Save Me From B-School

A friend with a particular gift for web wisdom once told me “there are only two ways people will find your site: through Google, or because someone tells them about it.” I subscribe to this assertion (of course “someone” includes aggregation sites and other trusted link collectors) and also believe that if your site is worth talking about, Google will respond to that as well.

I saw a link to Ling’s Cars last week on Twitter and stared in shock and awe for a good 10 seconds at the website. Animated gifs, FOR SERIOUS. It took me an additional 30 seconds of pretty concentrated analysis to decide whether the site was a farce, a scam or maybe-just-maybe a site that actually leases cars? You can take a look at the image below, but that’s just a small taste.  Click the link. Go ahead, I dare you.

That was just the beginning. In the hours that followed, I realized that Ling’s Cars is actually totally effing brilliant. I find myself sometimes so sucked into the rounded-corners gospel that I forget no one really notices that stuff except for *other design snobs*. I think good design is extremely important but I’m starting to realize design and usability aren’t as tied together as I once thought.

So why is Ling’s Cars awesome? Thoughts:

Authenticity

Car salesman have a (often well-deserved) reputation for sleaziness. Every time I interact with a car salesman, I am trying to pinpoint how exactly I am getting screwed, and for how much. Ling’s whimsical site prompts the opposite response - all the “shiny objects” prevent the buyer from going on the offensive the minute he/she lands on the site.

Did everyone see Jesse Schell’s awesome talk from DICE last month about “Design Outside the Box”? I think it’s relevant here - start watching at about 12:00, where he talks about authenticity.  The most interesting quote:

“Gilmore and Pine put forth this interesting concept, that the most valuable thing in products today is ‘are they real?’ ‘are they authentic?’…we live in a bubble of fake bullsh*t, and we have this hunger to get to anything that’s real.”

If nothing else, Ling’s Cars is authentic - you can tell it’s a real person behind the site and not just some SEO factory. Perhaps you missed this quote: “Note: I live inside this website Monday to Friday 9am-6pm, to give you the very best service and make your experience a happy one! - I am Ling, accept no substitutes.”

Entire video here:

Insane Understanding of Importance of Referral Traffic

After I found the site, I was curious to see what the smart folks at Hacker News thought of it. So I posted this thread and within 30 minutes, Ling had found the link, responded and emailed me. A personal email. From Ling.

I think many web business owners underestimate the importance of referral traffic, especially traffic that comes from sites that aren’t search engines.

Personal Attention

Given the quote about living in the website, the personal email I got from Ling and the piles and piles of customer letters on the site, it is clear to me that Ling really takes good care of her customers, in a genuine way. If I ever need a car in the UK, guess who I am going to call? Perhaps it’s not directly “conversion” but it’s that step before conversion -  “awareness”- that’s just as important.

Give The Customer What they Want

The reason why Ling’s Cars was getting so much attention on Twitter a few weeks ago was likely tied to this presentation from the 2010 Online Marketing Summit (start at slide 54). After doing some research I also found a blog post that speaks about the usability win of the site.

I think something the site excels at is giving people what they want. It’s surprisingly easy to navigate and find what you’re looking for.

First-mover advantage (FMA, not to be confused with FML) is one of those things they teach you in business school as *doctrine*. Be first, or don’t bother. This leads to much malaise when, upon coming up with, say, a brilliant idea for a mobile coupon business, hopes and dreams are shattered when it becomes known that hordes of other entrepreneurs are working on the same idea.

I have been thinking about how FMA applies to web startups, and after some thought, I now believe first-mover advantage is a myth in the web world.

If the premise of FMA relies on the fact that a first-mover will gain resources and advantages that  later entrants will not be able to match, then these advantages have to be compelling enough to warrant fighting to be first. And I’m not sure they are any more.

Argument below. Thoughts/criticism welcome.  Put this together pretty quickly (and highly unscientifically) so I’m sure there are lots of holes.

1.  Moore’s Law and speed.

Moore’s law is one of those “golden rules” in the tech world. Everybody looooves to cite it. Moore’s law is to tech nerds what Foucault is to philosophy junkies.

