Jared's Blog

Political Theory for Startups

There’s a rudimentary theory in Political Science that international relations and foreign policy can be explained through a combination of three major forces: personal actors, nations, and systemic conditions (international climate).  In order to understand major policies or an individual nation’s behavior, one must analyze all of these conditions.  For instance, if you wanted to know why the Roosevelt Corollary to The Monroe Doctrine was drafted in 1904, you would have to perform a psychoanalysis of Theodore Roosevelt, research national sentiments and politics, and factor in the international climate of the time.  No single analysis will sufficiently explain why the Corollary was adopted, but a combination of the three will provide a comprehensive answer.

This same theory can also be applied to explain the behavior of startups.  You can learn a lot, and predict a lot, by understanding the way a Founder or CEO thinks, understanding the behaviors and sentiments of a startup’s users and core staff, and evaluating the external forces at play (e.g. competition, VCs, legal issues, etc.).  When it comes down to major events such as acquisitions, UI and API alterations, new funding, and strategic partnerships, a one-dimensional explanation won’t tell you anything.  You have to look at decision-making from a macro-perspective.

There’s a lot of oversimplification when it comes down to explaining why some startups are successful and some are failures.  Many argue that the success of a startup is determined by how entrepreneurial its founder is (personal), and some argue that success is situational (i.e. the timing of a product’s entrance in a market, a need for innovation in a specific field, etc.).  This can be dangerous, especially when people devote all of their attention to one specific area instead of trying to understand the big picture.  With startups, successes, failures, and important decisions are not one-dimensional - they’re determined by individual leaders, product users, and externalities.

AnyClip: It’s a Winner

I went to the NY Tech Meetup last night and got to see a demo of AnyClip for the first time.  I’ve been psyched about this project since I first heard about it (send me an invite!) and what I saw exceeded my expectations.

AnyClip is a tool that is useful.  Hallelujah.  We need more useful products being developed.  It answers a question that I frequently ask: “Where can I find that clip from that movie?”  People love movies - it’s a multi-billion dollar industry and that’s not going to change anytime soon.  Not only does AnyClip provide instant gratification in finding a scene you’ve been aching to see again, but it rekindles an interest in  a movie.  Both of these points are important.  You log on to AnyClip with a mission, and you leave with passion.

AnyClip is data heavy.  It crowdsources and uses algorithms to find the most relevant clip(s) for your search query.  Last night, Nate typed in “flux capacitor” and the first result was the infamous Back to the Future scene.  This morning I typed in “flux capacitor” on YouTube to see if it would generate the same results.  The first two results were videos of people’s replications of flux capacitors (they failed - and I don’t care), and the third result was titled “Hot Girl wants Flux Capacitor.”  It’s obvious that AnyClip is a powerful tool for 1) finding desired clips through keyword search queries and 2) finding relevant clips through general interest search queries (e.g. typing in Times Square will yield multiple movie clips shot in Times Square or containing content/dialogue around Times Square).

So who gives a shit about this product aside from movie geeks?  You don’t have to be a movie geek to like movies.  At least once a week I find myself thinking about a particular scene.  I’d go rewatch it if it wasn’t such a painstaking and time-consuming process.  AnyClip provides immediate gratification.  It’s like that song that’s stuck in your head and the only way to let it out is to figure out what it is and then listen to it.  Same thing goes for movie clips.

The only issue with AnyClip is that it’s an absolute legal disaster.  The only way I see this project being able to sustain itself is if it goes the Spotify route.  It’s going to need the consent and support of major movie studios.  Ultimately, I think it should be the studios who back the project, just like the record labels backed Spotify.  Like I mentioned before, AnyClip is a service that rekindles the flame between a consumer and a movie - this is a win for studios.  I think there’s a viable business model in there somewhere, whether it’s a premium service or it capitalizes on affiliate revenue sharing with major brands/sellers like Netflix and Amazon.  Either way, I’m excited to see this project grow some legs.  I think it’s poised to go far.

Leveraging NYC Talent (Continued)

Last week I posed a question regarding how to leverage NYC talent in the startup community.  Initially, the most obvious pool of candidates seemed to be talented analytical brains in finance and consulting.  Although I still think their skill sets are translatable to startups, there’s another group out there with serious potential: university researchers and academics.

NYC is home to some of the world’s top scientific institutions (e.g. Columbia University and New York University).  Each year hundreds of millions of dollars are injected into the research and development of new technologies, yet only 0.1% of funded basic science research results in a commercial venture.  The remainder of these projects inspire a piece of academic literature and are subsequently shelved.

Center for an Urban Future, a NYC think tank, recently published an in-depth study on the importance of developing a more robust and entrepreneurial research community.  It calls for a public institution somewhere between the EDC and SBS:

What’s needed is an office that builds linkages and structures to grow and retain the city’s own technology businesses, and not just in the life sciences.  We need an office willing to interact intensively with the universities - to be in their face all the time - and to court the entrepreneurial community.

Successful institutions like this exist in Philadelphia and the Boston area.  Why shouldn’t one exist in NYC?  They set tangible goals: raising the number of companies emerging from research at city universities from X to Y and increasing investments towards research commercialization.

This is a good idea, but I think an even better solution exists.  Public institutions are inherently inefficient - they’re bureaucratic by nature.  Same thing goes for major universities.  The opportunity exists for a group of VCs/entrepreneurs to develop tight-knit relationships with key players at universities.  If the private sector can tap into university academics, researchers, and inventors, fund them and help them bring their inventions to market, it would be an economic boon.  Simply raising the number of commercialized research projects from 0.1% to 1% would result in exponential economic and technological growth.

In order for this to happen universities need to relax their transfer office policies, embrace the private (and public) sector, and encourage communication and joint-entrepreneurship with seasoned professionals.  The major institutions win, the academics win, the entrepreneurs win, and NYC wins.

How can NYC startups leverage NYC talent?

Here’s a response/question I posted on a thread on Nate’s blog.  There has been a lot of dialogue lately on the NYC startup scene and its potential.  I think this touches on one of the key issues at hand.

I agree that understanding programming (jargon and the whole works) is a necessity. It seems like that can be picked up in a basic CS101 book, reading the right blogs, and experiencing it firsthand. I luckily sit next to two very talented programmers who are more than willing to teach me about the different languages/uses/etc.

You began to address the primary dilemma before:
“Building a program which effectively identifies the best and brightest locked away in these industries, and providing the resources to turn their disruptive ideas into disruptive startups, is a big answer for me.”

I’m still not entirely convinced that learning code is the finite answer here. If I’m 2-3 years out of college working at the Goldman Sachs and McKinsey’s of the world and suddenly get the entrepreneurial itch, I can’t drop everything to learn to code. And even if I do, my code will never be as good or robust as that of a talented programmer who has been at it for years. Like you said, immersing oneself, eating and breathing engineering is a great way to start; however, I think there’s a lot more to it.

If the value-added of this particular demographic is not concentrated in product development, then where is it focused? How can you take the best and the brightest from the “Titan Industries” and focus their skill sets towards transforming the way startups grow? Chris Dixon also had an interesting post on this yesterday, but I’m still curious as to how and where this group fits in. I don’t think there’s one right answer, but it’s a question worth exploring in order to better understand how to leverage NYC’s competitive advantage in this area.