Silicon MBA

Google Changing Search Engine Results Page?

2010-04-16T13:34:00.001-07:00

My search engine results look entirely different today. Are they A/B testing or rolling something new out?

Expanding more...

Accounting Finance Jobs You Need to Check Out

2009-11-03T14:03:00.002-08:00

Personforce recently expanded its job search capabilities to include accounting finance jobs from across our network and the web. While traditionally we've had mostly tech related jobs, we're gradually expanding into jobs in accounting, finance, and more. You can consider this post an invitation to check out specializing accounting financing jobs on Personforce.

We hope this career section will provide career opportunities that are at the intersection of accounting and finance. You'll find jobs in tax, audit, book-keeping, m&a, investment banking and more. Please check it out below:

Accounting Finance Jobs

Facebook Jobs - The Killer Job Board

2009-11-03T13:34:00.000-08:00

I've often thought that Facebook jobs would be a killer feature for the social network. With a near monopoly on the attention of all college students and recent graduates, a Facebook Job Board would be the first place the new generation would look for jobs.

I often recommend to my friends with specialized hiring needs to create a targeted Facebook ad and see if they can hire someone that way. The problem with this is that it's very difficult to get someone's attention on Facebook via an advertisement. It's much easier to get someone's attention when they actively decide to go visit the Facebook job board and peruse job opportunities.

A Facebook job board combined with their targeted advertising system would be the killer jobs application of the next decade and a potentially $200 million source of revenue for the company.

StackExchange Needs an App Store

2009-10-29T15:39:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago, I created a StackExchange called Explain Business as fun side project. It's meant to be a site where entrepreneurs can ask questions about incorporation, accounting, legal stuff, employment issues, finding vendors, hiring, etc. Really, it's for all the boring but practical stuff no one ever teaches you. As a result, when it comes up, you have to ask an expensive lawyer or accountant.

So far, it's been very useful for me and a few of my former classmates to share startup tips and ask questions. I've been a huge fan of how well the platform is designed and how useful a tool it is to record knowledge. There are a few features I'd change here and there, but overall it is quite nice. I like my StackExchange.

I think StackExchange and FogCreek Software are on the verge of missing a really big opportunity though. While the original Stack Overflow caught on like wildfire, most of the StackExchanges seem to be sputtering and dying. In fact if you look at the 77 sites registered on StackExchanges Sites, only 5 seem to have achieved critical mass. Of those 5, some appear to be decelerating in activity.

FogCreek certainly has an interest in seeing many StackExchanges flourish so it can sell more licenses. Similarly Apple, has an interest in seeing it's iPhone developers flourish so it can sell more iPhones (and apps). When Apple launched it's app platform it created a concentrated distribution platform. This allowed it to ensure quality control, but also created a vibrant marketplace overnight.

To help StackExchange developers succeed, I'd suggest FogCreek implement an App Store where it can channel is huge collective audience (through Joel on Software and StackOverflow) to consumers who are looking for knowledge. FogCreek could be the Apple of knowledge applications. It's similar to what Philip Greenspun has proposed as a killer idea.

An App Store for knowledge communities could be a powerful thing. Right now there are some lists of StackExchanges here and here but nothing that drive significant adoption. Fog Creek will sill probably sell a bunch of licenses for StackExchange (especially for private company ones) regardless of what it does, but I think an App Store will help it become a truly transformative idea.

HBS Interview Questions

2009-10-27T10:45:00.001-07:00

Hi all. I was going through my old business school admissions folders and found this listing of HBS interview questions that my friends were sharing. Hopefully a question or two here will be relevant for your HBS interview!

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What do you want to do with your career?

Why the MBA? Why now?

Describe your career aspirations

What would you do if not accepted?

What are your long- and short-term goals? Why?

Why are you applying to business school?

Why did you choose your undergraduate major?

How did you choose your job after college?

What would you do if a team member wasn't pulling his own weight?

Is there anything you would like to ask me/us?

If someone approached you with an idea, would I take the risk of developing the idea if they would not?

