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I’m thankful my friend Josh Wilson recently referred me the highly regarded book: How Will You Measure Your Life?. If you’re looking for the short version, it’s based off a speech at the commencement of Harvard Business School Class of 2010.

But you might not even need to skip over to each of those links just yet. Instead, just think of the question right now:

How will you measure your life?

It’s simple yet profound. Will it be…

• dollars earned?
• lifelong friends?
• lives touched?
• college degrees?
• fancy cars owned?
• gold medals?
• mountains conquered?
• countries visited?
• children raised?
• languages learned?
• words written?
• grade-point-average?
• products built?
• jobs created?
• houses owned?
• dreams chased?
• celebrities met?
• twitter followers?
• facebook photos?
• YOLO moments?

This list could go on and on. My point is that it’s helpful to think about the questions author Clayton Christensen suggests:

• How can you be sure you will be happy in your career?
• How can you be sure your relationship with your family will be an enduring source of happiness?
• How can you be sure you will stay out of jail?

Only you can answer these questions, and there isn’t a right or wrong answer. My answer resonates closely with Christensen, “focused on family and others”. This blog is an example of my effort to positively touch as many people as possible. Read more…

As an American entrepreneur it’s really easy to develop tunnel vision and ignore economies around the globe. This insular thinking can potentially place a bottle neck on your growth, especially since the fastest growing economies are far from the U.S. border. But thankfully if you’re developing products on the web, it is now easier than ever to take advantage of the fastest growing economies.

A Goldman Sach’s economist, Jim O’Neil, coined the term BRIC in a 2001 research paper, claiming that the combined economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China will eclipse the G7 economies by 2027.

In a more recent 2005 report by O’Neil and Goldman Sach’s, they noted a new group of countries, Next 11, that have high-potential for becoming world economic powers in the 21st century:

Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Turkey, S. Korea, and Vietnam.

There are three main reasons to look at these countries for growth:

People – Young and expanding populations. They will raise the level of wealth (rise of the middle class) and drive demand for discretionary spending.

Potential – The BRIC countries will eclipse the G7 growth within 15 years and the N-11 may rival the G7 by 2050.

Possibility – The BRIC and N-11 countries will likely outperform the traditionally strong economies of the 20th century.

If you’re thinking about ways to expand growth then I would recommend you focus on the untapped markets that include BRIC and Next 11 countries. Learn more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRIC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Eleven

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIKT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerging_markets

http://www.goldmansachs.com/gsam/individuals/products/growth_markets/n11/beyond-bric/index.html

One reason why I visit the Bay Area frequently is because of the many critical eyes here. Questioning absolutely everything your about your product is absolutely necessary.

It bugs me when I show someone my product, and they end their commentary with “Wow, great job, keep up the awesome work.” This type of observation doesn’t build great products. And unfortunately I get this type of feedback frequently outside of the Bay Area because most people are exclusively consumers.

On the contrary, most of the best builders I know live in the Bay Area and they’re open to challenging everything they observe. It’s this type of thinking that eventually allows you to iterate and improve. Questions such as: “Why is the installation button on the right instead of left?”, “Why did you choose this headline?”, “What is the purpose of this page?”, “This section is confusing, it needs to be eliminated.”, “Why would you charge x dollars when your competitor is y dollars?”, “This element is not helping you achieve the goal of this page.”, “This is nice, but it would be even better if…”.

Eventually after enough iteration, you end up with a dead-simple product that is clear to your target user. The critical eye brings simplicity to your product.

Peter Cooper, founder of Cooper Union, once wrote: “The production of wealth is not the work of any one man, and the acquisition of great fortunes is not possible without the co-operation of multitudes of men.”

I’ve observed the truth to this statement many times in the past eight months. Everything that matters is about people. Regardless of your activities and goals, the most important issues for any organization are always related to the people we work and interact with, or seek to attract. The easiest example to relate to is a varsity sports team.

As the coach of a varsity team your job is to recruit and develop the best talent that’s available. This involves identifying the best people for the critical positions and helping your people become even better.

Recruiting the absolute best people in terms of talent and personality for each position is the first step to competing with the best, and ultimately winning against the best. My good friend Paul Dejoe recently commented the following on Quora:

Your job is to create a vision, a culture, to get the right people on the bus and to inspire.  When you look around at a team that believes in the vision as much as you do and trusts you will do the right thing all the time, it’s a feeling that can’t be explained.  The exponential productivity from great people will always amaze you.  It’s why finding the right team is the most difficult thing you will do but the most important.  This learning will affect your life significantly.  You will not settle for things anymore because you will see what is possible when you hold out for the best and push to find people that are the best.  You don’t have a problem anymore being honest with people about not cutting it.

