A Touch Of Asperger's

“Rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there,” Musk has said. “This is a good way to figure out if something really makes sense or if it’s just what everybody else is doing.” ....... To be great, you can’t think like everybody else, and you probably won’t fit in to the herd. As a child Musk was bullied and beaten so badly that as an adult he struggled to breathe through his nose and needed corrective surgery........ John Doerr, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins, who was an early investor in Google, Amazon and Netscape, has said that great entrepreneurs tend to have “absolutely no social life.” Great innovators, like those with Asperger’s, just don’t fit in...... Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been described as “a robot,” and having “a touch of the Asperger’s,” according to a former colleague. There are stories of a young Zuckerberg having awkward meetings, such as with Twitter’s co-founders. ...... One of Facebook’s first investors, Reid Hoffman, has said his first impression of Zuckerberg was how quiet he was. Zuckerberg said maybe 15 or 20 sentences in an hour-long meeting. ...... “What I most remember was scratching my head going, ‘Huh why is he being quiet?’ It turns out he was being quiet because he’s thinking a lot,” Hoffman said ... “He’s perfectly fine with, ‘Hey if there ends up being five seconds of silence, it’s five seconds of silence, I’m thinking.” ...... Zuckerberg’s willingness to defy social norms has paid off with an uncanny ability to position Facebook to thrive. It’s now worth $228 billion. ... He dared to spend over $25 billion acquiring companies without little or revenue — WhatsApp, Instagram and Oculus. ...... When Zuckerberg spent $1 billion on Instagram, which had never made a cent, many saw it as a crazy move. Now by one estimate Instagram is now worth $35 billion. ......... He wears a gray T-shirt every day, saying he wants to focus his decision-making energy on Facebook not fashion. .... Four of the six PayPal co-founders built bombs in high school. ..... While lots of “normal” people played with Legos, Google co-founder Larry Page built a functioning inkjet printer out of them in college. ...... “Think different,” happened to be Apple’s slogan, which its co-founder Steve Jobs embodied in his youth as he wandered India and experimented with LSD. ...... “If you have autism or if you have a mild form of it you might be kind of less interested in following the crowd and conforming to social norms. And you can think more independently,” Baron-Cohen said. “They want to know are we doing these things because it’s the most efficient way, it’s the best way of doing it or the cheapest way. They want some kind of logic.” ........ Obsessiveness, another trait of those with Asperger’s, also pays off when building a tech company...... Microsoft’s co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen were comfortable coding software for hours on end as young programmers...... “Some of the more prudish people would say ‘Go home and take a shower.’ We were just hard-core, writing code,” as Gates told ........ Asperger’s Syndrome is much more prevalent in boys than girls.

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Zynga Getting Hammered

Its IPO has not been good for Zynga, nor for Facebook. They have been hammered. Not long back Fred Wilson on the East Coast and John Doerr on the West Coast talked of Zynga as the fastest growing company they ever had in their portfolios. I guess there are ups and downs. Right now happens to be a down time. It is not that Zynga's user base has shrunk dramatically. This is more a case of Wall Street looking at cold, hard cash. If you don't have it, you don't have it.

Just like Facebook Zynga is also struggling with mobile.

Zynga COO Said To Lose Product Oversight As Growth Slows

Pincus embarked on the overhaul in early July, at the close of a quarter marked by slowing sales growth and a drop in demand for virtual goods. Schappert, lured away last year from Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) with a pay package worth $42.8 million, has lost support within the company and taken some of the blame for its underperformance ..... “The place is in utter meltdown mode” .... The stock has dropped 72 percent since the market debut. The decline accelerated last week after Zynga reported sales and profit that missed analysts’ predictions. ..... The reorganization was aimed in part at making mobile- software development more of a priority across Zynga

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Running Meetings: Charging Hard

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeBusiness Insider: How Larry Page Changed Meetings At Google After Taking Over Last Spring

1. Every meeting must have one clear decision maker. If there's no decision maker -- or no decision to be made -- the meeting shouldn't happen.
   
