Todd Sampson

I heard this great quote from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in a podcast a year ago.  The table discussion at last week’s Startup2Startup dinner made me think of it again.  Unless you are building flight controls or financial tools, this is how you should design social software:

Think of the last restaurant you went to. Did you have a knife on the table? Did you know that knives can do real harm if they are used to stab people? Have you seen our new restaurant? We keep each customer in his or her own cage, so that no harm under any circumstances can be done to others.

That is just so smart.  Build software like we build society.  Be open.  Fear less.  Trust more.  People are (mostly) good.  And, just in case someone really is a bastard, have police and emergency services ready to go when they are needed.

And, just for fun, here’s one more great take on computer security from XKCD:

Why is this happening again?  Why does every media industry feel compelled to make the same dumb mistakes? It’s like these companies are waving, Ms. Creative Destruction please come over here and wipe out my business.  I just don’t get it.

The latest case in point is the book publishing industry (from Reuters):

The new [Amazon] Kindle can read books aloud, but unlike with audio books, royalties are not paid to authors. [Author's Guild President Roy Blount Jr] argued the technology Amazon uses to turn text into a human voice is quickly improving, and authors need to be “duly vigilant” about this novel means of transmitting their work.  The guild, which is studying the issue, has called the Kindle’s speech function a “significant challenge to the publishing industry.”  On Friday, Amazon said rights-owners will be allowed to decide — title by title — whether to enable the function.

Go ahead, turn off the audio on the Kindle version of your book. I, along with many other people, will not buy the crippled version of your product.  But someone else will care just enough to take a few hours to break the encryption and give the entire book away for free.  (Sound familiar?)

I’ll be honest, the text-to-speech feature on the Kindle is the primary reason I purchased the device.  I like being able to read a book and then plug it in to continue listening while I am driving in the car.  It was a nice advance and has already caused me to purchase more books.  That said, I hope that the Author’s Guild and anyone else “studying” the impact of the Kindle’s new feature actually listens to one of their books played over a set of speakers.  The quality of the voice is crappy.  It’s bearable, and a major improvement, but it’s still crappy.  It simply can’t compete with the quality of a professionally recorded audio book.

So, what’s a publisher to do:

First, don’t cripple a poor quality new feature that competes with another one of your product offerings. Take a page from the movie industry’s painfully learned playbook: Some DVDs now include an iPod/AppleTV version of the move along with the DVD for $5 more. Could I buy the DVD and rip it with Handbrake?  In most cases, sure.  But when it takes me several hours and the results in inconsistent, and often lower quality, I’ll drop the $5 every time.

Second, if you want to make more money and make me a happier user of your product, let me have the relatively crappy computer read audio book with my book purchase for free. But offer to include your kick-ass professional audio book recording as part of the download to the Kindle for $5 more.  How often do you sell both a text and audio version of the same book to a user??  I am guessing — approximately — never!  Personally, I have done it 3 times in my 36 years on this planet — and I am a far greater than average consumer of both printed and audio books.  I would gladly give you more money on nearly every purchase for a better experience. And since you already have the audio book, it would be a no-brainer way to let everyone win.

Book publishers, I like your product entirely too much to see you kill yourselves off.  You are at a fork in the road.  Please don’t follow the music/movie/newspaper/magazine/software media industries down the wrong path.

Wow! I just realized it has already been two weeks since my last day at Yahoo!

In the last two weeks I have:

• Connected with tons of old & new friends in the startup world.
• Helped Rahmin, Strauss and the Cloudspace crew get Unclasses launched.
• Hosted an (un)bar-b-q — i.e. indoor bar-b-q that got rained out.  (Credit on this one goes to my wife.)
• Helped John & Jared get a rockin’ new Zentact extension launched — seriously, if you use Gmail, stop reading and go check-it-out.  Find out what all of your friends are up to as you are sending them email.  Great stuff!
• Had a killer 4th birthday party for my son at the San Francisco Zoo.  (Again, all credit on this one goes to Lissy.)
• Took an idea we had been kicking around for a long time and worked with John and Tim @ Cloudspace to make it real by South by South West 2009.  Famery is now live — though we are still doing minor tweaks for an official launch tomorrow.  Feel free to send in your sightings of friends that use twitter to help us kick the tires.
• Not slept much.  I’m amazed at how quickly my body jumped back into hacking sessions going to 3:30 a.m.