I know this may sound cliche but all cliche’s hold some truth. It’s absolutely fascinating to work with a small team of people when each team member is doing what they do best.

Going back to high school rowing, I remember that our coach had one top goal in mind: Prepare the fastest possible boat for race day. For my team this involved determining who was the best stroke seat, the best stroke pair, the best bow pair, and the best coxswain. Each position is unique and each individual rower committed to being the best at their respective position. When we all did our job individually better than anyone else, the sum of our collective efforts was a really fast boat.

An entrepreneur must follow a very similar pattern. My greatest challenge will always be finding the absolute very best programmers, web designers, and any other position critical to my success against competition. And you see it over and over again. Schools, law-enforcement agencies, movie sets, museums, musical concerts, and virtually all other organizations all seek to attract the very best people who can contribute to their collective success.

Steve Jobs simply named these people the “A players” and commented on the risks of not holing out for them:

It’s too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players.  The Microsoft experience taught me that A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can’t indulge B players.  –Jobs

The general test for evaluating an A player is to ask yourself the question: Would I fight hard to keep this person on board? If not, then you should certainly pass. Always hold out for the A players on your team.

Recently while attending an event for founders in New York City I pitched my product just like any entrepreneur would do when they are asked the question: “What do you do?”

I happened to meet Jeremy Mims, founder of OwnLocal and FrogMetrics. As we were talking about Glider, I had briefly mentioned that I have always been fascinated by company’s such as Mint.com and Chartbeat because they solved problems by building a sleek and easy to use dashboard. Their formula for a successful product seemed so simple: Take a bunch of unorganized data and present it nicely. I wanted follow the same steps with email data and Glider.

Jeremy immediately said to avoid building a complex dashboard. And I asked with confusion: “Buy why?” He responded: “Dashboards are only useful when things go wrong.”

Now think about one of the dashboards you encounter most frequently… Your car dashboard. It’s useful to make sure that you are not speeding and that you are not running out of gas. You check the clock to make sure you’re not running late, change the radio station when you hear a song that you don’t like, etc.. The same reasoning can be applied to just about any dashboard that you interact with on a routine basis. If things aren’t going wrong, or if the data doesn’t change, then users will not return on a routine basis.

Here’s an excellent example: Companies such as Klout do an awesome job of making you feel like your influence is constantly going down, and this forces users to routinely check the score and look for improvements.

Using this reasoning, I went back to the drawing board for a Glider dashboard with two key items in mind for creating a dashboard:

1. Needs to show only the most important metrics. (They tend to be the metrics related to your time or money.)
2. Needs to convey specific action items in order to change the data.

In other words, the dashboard in itself is not useful unless users can take action based on the data. Keep an eye out for the new Glider dashboard by submitting your email here: glider.io.

My friend and longtime business partner Herwig Konings recently sent me a link to a TedxTalk presented by his uncle, Herman Konings, in Belgium. You can see not only Herman’s optimistic personality in the talk, but more importantly his ability to understand the psychology of consumers as they interact with new technology next 5-10 years.

He struck a chord with my work on Glider as he mentioned “Information Overload”, a term coined over four hundred years ago at Oxford. He described common psychological problems today, including “option paralysis”, which is when people begin hyperventilating because they have too many options and not enough time to choose. Herman goes on to say that the results of “Filter failure” are causing common psychological disorders such as “Phantom Vibration” — When you think someone is calling your phone but it’s actually idle.

He proposes a solution to information overload on open communication platforms such as the smartphone: simple choice architecture. And by “choice architecture” he means that consumers will depend on and be most satisfied with products that execute on the basics:

0 – No manual.

1 – One button to start.

2 – Two options to choose from.

3 – Three seconds to have your problem solved.

0, 1, 2, 3. This choice architecture is the basics for the technology of tomorrow.

In the past couple of months since moving to New York City I’ve found myself reconnecting with some of the entrepreneurs who I had known since the beginning of my journey. Many of my closest friends come to me with their ideas, seeking feedback like any hustling entrepreneur. And then last weekend in San Francisco one of my tech friends asked for ideas to work on. I almost cringed. Again and again, I have retold one of my greatest lessons learned in the past year:

Stop building your idea. Start solving a problem.