It’s because there’s a lot of brilliance in Moore’s law.  As I understand it - the real brilliance here was the observation that technology progresses much quicker than people would think possible (or more accurately, that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 24 months).

If you think about how this plays out in the consumer world, it means that consumers will become socialized to adopting more advanced technology faster.  So the amount of time it takes for a market to develop, hit a peak, and become saturated (say, photo sharing) is shrinking.

How does this affect first-mover advantage?  Take a look at my lovely graph below. If a technology markets develop more quickly, this will seriously reduce the potential upside for a first-mover. The top graph is what we think is FMA, the bottom is what I believe it really looks like.

If this is true, the potential upside you can gain from FMA is shrinking.

2.  Underestimated importance of initial users (adoption) and marketing.

I know a lot of entrepreneurs who have the “if you build it they will come” mentality. No one will admit to this, obviously.  They talk to you all day about marketing and user acquisition, but it seems like very very few web startups actually do this well.

I know I’m not alone here - Dave McClure wrote an excellent rant on this about a month ago.

Initial users are the ones that will evangelize your service and make it zeitgeisty and remarkable. I saw this great video last night on the importance of “first followers” and how they help to create mass movements.

Sharp marketing and committed users have nothing to do with FMA and seemingly everything to do with popularity and adoption.

3.  Zero barriers to entry, commodification of apps, low switching costs.

Have you noticed all of those “hey look at what I built in a weekend” links on Hacker News? The ease-of-use afforded by these new slick web frameworks like Rails and Django make it pretty easy and quick to build a site and enter a market.

Web sites and mobile apps are undergoing a process of commodification as they become easier and easier to make, and the move toward cloud-based apps makes the switching costs for the user nearly zero. It’s no longer enough to have a single hit with a single great app.

All of these trends are really cutting into the upside of being first.

4.  “Early is the same as wrong”. This is something I heard a lot in Silicon Valley. I don’t necessarily agree - if you are early but are smart enough about your cash to hold on until the market matures, then you’re not necessarily wrong. Seems like the emphasis on being first is flawed - it’s about timing.

The tough part is finding the trade-off. There’s this sweet spot between the first-mover land-grab and market readiness, but you have to hold on until the wave hits.  Everyone’s favorite example here is online video - there were plenty of video sites pre-YouTube but they were slow and mostly annoying. The strategic use of flash and rise in broadband internet in homes helped to make the market timing nearly perfect, though with the dominance window narrowing I think even trying to time the market is an exercise in futility.

Market Dominance in the Brave New Web World

So, if not from FMA, where does real market dominance come from?

I suppose in a way I’m making an argument for extreme iteration. But it’s more than that. I think the consumer web industry - similar to fashion and music - is incredibly driven by trends and timing.  If you can hit a curve at the point right before widespread adoption, and do this consistently, you will become more invaluable to your user.

See the graph below - the point here is that it’s no longer a single curve and a single market. Instead, the companies that will do the best, in my mind, are the ones that can take advantage of many markets consecutively.

The company that I believe does this best is Facebook. If they had stayed a profile -n- poke site, they’d surely be dead by now. Instead, each product launch happens right around the top end of a curve - photos, videos, Twitter-style-messages, and now talk of geo-enabled features and even “check-ins”.

While FMA as a concept is not dead to me completely - it can be incredibly helpful in many many other markets, to me in the app-driven world of the web (and increasingly mobile too) it just doesn’t seem all that important.

Conclusion: “someone’s already doing this” should be a crappy deterrent.

If you really love something, you should want to know everything about it, right?

I am currently in an ongoing love affair with the internets. This, mixed with the liberal dispensing of tech-related kool-aid that goes on at MIT, has provided enough of an impetus for me to begin learning how to actually write beautiful code. The hack-job e-commerce sites I had developed and run and SEO-ed like mad before school just will not do. No, this is a completely different undertaking.

And guess what? Writing respectable code is REALLY EFFING HARD.

Genius conclusion, I know. I wanted to write this post though, not to announce to the world that hey-guess-what-coding-is-hard, but rather to analyze why I believe business-y people like myself tend to abandon ship at this point in the learning process.

