There's always something 'wrong' about tech people wanting to meet face to face. What is the point of the telecommunication tech YOU created? Did you not do a good job?
There's a better approach than what the blog outlines - imagine that you have infinite wealth and begin to build what you personally want.
In most cases you will not be able to create the whole thing, but you can tackle a piece of the problem.
Example - you want a flying car. Imagine that you have 1 trillion dollars at your disposal. What would you do? Hire engineers. How would you hire them? What software is required. Look around, if it does not exist already, that's your first product. If it the hiring problem is already adequately solved, look for the next thing. How do those engineers communicate? etc.
These series of questions will lead to finding niches of opportunity, and it is always a software problem (organizing workflows).
There's always something 'wrong' about tech people wanting to meet face to face.
Boy do I disagree. Face to face communication is richer, more contactful, and more satisfying. There's nothing wrong with any human being wanting that.
You can definitely talk over the phone. But real business seems to happen more quickly in person, even today. Email certainly doesn't cut it.
The problem with the thought experiment is that it assumes infinite knowledge. It's very hard to imagine what things would actually be like if you had a trillion dollars and you wanted to build a flying car. You can definitely come up with things that you think are likely, but I've found that often times you know much less than you think, and the actual problems are MUCH less obvious than they seem.
It's kind of like a non-engineer imagining what problems he would run in to if he had to build the Golden Gate Bridge including design and construction. You can definitely foresee certain things, e.g. you need a lot of materials, pens and paper, but there's still a ton of uncertainty and real gritty problems that only come out when you're in the thick of things.
"But real business seems to happen more quickly in person, even today."
Cost and time tradeoff and also what you get for closing and how often you have to close a sale.
You can send out more emails than you can postal letters.
You can do more postal letters than you can phone calls.
You can do more phone calls than you can in person cold calls. All depends of course on the product you are selling and the situation.
In any case going for the low hanging fruit to start (say sending an email to the IT manager at a university) doesn't mean you can't send a postal letter or a phone call or try to setup a meeting in person. But it makes sense in many (not all, many) situations to start with the easiest thing you can do and work your way up.
Example: I just closed a deal with a guy who has a reality show and all it took was an email which he replied to because he was interested in what I was selling. That's only one example I've obviously done the other things as well.
Lastly, negotiating in person also has it's drawbacks. Personally I prefer to negotiate by email in most cases. Depending on the other party and your own skills an in person does't always work out the way you would like.
Lastly, negotiating in person also has it's drawbacks. Personally I prefer to negotiate by email in most cases. Depending on the other party and your own skills an in person does't always work out the way you would like.
I think it totally depends on what you're selling, who you're selling it to, and many other factors.
For example, a guy emailed me one day about a domain I owned, and wanted to know if I'd part with it. None of the domain appraisal tools rated it as having any significant value and I wasn't emotionally invested in it, and had no specific plans for it, so I emailed him back and offered to sell it. He made an offer, I accepted, and told him to Paypal me the money, and then I'd transfer the domain to his GoDaddy account. No "escrow", no face to face meeting, no weird stuff, just email and two strangers trusting each other over $100.00 and a domain. And if F2F had been required, it would never have happened, since I was in NC and he was in Canada. So, totally an appropriate case for doing everything via email.
Now... our startup is in the business of complex, B2B enterprise software solutions which will sell for 10s (if not 100s) of thousands of dollars for a subscription. This stuff will need to integrate with existing legacy systems, and - if successful - will have big implications for the way people get work done. We are not going to get anywhere without some serious face time when it comes to selling this stuff.
Of course, those are two extremes, but I think there are a lot of cases where the higher bandwidth of face to face communication is still very valuable.
"None of the domain appraisal tools rated it as having any significant value"
Well first let me tell you that means practically nothing.
Especially on the end of "no significant value". Although I've seen more errors with domains with value being said to have "no value" than I've seen with domains with clear value "having no value". (Can't off the top see if I mean "false negative or false positive" but you get the point.)
"He made an offer, I accepted"
In general, in any deal to sell there always needs to be some "kickback". Otherwise someone might feel they have left money on the table. General rule. Kickback doesn't have to be "more" or "less" money. It can be as simple as "ok but only if you..." (some non monetary item that makes the other party feel you are borderline on their offer).
"trusting each other over $100.00 and a domain"
Easy because the total amount at risk is $100. (Would you do the same if you had a domain and someone offered $20,000 for it and that was the value?).