Startup ideas are bound to fail. This is not something that I realized until I tried to build one myself. Throughout last summer and the fall I had pitched an idea for a bookmark curation site. As it turns out, it’s not a compelling problem for many people. To cut to the chase, the average consumer can live without an improvement to their current bookmarking tool. And the business for bookmarking isn’t highly sustainable. I tried to build a business from a startup idea, and I failed.

I admit it wasn’t my natural inclination to drop an idea all of the sudden and begin exploring problems. I had the support of one of the godfathers in Silicon Valley (confidential for now), and I will never forget his advice. He said to stop thinking of startup ideas to build and instead think of problems to solve. Young founders such as myself are notoriously challenged with discovering ripe problems in the world because we don’t have much real world experience. To give you context, consider this example: ZenPayroll makes the process of setting up payroll for your company very easy. I would have never understood the painful payroll process until I started a company. Luckily the guys at ZenPayroll previously discovered this, and so they’re solving a huge problem for small business owners.

I immediately began to list the problems in my life. From the moment I woke up until I went to sleep, I wrote down all of the problems I noticed all day long for a week. Eventually I narrowed down the list to one of my most significant problems: email overload. Up to that point I had been okay with simply dealing with the problem. Passively dealing with a problem is the exact opposite mentality of an entrepreneur.

I did not consciously think of the email overload problem or solutions until I shifted that mindset from idea building to problem solving. I caution you to not over think your subconscious. Instead you should closely observe the painful or inefficient processes in your life.

You can toss nearly every successful company into the problem solving equation. Mark Zuckerberg is introverted and he needed a way to find more cute girls at Harvard. He built Facebook to solve his problem. The guys at Google did the same for finding and organizing information. Glider aims to solve problems related to email overload.

So, where do you begin to look for problems? Ask yourself the questions: What do I want to make absurd two years from now?  What products can I not live without? As I mentioned a couple of months ago, I believe the next big technology companies will be lifestyle automation companies.

Next, take your problem and follow the startup process:

1. Validate your problem.

• Who needs this solution to the problem? Is there a market for the solution?
• Setup a landing page in this format to be sure the solution to your problem is clear and concise.
• The problem is in the headline and the three bullets highlight the minimum features.

2. Relentlessly pursue product/market fit.

• Have you made a product that satisfies the needs of the market?
• Caution: Sometimes you might build a product that has no market. Also known as a startup idea.

“Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don’t want to, telling customers yes when you don’t want to.”

3. Scale.

• Repeat what worked in step two.

And it’s as simple as that! Let me know if you need any help.

My blog has been live for over three years and this is my 100th blog post. I’m certain that starting a blog was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life. I try to write two blog posts each month on the subject of anything technology related, or any other personal experiences that are valuable to share. I estimate that I spend about 1-4 hours researching and writing each blog post. By comparison, I spend about 30 hours per month on Facebook. Does that sound a little bit surprising? I admit I was surprised. Let’s dive straight into the numbers for May 27 – June 2, 2012.

Total time captured browsing all sites on the Macbook + Mac Mini

Total time designated as “Social Networking”

And just to make sure this activity has been consistent, I tracked my time from March 18 – 22, 2012. (It’s worse!)

Total time captured browsing all sites on the Macbook + Mac Mini

Time designated as “Social Networking”

There you have it, I waste an incredible amount of time on Facebook, nearly one working day per week. Let’s make these numbers easy to grasp: Assume that I spend one hour per day on Facebook, that’s 365 hours per year. If I value my time at $10/hour, that’s a total of $3,650 lost wages. $30/hour adds up to $10,950/year. But is it really all a waste? Let’s be clear on what Facebook really means to the average user…

Of course it’s not a total wast of time. I choose to look at my time on Facebook as an investment in my personal or professional life. Facebook is an important communication tool for many of the social circles in my life. I manage my loose connections through Facebook, and indeed it is satisfying to see an unexpected notification from time to time.

The Thiel Foundation uses a Facebook group to broadcast the majority of it’s news and events, and I stay in touch with friends from around the world every day through the chat bar. Not to mention Facebook pages are an incredibly powerful marketing tool; the Facebook advertising platform offers more targeting options than any competing product. But isn’t it also a powerful tool for promoting yourself? I think so. Facebook is the ultimate tool for image management. Your timeline is the showcase story of your life, and most importantly, with pictures.