I do not plan to quit. In fact, I am only *more* determined and believe that over the next 2 years I can learn enough Python to be dangerous. That said, long-term-progress undertakings are really easy to quit.

The reason I’m not quitting is because I’ve been through this before, when I decided in 2005 that I just had to learn Chinese. So I did what any normal/sane person would do and packed my bags and moved to Beijing. I was not leaving until I could speak Chinese. Period.

I wanted to learn Chinese because my ultimate plan was to get a PhD in Chinese-American relations and become a badass diplomat (translation: spy). I really believe that in order to understand something at the most intimate level you need to learn the entire chain - ie, in order for me to understand the inner workings of the Chinese government, I had to be able to understand how the interactions take place in their most basic form.  Same thing with computers and the internet. In order to truly understand macro trends, it seems like one needs to be familiar with the most granular aspects of the trade.

I enrolled in a beginner (level 0) Chinese class here and off I went. What I did not realize is that any Chinese class worth a damn will spend at least the first month going over the fundamentals of the language. This means you don’t even learn how to say a single sentence until at least one month in - and keep in mind this is full-time studying. See the video below. Welcome to my entire life, September 2005.  I’ll call this the “bopomofo” period. Day after day it was “bo po mo fo”, again! repeat! You learn sounds and tones and initials and finals and radicals and you leave each day not one bit more prepared to go and order lunch than you were the day before.

I was frustrated, and wanted to quit. Why was I wasting my time learning how to shape my mouth and twist my tounge just right and listen for the difference between first tone and fourth tone? Hello! I had dumplings to order, and fake-North-face vendors to haggle with!

With Chinese, you can’t just take what you know from English or Spanish or German or whatever and apply it. You have to start from scratch and completely re-conceptualize how you think about language and structures and communication fundamentally.

After three months, it started to make sense. If I wanted to actually become good and not just some dummy with a phrase book, I had to have a strong grasp of the fundamentals. I couldn’t go straight to learning phrases otherwise I would have to eventually unlearn all of my bad habits. So I sucked it up and went back and really really mastered all those mouth formations. And then I skipped two levels of class and ended my year having an all-in-Chinese throw-down with a military doctor in Tibet. Good times. (Though sadly now I’ve forgotten a good chunk of what I learned).

Seems to be the same in the world of developers. There are probably more than a few who have some knowledge here and there but don’t really have a clue how the entire system works together. These are the people with the phrase books who can say enough to sound impressive but in reality have a really shallow knowledge-base.

I am in the “bopomofo” period of learning to program, which is fine with me only because I know it’s going to be these micro-incremental teeny tiny baby steps for a while. But man, it sucks.

Now I understand why so many business students and other non-technical types who love technology make the attempt to learn how to code and then quit right around now. In non-technical professions there really is no equivalent to this particular type of learning. Spending an entire day to get the “name” field to work on a form for your website is easy to dismiss as a “non-optimal” use of time, especially when there’s someone you can hire who can do it in 5 minutes.

Though I think that is completely missing the point.

Knowing the “bopomofo” of the web world can be extremely helpful for non-technical people when interacting with a technical team. And once you make it through mastering the fundamentals, your ability to learn new concepts improves exponentially.

At least that’s what I’m hoping.

I believe the J-term (short for January term) might be the best thing to happen to an academic calendar since President’s Day.

I never had one in undergrad (silly quarter system) so I was unable to appreciate that four weeks of “do-a-small-project” at the beginning of the year is a most excellent way to try something new.  Almost no downside.  It’s not like the “internship” during the summer between the two years of business school - a popular topic of conversation at cocktail parties among MBAs.

When I started business school, I was totally S.O.L.D. on cleantech. Coming from Texas, I had drank the energy kool-aid hard. I was extremely lucky to land an opportunity to work for a clean-tech startup in Beijing over January 2009 and it was through that opportunity that I realized that although I was in love with cleantech conceptually, I needed to have a more direct interaction with consumers. And that I loved the internet too much.

So, as they say here in Silicon Valley (SV from now on), I “pivoted” away from Cleantech and approx one year ago decided that the consumer web and everything that goes along with it was really my jam.