"We are not going to get anywhere without some serious face time when it comes to selling this stuff."
Agree.
Let me know if anyone ever approaches you to sell any other domains.
Yes, I totally agree. I don't want to make it seem like phone / email are not legitimate tools for doing this type of stuff. I'm based in Philly so I'd say those two are REALLY important for what I do - we can only go out and meet clients in person a few times a year.
I think email is helpful for starting conversations (via cold emails). But what I was trying to say is that at some point you need to actually start talking to people on the phone or in person. You can only learn so much from watching your Google Analytics graphs.
Appreciate the perspective, thanks for allowing me to clarify.
I think technical founders would gladly do all customer development by email (if it worked). The problem is, often your customers aren't "tech people".
We freelancer also do business. Sometime ,we not always online and doing other thing.But too abuse and trying keep cost like only entertain Facebook message just for just communication just too way annoying.To me,i you don't want take the call or meet face to face better not deal with me.Sometimes meet face 2 face required to knew client capability on payment and scheduling.
This is good stuff. Even better would be small cameras that can be worn around the body so the incidents can be recorded.
Yelp has already demonstrated why crowdsourcing is so important. The public often rails against the government, but most of the bad stuff is done by everyday people and they need to be held accountable.
The root cause of poverty is the incompetent government education system - The Teacher's Union. Most public school teachers I've come across have contempt for the businessmen (people who create the wealth) and for poor people (teachers tend to be limousine liberals).
The first country or state to disband the current teaching system and replace with a competitive system will skyrocket to success. This is a no-brainer, but it's so to difficult implement because there's so many of the 'government handout' teachers voting they swamp the rest of us.
Boo-hoo, teachers, who cannot clearly demonstrate how they actually add economic value to anything, want to be paid even more than their current $52,000 median salary.
Meanwhile, fisherman, who hold the most dangerous job, have a median salary of $25,000.
Firefighters, whose job is to enter dangerous buildings, $45,000.
You seriously don't see any economic value associated with the education of a child from age 6-18?
We can argue about what specific subjects are best to teach in school, and what a teacher ought to be paid, but don't you think that, broadly speaking, educating children provides some economic benefit to a nation?
Where are the proper studies (with 1000s of participants) showing teachers can do a better job than babysitters who hand out an ipad with learning software to every student?
The teaching system is a 19th system. It's like if the tech industry continued on with using telegraphs and morse code for everything.
I think education is definitely ripe for disruption.
There's a lot of "but it's always been done that way", and teachers' unions are very quick to play the "think of the chilllllldrun card". Lots of entrenched bureaucracy and budgets that people don't want to lose.
Wow... The root cause of poverty is incompetent education? What about the college educated poor? What about the failure of the voucher program in Milwaukee?
Why are public schools with the same "limousine liberals" operating them more successful than poor schools? I think your theory has a few holes.
The root of all poverty is that children aren't taught to worship the businessmen who choose to value their time at "as little as the government allows" and avoid employing them and their parents at all if possible. What?
You can't be a successful businessman without 1) having or making something that people value (which requires skill, capital, or some of both) and 2) taking risks with your time and money instead of earning low but guaranteed income. If you don't have skills, capital, or the cash to survive when your gamble doesn't pay off (just like it usually doesn't pay off in Silicon Valley), you don't get to be a businessman. Teaching a child from a low-income family how to run a business is stupid unless you are also prepared to make a brain-dead investment in a kid with a shitty high school diploma and zero professional experience outside of a Walmart.
I have a laptop and I've had the luxury of time to learn to program. If I invest 1,000 hours in a web startup that fails, I still get to eat food from a grocery store and sleep on a bed.
As a young adult in a family living paycheck-to-paycheck (because they are paid barely enough to survive) you are not likely to have free time to develop skills - you need to be working to cover the cost of your meals, taking care of young children, etc. You don't stand a chance.
But let's say you had some free time, and you went to the (evil socialist government waste-of-taxpayer-money) public library and taught yourself some Rails and spent enough time on the Internet to get an idea of something people wanted. Already we're talking pretty implausible, but let's go with it. High school ends, and you want to dive into building this thing. But guess what? You need to eat. So you take a shitty minimum wage job and come home exhausted every day; your body physically will not let you concentrate no matter how hard you try. Game over.