Depending on how you use Facebook, it can be useful, but how many of us mostly use Facebook as photo stalking tool? I’d bet Facebook users primarily view photos more than anything else. While some seek validation metrics such as friend counts, likes, wall posts, notifications, photo tags, the most common use of Facebook is flipping through it’s incredibly organized photo album.

Don’t take my word for it… Facebook just bought the most popular mobile photo sharing app, Instagram, for $1 billion. To give the acquisition perspective, SpaceX built and launched a rocket that docked at the International Space Station for less than $1 billion.

So, why should you blog? There are a number of reasons depending on the person. Some people blog for the sake of self expression and some people blog to make money. Blogs cover all topics, from celebrity gossip on Perez Hilton amd Failblog to The NY Times. Others blog to establish a brand, reputation, or opinion. Some blogs highlight the work of others. And some people blog just because it’s required to get an A on a school project. I encourage you to start your own whether or not it’s another credential or just a personal fulfillment activity.

And the challenge of blogging will probably seem intimidating at first, but don’t let that hold you back. I’m not even alone among my peers. My friend Mike Williams curates a photo blog. Another friend Brad Buechner is writing about his homeless experience. And many people I’d like to have as friends post the latest hot music. If you’re searching for something to write about, I encourage you to think about these possible perspectives:

No time or energy to put in all of the effort? No problem. I am frequently asked about when do you find the time to post this stuff. I find the time, at least two or three nights per month. My thoughts are most clear and free of distraction between the hours of 11pm-2am. I also write a lot when I fly, sometimes almost exclusively on the 6 hour segments between NJ and SF. Flying is an activity of simultaneous reflective and forward thinking, thus a great state of mind for writing about my previous thoughts and experiences.

In my opinion, we are ultimately judged by the original work we create in the world. Our legacy is the sum of our ability to introduce new things that make a difference. The greatest works transcend time and impact society for years to come. For example, Andrew Carnegie was the Bill Gates of his day, but he is not judged today for being a rich man. Carnegie’s legacy is manifested in the things that his wealth has created, such as the founding of Carnegie Mellon and countless other philanthropic acts. A blog is something you can create for free in just a few hours each month, and it’s a great place to start publishing your own original work.

Notes:

• Most of my highest trafficked blog posts are found at blog.ingenic.com, blog.glider.io, and blog.mediatrust.com.
• Check out RescueTime if you would like to know more about your browsing activity.
• More stats to be published later this week.

I recently read this excellent blog post on PandoDaily by a venture capitalist, Scott Johnson. I was impressed by the simple explanation of four past and present hot investment categories. It’s often difficult to grasp all of the different types of venture investments in consumer tech companies and many times I feel overwhelmed by the large investment numbers rather than the startup itself. Johnson makes the point that the niche app category (a la Instagram) was making waves in the past couple years, but it has hit its high watermark. The dominant category in the next couple years will be life process automation.

Life process automation has just recently taken off because location-aware mobile devices are enabling immediate services that were simply not possible five or ten years ago. Uber is a great example, the mobile interface forces simplicity and thus users are left with a simple solution to the need for a taxi: tap a button and wait a few minutes watching the car to come to you. Johnson also makes the point that many life automation apps were built during the pioneering days of the web. Priceline eliminated the need for a last minute travel agent, and eBay brought your home garage sale to the world. But even these existing sites are prone to disruption. eHarmony is an easy example; Grouper sets up drinks between three guys and three girls. Just connect with Facebook and wait for your date. Craigslist put newspaper classifieds online. Airbnb brings previously bare bones craigslist listings to life with property rentals. They’re taking it one step further by automating the process of renting out a spare room and making it beautiful. Netflix recommends movies for you to watch instantly. It’s absolutely fantastic and these are real businesses with massive revenue.

Going forward the most popular companies in the next couple of years will mechanize some repetitive aspect of life. Keep an eye out for companies that are making moves in life process automation, they will likely appear in places that can be improved with the help of mobile technology.

I get this question quite often. The myth from outside startup land is that new web companies are mainly a bunch of people writing code into the computer. This is far from the truth. What they don’t realize is that if you build something, you need a strategy to get people to use your product. My online career started in the internet marketing industry getting users for other companies, and now I’m focused on doing the same for my own company. Hardly anyone understands how my internet marketing experience translates to building a product/company because few people understand distribution itself. You need to write code, and get users!

