Very nicely done.  When I click on my social circle it gives me a nice transparent look at exactly what is going on here

Since I don’t really use google chat and have never consciously curated my chat list, it is mainly just a list of people who are also gmail users with whom I have exchanged email from my gmail account.  I think I disabled my Google Buzz profile a few months back (ie my twitter account is not tied in because I opted out) or else I would have a lot more connections.  Mark Suster maybe this sort of answers your question about Google Buzz??

There is a lot more information available to me about my social circle, including all of the source data that Google is indexing for me broken down by contact.

I was a guest speaker last week at Andres Terech’s two MBA-level Marketing Strategy classes at UCLA Anderson GSM.  The main subject of the discussion was internet privacy as it relates to marketing strategy.  I left both classes with the advice to strongly consider starting a personal blog and make sure they maintain an up-to-date LinkedIn profile, mainly as a way to curate the information that is associated with you on the internet.  The idea is that when you are going on a job interview or even to a business meeting, its likely that the people you are meeting will do a Google search on you, and you want to be controlling what is on the first page.  This advice is even more important in light of this feature….

One of the ways we differentiated Flux – a white label social media toolset for brands where I worked for 2 years – from Facebook was that we were encouraging less private social media activity in order to increase interaction with content (video, photos, games) via a streamlined set of business rules. Simply put, you knew you were building a profile on MTV.com or Souljaboy.com in order to behave in a public manner, there was no expectation of privacy. We weren’t trying to help you invite people to a party at your house, or share photos of your children with your cousin. Based on the implicit privacy contract we though FB was making with its users, we assumed that FB had too much overhead infrastructure to be the underlying social technology for content companies.  Bravo Facebook, you got there, it just took you a few years to catch up…

An analogy is the collapse subscription music business v 1.0. It wasn’t the lack of market demand that killed the first generation of subscription music products, it was the unnecessary technical overhead created by DRM requirements. Enforcing strict digital rights imposes performance costs, technology costs, and bad user experiences even if the DRM software is license-free (see MSFT VIsta). Now that a lighter level of subscription DRM is available, Pandora and other other alternatives are becoming profitable.

Because Facebook is pursuing an ad supported model, it is moving its implicit privacy contract to the less private side of the spectrum. This encourages more interaction with content, which is what Facebook is ultimately are selling. It also will reduce their technology costs over time since DRM is hard.  In hindsight its the obvious move, and nobody should be surprised. Some people like Umair Haque call this “evil”, but strategically its the way to capture the most market capitalization right now, so those business ethics are pretty straightforward. The brands are going to come running with buckets of cash, that is for sure.

The result of this math is that you are more valuable to Facebook as a user the more 1) you interact with content (by liking etc.), and 2) the more friends you have.   Because of the friends of friends (see Danah Boyd’s post for an explanation) there is an exponential effect.   And your resulting privacy diminishes inversely. The equations are something like:

(Facebook NPV) _(user) = b X (FB activity) X (Number of friends _(user))²

Privacy _you = 1/FB NPV _(you)

where b is a coefficient that reflects your account privacy settings

What are the implications of his math?  The more FB friends you have, the less privacy you have.  Probably squared if you haven’t adjusted your privacy settings.  While this may seem obvious and is the reason I reject more “friend” requests than I accept now,  it wasn’t as obvious 5 years ago when I started using FB.  Fact of the matter is that a lot of my FB friends aren’t really friends, they are just people I knew back when we were both early adopters.

I’m not ready to leave FB altogether, it does provide value both personally and professionally.  So I just went through and did a high level culling of my FB friend list and “unfriended” 20 people. (This is really tedious to do).  Especially high on the list for elimination are casual friends with 1000s of friends.  Their low value “networks” are (were!) really just privacy sinks for me.  If you are one of them – nothing personal, it’s Zuckerberg’s fault!!

First let me state that many many meetings are bad, but that’s mainly because people don’t know how to run meetings.  Good managers learn to minimize the meetings in their organization, and make the meetings that do happen ultra efficient.  I’m not a fan of meetings.  But they happen.

I agree with the thesis of the post – which is that people benefit from having long stretches of uninterrupted work time.  In fact if you attend just about any seminar on time management this is basically what they teach you.  Make sure you have a clear understanding of your priorities and then block time out daily to accomplish the most important tasks.  If your number one priority is to accomplish a job that requires several 4 hour (or 8 hour or 10 hour) blocks of time in the coming week, then just open your calendar and block out the time.  This is called “managing”.  If I am managing someone who is falling behind schedule because they have too many meetings, I will make them open their calendar and go through the meetings one by one and decline the less important ones.   Everyone is happy – meetings just disappeared!

