Brother Strength

A few months back, my brother and I ended up staying at the same hotel in Orlando while attending a good friend’s wedding for the weekend. While we were there, we agreed to meet at the hotel’s gym one morning to work out together.

Or, at least, that was the ostensible plan. But, really, both of us knew we weren’t there for a workout. We were there for a Grand Competition of Manliness and Strength. Somehow, that’s what our workouts always become.

Of course, a little competition shouldn’t hurt. But, in our case, it does. Because, while both of us are fairly conservative in our exercise in general, putting safety and effectiveness first, and while both of us will gladly admit in the abstract that we have differing physical strengths and weaknesses as compared to the other, if you actually put us into a gym together, all of that goes right out the window, and we instead each become monomaniacally focused on totally crushing the other.

In that situation, we’re even further set back by a phenomenon that I will here call ‘brother strength’ – essentially, a less benign relative of the sort of ‘mother strength’ that allows slightly built women to lift cars off of their children in emergency situations. Here, instead, it’s channeled towards, say, allowing a brother to bench press more than his sibling, even if his doing so flies in the face of all recorded exercise physiology and science.

I, for example, almost never train the bench press, whereas my brother does frequently, and has since his ice hockey days. Also, he outweighs me by about twenty-five pounds. But if you make him go first, and I get to go second, I can always, always bench at least five pounds more than he can.

And then, say, if we get on the pullup bar, and I go first, David can hop on and do at least one more rep than I did, even if that entails knocking out more in a single set than he’s performed in total over the past year.

Driven by a strange cocktail of testosterone, adrenaline, and long-submerged childhood rivalries, we can go back and forth like this, the second brother to try a given feat invariably besting the first, for literally hours on end. Eventually, we leave, laughing, perhaps part with an overly firm, hand-crush-attempting handshake.

And then, a few hours later, the high passes, and the hangover sets in. Down in Florida, the next morning, I woke up sore not just in my muscles, not even just in my tendons, but down in my very bones. My only solace, later that evening at the wedding reception, was noting that my brother looked equally rough.

But somehow, still, we both managed to pull ourselves out onto the dance floor. And we both did our damndest to out-boogie the other, excruciatingly painful as it may have been. Or, maybe, it didn’t hurt at all. Once the brother strength kicked back in, I don’t remember feeling a thing.

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Stuck in the Middle with You

In the past few weeks, the film and tech worlds have been dueling over the pending Stop Online Piracy Act, HR 3261, which hugely increases the rights of copyright holders in preventing online piracy. Given that I’ve lived on both sides of that debate, it’s been an interesting fight to watch.

In my estimation, the tech crowd’s right that SOPA is a terrible piece of legislation. It’s full of impractical, draconian measures that will unintentionally yet severely cripple the entire internet.

And the tech crowd is also right that the movie studios’ approach to distribution in general is badly out of date. Ideas like windowing – releasing a movie sequentially across theatrical, VOD, DVD, and then digitally, rather than simultaneously on all those mediums – no longer make sense in light of how people prefer to consume media in today’s world. A film should be available on your iPhone at the same point it’s available in theaters, not six months later.

But I’m more than a bit surprised by how quickly tech people seem to be jumping from those two points to morally justifying the illegal downloading of films. I’ll be honest: I steal movies. But I think of it as ‘stealing’ them, and do it only when I can’t download and pay for them legitimately. Whereas the otherwise usually reasonable Fred Wilson, for example, apparently went off the hook just hearing that same copyright infringement referred to as ‘theft’. And it’s not just a matter of terminology: discussion on Fred’s post went on for nearly 500 comments, largely echoing the idea that the solution to movie piracy is to simply let people legally download any movie for free.

In light of that, it’s ironic that a great short piece by Maciej Ceglowski, founder of social bookmarking site Pinboard, has also been making the rounds. In it, Maciej points out that web services with no business model rarely stick around for long. By their very nature, free tools become increasingly impractical to maintain the more popular they become.

So it’s odd that people don’t see a similar problem with not paying for movies. Perhaps that’s because movies are often made for budgets in the tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars. While Maciej jokingly disclaims his post with “I run a paid bookmarking site. Every morning I wake up and dive into my vault of golden coins,” some of those movie budget millions do indeed go to paying a small number of people enough to actually fill gold coin vaults. But those movie stars’ salaries typically make up only a small percentage of a film’s overall budget – the vast majority instead ends up, as they say in the film world, ‘on the screen’. It pays modest salaries to an army of people, and covers a slew of logistical and technical costs, all of which go directly into making a movie a certain length, scale, and quality. In other words, reducing the amount of money a movie makes therefore necessarily reduces the amount of movie that gets made.