What is something from your past that you wish you would have done differently and why? The experience can be from work, school, other activities, or from your personal life.

Talk about essays

Who is a client you admire and why?

Since submitting your application, how have you continued to take leadership roles?

With all of your experience, why do you need an MBA?

What makes you think that you are prepared for the academic rigors of HBS?

The Secret to Finding College Jobs

2009-10-26T15:54:00.000-07:00

With the Fall comes a rush of college students trying to find jobs. While most students think of on campus recruiting as the ultimate source of college jobs, this is not the case. In reality, less than 1/3 of college students find jobs from companies that hire through career services.

Personforce has thousands of jobs for college students and works with dozens of college newspapers, so I thought I'd take a minute to discuss finding college jobs.

So what is the secret to finding college jobs? Focus and persistence. I'm going to assume you've spent the last 4 years figuring out what kind of job you want and what industry you are interested in. Once you've identified your ideal post-college job, here is the secret to getting it.

Focus. First off, become an expert in your area. My number one recommendation is start a blog and post one entry every day about this industry and job function. You'll be surprised, but eventually people in this industry will start coming to your site (mostly through search engines). While the rest of your classmates will be searching for jobs, college jobs will be finding you. Through your blog you'll start to build relationships with people in the industry. They'll be impressed that a college student has taken such an interest in their industry.

Relatedly, build a focused online presence geared toward this industry. Create a LinkedIn profile, send some insightful tweets, create an profile on various career sites.

Persistence. Remember you'll probably be shot down for 95% of the jobs you apply for. You have to be darn persistent when finding college jobs. Create a spreadsheet of the top 100 companies you want to apply to. Then go through the list and actually do it. Go through your alumni database (or LinkedIn) and create a list of people you want to speak to. Then, contact each of them and try to set up "informational interviews" to learn more about the industry. Be disciplined and try to set up one call a day.

Finding college jobs is hard, but it's easier if you build a presence in the industry. The best way to do that is to start interacting with the industry by writing and meeting people. It's great if you can search for college jobs, but it's even better if they find you.

For more information about finding a job during your senior year, check out Personforce.

Production Supervisor Job in Ohio!

2009-10-26T15:19:00.000-07:00

At Personforce, many of a the job postings we get are tech-related. Much of that is due to our location in San Francisco and base of publishers. We get job postings from all across the world and in all industries though.

Recently, there was a production supervisor job posted in Fremont Ohio. The Heinz Company (and more) are hiring production supervisors so get your applications ready! It has been especially popular so I thought I'd highlight it on this blog. Check out these jobs and more manufacturing jobs on Personforce:

Check out the production supervisor job board here.

MySpace Jobs is Gone

2009-10-22T14:28:00.000-07:00

MySpace has decided to kill its jobs section, according to an interview with its new CEO. This has to be a big hit for SimplyHired, the company that powered the jobs section for the massive social network.

While the traffic loss associated with the termination of MySpace Jobs has to be significant, the bigger issue for SimplyHired is that its partners may increasingly start to question whether a jobs section is a productive use of their advertising real estate. More and more publisher may question the premise of job advertising networks.

In the same interview, it also came out that MySpace Classifieds (powered by Oodle) is gone as well.

A Career Advice Forum That Doesn't Suck

2009-10-14T14:15:00.000-07:00

At Personforce, we help connect people with careers.

Often times in that process, people have questions when they are looking for jobs. What is the salary range for this position? How can I get a job in Homeland Security? Do I need a graduate degree for this position?

Until today, there has been no good place to ask these questions. You could email your friends, use a forum or bulletin board that sucks, or just hope for the best.

I'm proud to introduce the new Personforce Career Advice Forum.

Ask any question and our staff of career experts and community will answer your questions. It's built on the StackExchange platform that I've been using to power my business advice forum.

Go ahead, ask questions about your career now!