My main problem with the post is the assertion that most powerful people are on a manager’s schedule.  Really?  Who is that?  Most powerful people are work-a-holics who don’t sleep much.  They are on a “managers schedule” during the day, but they are finding blocks of time early in the morning or after the meetings have stopped to be makers.  My first boss ever told me before 6PM is for people, after is for working.  In today’s economy, especially in the tech space, there are no pure managers.  Everyone has making to do.

Seems like Paul’s main problem is that he doesn’t want to work the schedule of these so-called “powerful people”.  No problem there, but lets call it like it is. He needs to go grab coffee with Mark Suster (@msuster), investor by day, uber blogger and maker by night.

The origin of the post is that Paul Graham gets too many “lets grab coffee” requests and feels like he needs to explain his reason for turning down so many requests, but wants to frame it like he has found a better way and distinguish himself from run-of -the-mill managers.

Let’s frame the argument in more reasonable language.  Everyone has a different prioritization for networking – we all agree that even the most makerish coder can benefit by meeting new people once in a while, even if its just on the annual trip to comic con.  Other professionals (like esp. investors) need to assign networking a higher priority.  Some of us can’t possibly meet with everyone who wants to meet with us.  So use your new managing power to block out time for making, and time for meeting according to your own personal prioritization.  My friend Jill who runs a great non-profit in Portland gets a ton of non-directional “lets get coffee” requests and has come up with a rule – she does one such meeting a month.  If you want to grab coffee with Jill you might need to wait 3 or 4 months.  Another strategy that busy people use to good effect is to regularly attend a local meetup so that you can suggest to these people that if they want to grab coffee or a drink then attend the meetup.  Seems like Paul keeps office hours.  Everyone is happy – meetings just disappeared!

But lets drop the “makers vs. managers” characterization.  Just manage to make a little better.

I love the Sound Opinions podcast from music critics Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot and listen to it every week.  Last week they did a great show where they broke down their favorite live albums of all times.  As usual I learned a few things and discovered some music (in this case the Ani Difranco album).  But guys, how do you not even mention the live music that promoter extraordinaire Bill Graham gave us from his Fillmore East Club in the East Village?

We still have great albums coming out of the re-opened Fillmore West – check out Lucinda Williams Live @ The Fillmore double CD, and the 60s produced some killer stuff by Santana, Chuck Berry and the Jefferson Airplane on the west coast.  But to me the Golden Age of Live Recordings occurred in New York at the Fillmore East in the roughly year and a half after New Years Eve 69-70 when Jimi Hendrix and the Band of Gypsies the  recorded their incredible live album Live At The Fillmore East.  Two months later Alvin Lee and Ten Years After made a seminal live album Live At The Filmore East, and in March Neil brought his new band Crazy Horse down to work the kinks out of Down by the River and Cortez the Killer, which was only released  recently as Live At The Fillmore East as part of Neil’s archive project.  Later in the year Clapton came by and recorded his amazing Derek and the Dominos Live album Live At The Fillmore.  In April of the following year the Dead recorded 5 shows there that turned into Ladies And Gentlemen…The Grateful Dead: Fillmore East, New York City, April 1971. Frank Zappa brought the Mothers and closed out the run in June 1971 with a solid live album shortly before the venue closed.  And of course what is in my opinion the greatest live rock and roll recording ever made – The Allman Brothers Band “At Fillmore East” (rereleased as The Fillmore Concerts) which was recorded in March 1971.

Other notables who made great live records at the Fillmore were Aretha, John Mayall, John and Yoko, Miles Davis and the Byrds.

Some of the greatest live guitar solos ever recorded happened on Second and Sixth in Manhattan in that 18 month period, and damn it Jim and Greg, you blew it by not including them in your show.

Derek and the Dominos – Why Does Love Got to be So Sad?

Band of Gypsies – Hear My Train

The Allman Brothers Band – Done Somebody Wrong

Ten Years After – Good Morning Little Schoolgirl

unclasses is a really cool concept, I hope it catches on.

