it is also the story of you and the people on your team, the industry you are targeting, the story of your customers and finally, the ending chapter of your company.   Like every good story, these should have arcs that meet at some logic point.   And, like most good stories, it needs to be cogent, logical and progress along path.   All that said, what are the tangibles that I would look for in a pitch?  Well, here are some:

• Entrepreneurs should know everything about their business/market and I consider it a bad sign if I know even just a little more
• Know who I am, why you are talking to me and what your expectations are from me
• Have done their homework about investors, funds and criteria.
• Polished presentations & financials
• Business plans in the traditional sense are a waste of everyone’s time – I don’t really care if you have one
• A good, clear slide deck that lays out the future of the company (the story, see above)
• Detailed financials that are in sync with the deck
• Polished, articulate delivery of both the deck and financials (you need to know this stuff cold)
• A clear understanding of real and potential competitors, with a view of competitive differentiators
• A clear and complete executive summary that someone can grok in less than 10 min.
• A good website
• Finally, there should be some sort of working prototype or demo, esp. if it’s software.

There are tons of online and offline resources for learning how to do all of this and there really is no excuse for not doing it.  I would also point out that I don’t expect everything to be in the deck, just a good, compelling story about the future of your business, industry and customers.  That said, I expect you or your team to be able to answer every question I ask, in detail if appropriate.  And if you don’t know, don’t make it up.

So there it is, a basic outline of what should be in the pitch.   I would point out that there is a lot of other detail about what should be in there and that you should understand what your target investors are looking for when putting together your pitch.

TEDxSV – Not inspiring

I’ve heard a lot about TED over the last 10 or so years.  It’s always an event I’ve wanted to attend but have never been able to justify the cost.  Lots of brilliant people I know rave about it, so I was happy to see the TEDx series of local events emerge.   I missed TEDxSF San Francisco, as, like many other people, I only heard about it after it happened, but I was lucky enough to go to TEDxSV.

Or so I thought.

I couldn’t make the whole thing as it was an all day event and I had overlapping obligations.  Instead, I did my best to catch bits and pieces of the stream and show up for the afternoon portion.   Disappointing is an understatement.  I’ve watched many great TED talks online, and only one of the TEDxSV talks came close to any of those (Sekou Andrews – watch it here starts at about 22min).   Most of the talks seemed to be talking down to the audience, as in ‘you are lay people, let me preach to you’.   Not inspiring, not like Itay Talgam describing how performances are about telling many stories, including the story of the audience (see Itay Talgam’s presentation at TED here).   Most of the TEDxSV talks had only one story and it was about the presenter.

To bad, it could have been great, but perhaps this is what happens when you try to replicate something in multiple places.

Thunderbird 3 on Mac OSX – Not so great

I’ve been a longtime Thunderbird user, and I thought I would upgrade to V3 today.  Bad idea.   Although the UI was slightly updated (notably through the use of tabs), everything else was either the same or broken.   The mail compose toolbar wound up overwriting the From field section (with From, Subject, etc all in lower case) and nothing seemed quite right.  It was faster, but I decided that reverting back to the status quo ante was the fastest route to productivity.

It seems, however, the Mozilla makes it as hard as possible to download previous versions.   I never actually found the download for Thunderbird 2 and instead went looking for it in my ‘Downloads’ folder.   I keep it for occasions such as this when people decide that old versions are not good for you….

Finally, since Lightning did not work with Thunderbird 3, I decided to use Sunbird (a standalone calendering app) to extract the Lighting data.   Since I was doing this after installing TB3, I went hunting for the file containing my calendar data.   Not only was this the most obscure file in the most unobvious place, but Sunbird was incapable of importing.   Compounded with my basic problems with the buggy TB3, reverting back to TB2 was the thing to do.  After I’d found my download backup, it was relatively easy to do, although the whole adventure cost me the better part of 2 hours.

On another note, I have huge amounts of stored email.   It’s always been an issue, and it’s one of the reasons I use TB over Apple’s Mail.app.  Mail.app just can’t handle large mailboxes (e.g. 3gigs 70k+ messages).    Searching across all this is somewhat of a problem, however, and my solution was to run a local search engine on exported mbox files.   However, I’ve found a better solution, MailStewart, a Mac-only application that will archive all your mail and attachments, index them and make the whole think searchable.  It’s cheap and works great.

The problem with biometrics

I’ve always said that the security of biometrics is really problematic.  Once someone figures out how to hack a biometric device, it’s impossible for users to ‘change the password’.  Unlike most systems that provide authentication (e.g. passwords, SecurID tokens, drivers licenses, etc), you can’t just throw out the ‘token’ (e.g. your fingerprints or eyes) and replace it with a new one.

There have been numerous attempts to hack fingerprints in particular, such as gelatin overlays, cutting off the actual persons fingers, etc., but it seems that the ultimate hack has now come about:

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8400222.stm

A Chinese woman managed to enter Japan illegally by having plastic surgery to alter her fingerprints, thus fooling immigration controls, police claim.