Instead of another international trip this January, I decided instead to pursue a different type of “cultural immersion”: spending the entire month in Silicon Valley. I am curious how I’ll do here - after many failed attempts to ditch my East Coast attitude problem, I have mostly stopped trying (which could potentially conflict with the “hella chill” personality type pervasive here in norcal).

The first few days of January was the MIT Entpreneurship Center’s “Silicon Valley Study Tour” where first-year students visit tech startups (both early and later stage) around Silicon Valley. 93 first-year students plus a few wise second-years stayed at the Stanford Park Hotel (which BTW is totally awesome - one of those places where you really feel “taken care of”) and organized a crazy scheme of rental-car-key-trading to get to lots of different startups over 4 days. Company List included below.

The two companies I visited - Pandora and Digg - were interesting to see because I am a user of both sites. Hearing stories from the execs about the challenges that each company is facing and the underlying shifts in the media industry that both companies are helping to perpetuate left me with a new respect for both companies.

Though the tour is over, I am very excited to be taking a class this January through Stanford/Harvard Law Schools called “Difficult Problems” taught by Jonathan Zittrain and Elizabeth Stark. The course will wrap up its first week tomorrow and has already provided a fantastic overview of a few very pressing current and future problems in cyberspace. For more on the class, check out the wiki, blog and twitter pages.

Finally, I’m working on a side project of my own in January while living in Palo Alto.  Because there’s always a side project.

I’m hoping after this month I’ll come away with something insightful to say about the startup ecosystem here in SV.  We’ll see.

MIT E & I Silicon Valley Study Tour Company List -

To all you crowdsourcing-lovers out there who see the web as a way to subvert impenetrable elite networks and democratize industries and systems, congratulations, you have a new convert. (This girl.)

I was totally fascinated by the DARPA red balloon challenge earlier this month, and obviously pumped to see an MIT team named the winner. It took less than 9 hours for the team to locate the 10 red weather balloons deployed in different cities around the U.S.

If that stat alone doesn’t for the zillionth time reiterate the astounding power of the internet, please return to your cave.  K thx.

What was most interesting, though, was not the shockingly short duration of the competition, but the very different strategies used by the MIT and Harvard teams and how each played out during the competition itself. To me, the strategies proved to me that effectively deployed crowdsourcing is an extremely powerful tool.

First, some disclaimers:

-I am currently a student at MIT, though I was not involved at all in the team’s efforts.  I didn’t even register on their site.  But I’m still biased.

-Everything I know about the Harvard team I got from these two great and thorough blog posts from Rafael Corrales and Caren Kelleher.

So, my thesis. The MIT team’s use of recursive incentives (ahem, cash money) to compel participation indicates to me that:

-Even on the web, greed and personal gain are powerful motivational forces

-Although the Harvard team was able to mobilize and engage their extremely powerful student and alumni network, the MIT team’s more tangible incentives were better suited to encourage widespread participation. Could this be an indicator of the potentially diminishing power of single networks (no matter how powerful)?  I think it is.

Here’s why:

Based on the articles I read about the Harvard team, although they ran a Google adwords campaign, had a website, a twitter account (@helpredballoon) and a pledge to donate the entire $40,000 to charity, by far the most useful tool they employed was leveraging the current student and alumni networks.  The Harvard network is arguably the most powerful network in the world - a common bond that ties together world leaders, politicians, billionaires, academics, etc. The sheer level of participation and engagement that the group received from this network is notable.

The MIT team, on the other hand, created an incentive structure that encouraged people to not only participate themselves, but get their friends to participate as well.

I think to me that was a key difference - converting participants versus converting them AND compelling them to get their friends involved too (the Facebook application Causes comes to mind here).

I don’t think the tools available on the web even five years ago would have had such success when pitted against a network as powerful as Harvard’s. But web tools are becoming downright easy to make, which I believe will enable this sort of mobilization to take many forms in the next few years and continue to chip away at the relative power of these very elite and deeply entrenched networks (examples: big media + youtube, finance industry + kaching, etc.)