Peggy Curry from the Growing Great organization let me use her fantastic designer kitchen and coached me through the syllabus as well as helped me during the class. She is a superstar green entrepreneur, I’m looking forward to working with her again.  If you live in LA plan to make it to her Living Healthy Festival on Sunday May 17.  Thanks Peggy!

Thanks to Stephen Henault for taking some great photos.

Here is what we made and ate:

1.    Hot garlicky olives
2.    lemon vinaigrette
3.    classic pesto
4.    Braising – Coq au Vin
5.    Roast Vegetables and Roast Chicken wraps
6.    Stock and simple red sauce
7.    Pressure cooker risotto
8.    Pasta – Perciatelli with Artichokes
9.    Lemon bars

My syllabi:

Cook More Often, Eat Better Part 1 – Free Legal Forms

Cook More Often Eat Better Part 2 – Free Legal Forms

When I was looking through my desk drawer a few weeks ago I noticed that the cowbell that we rang (loudly) when we closed a new partnership and got a new site live was tucked away there, and hadn’t been rung in a long while.  Somwhere between being a scrappy fast moving startup and becoming a division of a major media company you stop doing things like ringing cheap cowbells when you get up on the scoreboard.  I’m not sure whose bell it was originally, and I hope they don’t mind that I’m taking it with me to my next gig.

1. KISS – Destroyer:  3rd grade in 1977, the first real rock and roll I got into

Detroit Rock City

2. The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band:  LOVED The Beatles in grade school

With a Little Help From My Friends

3. Led Zeppelin – Houses of the Holy:  Hearing The Ocean for the first time blew my mind

The Ocean

4. The Grateful Dead – Cornell ‘77:  Its not an album, but it sure is awesome.

New Minglewood Blues

5. Bob Marley & The Wailers – Rastaman Vibration:  My Dad somehow owned this great record – I’ll never forget being curious and digging it out in 5^th grade, dropping the needle and hearing the dub groove for the first time.

Positive Vibration

6. Dire Straits – Alchemy:  Straits!!Strictly speaking this video isn’t from Alchemy, but Knopfler played the same notes every night so it might as well have been.  Knopfler melts Clapton’s face for a few minutes starting at 4:30 and then at 8:00.

7. Pearl Jam – Yield: One of only 4 or 5 cassettes I had when I drove around Europe and Turkey for 3 months in ‘98, their most underrated album and still my favorite.

No Way

8. Thelonious Monk – Monk’s Music:  One perfect melody after another with Hawkins, Monk and ‘Trane trading jams. Purchased in Providence in a bargain bin, played 1000 times.

Epistrophy

9. Joni Mitchell – Blue: well, you know

California

10. Drive-By Truckers – Southern Rock Opera:  My favorite rock band reaching and making anthems work – a masterpiece

Ronnie and Neil

11. The Stooges – Fun House:  Missed this one growing up in the Aerosmith, J Geils, Boston dominated Northeast in the late 70s, discovered it later, now a lot of other things make sense

T.V. Eye

12. Ryan Adams and the Cardinals – Cold Roses:  No artist gets more airtime on my stereo the last few years – this is the record that drew me in.

Easy Plateau

13. Howlin’ Wolf – London Sessions:  Introduced me to the Blues when I found it at age 14 – without that where would I be?

Built For Comfort

14. The Allman Brothers Band – Live at the Fillmore: (hon. mention Derrick and the Dominoes at the Filmore, Band of Gypsies at the Filmore, Santana at the Filmore, and Bill Graham)

In Memory of Elizabeth Reed

15. Bob Dylan – Blood on the Tracks: My favorite album by my favorite artist

You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go

16. Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band – The Mountain: The greatest bluegrass album ever recorded, and nobody knows it.  The mandolin intro on The Graveyard Shift is precision awesome.

Harlan Man

17. Neil Young with Crazy Horse – Everybody Knows This is Nowhere:  Still thrills me to cue this one up, the soundtrack to a lot of wild times in high school on the tape deck of my ‘78 Pontiac Catalina.

Cowgirl in the Sand

17. Bruce Springsteen – Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.:  A lot of Springsteen albums could be on this list, but this one stands the test of time – the Boss was my guy in the musical wasteland of the early 80s.

Spirit in the Night

18. Miles Davis – Filles de Kilimanjaro: We all wish we were cool, I wish I was Miles.

Frelon Brun (Brown Hornet)

19. Kimmie Rhodes – Love Me Like a Song:  I heard Love and Happiness on public radio late at night in my car, searched out the album, then searched out Kimmie in Austin and became friends. Alec and JJs favorite lullaby, and for that I’ll always be greatful.