Sure, SOPA is a piece of crap, and the film industry’s entire model is badly broken. But that doesn’t mean that movie piracy isn’t a real problem for anyone who loves, or works on, films.

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Geek Ambassadors

More than a few people have observed that entrepreneurship is extremely simple: all it takes to build a successful company is to make something people want, then sell it to them.

Of course, there’s a difference between simple and easy. After all, 90% of new businesses fail. So entrepreneurs lay awake at night, thinking about how to grow their companies. But they tend to worry about the wrong things: how to make something, and how to sell it. In my experience, those parts aren’t actually the problem. Sure, getting the making and selling right requires ungodly amounts of hard work. As Paul Graham has described it, a startup is a bargain in which you squeeze a lifetime’s worth of work into three to five insanely hard years, in exchange for receiving a lifetime’s worth of salary at the end of that time. It’s tough. Very tough. But that work, the making and selling, is rarely where companies actually go off the rails. Indeed, it turns out both parts tend to yield eventually to smart, focused, head-down busting ass.

The thing that really kills companies is the part that founders worry about less: making something that people want. I’ve screwed that up in a bunch of ways in the past myself, and I’ve seen literally thousands of current and prospective companies do it, too.

Figuring out what people want is hard. And it’s hard for a lot of reasons. In the tech world, for example, it’s hard because builders tend to forget they’re different from regular users; hackers argue about the relative merits of Emacs vs VI, while according to recent research 90% of ‘regular people’ don’t use keyboard shortcuts. And it’s hard because, as Steve Jobs famously observed, those people don’t even know what they want until you show it to them.

So figuring out what people want is tough. During the first Internet bubble, VCs ‘solved’ that problem in a standardized way: by hiring MBA CEOs. Find someone with an HBS diploma and some biz dev / sales experience, put him (or her, but probably him) in charge, and task him with figuring out what users want, then with explaining it to the engineering team. While that sounds excellent, unfortunately, it doesn’t actually work, as the subsequent implosion of the internet sector demonstrated. In short, it turns out it’s nearly impossible to figure out what you should build, if you have no idea what you can or can’t build.

In today’s Internet Bubble 2.0, VCs read the lesson of the MBA CEO debacle as: put the tech guys in charge. Now, everyone wants teams of ‘technical founders’. But, in my estimation, that’s a bit of an oversimplification, as not all tech founders are the same. As Geoffrey Moore observed in his excellent (albeit slightly dated) Crossing the Chasm, bleeding edge types actually break into two, very distinct sub-groups: technologists, who are excited about technology for technology’s sake, and visionaries, who are excited about what technology can do for people, about how it might change real, day-to-day lives.

Both types these days pass themselves off as technical founders – that’s what gets funded. But when it comes to actually writing code, the visionaries tend to be more or less crap. Consider Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley – ‘technical’ visionary to Naveen Selvadurai’s legitimately technical technologist; while the two wrote the first version of the app together, their first hire, Harry, was initially tasked with rewriting all of Dennis’ code. At the same time, it’s the visionary who shoulders that crucial question of what people want. Hacking skill aside, it’s good news that Dennis squeezed his quasi-technical way to the helm, as Foursquare would never have grown to what it is today without his lead.

Even if we also call them ‘technical founders’, visionaries aren’t exactly tech peeople, nor exactly business people, but some weird hybrid, some kind of geek ambassador, living in the world between. As a result, the ideal technologist/visionary startup pairing is easy to miss – or, at least, to mischaracterize. Some would see the pair as a tech guy and a business guy, while others would see two tech guys. Neither is quite right. Because what, exactly, was Steve Jobs? Tech guy? Biz guy? Neither and both. He was the prototypical visionary to Woz’s prototypical technologist.

Recently, in an effort to re-secure the US’s place on the world innovation and economic stage, there’s been a strong push to increase the number of engineers coming out of America’s colleges and universities. But if we believe startups are a real driver of innovation and growth, I worry that education push will miss half of the founder equation. Our education system tends to divide students binarily into ‘art people’ and ‘science people’, giving short shrift to those in-between geek ambassadors.

Computer Science departments, for example, are notorious for disdaining ‘dilettantes’. If you’re not hacking compilers in assembly language, you might as well head back to the theater department, because most CS profs have little patience for or interest in anyone who isn’t at least willing to pretend they’re chasing a CS PhD down the line. Still, from what I’ve observed, at least a small number of budding visionaries manage to find ways to build the education they need, often hiding out in the slew of new ‘cognitive science’ majors that have popped up in the last decade – a spot that allows them to balance CS classes with psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and linguistics.

To grow the next generation of startups, we need to grow the next generation of both geek ambassadors and top-notch hackers, then to find smart ways to pair off the two. A technologist and a visionary. It’s the best way to build a startup that makes something amazing – something that people really want.

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