Apparently, this is quite a widespread thing and it should really worry people.   Not because of those bypassing the system, but because it’s only a matter of time before fingerprints are ‘cloned’ and innocent people are improperly accused/denied/arrested.  It’s compounded by the fact that laws and law enforcement sees fingerprints as one of the stronger ‘proofs’ of someone’s presence in a particular place.

How long before fake irises or even DNA?  Who knows, but it turns out that fingerprints are no more secure than any other form of identification.

VCs may be exempt from new financial regulations

Never mind the apocalyptic drop in funding for VCs, what would have really killed off the industry would have been financial regulations.   According to the Wall Street Journal, looks like these have been stopped by Barney Frank.

As a rule, VCs carry no debt, don’t use derivatives and don’t trade in the public markets. Since they had nothing to do with the credit meltdown, it remains a mystery why Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner urged Congress to force them to register with the SEC as investment advisers, subject to staggering compliance burdens.Mr. Frank’s planned stay of regulatory execution will have a positive economic impact disproportionate to the small size of the VC industry. Venture-backed companies are responsible for supporting firms that now generate more than 20% of U.S. GDP and are needed more than ever to ignite a rebound in private-sector jobs.

From the Wall Street Journal

Hopefully this will lead to a revival of fortunes in VC land, although it’s probably false hope until the other end of the equation (SarbOx) is also dealt with…

New healthcare plan ignores small businesses

Kevin Kelly, a small business owner in Union City, CA, writing in Newsweek, outlines how healthcare plans are just not doing it for him.  One interesting datapoint is the way SMBs are defined by congress vs the Small Business Administration:

most legislation defines small business as companies with less than 50 employees. This stands in sharp contrast to the standard set by the Small Business Administration, which defines small business as manufacturing companies with less than 500 employees and nonmanufacturing firms with receipts of less than $7 million. The definition matters. Most plans in Congress set employer mandates at 50 employees or more, with no tax credits going to companies that are larger. Small businesses will have to offer the same levels of coverage as companies many times larger, and they’ll get no help to offset costs.

He concludes with some rather sobering thoughts about small businesses leading the recovery, or not, as the case may be:

[M]y costs continue to skyrocket each year, with little hope increases will ever end. This puts me at a competitive disadvantage against foreign competitors with state-run systems.Last year our health-insurance bill jumped $140,000. We decided not to pass any of the increase on to employees since they were already being hammered by rising gasoline prices. We worried that bumping their costs up might force some good, well-trained employees to look elsewhere for work. But in order to cover that cost, we had to find either $2 million in new sales or the same in cost cuts. Otherwise, it came out of margin. I’ll give you one guess how we covered the hike.

Today I am no more hopeful, reform or not, that our company’s lot will change. I will still think twice about adding jobs when I know that I am not just taking on a new wage or salary, but high health-care costs as well. “How can you have a job recovery when you worry about such things”

Source: http://www.newsweek.com/id/217136

Obama as Nobel-laureate – Not popular

Well, everyone is buzzing about it and mostly not in a good way.  This post by port1080 @  TnT provides a good series of comments from usually supportive websites:

If there’s any question that this decision was bizarre, it should be dispelled by the fact that even most of the left (from the center-left to the far left) is puzzled by it:

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2009/10/09/a_premature_peace_prize/index.html

“If he achieves all [his goals], he definitely deserves a prize. But not quite yet.”

http://www.tnr.com/blog/obama-wins-nobel-peace-prize

“Seriously. Should he turn it down?”

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/10/9/791325/-Turn-it-down,-Obama

“He has to turn down the Nobel Peace Prize.”

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/482445/the_aspirational_nobel

“These Nobel sentiments, however, are aspirational in my view. Obama doesn’t deserve the prize, yet. ”

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/10/unexpected_developments.php?ref=fpblg

“This is an odd award. You’d expect it to come later in Obama’s presidency and tied to some particular event or accomplishment.”

34 banks miss TARP dividend payments

Naked Capitalism has a good post about banks missing TARP dividend payments.  It’s pretty stunning that some are missing payments on relatively small sums:

Of the 34 miscreants, two are pretty large, namely AIG and CIT, But the next on the list is First Bancorp, which received a mere $400 million from the TARP. Probably more important than the number is the trend, since the number of institutions that skipped dividends nearly doubled. In a supposedly improving economy and with a steep yield curve (at least until very recently), things appear to be getting worse rather than better.

Boy, if I missed an IRS payment, there would be some pretty big fallout, I’m sure.   But with the banks, apparently nothing bad happens…..

World in Transition

I don’t know how many people remember the ‘World at War‘ series produced in early 1970’s, but if you do, I think someone, in 20 years, will produce a similar series about the last dozen years.   Except, it will start in January 2009 and go backwards.

If you step back and look at what has happened in the last dozen or so years, it’s been a remarkable ride.  Not only have we invented whole new ways of communication, but these new technologies have wired us together in a way that no political, social, religious or economic movement has ever been able to do.   It’s lead to whole new businesses, industries, jobs, fortunes and social trends. More »