2. No more than 10 people should attend.
   
3. Every person should give input, otherwise they shouldn't be there.
   
4. No decision should ever wait for a meeting. If a meeting absolutely has to happen before a decision should be made, then the meeting should be scheduled immediately.
   

To that I would add another observation. A team should be three people, maximum five people. And then you are moving.

Think Quarterly: Start-Up Speed

.... we needed to grow and speed up at the same time ..... that holy grail of business speed: The start-up ..... For starters, we noted that every decision-oriented meeting should have a clear decision-maker, and if it didn’t, the meeting shouldn’t happen. Those meetings should ideally consist of no more than 10 people, and everyone who attends should provide input. If someone has no input to give, then perhaps they shouldn’t be there. That’s okay – attending meetings isn’t a badge of honor – but the people who are attending need to get there on time. Most importantly, decisions should never wait for a meeting. If it’s critical that a meeting take place before a decision is made, then that meeting needs to happen right away. ...... “Google+ shipped over 100 new features in the 90 days after launch, while accelerating to over 40 million users. That’s a velocity we’re proud of.” ..... Besides fast decisions, another key hallmark of start-ups is their fast-paced, densely populated offices. We’ve always promoted this approach at Google, organizing around small teams and working in close proximity to one another. Even Eric Schmidt shared his office with an engineer when he first joined the company. ...... we created a ‘bullpen’ in one of the buildings on our main campus, which was specially designed as a place for members of our executive team to work and talk in an informal setting. These execs now set aside a number of hours per week to be there. It’s amazing how fast things can get done – even in a large company – when you put so many key people together and don’t give them an agenda. ....... Creating quarterly OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) has been part of Google’s culture since board member John Doerr introduced the concept in 1999. ...... Team by team, the leaders lay out their objectives and how they’ll measure success. Afterwards, they’re posted for anyone within the company to see. ..... a recent OKR objective for our search team was to improve the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, which restates and reiterates the company’s mission statement ....... Having these shared goals also has the benefit of helping prevent the formation of silos – always a concern as companies grow. ...... in a permanently accelerating environment, we’re all seeking the best ways to move faster and be smarter. ... Larry’s closing speech at Zeitgeist: “There are no companies that make good slow decisions.”

Mark Pincus Is Really Something

(Article first published as Mark Pincus is Really Something on Technorati.)

Image by Joi via FlickrMark Pincus stands out. He really does. He does not fit the stereotype. The guy is responsible for one of the fastest growing companies in history, but his past is littered with all sorts of entrepreneurial failures. To the seasoned eye, those failures were the stepping stones to his grand success, but only in December 2009 he was being pilloried by some small name journalist to whom Pincus pleaded on the air: "We go way back."

He did not drop out of college. He was not 19 or 23 when he started Zynga. He is not 20s young. He is not the most photogenic entrepreneur out there. His public appearances tend to be littered with all sorts of horror stories of him having had to deal with venture capitalists and other creatures of the tech ocean. John Doerr's firm rejected him several times, and Zynga has been better for John Doerr than Google has. Now why would John Doerr do that? I think there is a cultural bias against people who are not the most photogenic.

Exuberance, Not Froth

Image via WikipediaI said it was not a bubble, but there was some froth. I am revising that. I am now saying it is not froth, it is exuberance. It is mostly a positive scenario.

Fred Wilson: Megatrend Crosscurrents: The history of tech investing is a series of waves or megatrends that come one after another. Mainframes to minicomputers to PCs to client server to Internet, for example. But right now we are in the midst of a number of these megatrends all happening at the same time. There are at least four big ones going on at the same time:
- Mobile - yesterday I wrote that at least 16% of the visits to this blog are coming from mobile devices and that number is up from essentially zero six quarters ago
- Social - Facebook will have 1bn users in the next year or so
- Cloud - A third of Netflix' new subscribers are opting for the streaming only plan
- Global - companies like Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Google see upwards of 80% of their users from outside the US and these numbers are growing faster than ever ...... Each one of these megatrends would be an investable wave on its own. But we are in an environment when all four are crashing on the shore ata the same time. Twitter, for example, is mobile and social and global.