A New Small Business Advice Forum

2009-10-12T10:34:00.000-07:00

I recently launched a forum for Business Advice using the stackexchange knowledge sharing platform. It's basically a site where small business owners can post questions and have them answered by the community.

The site is called Explain Business - you can check it out here.

Whether you are starting a business or run your own small business, I hope you'll find it to be a useful way to get business advice. You can ask questions about coming up with an idea, incorporating, hiring, firing, legal, accounting, or anything entrepreneurship related! The community also votes up the best questions and answers.

Review of Starbucks Instant Coffee: It's not very good

2009-09-29T11:04:00.001-07:00

This morning at Starbucks they were giving out some free sample of their new instant coffee, Via. I had gotten a sample of it a few months ago and tried it again this morning.

My verdict is in, Via is not very good. Starbucks advertises their instant coffee as being as good their drip brewed coffee. This simply is not the case. Via definitely has the sort of burnt, stale taste of instant coffee. Via is a bit over-priced as well. An 8 ounce cup of instant coffee costs about about a dollar. That's practically the same price per ounce as Starbucks in store drip coffee.

However, Via does taste better than most brands of instant coffee I've ever had. I'd definitely take it camping with me but I can't think of when else I'd use it.

So final verdict: Via doesn't taste that great and is very expensive for instant coffee. As instant coffee goes, it's pretty good, but what does that really say?

Job Advertising Networks Generally Fail

2009-09-10T15:45:00.000-07:00

It's now been about 3 years since we decided to start Personforce. When we first started, we had some idea about being a "Google Adsense for Jobs" or a "Ad Network For Jobs". After talking to potential customers, we dismissed the idea. Every few years though, a company tries to setup up this sort of ad network. There are a couple of reasons job ad networks are economically unsound ideas:

1. It's unlikely a job advertisement is the most lucrative use of ad space for a publisher. In fact, it's impossible.

2. Advertising to "passive job seekers" is a kind way of saying "advertising to people who have no interest in what you are advertising."

3. Cost per applications are very very expensive when you are advertising to people who have no "purchase intent" for what you are selling (your job opening).

4. An easier way to target passive job seekers is just to find their profiles on LinkedIn and message them.

These economic realities generally make it difficult to pull off an ad network for jobs.

Virtual Gifts on Twitter - Twitgift.ly launches!

2009-08-17T08:29:00.000-07:00

About 6 weeks ago, I came up with an idea for a lightweight Twitter application that lets people send virtual gifts to their friends on Twitter. I decided it might be a fun little side project to bring this to market.

Today, I launched TwitGift.ly, a site that lets you send virtual gifts on Twitter. It was a fun project to do on the weekends and learn more about Twitter, digital goodies, and viral applications. I'll keep you posted how it goes and maybe do some more posts about building the site and the developing the idea.

Perhaps the neatest part of TwitGiftly is you can use it to raise money for charities like LIVESTRONG, Donors Choose, Charity Water, UM Health and more. All you need to do is send a charity gift and all the proceeds go to the non-profit.

Job Apps for iPhone, Android & BlackBerry

2009-07-16T11:27:00.000-07:00

Oh my!

At Personforce we just launched our Mobile Jobs Platform. Basically we can help any job site take their existing website and turn it into an iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry app.

TechCrunch did a story on it here:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/15/personforce-launches-mobile-jobs-platform-to-develop-job-search-applications/

You can also check it out on our blog:

http://blog.personforce.com/?p=53

An iPhone jobs application from me

2009-07-07T14:40:00.000-07:00

Silicon MBA readers,

Personforce and Next Mobile Web just released a free iPhone jobs application we think you like. The jobs app is called "High Paying Jobs". We're trying to help deliver high quality jobs that you can browse, bookmark, and apply to from your iPhone.

The application is totally free and hopefully will be useful if you're looking for a job.

Download it on iTunes here.

Let me know if you have any feedback on it. When the iPhone app platform came out, I was a bit skeptical if it would be useful for job search. Consider this an experiment as to whether iPhone jobs applications and mobile job search will be useful or popular.