Peter Thiel recently gave a lecture at Stanford regarding distribution. Unfortunately I was not able to attend his lecture in person, but one of the students in the class posted the lecture online:

http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22405055017/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-9-notes-essay

This lecture alone is one of the best resources I’ve found on product distribution. Here’s a quote from early in Thiel’s lesson:

The first thing to do is to dispel the belief that the best product always wins. There is a rich history of instances where the best product did not, in fact, win. Nikola Tesla invented the alternating current electrical supply system. It was, for a variety of reasons, technologically better than the direct current system that Thomas Edison developed. Tesla was the better scientist. But Edison was the better businessman, and he went on to start GE. Interestingly, Tesla later developed the idea of radio transmission. But Marconi took it from him and then won the Nobel Prize. Inspiration isn’t all that counts. The best product may not win.

Last fall I studied this exact case in depth as part of one of my courses at Wake Forest. I was amazed to learn about Nikola Tesla and his incredible engineering achievements over Edison’s competing product. However, Edison was a much better businessman. Tesla failed to bring most of his inventions to market with the same degree of success as Edison because he didn’t focus on a disruption distribution channel. Just as Friendster and MySpace existed before Facebook, they were better products. But they didn’t have the word-of-mouth distribution that spread virally across college campuses. Facebook built a product that harnessed distribution through photo sharing among college students.

As Thiel said, “Great distribution can give you a terminal monopoly.”, and that’s exactly what Edison had. Thiel explains further:

Distribution isn’t just about getting your product to users. It’s also about selling your company to employees and investors. The familiar anti-distribution theory is: the product is so good it sells itself. That, again, is simply wrong. But it’s also important to avoid the employee version: this company is so good, people will be clamoring to join it. The investor version—this investment is so great, they’ll be banging down our door to invest—is equally dangerous. When these things seem to happen, it’s worth remembering that they almost never happen in a vacuum. There is something else going on that may not be apparent on the surface.

All of these distribution challenges, including getting users, recruiting employees, and soliciting investors must be deeply thought about in your organization.

Just like every great tech company has a good, unique product, they’ve all found unique and extremely effective distribution angles too.

Does Pinterest ring a bell? Or how about Instagram? They are the most recent examples of viral growth. They both nailed product distribution and now they are reaping the rewards.

Thiel goes on to explain that all companies rely on distribution:

Engineers underestimate the problem of distribution. Since they wish it didn’t exist, sometimes they ignore it entirely. There’s a plot line from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in which some imminent catastrophe required everybody to evacuate the planet. Three ships were to be sent into space. All the brilliant thinkers and leaders would take the A ship. All the salespeople, consultants, and executives would take the B ship. All the workers would take the C ship. The B ship gets launched first, and all the B passengers think that’s great because they’re self-important. What they don’t realize, of course, is that the imminent destruction story was just a trick. The A and C people just thought the B people were useless and shipped them off. And, as the story goes, the B ship landed on Earth.So maybe distribution shouldn’t matter in an idealized, fictional world. But it matters in this one. It can’t be ignored. The questions you must ask are: how big is the distribution problem? And can this business solve it?

So, there you have it, those are two of the most challenging questions any startup faces. What do you do to answer the second question? Find one distribution channel that works. Whether it’s internet marketing, door-to-door sales, partnerships, or a number of other options, you need one channel that works.

It is very likely that one channel is optimal. Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. Poor distribution—not product—is the number one cause of failure. If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished. So it’s worth thinking really hard about finding the single best distribution channel. If you are an enterprise software company with a sales team, your key strategic question is: who are the people who are most likely to buy the product? That will help you close in on a good channel. What you want to avoid is not thinking hard about which customers are going to buy it and just sending your sales team out to talk to everybody.

Mark Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com, is notorious for his thoughts that finances for all companies are a direct reflection of the sales people that sell for the organization. At the end of the day all of these organizations are manifested in a numerical profit and loss statement. Your ability to get product distribution will determine the balance sheet.

I don’t currently write code. I focus on the distribution game.

Finally, a side note to those that believe distribution channels such as advertising have no effect them:

We live in a society that’s big on authenticity. People insist that they make up their own minds. Ads don’t work on them. Everything they want, they want authentically. But when you drill down on all these people who claim to be authentic, you get a very weird sense that it’s all undifferentiated. Fashionable people all wear the same clothes.