The web/software as a tool of democratization is not a new idea; it has been very artfully articulated for years. Though few instances have provided such a clear case for why the process is so game-changing and how the web’s ability to mobilize disparate groups is changing the meaning of elitism.

Pluralists, take note.

I am betting aggressively on the coming ubiquity of portable projection devices.

Not just because they’re cool. But because, as our lives become more digital, content will need to get out from the confines of a screen.

First, some background:

I took this class last semester at the MIT Media Lab called “Social TV”. Perhaps it was all those hours I spent as a teenager watching endless hours of television, but the class had a profound effect on the way I think about TV and media in general. I learned the term “three screens” – for television, computer and mobile – and spent a lot of time thinking about how the three-screen experience has changed the way we consume media.

The big question now is how to integrate those three screens in a way that is intuitive and seamless. No easy task. There have been a few attempts, but it seems to me that the timelines won’t align: by the time someone is aggressive enough to do deals with the telcos, MSOs AND the content providers, the technology itself will be so different that it might not matter. Technology moves fast; large “cruise ship” companies like Comcast move slow.

The fundamental problem with three-screen integration attempts is that the television model is, for the most part, still very bankable. People still watch a crapload of television and pay their service providers handsomely, on a monthly basis. So the MSOs have little motivation to indulge new models, and the content providers (especially powerful ones like ESPN, MTV, CNN, etc.) are scared to rock the boat, especially when it’s related to the companies that are writing them enormous checks every month.

As a result, recently I have moved away from thinking about integration. In some ways, I believe that the three screen model isn’t sustainable – maybe the screens are not meant to work in tandem, and instead are in a sort of battle for dominance. Problem is though, all three have very compelling pluses: TV has massive market penetration and usage, computers have the greatest capabilities, and mobile phones are with you 24/7.

Of these three, I think mobile phones will eventually win the battle. Look at laptops – they keep getting smaller and more portable, while mobile phones get smarter and more powerful. A phone most definitely can replace a computer, but a computer will never become a phone. Form factor is a big issue here as well. Perhaps that’s why there is so much excitement about the Apple Tablet – I now think of laptops as huge versions of the clamshell cell-phones of the mid 1990s. They’re bulky and not particularly intuitive, but the use of a laptop has become so ritualized at this point that I don’t think people notice any more.

If you buy the hypothesis that phones will eventually replace computers, which I do, then the real stumbling block is the display. It’s just too small for sharing.

This is the crux of my bet on mobile projection devices. The usages are endless, the technology is there and is awesome, and the battle that I believe mobile phones will eventually win is in full force. Perhaps this is the market opportunity I should pursue - I saw this video of Marc Andreessen on Business Insider talking about how to define the future, and he said you can see what’s coming in the near-term by hanging out at university labs. I am starting to see these devices everywhere. Perhaps this is worth examining further…

I worked at small web companies before business school. This meant that anything I did not know how to do, which was a lot, I made up as I went along. Terms like EBITDA, ROI, and value proposition were all foreign. This is why I came to business school - it’s finishing school for those of us who have never spent time as consultants.

I am fascinated by the term “customer acquisition cost”. Like many other b-school terms, to me it reflects the core narcissism of many businesses. Because it’s not just you, the business, that must “pay” (whether in dollars or otherwise) to acquire me, your customer. I have to pay as well to move over to your product. Maybe it’s not necessarily money, your product could be cheaper than whatever I’m using now.  But I need to change my habits to adjust to whatever it is you’re offering. And this cost is MUCH MUCH higher than I think many new businesses realize.

Why?

Because I, the consumer, am lazy and averse to change.

This is the problem that I have with aggregators. You think you’re making life easier by pulling together various “feeds”, but really you’re making it harder by giving me a new interface I have to get used to and yet another account to manage. If there’s no value-add (b-school term in action!) what do I gain from shifting?

Example: weather widgets. Seems like they’re everywhere - on my desktop, taskbar, cell phone and anywhere else you can think of. But I check the weather on weather.com.  Every time.  Just because it’s habit and it’s reliable. My eyes already know where to find the information on the page and it’s always there. In order to sway someone to change his/her habits whatever you’re offering has to be an order of magnitude better than what’s already out there. And even then it still takes time.

