Gregory Koberger :: the blog

When asking for advice, implement a 5 minute rule. Don’t let anyone advise you until they’ve thought about it for at least five minutes.

It’s amazing that people take five minutes to decide what they want from the McDonalds Dollar Menu, yet they’re ready to jump in with their take on life or business decisions before you’re even done talking.

It doesn’t have to be five minutes- thirty seconds, an hour, or a day all work. The important part is that you’re asking the person to think first.

Remember this rule when you’re giving advice, too, and you’ll instantly become much more thoughtful and helpful.

Recently, there has been an ongoing debate on which is better- the lean or fat startup. A lot has been said for both sides- and honestly, it comes down to what’s best for the given situation.

One thing we have to look out for that hasn’t yet been mentioned: massive offline companies. They have a ton of money. To put the $100k or $1 million investments we see announced on TechCrunch all the time into perspective: Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein got a $53.4 million bonus in 2006. Imagine what a tech start-up could do with $53.4 million- and that was just one guys bonus. Once these big companies- especially the old media companies- figure this internet thing out, lean start-ups are out of luck.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at the story behind Hulu. Imagine a lean start-up doing what Hulu managed to do. You’d end up with, well, Joost or Yidio. Pretty soon, every company will realize they need their own Jason Kilar. Imagine if some brilliant, budding entrepreneur had the half a billion dollars News Corp spent on mySpace to create their own social network. Had Rupert Murdoch found a man with a vision to fund, rather than pouring all that cash into the massive dying social network? Facebook would have some serious competition.

Quite frankly, the problem with lean start-ups comes down to quality. Can it be done? Yes, it can. But imagine how much faster and better a start-up could be created if they had a few bucks in their bank account.

Have an idea for a start-up? No need to be a starving entrepreneur anymore. Now might be a good time to skip the VC route and head straight to the old media offices. They certainly have the money, and they’re starting to believe this Internet thing just might take off.

I’m bad at answering emails. After all, it’s so easy to procrastinate. “I’ll get to it tonight,” or “what difference is a few hours going to make?” are just some of the convincing arguments I regularly make to myself.

I really liked this line on developer Kenny Meyers‘ contact form:

I’ll get back to you within 24 hours.

That simple sentence guarantees two things:

1. Kenny won’t procrastinate when answering emails, since a few hours will make a difference.
2. People are more comfortable emailing him, since he’s made email slightly less asynchronous.

By making a public promise with absolute numbers, you’re forcing yourself to adhere to it. Using a relative time frame such as “as soon as possible” affords endless procrastination- “24 hours” does not. This technique isn’t limited to just email, either. You can use it for workouts (“3 miles a day” rather than “exercising daily”), blog posts (“new blog post every day” rather than “regular posts”), or making plans (“by the end of the week” rather than “soon”)- basically, anything that involves some sort of self control.

Does it work? I’m not sure, I’d have to ask him. I’ll know by this time tomorrow.

Job descriptions tell employees what they can’t do. Take the average job description for a programmer: it relegates them to their IDE, saying they can’t do marketing, biz dev, sales, writing or project management.

What this does is put employees in silos- just like a programmer wouldn’t take coding advice from a sales guy, marketers won’t listen to a techie.

So, how about using this as a job description?

Wanted: People who can help us create a kick ass startup.

Yes, you need people who can program. And you need people who can balance the books. So, throw in something like “* programming experience encouraged” at the end.

It reminds me of how they cast the show Lost:

A lot of the casting came out of, like, finding actions they wanted to work with, rather than necessarily fill in a roll.

-Jorge Garcia, Hurley, Lost

The producers didn’t have jobs for much of the cast- many of the characters were created simply because they liked the actors.

What’s my point? When starting a company, don’t tie people down to certain tasks. Ideas and talent will be wasted, and they’ll eventually get bored. Let people decide for themselves how they can best use their talents to help the company. Sure, some things have to be done to keep the lights on. However, if you give people the freedom to manage themselves and decide what needs to be done, you might be surprised. A good enough team will rise to the occasion, and do more than just keep the lights on.

Over and over again, I see the same misconception: “Lowest Common Denominator” means “dumb.” That’s how people criticize stupid comedies on TV or lolcats on Digg- they said it’s catering to the lowest common denominator.