"Sponsored Definition" - Ads come to Twitter

2009-06-23T15:03:00.000-07:00

This morning on my Twitter, there was definitely an ad labeled "Sponsored definition" for the iPhone ExecTweets by Microsoft (and federated media).

When I clicked on it, it opened up my iTunes (somewhat annoying). I can only assume this has to be an ad? Is this the end of the free advertisements for Twitter apps?

Using Adsense to test your business model

2009-06-16T11:27:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot written how entrepreneurs can use Google Adwords to verify whether customer demand exists for their products. Even before you have a product built, you can write a text ad and pay to have it displayed next to search results. If people click on your ad at a solid clip, you have a good sense whether customers are interested in what you are offering.

Another interesting tool is to use Adsense to test your business model. You can use Adsense to answer a simple but important questions - is there money to be made in what I am doing? All too often, entrepreneurs start a social network, blog, or site where there is literally no way to make money. This is a little diagnostic to help avoiding that. Here goes:

Put Adsense on your site. Observe the eCPM. If the CPM is high (say greater than 5 CPM) this is a good sign. If you have low CPM (say less than .5 CPM) this is a bad sign.

The eCPM of your site tells you two important things. First, are you in an industry where there is money to be made. You might not understand yet how to make that money, but someone out there is willing pay for traffic and therefore they know how to make money.

Second, the eCPM tells you whether your vistors have "purchase intent" for something. If they are coming to your site to read an article, message their friends, or write a post, they probably don't have purchase intent for anything and will exhibit a low eCPM. If they are looking for real estate, browsing car prices, or looking at electronics reviews, they will tend to have an higher eCPM.

If you are getting a very low eCPM, I'd encourage you to think very critically about the industry you are getting into and your prospects for making money. Your site could become massively popular, but your business could still be a failure. Your business model will feel like you are squeezing blood from a stone.

In short, you can use Adsense to determine industry profitability and whether you are attracting visitors that might want open their wallets. This does not mean you should use Adsense as your primary business model. Making decent money from 3rd party advertising (even at a high CPMs) requires a level of traffic that most sites will never achieve. However, if you are achieving a strong eCPM, there is a good chance eventually you'll figure out how to make money.

Does Craigslist make $96 million in profit?

2009-06-10T14:36:00.000-07:00

The AIM Group is estimating that Craigslist is doing about $100 million in annual revenue. Given that you can physically count the number of paid listings on their site, I take this to be a solid estimate of their revenue.

The more remarkable fact is that Craigslist achieves this revenue with only 30 employees. They've built a product so compelling that they don't need any sales and marketing to achieve this revenue. Customers just show up and hand them money. If you assume a fully loaded average wage of $130,000 per employee, that comes out to a cost base of only $4 million.

So is Craigslist making $96 million dollars in profit? This leaves a heck of a lot of money to pay dividends to it's owners (and the government).

When I first started Personforce, I met with a former senior exec at Monster. The advice he gave me was try to be more like Craigslist and less like Monster. His point was that running a sales force is expensive and pushing a product that no one is excited about is not fun. Instead, build something that is so unique and compelling, it sells itself. Who wouldn't want to run a company with 95% net margins?

Ha, I was right about Stack Overflow jobs!

2009-06-05T13:50:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I wrote a post saying that Stack Overflow would be come a recruiting and jobs site.

Today, I logged into my Google analytics for the first time a couple of weeks and saw a massive spike in traffic to that post. One of the co-founders of Stack Overflow linked to it on twitter, saying "the silicon MBA is on to us!"

Turns out I was right. They added a job board to the site and hinted about more recruiting functions to come. Looks like a solid move for the company and an innovative way to find technical talent.

Thanks for selling my information, Yahoo

2009-06-04T13:52:00.000-07:00

About a year and a half ago, a friend and I decided to start a tshirt business on a whim. Our plan was to sell hyper-targeted tshirts to folks using Facebook's self-service ad platform. Our target market was management consultants, a market which we sized to be about $500 in annual revenue (if we achieved 100% marketshare) and we would have negative gross margins. Seemed like an inspired idea!

