Looking forward to 2008

I am really excited for 2008. More than any other year, I feel as though I have made significant progress toward doing work I truly love, helping early stage companies with product vision, strategy and execution. I left Jobster in March, after helping found the company in 2004. I also returned to Microsoft for a short time to support my old team as a consultant.

I will start 2008 working with Verdiem, whose power management software aims to dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of IT devices in organizations of all sizes, while delivering tangible cost savings. Did you know that 15 PCs running for a year is equivilent to a midsize car in terms of CO2 emissions? More on Verdiem in a later post.

From a networking and relationships perspective, I expect this year to be very exciting as I watch many "Jobster alums" continue to make a go of it with their own early stage ventures. By my count, I know of at least 20 and probably close to 25 Jobster alum start-ups. If you broaden the scope to Jobster alums that went on to work for other startups, you easily can add another 15 ventures. What a great thing.

Last, but certainly not least, this year should also be a big year for us on the family front, as our youngest boy moves out of his terrible twos and starts using words to tell us what he needs rather than screaming at the top of his lungs :-)

Goodness all around...

Judy's Book to Close, Lessons Learned

I really appreciate the willingness of Andy Sack to open up his thoughts about the missteps of Judy's Book over the course of it's existence. This sort of content is so useful and engaging for those of us that are onto the next thing, plugging away, yet need something to pull our head out of the details for a bit.

Judy's Book was a company that I followed closely because of our kindred beginnings in 2004; both funded by Ignition Partners, and both focused on social networking as a key lever in our businesses.

I wanted to add my thoughts to his points in this particular post- perhaps add a layer of perspective from Jobster.

The first mistake: we weren't aggressive enough in customer acquisition.
I remember this coming up several times in our feature meetings, where we had the opportunity to really "grease the wheels" of allowing a common consumer who does not have MS Outlook, and yet the notion was met with hesitation that is was too aggressive. Looking back, this should have been one of the first things we did, which was to make it seamless for a common user to pass on opportunities to contacts regardless of where they were stored (hotmail, gmail, etc.).

"We had the idea of using the address book as a hook into customer acquisition but we never spent the energy and focus to really maximize the use of the address book in growing the social network."

I believe Jobster has implemented this today, after nearly 2 years of considering it. I think in some cases we lost sight of some of the core social user scenarios that could have really changed the game for candidate referrals.

The second mistake: we expanded out of Seattle in August 2005 and went national.

Expansion is something that could be geographic or it could be expanding into another product line, or another market. This is really a fine line for a startup, in that strategically it makes sense to place a few bets, yet too many bets can stretch the focus of the organization too thin.

"At Judy's Book we had a BIG vision -- I think in retrospect, perhaps too big for a
start up and in retrospect I think we didn't take the necessary steps to break
that BIG vision (your friends yellow pages) down into sufficiently small enough
baby steps to prove out the concept before expanding the concept
nationally."

Jobster had a BIG vision as well. Did we break that vision up into digestible pieces? I think we did so early on. Where we maybe did not do that good of job was in setting goals and metrics for each of those pieces, which would have told us when it was time to (1) accelerate our investment due to success, (2) shift focus on other areas due to lack of traction, or (3) create a SWAT team to troubleshoot the problem areas because we saw evidence that we were on to something.

For Judy's, competitive pressures maybe pushed them into making a decision that they truly did not yet need to make? That is a tough one as well; we struggled daily with how to respond to competitive pressures, whether they were subtle or audacious "shots over our bow."

I think a great example of smart expansion is Urbanspoon. Having watched these guys from the beginning, you can tell that they are being very thoughtful about expanding the scope of their restaurant review site. Although I haven't chatted with Adam, Ethan or Patrick much since their departure from Jobster, you can easily tell from the gradual evolution of the site that they only started to add cities once they had figured out what they wanted the site to be. Good stuff.

Plaxo Sync could be the thing I need

I was super encouraged to try out Plaxo Sync recently. It seems like the Plaxo team has reconnected with their ability to solve fundamental problems that we have. They seemed to have gotten off track for a few years, wandering aimlessly through the woods barefoot, but are clearly back on track.

In 2006, I was in deep business development discussions with Plaxo as Jobster evaluated the potential to be more distributed across networks. Due to other priorities on our plate at the time, nothing really became of those discussions. In hindsight, Jobster was at that time in a unique position in the recruiting space (both from an industry traction and a PR perspective) to make a product play as the recruiting tool that orchestrated recruiting across distributed networks (social and other). As I see iLike evolving their value prop with new tools for artists to interact with their fan base on multiple networks, I am struck with the parallel.

They started with contacts, and have now moved to calendars, photos, socials networks. For me, this is more powerful and useful than what Facebook offers, because it is an aggregate activity feed across networks, which is much more valuable to me. Take a look...