Most of us learned in middle school how to figure out the lowest (or least) common denominator. It’s the smallest positive integer that the given set of numbers all evenly fit into. That’s exactly what finding the lowest common denominator for a piece of content does- it tries to find the smallest integer (or, most interesting content) that the set of numbers (or, the people consuming the content) can fit into (or, enjoy together).

So, to use an example: let’s say we have a biologist and a chemist. Their “Lowest Common Denominator” might be science- the highest level topic that they both agree is interesting. Throw in an economist, and the LCD might become math. Throw in an artist, a construction worker, a computer geek, a WalMart greeter, a stay at home mom and a professional athlete, and you find that Two and a Half Men and funny cat pictures are all they really have in common.

Lowest Common Denominator doesn’t mean stupid- it merely means “this is the highest level that everyone involved can agree on.”

This brings us to Digg. Digg started out as a place for tech news, and it attracted a geeky following. It caught on, and soon found itself getting popular. As more people joined, the diversity of topics expanded- political and scientific stories started to seep in more. Digg had two choices- either stay dedicated to tech news, or do whatever it could to increase its popularity.

Eventually, the interesting domain specific stories couldn’t make it to the front page anymore because not enough people on the site were interested. Instead, funny pictures became the lingua franca on Digg.

So, how do we fix this? Digg v4 aims to rectify this problem by making it so you follow people rather than everything. This means the death of the Digg Effect- no longer will we all see the same thing, but rather, we’ll just see what our friends post. This does not fix the problem, however. Lets say you are a chemist- unless all your friends on Digg are chemists, and all their friends are chemists, chemistry articles will still have to be diluted (either in terms of quantity or level of depth). It doesn’t even have to be based on profession- I’m from RIT and want to hear RIT news, yet that will never find its way onto my Digg front page. On top of that, this leaves you with a very closed source of information. You’ll only get news from people who you follow- people who think the same way you do, and have the same beliefs.

In order to fix Digg (or any other large site), it’s important to understand and embrace the Lowest Common Denominator. If you could follow and post to topics, rather than people, the problem would be reduced. Digg, Reddit stole your concept six years ago. They’re onto something with their subreddits, and they owe you one. Take the subreddit concept, and improve on it- for example, maybe add advanced filtering controls?

I want to be able to say: “Digg, my front page should show me all posts about RIT or programming. Also, show me anything from the World News topic that has more than 600 Diggs, and any funny pictures my friends have dugg.” That is what would make Digg useful for me- not just the Facebook/Twitter/Google Reader clone they’re about to launch.

Over the weekend, I created a small app called PleaseCallMyPhone.com. It does just that- it calls your phone. I made it as a remedy for lost phones, however it is simple enough that you could use it for other things. It only took me a day to make, however I wanted to share a few quick lessons I learned from making it.

I created Please Call My Phone for me- I kept losing my phone, so I needed a way to find it. I decided to spruce it up, however, and throw it in my portfolio. After all, it couldn’t hurt.

Deciding to let anyone use it, however, meant having to cut a few features. I could no longer let people enter in their own messages, since I knew I’d end up sending out a large number of monotone text-to-speech “I’m going to kill you” messages to unsuspecting recipients.

I figured my friendly “Hey, this is Gregory from PleaseCallMyPhone.com” message would be enough to dissuade people from using the application for nefarious purposes. Sure, people could still call their friends numbers- but, why? What would be the benefit of sending friends a phone call that clearly explains what it is, and how they can block the number?

I could have limited the calls per phone, or the calls per IP. But what if someone really couldn’t find their phone? They might need to call it 2-3 times, especially if it’s on vibrate (I recommend people add the number to their phones and set the ringer to a non-vibrating one, although I know most people won’t be that proactive). I wanted my application to be as useful as possible.

I was wrong to trust people. The amount of people (both friends and people I don’t know) who abused the system was unbelievable. So, I had to take the service offline temporarily until I have time to lock it down.

I know I should learn, but I’m still surprised by peoples boredom- everything from weird emails from my contact form to finding SQL injection attempts saved in my signup forms. It’s a shame I couldn’t make a simple little toy, and have people use it the way I intended it.

But that’s my problem, I suppose.

Lesson #1 was posted Monday, and Lesson #3 will be posted soon.