That very morning, we bought the domain and set up a store using Yahoo Stores to power our ecommerce site. Within 3 hours of thinking up the idea, we had our business up and running; 8020 tshirts was born!

By the afternoon we lost interest in the idea; 8020 tshirts was dead! After letting the site sit around for a while, we cancelled the account with Yahoo Stores (after paying them about $150 bucks in fees). So this business only lasted about 3 hours and the only one who ever knew about it was Yahoo.

But why the heck do I get junk mail almost every week addressed to 8020 tshirts? Credit card applications, small busines banking promotions, all sorts of crap. It's rather annoying actually (and a constant reminder of our sad business failure!).

I can only assume that Yahoo sold our information to a mailing list company. That seems like a pretty low move. I could never see Google doing something as greedy and short-sighted as that.

What gives Yahoo?

How this blog got me in Fortune Magazine

2009-05-14T16:02:00.000-07:00

Well, around a month or two ago, I started writing more regular posts on this blog. There really isn't much of a purpose to having this blog other than it helps me learn about publishing, advertising, SEO, and content.

A few weeks ago, I got an email from a Fortune magazine writer that was researching how small businesses use the iPhone. Apparently if you google "iphone small business", this blog comes up second. The reporter found the blog, contacted me and we set up a time to talk. When the article came out, it had this quote from me.

"I use my iPhone to react to information, but not for active tasks," says Rohin Dhar, owner of Personforce, a creator of online job boards. "Typing on it is really hard."

You can checkout the full article here. I have no idea whether the article came out in print.

So is blogging worth it? Well, the publicity generated from a quote in Fortune was . . . absolutely zero. No bump in traffic, no friend encountering it and emailing me, no inbound link, nothing really. I guess this bodes poorly for traditionally media...

A TechCrunch for the recruiting industry?

2009-05-07T15:20:00.001-07:00

It's sort of a bummer there is no TechCrunch for the recruiting industry. TechCrunch covers the latest news about web startups and established tech companies. It's a great blog to follow to find out what companies are being started, funded, acquired, as well as information about larger tech firms. I personally like the fact that TechCrunch takes an opinion on the news because I think it's generally an informed opinion.

Unfortunately, there is no TechCrunch for the recruiting industry. There is no site that intelligently covers hot startups in the jobs and recruitment space and that's a shame. Of course there are a few blogs out their about recruiting, but no publication of record (that i know of; if you know of one, let me know).

So why is there no TechCrunch for recruiting? Is it:

1. People don't care about recruiting startups?
2. It's too small a niche?
3. The recruiting industry is bereft of talented startups and sharp writers?

So, anyone out there know of any good blogs that cover and analyze recruiting startups? Heck, if recruiting startups out there contact me, I'll even review your company here. Let's hope that in the next year a sharp blog comes out that provides objective analysis about recruiting startups.

Scarcity Brings Clarity - a good startup quote

2009-05-07T13:26:00.000-07:00

A great quote from Sergey Brin about conducting business in an economic downturn in Google's 2008 Founders Letter:

"Nonetheless, I am optimistic about the future, because I believe scarcity breeds clarity: it focuses minds, forcing people to think creatively and rise to the challenge."

It's the same reason why Toyota tries to carry zero inventory - when you're operating without a safety net, you better operate correctly.

Official Google Blog: The 2008 Founders' Letter

A job search tool for finding MBA jobs

2009-05-05T14:54:00.000-07:00

At Personforce we recently enhanced our jobs page to allow people to browse jobs by tags. Basically, now when an employer posts a job, they have to tag it with keywords. By doing so, it makes it easier for job seekers to find and browse related jobs. Each tag page also serves as a "mini job board" that job seekers can bookmark and return to to find relevant jobs.

So now that we have these tag pages on Personforce, I thought I'd highlight some of the mini job boards that can point you towards finding MBA jobs.