Tomorrow (er, later today) I fly to Austin, TX to attend SxSW Interactive.  Can’t wait to see everyone there!  Be forewarned, everyone I see will be sighted on Famery.

I just realized that I restarted blogging again a year ago last Tuesday.

I’m really happy that I have stuck with it somewhat consistently. Blogging has been a great outlet for helping me shape ideas and getting input from a ton of really smart people. Thanks to everyone who has stopped by to check things out and especially to those who have taken the time to give their $.02. Looking forward to continuing the discussion.

A company is made up of humans that interact with it.

A company should be an amplifier for the personalities of the people that work, invest, discuss, hire, or partner with it. (That is what great brands do, right — they polarize and let a person say something to the outside world just by having the product or using the service.) Being a political correctness shield that tries to remove all personality in an effort to be inoffensive and appeal to everyone just doesn’t work anymore. You can’t be all things to all people and neither can (or should) companies. Love us or hate us, just don’t let us blend in to the sea of blah companies.

On my favorite day of the year (yes, I am a true believer in the magic of Christmas) I wanted to wish a very merry Christmas to all.  And I can think of no better way to do so then with the lyrics from one of my favorite holiday songs.

“The Christmas Waltz”

Frosted windowpanes
Candles gleaming inside
Painted candy canes on the tree

Santa’s on his way
He’s filled his sleigh with things
Things for you and me

It’s that time of year
When the world falls in love
Every song you hear seems to say
“Merry Christmas
May your New Year dreams come true”

And this song of mine
In three-quarter time
Wishes you and yours
The same thing, too

Merry Christmas

When my great friend & MyBlogLog co-founder Eric Marcoullier and I are asked by other founders:

“Hey, we just received an offer of $XX Million to sell our company to [Google/Microsoft/Yahoo!/etc.].  Do you think we should take it?”

Our answer is always the same:

“Is it enough money for you to never see your startup change again?  Would you be comfortable calling this project you have worked on so hard ‘done’ — including reading posts in the media saying that you have stopped innovating?  If so, and the organization is a good fit for you and your product, then absolutely sell.  If not, you should think very deeply if selling is really the right move for you now.”

I am now wondering if we should go even further:

“Would you be comfortable never touching your product again?”

You are selling your company after all.  It now belongs to someone else.  Perhaps the best move for the startup, founders and the acquiring company alike would be to make the hard choice — like parents sending their kids off to college — to let their baby grow up without those that brought them into the world.

For those who missed the classic Seinfeld episode (scene 1, scene 2) shrinkage is what happens when your man-bits get too cold. The funny thing is, the same thing can happen to your network. If the relationships with your contacts go cold — through falling out of touch or contacting them only when you need something — your network shrinks too.

Along comes Zentact to help warm things up.

In its current form, Zentact is a Firefox add-on that helps you keep-in-touch with all those people you have intended to build relationships with; but may have let slip. (You planned on building relationships with those hundreds of people you added to LinkedIn didn’t you? What percentage have you contacted in the last six months??) The add-on surfs along with you and notifies you when a page you are reading might be of interest to your contacts — based on their name or tags you have entered for the person.  Zentact then lets you send them a link without leaving the page using email or Twitter.  Hopefully the link you send brings some added value to your contact.  But at the very least, it makes them feel good that you took the time to reach-out.  And just like that, +1 in the relationship bank account.

Zentact was created by my brother & former MyBlogLog lead engineer John Sampson and Jared Brandt — of A Donkey & A Goat Winery fame. My buddy & MyBlogLog co-founder Eric Marcoullier and super-investor/internet rock star Howard Lindzon are some of their main advisers. And to top it off, the crew at Cloudspace — the Orlando-based agile development shop John & I founded in 1996 — have done most of the development to date.

Based on the early reviews in Mashable, VentureBeat, TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb it looks like they have a really big potential hit on their hands. Mashable even said, “Zentact Might Be the Best Social Networking Idea of the Year.”

Damn guys, I couldn’t be prouder or more excited for you!