Wait, Did They Say Froth?
Bubble, Boom Or Froth?
Is It A Bubble?
Glass Half Full Phase

At first Fred Wilson said maybe a bubble. John Doerr said it's a boom. That word does not quite capture it. I said froth. Fred said froth. Then Fred said glass half full. Now he is saying exuberance. And I agree. It is not bubble, boom, or froth, it is exuberance. Done right this can give America China like growth rates. This is about lifting billions out of poverty, and making the already rich feel like it is not happening at their expense or at the expense of the planet.

Larry Page At The Helm

Image via Wikipedia

"I was talking to Larry on Saturday," says Nikesh Arora, Google's chief business officer, when we sit down to talk the following Tuesday. "I told him that I'd gotten back from nine cities in 12 days -- Munich, Copenhagen, Davos, Zurich, New Delhi, Bombay, London, San Francisco. There's a silence for five seconds. And then he's like, 'That's only eight.' "

I have been explicit in my preference for the Founder CEO. I have maintained that Eric Schmidt should have been brought in as COO, Chief Operating Officer, at the outset. That he was brought in as CEO tells me VCs have more power than they should have. Or at least that was the case over a decade ago. In John Doerr vs. Larry Page, I am with Larry Page. John Doerr made a big mistake.

Larry Page had Google work on Android and Chrome behind Eric Schmidt's back. Google not "getting" Facebook is not a big problem, but if Google did not have Android and Chrome today, it would have become an old company by now. Android and Chrome are fundamental to Google doing well in the 2010s, crucial to Google staying relevant and on the edge. And Larry Page gets primary credit.

Bubble Talk Goes On: It's An Overshoot

Image via WikipediaFred Wilson: Invest In The Mess
New York Times: A Silicon Bubble Shows Signs Of Reinflating
The Day I Got Called Sean Parker
Did Not Meet Fred Wilson, But Met Mazy Dar
Angel Bubbles: No Bubbles
Bubble, Boom Or Froth?

Fred has said repeatedly that what we are seeing is a bubble. First thing I say is this is not a yes no question. Is this a bubble? If you force ask me, my answer is no. This is not a bubble. This is hyperactivity. Will many angel investors lose money? Sure. But that does not make it a bubble. Even a top notch VC like Fred Wilson expects one third of his portfolio to go down under. And these are companies that he did not invest in on day one knowing they will go down. You think you picked a winner, you give them sufficient money and guidance, you go to bat for them, and they still go down. If Fred Wilson is at peace with a 33% failure rate, there are VCs whose failure rates are 66% and 90%. Most VCs fail. Most entrepreneurs fail. By some estimates as many as 90% of new businesses fail within a year of getting launched. Looks like 10% is all capitalism needs to survive.

Bubble, Boom Or Froth?

Image by placenamehere via FlickrFred Wilson has been calling it a bubble. John Doerr says it's a boom. And that's just two guys, although high flying, legendary types. I think what we are seeing is a froth. Let me explain.

A bubble is something waiting to burst. As soon as people wake up, they hunker down, and then where are you? The whole thing collapses like a ponzi scheme. There are some bubble aspects to what is going on. Do you think all startups that are getting funded will grow the money for their investors? That has never happened. Even a seasoned VC like Fred assumes one third of his investments will go down. But are too many flaky companies getting funded? The question is are more than the usual number of empty shell startups getting funded?

Web 2.0 Summit 2010: Fred Wilson, John Doerr

TechCrunch: Wilson Vs. Doerr. Bubble Vs. Boom. East Vs. West. Android Vs. iPhone. Facebook Vs. The Web (VIDEO): With Web 2.0 Summit now over, looking back, in my mind, easily the best panel was the one entitled Point of Control: Finance. It featured venture capitalists John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins) and Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) talking with New York Magazine’s John Heilemann about the state of both investing and the state of the web ecosystem at large. What made it so interesting is that Wilson and Doerr clearly don’t agree on many of the big issues.