MBA Job Board - a collection of jobs where MBAs are a requirement
Analyst Job Board - a variety of junior and senior financial positions
Accounting Job Board - jobs requiring accounting degrees
Advertising Job Board - a broad range of jobs in the advertising industry
Business Development Job Board - the sweet spot for MBAs - business development jobs!
Business Statistics Job Board - less of a sweet spot for MBAs - business statistics jobs!
Intern Job Board - junior and senior intern positions
Internship Job Board - ditto
CEO Job Board - "CEO" jobs (though most real CEO jobs are posted on job boards)
Cleantech Job Board - the industry of the hour for business school students, cleantech
Marketing Job Board - marketing jobs for business school students and anyone really
Finance Job Board - a broad selection of finance jobs
Sales Job Board - a broad selection of sales jobs
Sales Vice President Job Board - vp of sales jobs
and more job boards by tag

Hopefully this can help in your MBA job search!

Wharton interview questions & tips

2009-05-04T15:27:00.000-07:00

From my old business school admissions files.

----------

Wharton interview tips (Do's and Don'ts)

Do's

Be self-confident and be yourself:
The best answer for how to prepare or do an interview comes from the adcom member of a b-school. She answered the question, “ Just recognize how great you are. Be self-confident, be yourself, and show him/her who you are.”

Answer in real, professional terms:
When you are asked about the hypothetical situation in terms of teamwork or leadership, try to speak in real, professional terms.

how an interviewer how well-informed you are of the school:
If you are interested in international perspective of the Wharton, tell him/her which programs or classes can help develop your career in detail. Do not forget How & Why

Imprint your strength into an interviewer:
If your strength is “passionate” (it is mine.  my nick name is “Walking Energizer!”), then show him/her your passion. What you are passionate for, What you have done for it, Why you are passionate for it, How it has changed your life, and How your passion is related to the decision to go to Wharton.

Big Smile & Positive thinking:
Never bother yourself with what you have already said during the interview. Even if you made a stupid mistake in your eye, the interviewer might think you are cool just because of it. Think positively.

Don’ts

Never pass the fine line between self-confidence and arrogance:
As you already know well, Wharton is looking for down-to-earth types of people. While you need to remember how great you are, you also need to keep in mind how great other peers are. It might not be anything wrong even if you are so confident of your accomplishment. However, do not overact to impress the interviewer.

Do not bring up GMAT unless asked:
Unless asked, you may not want to bring up GMAT. It wouldn’t matter whether your score is 800 or 600. 30 minutes are too short time even to articulate your passion and goal. You may not want waste your time talking about vague numbers. And then it may have a negative result.

Be ready but do not rehearse:
Unintentionally you might need to make up a story because of a lack of readiness. Study your resume enough. Think about your life-past and future. Be fully ready to answer any question. Sometimes we hear applicants were too nervous to remember the name of an author whose book they had read recently when asked. Check every stuff, which will be asked. However, Don’t rehearse the answer over and over. The interviewer can tell when people do this

Sample Wharton interview questions:

WORK EXPERIENCE/CAREER GOALS

Walk me through your post-undergraduate work experience and describe transitions you’ve made.

Tell me about the person with whom you have least enjoyed working. How did this relationship function?

What are some of the frustrations/rewards you've experienced as a manager?

What are your plans if you’re not accepted into an MBA program of your choice?

Of what accomplishment at work are you most proud?

Describe your ideal work environment.

How do you vent work-related stress?

How does your current job relate to your career goals, where does an MBA fit in?

Where do you see yourself in 5 years, 10 years?

WHY MBA/WHY MBA NOW/WHY Wharton

Tell me about the decision to get here – to apply for an MBA.
Why now?

Why do you feel you are a good fit for the school and vice versa?
What kind of value do you can add to the Wharton?

PERSONAL QUALITIES

Describe a difficult team environment in which you have been involved and how you responded to it.

What role do you usually play in-group situations and give some examples?

What happens when you feel strongly about an idea that a majority of your group is against?