You have a shitty education and no GitHub portfolio. There is absolutely no reason for a venture capitalist to believe in you, you're just another delusional starry-eyed kid who has no idea how much he doesn't know. But let's say your parents have faith, and they're willing to continue eating the cost of your room and board in their apartment because they just know you're going to make it big like Mark Zuckerberg and will be able to take care of them. You work 100 hours a week on your idea for 6 months, but it fails. It was a good idea but it turned out there wasn't a market for it, or you screwed up because you've never done this before, or you got eaten alive by competition staffed with Stanford comp sci graduates. Not only is the game over, but you've betrayed your parents, you're getting evicted, your siblings are being placed in foster care, and you're homeless.
It was pretty irresponsible of your parents to let you do that. Which is probably why "keep your head down, work hard, take what you get, and recognize ambition as sinful" makes sense to people as a religious value.
Taking risks with your time is a luxury which you absolutely do not have when you're living on the edge of not making rent. Capitalism does not allow for everyone to be an owner - the whole point is that the ability to make money resides in the hands of people with money as opposed to the collective.
That's $120,000 over k-12 (not including pre-school). Is $120,000 and 12 years not enough to teach every kid entrepreneurship and coding?
As I wrote in another comment, the current education system is 19th century stuff and it's amazing a lot more people aren't astounded why it still exists.
There is not demand for an infinite number of web programmers or web startups. Teaching every child to program just drives down the value of programming skills.
You have not solved the risk or capital problems.
Yes, there are a lot of problems with the education system. Wake me when you find a way to fix it that actually works in a sustainable and scalable fashion.
Punishing teachers for teaching students who don't give a shit because there is no good reason for them to give a shit just decreases the number of teachers willing to work in poor districts.
We wouldn't be punishing teachers, just get ridding of a system that doesn't work. Salman Khan has a proposed a better one where schools are essentially libraries/babysitters that any child can go in and learn a self-directed curriculum.
There is an 'unlimited demand' for programmers skills because of demand ran out, there would be no work left (we'd have a singularity/post scarcity) - programmers automate work.
Teachers' unions are preventing test-score linked pay and firing. Several of my union teachers did flipped classrooms on a regular basis. How is the teachers' union the villain here?
> There is an 'unlimited demand' for programmers skills because of demand ran out, there would be no work left (we'd have a singularity/post scarcity) - programmers automate work.
Someone has to pay programmers to live. If everyone is a qualified programmer, then there's always a programmer willing to work for less (barring a powerful labor union) - until you've driven the wage back down to basic survival (at least for many of the 90% of people who are by definition not in the top 10% as far as skill level), and we're back in the same cycle of poverty we were trying to fix.
But you just told me we don't want to punish teachers for low test scores and the solution is flipped classrooms.
Prove that teacher quality and not curriculum design or cultural factors is actually what's holding down education in poor districts. (You do realize that teachers don't get to choose what they teach, right? Curriculum is set centrally.)
There is an 'unlimited demand' for programmers skills because of demand ran out, there would be no work left (we'd have a singularity/post scarcity) - programmers automate work.
With people like you around, even the Singularity wouldn't get rid of capitalism.
The flip side is does he help you succeed? You just made a case for why you should be in his portfolio - he'll go to the lengths of shady stuff to help you out.
He openly admits he's tough, but that's out of wanting all of his investments to succeed.
You? No. He helps himself, first and foremost. And it goes far beyond an ROI. He makes sure he's uniquely in a position to win. That's not founder friendly.
Again, the proof is in the portfolio. He wins, few founders have with him. The lack of YC there is telling...
Vinod Khosla is one of the few good guy VCs out there. He's invested in high tech foods, robots, energy, healthcare, farming. He runs a Google X type fund.
Also, his first two funds were self-financed. He did well enough on those that when he started Khosla Ventures III he was able to raise $1Billion in LP money.
Not true. Yes he takes what appears to be big risks but he hedges by insisting on insane terms. Then it's his and only his company. A good guy he is not. Smart, yes. He does deals no one else will. There's value there but mostly to him and his LPs. The founders are mere employees.
One easy test is the lack of YC companies in his portfolio. Another is the lack of big name founders he created. It's all about Vinod.
Crowdfunding will replace venture capital, and investing itself to a large extent. You don't need investment, you make the case to customers directly and they prepay you.
It would be nice if this were true. But it seems rather unlikely, as even the biggest hits of crowdfunding have been on the low side of VC funding amounts. Crowdfunding might eventually yield 100M rounds, but that doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon.
> A good VC brings a lot more to the table than just money. Crowdfunding cannot replace that.