Because there’s been a decent amount of buzz lately around the Mint acquisition, I’ll use that site as an example. I attribute the popularity of Mint not to the fact that it aggregates one’s bank accounts, or because it has a fancy UI, but because it was so, so much better than what already existed and gave so much *new*, valuable information to its customers.

The internet has been around long enough that people have developed habits.  This is great - you can afford to be a bit riskier with design simply because you can assume a baseline of familiarity that is much higher than it was even five years ago. But be warned: the cost of disrupting habit is high and not necessarily always welcome. What you’re offering has to be exponentially better than what’s already out there, or completely integrated into existing habits. Otherwise it will be hard to convert people.

Especially lazy ones like me.

I really love the website stackoverflow.com. When I discovered the site about a month ago, I had one of those “wow” moments that I was desperate to share with any willing soul, though it was difficult to find someone interested in freaking out with me over a fancy coding bulletin board. Alas.

Stackoverflow.com is a free question-and-answer site for developers, but yes, so much more. Poking around on this site has inspired me to think about how this model can be used for education on the web. I’m calling the model “lurk and learn” and will explore in this post how to replicate it.

But first, why the site is awesome:

1.  Concentration of Expertise - Whatever “secret sauce” they used to attract so many developers worked. Clicking around the site you can tell that this site has a higher concentration of top-developer-talent posting to it than probably any other site on the web. The ability to corral smart people is extremely difficult - just ask any conference organizer. Yet day after day, top minds congregate at stackoverflow.com to ask and answer highly technical questions.

Anyone who doesn’t see the opportunity here is nutso. If you want to see the pulse of the developer world, here it is.  Part of any job is learning the syntax of the industry - the way that people talk about what they’re doing, the terms that they use, the “language” of the trade. It’s all here, and nicely grouped into tags for easy browsing.

2.  Bite-Sized Bits of Knowledge - The problem with learning from experts is that many incredibly smart and accomplished people are terrible at communicating what they know in a way that’s easy for novices to grasp. StackOverflow combats this problem through the question-and-answer format. Instead of “tell me everything you know about Java”, users will ask very specific questions like “Is there a Java library that performs a message digest on a tree of objects?” This allows beginners to piece together bits of knowledge at their own pace instead of alienating/frustrating them at the beginning with a massive brain-dump of hard-to-grasp programming talk.

Additionally, every company I’ve ever worked at whines about “knowledge transfer”. What’s the best way for the smartest people in the company to teach the new kids? I’m starting to believe more and more that bite-sized little packets might be the answer.

So here I was, thinking about the coolness of StackOverflow when I stumbled on this video – a Google TechTalk from Joel Spolsky, one of the founders of the site:

And then the wheels started turning. Could this work as a model for other industries?

Defining the Educational Model: “Lurk and Learn”

I am a big fan of learning by osmosis. If you surround yourself with smart people and listen to how they talk, what they read, who they listen to, eventually it will penetrate your habits, thoughts and behavior. This is why I love Twitter – it has virtualized osmosis-learning for me. I can fill my stream with people who I think are interesting and accomplished and smart and then maybe a little bit will rub off.  Maybe.

What works about StackOverflow is that there is evidence of an entire spectrum of expertise on the site. It’s not just the whiz-kids, there are some dummies too. This is a good thing – it makes the site a lot less intimidating. The newest of wannabe coders can click around as much as they please (“lurk”) without ever having to answer a question, absorbing information like a giant sponge (“learn”).

This socialization process allows new users to develop a relationship with the community. There an article in ReadWriteWeb that discusses the “building blocks of social engineering” that Spolsky discusses in the video. Here’s the key diagram (read the article for an explanation of each block):

When you hear Spolsky talk about the site, it becomes clear that this model is not specific to the coding world.

So can it be replicated?  I think it’s a worthy experiment that I would love to work on. In addition to the social engineering road map above, I would suggest three rules:

1.  Create sites focused around a single subject/industry but with lots of breadth.  LOTS.

This requires lots of users, so there’s high potential for a chicken/egg fail. Providing value immediately is really important.

