Life of a Digital Entrepreneur

It’s funny how fundraising is such a widely written about activity when it really has little to do with product or business itself.

This is a little video spoof on just that.

My desire to share information and promote tight nits companies is completely selfish. I want other companies to adopt this philosophy, therefor making marketplace more competitive, therefor delivering higher quality products and companies to work with, therefor making my job easier.

We have had our share of bad relationships that I can look back on and all center around the lack of how “tight nit” that organization is.

The goal of this post isn’t to point out bad instances though, but rather highlight amazing relationships.

Stealing a bit of Gary Vaynerchuks thunder, would say these companies are “crushing it”, with regards to how tight nit they are

Tubemogul

These guys have built an amazing analytics company and someone we work with extensively to power our analytics toolsets. They started out of Cal Berkley and have many incredibly smart people working for them. At around 20+ employees they have been able to rapidly build out the best analytics platform in the online video business.

When working with them, if we have a problem an API here or there, they will work overnight to get us the answer or fix by morning. One evening in particular, we had a problem with our flash player and analytic tracker, with everyone out for the day, and not his responsibility, Jason Lopatecki, Chief Strategy Officer, pulled out flash editor, and put together a fix for us. Who has C level officers that know how to code flash?

Incredibly smart and passionate people that are not afraid to wear multiple hats.

Edgecast

The Content Delivery Network (CDN) business is very competitive right now, and get dozens of vendor emails weekly about new CDN price breaks. Having worked with these guys for over a year now, they listen and deliver. This is extremely important as many larger CDN businesses think they have it figured out, and aren’t invested in innovating and listening to there customer.

We have many business service customers we work with. Each of these customers needs to be tracked individually for bandwidth usage. Edgecast listened to this need and not only delivered reporting functions for us with a UI layer but delivered an API with 20+ functions a few weeks after.

And when someone on the Viddler team may call in because we are having a problem with some reporting tool, or inquiring about new services, the level1 support engineer could be the core architect for all we know because of how well versed he is with the status of features and problems within the company. Transparent organization or talented hire? I would assume all organizations have high level of transparency, just that they find passionate and intelligent people.

To get started over there the man to talk to over there is Duane Sulo.

Google

Due to size of Google don’t want to post anything too confidential here. What I will say is that there account reps and support staff are all on point. When working with individual units of Google, they feel like small startups themselves, proving that you can still be tight nit in one of the largest companies in the world.

Woopra

Just started using this product on this blog. But the fact the CEO, John Pozadzides,  is talking transparently about business model with his users, just rocks and leads by example on how passionate his company is about his users.

In summary it appears that there are a few key factors in running a tight nit organization:

1. Smart/Passionate People
2. Ability to Listen and Deliver
3. Employees not afraid to wear multiple hats.

Please think of these when building a company or working with other companies as it’ll help foster more tight nit companies.

Also, just a small disclaimer, there are a more companies I want to list, but in order for Viddler to attempt to be a tight company, am going to have to cut this off here.

If you know of a tight nit company, let me know what tight nit company you work with, would love to hear your story via comments, blog post, tweet, viddler, or email rob at viddler.

Have been asking myself business scaling questions (mostly on how it pertains to Viddler) as I have been listening to Jeff Jarvis’s new book,What Would Google Do. Jeff has a huge point in the book where he points out that to scale like Google/Facebook/etc, you price based on what the customer can pay not on what the company needs to meet it’s margins.

I never really thought this concept applied to “physical businesses”. Ones that make things physical for people to buy (Google t-shirts do not count).

Well, while obsessing over my favorite new upcoming car, Chevy Volt, ran into a livechat with GM retiring executive Larry Burns.

Toyota recently announced they will not go down GM route as it’s doesn’t make business sense for typical margins. Larry responded very “google-like” to one of my questions with regard to cost of the new lithium-ion batteries.

It’s great to see GM act as Google would.  One more reason to get the Volt!

Viddler is located in Bethlehem, PA and a few of us share our favorite sandwiches that are all less then $5!

Scrappy.

As a product guy, it’s been very apparent Myspace has been on it’s way out for many years, mainly due to it’s inability to innovate, and putting advertising efforts clearly ahead of it’s users.

When Jay Leno, a mainstream comedian, uses Myspace as center of a joke, it really questions the mainstream perspective on them.

Myspace is far from over though, and still has a chance to come back.

If I were over at myspace I would do two things to combat this before it’s too late:
What: Make it clear Myspace is going to change attitude on advertising, putting users first. Scrap all ad units and start over with more engaging campaigns. Reinvent itself.
How: Become socially transparent in this effort. Get feedback from users. Turn it into a conversation as apposed to a one way battle.

Update: NBC has pulled the commercial from it’s site. It used to be here and when you still google “Jay Leno new material” you will find it once existed on the site.  NBC and Myspace have a relationship on many levels, wouldn’t be suprised if someone asked for it to come down due to it hurting the relationship.

As you may know we relaunched our advertise directory to be completely transparent to help promote content partners that work with us as well as share with advertisers what we are about.

With it you can advertise with some of the AMAZING partners that I personally am privileged to work with including HotHardware, Engadget, Joystiq, Tweektown,  iJustine, Phillyd.tv, any many other FANTASTIC partners.

This is just the start. What I hope is that we can spur up small businesses with $500-1000 budgets to find value in this.

Would love your feedback on the guide.

Also to kickstart the program put together my first advertisement I have ever created.

 

Mapping USB Thinkpad Keyboard Middle Scroll Key to OSX

Originally uploaded by sandieman

I am in love with my IBM Thinkpad keyboard and how much it saves your fingers. When your on your computer 10+ hours a day, efficiency is everything with the mac red nipple, saving moving hands on mac from keyboard to mouse 1000+ times a day.

There is one thing that is missing though when using it with OSX which is very annoying. What I am trying to get to work is the middle scroll key that you press and when pressing it it allows you to scroll up and down a website page or document. This is very important function for keyboard to work for me.

Alternatively a shortcut for scrolling (Ctrl-J) would be acceptable as well.

Apple OSX’s default keyboard mapping function is pretty simple and isn’t apparent howto get this to work.

If you have any ideas on howto get this to work, please let me know in comments below or @sandieman me on Twitter!

Thanks!

UPDATE: Smart Scroll fixed this problem for me. It’s a payed shareware application but worth it.

Recent Mac commercials (which I always love) share Windows guy freezing 2150 many years into the future. It’s making fun of the Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates commercial where Bill hints at next version of Windows. That being said, all this poking and competition has got me thinking on where it will be in 2040 (2150 being too far away).

What are pretty much guarantees:
Dropping prices in hardware
Culture changes at Apple and Windows
Opensource movement to continue to grow
Steve Jobs will die. (sorry folks, everyone does)

Rating past, present, future
Without using any formal metric (market share, revenue generated, etc), I would like to post my prediction of how the market will evolve based on a Wine Spectator point scale. Have made a few notes on why each of the trends.

What do you think?