Crowdfunding replaces the money piece. The other bits are knowledge which the startup might need to purchase separately. Whether that will be more or less efficient than purchasing them together for startups that need both is, perhaps, unclear, but at least some startups will really only need the money (which, obviously, won't necessarily be the same ones that think they only need the money, but that's life.)
Employers pay big money to find employees.
Students pay big money to get educated to get a job.
Hackers roll in with apps that allow students to do courses for free on the smartphone/tablet, sell the info of the students to employers, who then hire the students. Everyone wins. Hackers are proclaimed heros.
The only difference here is who is paying who. "Run an online university. Oh yeah, the university is an app, not a website, and therefore super trendy." is not a "perfect opportunity for hackers". The actual software involved with such a proposal is chump-work.
Writing a really good app that is both enjoyable for students and a rigorous test of ability that employers are looking for is not chump work.
If you can show employers that your app truly tests useful abilities they would be lining up. The current education system fails at producing workers with the right skills and employers are always complaining abou this.
What you are looking for is Khan Academy. Khan Academy with enough content, with sufficiently rigorous content, with sufficiently rigorous evaluation, to become accredited so that employers will value their assessment of a students worth. Actually, they would need to be better than merely being accredited, since employers sure aren't bending over backwards to pay accredited universities serious cash for access to their students.
See, what is Khan Academy really lacking at this point? Is the hard part their website with youtube hosted videos? Are they really just jonesing for some mobile developers? Or is producing quality content with broad coverage and depth their bottleneck?
Making an app is the easy part. Education is not failing for want of an app. Certainly not for want of a gamified app.
But hey, I can't stop you. Knock yourself out. Hell, pitch it to YC; I hear they are doing non-profits now.
1) The absolute last thing this world needs is more for-profit education, particularly for-profit education that has somebody else foot the bill. Do yourself a favor and try to sell this idea as non-profit; I was giving you the benefit of the doubt by assuming it was.
2) An app that teaches people things but doesn't have anything to teach them is worthless. Of course the software is the easy part...
If you really think a for-profit Khan Academy that teaches... nontraditional... curriculum, but doesn't actually have any content since you seem to be completely ignoring that problem... is what the world really needs, then pitch it to YC as a for-profit startup. I ain't stopping you...
Why would it need to be an app at all? It has zero benefits over being a website and requires students to buy an expensive piece of hardware to access it.
Very enjoyable article. I was just thinking that recently, mobile is just a nicer experience and it's because of these cards.
There was something about reading books and magazines before the web came, a gamified experience, because you could more visibly see your progress. On the web you might have read the equivalent of a 1000 page book but you never get the sense of that.
This is why we hackers should all be helping Google get their self-driving cars on the road. It could save so many lives if people could have the option of living in their car.
The guy in the article wasn't completely moneyless, he just came up against the recurring costs of taxes/rent which can trip up the unorganized.
Google car expense is overplayed. In mass production and with competition the cost would go way down.
Also, if the government makes the 'homeless' drive to specific places out in the desert or something, that's better than the current situation where you're exposed to other homeless and dangerous people.
I actually wouldn't mind going 'homeless' for a while to save money on rent, but currently it's really dangerous to do so. Moving to low rent places is also usually more 'dangerous', especially with children. With a driverless car you can just take your family out into the desert or forest and pretend you're camping.
The current system of full-time rv-ing is quite hard because of parking restrictions and because sending kids off too school and getting groceries from out of town is hard, and because the rv's are too small. With self-driving rv's you can have a few of them to space out in.
Also, if the government makes the 'homeless' drive to specific places out in the desert or something, that's better than the current situation where you're exposed to other homeless and dangerous people.
But what if they're driving all of the homeless people out to the same spot in the desert? Cars, sure, are better than nothing but better still are cars the government can't use to expel or trap undesirables.
I'm sorry, but the idea of self-driving cars just creep me out.
There's a better approach than what the blog outlines - imagine that you have infinite wealth and begin to build what you personally want.
In most cases you will not be able to create the whole thing, but you can tackle a piece of the problem.
Example - you want a flying car. Imagine that you have 1 trillion dollars at your disposal. What would you do? Hire engineers. How would you hire them? What software is required. Look around, if it does not exist already, that's your first product. If it the hiring problem is already adequately solved, look for the next thing. How do those engineers communicate? etc.
These series of questions will lead to finding niches of opportunity, and it is always a software problem (organizing workflows).