Björn Jeffery

A fantastic speaker from last week’s GRID conference.

(via GRID 12)

The acquisition of Sparrow has caused quite a stir, and rightfully so I think. I’m also an enthusiastic user and was disappointed to learn that the product would no longer be developed or maintained. At the same time, it raised an interesting point about entrepreneurs´ motives and requirements to keep their businesses running.

Marco Arment wrote the following:

It’s frustrating when a product or service you like goes out of business, and that’s effectively what happened here. Sparrow tried to succeed in an extremely difficult market, and apparently failed. Their customers supported their efforts up to this point, but there probably weren’t enough customers for them to refuse Google’s offer.

Don’t blame Sparrow. Blame the terrible market for email clients.

Although I agree with the statement above, there is also a third alternative that is not brought up. You can either:

1. Make it on your own, and finance your company through your revenue.
2. Sell your company (and maybe more so, yourself) to someone that wants to utilise your skills for something similar, or integrate your product into something else.
3. Become a part of a company that actively wants to support your current product as it is.

Acquisitions don’t necessarily have to lead to your product changing or forcing you to leave what you are doing. They could (and arguably should to a higher extent) simply be a way to gain access to a great and loved product and give it the financial and structural prerequisites to keep growing. Eventually it will need to be profitable in its own right in order to be viable but that can take a while – and that’s fine. Because the product and team are now there to stay.

This, in turn, requires the entrepreneurs to see an acquisition as a stepping stone in what they are intending to create, not the end of the road + a 2 year lockup period. I think there’s a difference here between people who are passionate about something and become entrepreneurs to create something within it, and the people who are passionate about entrepreneurship per se. Both are fine, but they are not the same.

The Silicon Valley vibe is definitely premiering the latter, which is a shame in my opinion. Vinod Khosla puts it well in this recent NYTimes article:

An acquisition may be a safety net, a way to free yourself or learn to pursue another bigger or more interesting vision, but those are tools rather than goals of the true Silicon Valley entrepreneurs I have seen.

There are investors and buyers that do so to keep. If you’re passionate about your product, look for them.

There are entrepreneurs that are willing to stay and make use of these new resources. I think they will be among the ones creating truly great companies.

I’ve been using a lot of Uber lately, and have been thinking about the service even more. Being a new resident of San Francisco, the unreliability of taxis is something that takes a little getting used to. You call a cab and, if you’re lucky, eventually it shows up. More often than not, it doesn’t. This is not a problem most of the time since you just hail a cab on the street and if it stops – you’re in. But there are occasions that require a little more reliability than that.

I’ve spoken to several cab drivers about the situation and most say that you simply call three cabs (from three different companies) and then one of them will probably show up. It makes the overall situation even worse since all three cabs might decide to come, but only one of them will get the passenger.

The problem stems from a break down of trust in the system. If the cab driver can’t trust that the caller is still there once he/she gets there, then the likelihood of them picking someone on the way there is much higher. The same goes for the caller – if the cab rarely shows up otherwise, why not just grab any cab that happens to pass by? This is, of course, a vicious circle. 

However, where trust breaks down there is also opportunity. Uber has a premium offering by driving town cars, but I think for many the premium is simply that the car turns up. It’s quick, convenient and reliable. Their recent venture UBERx (that drives hybrids at a lower price) seems to support this theory. Not only is it an elegant idea to use remnant car inventory cruising around the city, it is also filling in the blanks of a trust system that has failed. And by doing so – creating a whole new market for itself. Very impressive.

There are many other markets where trust is low, albeit not as low as the SF cab market. Two of my favorite love-to-hate-industries are banking and insurance. Although I was too early in my predictions that these markets would be disrupted (you know how hard predictions can be), I still feel that they are ripe for change.

Do you trust your insurance company to help you out if something goes wrong? Probably to some extent. But what is their listed value of the object that you have lost – is it the same as the value you place on it? Probably not. Many have decided against contacting their insurance company simply because it is too much trouble for too little money. In short – people don’t trust the insurance to help out in the way that it was originally intended when it was purchased. I think there’s something there to be explored.

Banking is the same. This well-written piece (about an investment bank, but still) shows the contempt that they show for some of their customers. Documentaries like Inside Job show an industry that clearly isn’t putting their clients first. The current Libor situation will not help here either.