For a whole range of search terms, Google currently favors a range of well-SEOed but ultimately useless content sites that are filled with ads and just the right keywords. This is especially frustrating when you’re searching for a very specific, somewhat advanced topic.

Having a site focused on a single, highly specific vertical will hopefully attract your key user: the experts. This is the difference between StackOverflow and the other hoards of q+a sites (Yahoo Answers, Mahalo, etc.) - it’s specialized.  Attracting experts will be the key to success – if StackOverflow was a bunch of novices like me asking questions and not getting answers the site would be useless. Instead, lure in the experts and treat them well. Let them rule their own small sliver of the internets and fight hard to keep them around.

Additionally, the specific focus and emphasis on breadth will help with Google as well. StackOverflow’s SEO is so good that it now pretty much owns Google for a lot of very specific coding terms (long-tail score!!)

Other sites that follow this model and do it really well:

-  HackerNews – uses the reputation model and provides some of the most in-depth and interesting startup-related content on the web.

-  ChinesePod – I have been a fan of this site since 2006. I was living in China and trying to learn Chinese (Chinese and now coding. Can you tell I am a masochist?) They have nutured a huge Chinese-studying community using bite-sized podcasts on specific parts of the Chinese language (for example “Calling a Supplier for a Quote“). Their levels range from novice to advanced meaning that the community can also teach/learn from each other. And now they’re so popular that they charge a crapton for their content. (And good for them – $17/month – daaaaaaaaamn).

2. Support discussions (whether through a question + answer format or otherwise) as opposed to definitive and static content

Wikipedia is great, but there’s only a single Wikipedia entry for a given topic. Example – let’s say I’m trying to understand tort law. I can easily go and read the Wikipedia entry, but sometimes it take more than a single explanation to “get it”. This is the difference between going to law school for three years and reading a bunch of wikipedia entries. So what’s in the middle? The place where you go to get a working understanding of highly advanced subjects?

As far as I can tell, there isn’t one. The process of knowledge acquisition is different for different folk, and sometimes a single definitive explanation isn’t as good as multiple explanations of varying quality. Wikipedia is definitive; learning is not.

Another example – take this question: “What does Ruby have that Python doesn’t, and vice versa?” You could answer the question in a few sentences, or read through the twenty-four answers posted on StackOverflow and get a much more comprehensive explanation of the differences between Ruby and Python, sorted according to how useful the community deems each answer.

3. Create a hang-out spot, not just a content site. And make it just as compelling for experts as for beginners.

For me, the best part of learning is the struggle. It’s surveying some seemingly insurmountable subject matter and breaking it down into digestable pieces. But a lot of people are more likely to walk away/give up rather than go through the process of breaking down complicated subjects. Sites like StackOverflow take care of that process for you.

Additionally, the constantly changing content and the social engineerning that Spolsky and Jeff Atwood implemented when they created the site turns it from simply a content site to a hang-out spot. And one that’s interesting for people with varying ranges of expertise. They keep coming back because they keep finding useful stuff.

Where to begin?

Medicine would be a great place to start. Given the recent what-have-yous over healthcare, there is increased public attention on the topic and people are craving change.

Law would also be on my list, though I have a feeling lawyers hate the internets. Finance would be on there too, along with food/recipes/cooking, language learning (like Chinese!), auto repair, chemistry, accounting, real estate, and umm etc. Oh, and SAT and other standardized tests would be cool too. This list goes on.

You could also create a network of sites like these, roll them up and build a massive search engine on top of it.  Perhaps that is what Mahalo is trying to do, but because it’s not vertically-focused I have trouble tracking down information there.

The reason why “lurk and learn” is so hard to pull off in the real world is because when you walk into a classroom, you’re noticed. You require a seat and there are a limited number of seats. At the best schools, you have to pay for a seat, and you need to pass through rigorous tests just to be able to pay for a seat. On the internet, though, there are infinite seats. Now we just need to create the classrooms.

School starts up again in ten days.

Despite the fact that this is more than likely my last “first day of school” EVER (scary thought) I am still dreading the “OMG how was your summer?!” bombarding that one gets at the beginning of the school year. Here’s my summary for your consumption. I’ll try to include more than the required sound byte: “I was in NYC working here, and it was great.” Cause I was, and it was.