Love and Happiness For You

20. Tom Waits – The Heart of Saturday Night:  “Love needs a transfusion, let’s shoot it full of wine – fishin’ for a good time starts with throwin’ in your line.”

New Coat of Paint

21. Tom Petty – Damn the Torpedoes:  A nearly perfect rock and roll record that I never tire of listening to.

Even the Losers

22. Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble – Soul to Soul:  I saw SRV 6 times in concert before he died during my junior year in college.  I had tickets to his final show but I passed on the 3 hour drive from South Bend to Wisconsin because I had just seen him the month before.  The first time I saw him was at a Jazz festival in Massachusetts touring for this album the day I got my driver’s license.

Ain’t Gone ‘N’ Give Up On Love

23. Brian Eno – Music For Airports:  An original Sam-leg (burn by my brother-in-law Sam), this album and red wine has gotten me through that last hour of the JFK-SFO, ATX-SAN, SEA-LAX more times than I care to count.

2/1

Jonathan’s excellent post does however repeat a somewhat faulty point of view that is shared in countless articles, blog posts, and music industry forums about the state of the music industry and just how wrong the labels got it.  It is *not* true that investors value the long term survival of the company over short term profits.  They actually value the net present value of all future cash flows – classical Finance 101 is about trying to predict what those cash flows might be and correctly assign a present value to them in order to make investment and management decisions.  So as the CEO of a company (both public or private) you have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders to try to maximize that number within the constraints of myriad other variables.  I find that critics often make this mistake when breaking down the recent history of the music industry.  Put another way:

Sometimes the most profitable/ethical course for a business is one that sets it on a path to obsolescence.

One of the best 5 or 6 classes I took at Anderson was a Business Ethics course given by Bill Cockrum (a legendary finance/entrepreneurship professor at UCLA).  The framework he taught for ethical problem solving was essentially one in which we identified all of the stakeholders for a given issue and detailed the outcome from each point of view.  So a hypothetical problem involving gender equality in the workplace would be looked at from many points of view:  shareholders, male employees, female employees, residents of the local community, etc…  Interestingly, one common theme that came from our casework is that managers often incorrectly overvalue a company’s survival at the expense of creating shareholder value.  Most executives try not to work themselves out of a job.

To oversimplify, consider a case in which a CEO has to choose whether or not to create a new product that will require expensive-to-the point- of-bankruptcy new R&D and marketing.  All of his analysis tells him that the product’s probability of success is a binary coin flip:  50% of the time it will be incredibly profitable and increase earnings 5X, 50% of the time it will put the company out of business.  Given those odds the right answer from the shareholders perspective is to green light the product – they’d gladly flip a coin to risk $1 to make $5.  But from management’s point of view its not such an easy decision.  Heads I get some kudos and maybe a bonus, tails I lose my job in disgrace.  This ethical problem is pretty much why companies like to compensate their executives with stock and stock options, and also why big companies are typically not good at taking risks (its one thing to bankrupt a startup with a few dozen employees, quite another a big public company with 100o’s of employees).

Now lets take a look at what happened in the music industry.  Say you could wind back the clock to the Napster era in 1998 and provide the heads of the labels with perfect clarity about their probability weighted expected returns for 3 courses of action.

1. Lock It Down and Sue Your Customers:  If you follow this strategy, you slow down the death of your existing CD sales line of business to the greatest extent, but you alienate your customers and allow smaller nimbler players to take all of the future online profits, putting you out of business in 10 years.
2. Hybrid: You drag your heels somewhat, slowing down the rate of cannibalism of the CD sales business and developing alternate forms of business that allow you to fumble your way into an evolved but less profitable business model in 10 years time.
3. Open It Up and Survive:  You clearly embrace a customer-centric view of the future, and rapidly develop long-term winning strategies for content consumption that hasten the demise of your existing business but put you on a long term path to sustained profitability.

Now lets calculate the net present value (discount rate=10%) of your hypothetical expected cash flows.

Clearly, given this spectrum of expected returns, the best course of action is the one in which you drag your heels into planned obsolecence.

NOTE: I’M NOT SAYING THAT THIS IS WHAT DID HAPPEN OR WHAT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED!! IT’S AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION.  The labels did not act rationally in possession of omniscient foresight, just as the other media companies actions wrt Boxee etc. are not likely profit maximizing.