All in all, there is a break down in trust in these markets too. It is obvious in banking, and somewhat slower (and more accepted) in insurance. The trust is disappearing, and thus the opportunities are starting to occur. I wonder who will be the first to fully exploit them.

All I care ‘bout is money and the city that I’m from

A Yayoi Kusama x Louis Vuitton pumpkin.

(via Photo by fionaspruill • Instagram)

A Yayoi Kusama x Louis Vuitton pumpkin.

(via Photo by fionaspruill • Instagram)

Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” single, which tops the Hot 100, this week moved 296,000 downloads, according to SoundScan, while another version by an artist listed as “Here’s My Number So” sold more than 27,000 downloads of an identically named song in the same week. Both songs are listed at $1.29 on iTunes.

For the most part, these covers try to sound exactly like the hit single they’re reworking, and the more successful ones use search engine optimization-friendly artist names and song titles to lure unsuspecting consumers looking for the original version into making a song purchase.

We once talked about success and failure, during which time he relayed what someone in India had said to him: “Only if there is a large problem is there a large opportunity.”

Roux laughed out loud, which he did often, and then said: “Isn’t that wonderful? That is now my auto-signature at the bottom of my emails from my iPad, because I think it is so valid.”

It’s a maxim he lived by, and which helped him build an industry. And as a result, the legacy he leaves behind is enormous.

A month or so ago I was interviewed about the future of luxury. Not exactly my regular topic of expertise, but I wrote a piece about it for David Report in 2007 and it still ranks high on Google. It seems not much future has happened there for a while.

Either way, I came to think about it when I read this article in The Economist about counterfeits. It refers to studies around purchasing counterfeited luxury goods and the attitudes that Chinese consumers have towards it. This paragraph stood out:

If a customer falls for a fake, they obviously lose out. That is a clear example of malconsumption. But many buyers are not duped by their purchase; they want their purchase to fool everyone else. No doubt they often succeed, passing off a counterfeit good as the real thing. But in China, fakes are so widespread, the opposite danger also looms: genuine articles may be mistaken for fakes.

When fake products become the standard it seems to devalue the original product. There is no point in purchasing the original if no one, apart from you, knows that it is any different from the other fakes. This in turn poses the question what actually defines luxury and what driving forces that are behind it. What attributes does a product have to have in order to be perceived as more valuable than others?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this when it comes to digital products and software. Seeing as they are easily copied, the line of reasoning above would suggest that their value would decrease. Would that then mean that a luxurious digital product is something that cannot be copied? Even if it were the case it would seem difficult to ensure that the copying couldn’t take place. A few creative industries have tried this approach fairly unsuccessfully. But if it was technically possible – would that per se create a luxurious digital product? Sounds unlikely.

Another take on it could be that digital manifestations of your own accomplishments could be considered luxurious, or at least admirable – assuming that you buy into the manifesting system being correct. You need to trust Nike+ in order to be impressed by someone’s run on Facebook.

The perceived value (in terms of willingness to pay) of digital products by consumers tends to be low. But considering the lack of effort that seems to have been put into changing this matter by people creating the products (and I’m including myself in that category), perhaps this is not especially surprising. Surely it cannot be that software is one of the few realms where the notion of luxury, in whatever shape or form, is not applicable? 

So here’s to finding the intangible qualities that could differentiate the experience and perception of a digital product. If you have any thoughts, I’d be more than grateful to hear them. I’ll be making my own list too.

Making a good prediction is hard – even in the short term. Gartner knows this. However, what makes it good is not working out what is going to happen but rather when it will happen. Or even more interesting – when it will happen, why it happens just then – and what someone should or could do about it. That would be a good prediction.

Some examples of bad predictions are for instance saying that newspapers will die. That linear television will have a hard time. That e-books will take over. That iOS can’t maintain its current market position.

All of the above may be true, but without the correct parameter of time they are all fairly useless – and even more so, they are safe. There are tendencies for all of the above. So simply placing a bet saying that they will eventually happen and then take credit for the prediction when it does – well, that is a bit like Nostradamus. Keep it vague enough and sooner or later you’ll be right, to a certain extent.

I tip my hat to people like Horace Dediu and analysts like him. I’ll choose a faulty but honest prediction over a Nostradamus ditto any day. Because these analysts are taking a risk that could prove them wrong in public. I’m impressed by that. And they’re not just waiting long enough to eventually (claim to) be right.