So what did I get out of a summer working in VC?

Three main take-aways:

1.  A summer is just long enough to figure out that you’ve got a lot to learn

Ten weeks go by, and right at the moment when you feel like you’re starting to “get it” it’s over. I am pumped for the class “Early Stage Capital” this fall where I’ll continue to chip away at the intricacies of term sheet math and excel models. For someone whose finance experience before school was exactly zero, this sort of thing excites me. Perhaps I should not admit to such things in a public forum.

2.  New York Startup Forecast: Rosy

If the launch of the First Growth Venture Network wasn’t a huge give-away that there’s a lot of excitement around the NYC startup scene let me say it again: THERE IS.

After starting off the summer at Internet Week, I went to one packed-house event after another all summer until it was beat into my nay-saying little head that yes, people DO want to start companies in one of the most expensive cities in the whole world.

While New York lacks the informal advising/hacking culture of the Valley, it makes up for this through the fact that every other industry has solid representation in NYC.  A clothing startup that wants to do deals with designers?  You can just trot down to their studios.  An art website that wants to feature gallery work?  The subway to Chelsea will get you there.

Ultimately, startups need something that will provide momentum.  I think - contrary to the popular Valley-centric belief that it’s “here or nowhere” - there are a lot of different ways to create momentum and one is having access to the best + biggest players in many, many different industries. No place better than NYC for that.

3.  Early-Stage Investing is about People

What I found so heinously unattractive about finance jobs (for the 2.5 seconds that I was considering working at a bank) is that I saw it as high-class paper pushing. You don’t get to really know people. It’s about excel and ratios and presentations and deals, but not really about people. Early-stage investing is mostly people-focused. It’s about getting to know a team and assessing not only what they’re building but how they will build a successful company.

I believe this is what separates really good VCs from the rest - the ability to not only spot a market-crushing business model or technology but the ability to pick out a winning team.

This is not something one can learn in a summer.

So that was my summer. There were some other key moments, but I need to leave some items for the first-day-of-school excitement.  I even got a new haircut.

I thought “Town Holler” was organized by Foursquare.  Nope.

The event, the first of its kind as far as I know, was organized by a user and fan of Foursquare and managed to draw 50+ people to come out at 4pm on a Saturday in the middle of summer.

It started at One and One in the East Village, and everyone drank beer and wore name tags with his/her name and the name of the place where he/she was the “mayor”. The event went on into the evening with people coming in and out and the crowd moving to different venues around the East village.

I met some new people - not necessarily “strangers” but definitely new faces. They were friends of friends, in a similar field, had similar interests, etc. Not friends, not strangers. Fr-rangers. Or maybe just other “foursquares”.

It reminded me of Paul Graham’s quote that I love: “Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.” Foursquare is a great example of that quote in action. People care enough about the product to self-organize and show up.

Through events like Town Holler, Foursquare is helping to solve an issue that social networks, dating websites, and location-centered local sites have been trying to solve for a while: meeting new people and finding new places. And Foursquare, so far, does it best. Why?  Because it’s built for mobile devices. After all, when’s the best time to meet new people and find new places:

a. while at home surfing the internet
b. when you’re already out and about

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

And then - oh yeah - there are the HUGE potential benefits for local businesses.  The biggest challenge for a lot of local businesses is foot traffic. They want bodies in their establishment spending cash money. Foursquare drove a hoard of people to a group of local bars during the dreary afternoon lull - and the establishments were more than happy to provide drink/food specials as a result. Sounds like win/win to me.

There are also all the bomb “discovery” and gaming features as well. Yesterday’s post in Mashable highlights some of the gaming features, and Charlie O’Donnell does a great job explaining the discovery angle in a post called “Why Yelp (…and Every Single Retail Establishment) Should Support Foursquare.”

If anything, yesterday’s event was Charlie’s post brought to life. I knew it before, but saw it so clearly yesterday: Foursquare  will soon be the default engine for connecting people to local businesses and to new and exciting things around them.