In most cases profits are maximized by reinvesting profits from cash cows into evolved business models that strike a balance.  The intended take-away is that in the case of killing highly profitable cash cows, its incorrect to argue that all decision making should be predicated on long term viability as a business.  Sometimes the most profitable (and correct) course kills you.

Hulu

If you haven’t used Boxee, its an interface for media based on the XBox Media Center (XBMC) platform.  You can install it on your Mac and it’ll scan all your media folders and give you a browsable interface thats compatible with the little white Apple remote.  It also does a good job with streaming content sources (like Hulu, Comedy Centtral, etc) and it is social (you can make friends and see what they are watching, etc.)

But what really had people excited was that you could install Boxee on AppleTV and access all the same functionality on your living room on your sweet HDTV with your home stereo etc.  I’ve been following this space for a long time and it seemed like just maybe someone had finally cracked the living room media center code, which has seen hundreds of millions of dollars in flame outs.  Why?  An open architecture that would work on any living room based linux box with a good mix of streaming vs. owned media and a nice UI and some lite social networking.  No DRM, no prepackaged content deals with a locked partner set.  And a small company with a moderate burn rate that didn’t need to become a behemoth to be successful and provide a good return to its investors.  Success would mean that the streaming/caching models that are developing on the internet would work on your best media-watching screen.

And Boxee has been going about their business the right way.  They preserve the Hulu interface, preserve its commercials, don’t allow stream ripping, etc.  Its basically the same experience you can have right now on your PC.  Any Macgiver with some duct tape and some patch cables can already put Hulu on their TV.  Boxee just made it easier.

I don’t actually use Boxee a ton, but it’s great for what it is.  I NEVER watch live TV, I always time shift so I never watch commercials in my living room.  The only exception being on Hulu on Boxee on Apple TV.

So if you are a media company and you’ve already come to terms with putting your content on Hulu, why on earth would you not want entrepreneurs to figure out ways to get that content on more screens?  Of course this means that existing models and franchises (like Sat TV and cable TV esp.) are threatened, but that was the case before Boxee.  And as Mark Cuban has so elequently (and correctly) argued the internet is a long way from being able to replace satellite and cable for breadth of on demand HD content in the living room at a mass market level.  Companies like Boxee are exactly the kind of companies you want innovating for you, because if the innovation doesn’t happen there its all hacks and hackers and torrents.  Plus if they start picking up steam you can buy them and have them help you evolve and live to fight on.  Its like our experience with the music industry all over again.

The living room TV is a screen, just like my phone and my computer screen.  Captive media audiences are a thing of the last century, you can’t lock down the content and you can’t completely control distribution.   If you can’t figure out a way to create loyal followers with great user experiences, your content is useless.  Pissing off early adopters is a horrible way to go about evolving your business.

UPDATE:  check out Jonathan Strauss’s Boxee logo with a black eye.

Isbell’s music is both easy and difficult to categorize. Easy: He’s an alt-country singer songwriter from Alabama. Hard: He’s a little bit of Townes Van Zandt (imagery), Bruce Springsteen (symbolism), the Band esp Danko (brawling musicianship), Willie Nelson, Tom Petty (hooks), Dylan (songwriting). With the release of Sirens of the Ditch he’s got a shows worth of great songs to perform, going back to his early Truckers’ songs (Outfit, Goddamn Lonely Love) and before (TVA). He’s also not afraid to do a cover – Dylans The Man in Me was a real highlight last night. He made mention that there “probably aren’t too many cover bands in Los Angeles”, like he was the only one in on the joke.

Another highlight of the evening was the young Marine from Jason’s hometown of Greenhill, Alabama who had driven up from the proving grounds at 29 Palms to see the show. Juxtaposed against Isbell’s poignant intro to Dress Blues where he talked about the empty space a dead soldier could leave in a small southern (anywhere?) town that inspired the song, the young soldier’s presence was moving.

It was a great performance that left me really looking forward to his 2nd solo album which is due out in early ‘09. He mentioned last night that the album is in the can and seemed really happy with it.

If by some Google’s chance in hell the guy taping last night’s show stumbles across this post – hit me up I’d love a copy.  Also MickO leave a comment when you get your film developed and up on Flickr.

Jason Isbell – Dress Blues

Drive-by Truckers – Outfit

Drive-by Truckers – Goddamn Lonely Love

Sirens of the Ditch on Amazon