Tell me about a conflict you had with a co-worker. How was it resolved?

Tell me about specific situations in which you’ve had a leadership role.

How would others describe your leadership style? Would you agree with this assessment?

If you suddenly had an afternoon off, what would you do with it?

In what non-job related activities do you participate? Describe your involvement.

OTHERS

Is there anything else you would like the Admissions Committee to know about you?

Is there anything you would have liked me to ask you that I didn't?

What would you say is the greatest weakness in your application?

AOL acquires resume-builiding site Emurse

2009-05-04T15:09:00.000-07:00

I somehow missed this, but AOL acquired resume building site Emurse last month. Emurse allows you to build, store, and share your resume online. The design of the site looks excellent and it looks like an easy to use tool for job seekers.

Great to see some acquisitions going on in the recruiting space. As far as I can tell, the founders of the company were former AOL employees who struck out on their own before being acquired by their former bosses. No word on the purchase price, but I imagine it was enough to make the founders quite happy. Congrats!

Stack Overflow will become a recruiting site

2009-04-29T18:09:00.000-07:00

And Dice will be screwed. So will technical recruiters. That's my guess anyway.

I just watched part of a presentation by Joel Spolsky at Google about his startup StackOverflow.com. Stack Overflow is sort of a Yahoo Answers for programming questions. During the presentation, Joel hints that in the future the site could help connect programmers with jobs.

Since Stack Overflow members answer specific programming questions, the site knows exactly what technical skills its members possess. This will make it a far more valuable data resource than Dice's resume database. Instead of companies buying access to an unwieldy database, they can probably pay to connect with programmers who actually demonstrate prowess on the site. Through the job board on his blog, he probably has direct relationships with thousands of employers already.

Moreover, I have a feeling that Joel probably doesn't like the fact that technical recruiters are so important in recruiting engineering talent and charge such high fees. My guess is he'll try to leverage the data created by Stack Overflow to disintermediate Dice and technical recruiters as well. We'll see how it plays out.

Should you apply to business school?

2009-04-29T14:52:00.000-07:00

The other day, I was thinking about why I decided to go to the business school. Perhaps, I'll touch on that in another post, but I thought it would be interesting to list some of the important questions to consider before applying to business school.

If you are thinking about applying to MBA programs this fall, I'd encourage you to think through these questions:

1. What is the exact mechanism by which an MBA will improve your quality of life or career?
2. Do you envision your current job becoming your long-term career?
3. Are there gaping holes in your business knowledge that can be filled by book learning?
4. Can you afford business school right now?
5. What is the exact ROI you are forecasting from getting an MBA?
6. Does applying to school this year fit with your personal life right now?
7. Is this the year you can put together your best application?
8. What non-monetary benefits do you think spending time in business school will provide?
9. What are your alternatives to going to business school?
10. If you didn't get in to your top choice business schools, would you still get an MBA?
11. If you want to take a break from work, what other options can you pursue other than business school?

Selling eBooks on your blog

2009-04-24T10:47:00.000-07:00

Recently, I encountered two articles that made a combined impression on me. They were both related to internet marketing and the process of customer acquisition, conversion, and product fulfillment.

The first was a fascinating article about selling eBooks to monetize traffic on your blog or website. It describes a website called "Parrot Secrets", that provides information about caring for parrots and makes about $400,000 a year selling eBooks about parrots. For all I know the story could be completely made up, but I found it instructive.

Now most people that have a blog or website about Parrots probably would think it would be next to impossible to profit from the traffic. Selling an eBook about how to take care of your parrot was an interesting angle I never would have considered. It seems to provide value to the consumer while compensating the site owner.

Most interesting to me about the eBook is you are selling a product. Because you are a selling a product with fixed prices and fixed margins (95%!), you can model traffic acquisition costs and conversion rates to know exactly how much you would pay for a visitor. Once you know exactly how much a visitor is worth to you, you can buy traffic that costs less than that amount. The extent to which this is a large market and traffic is relatively inexpensive, you can grow the business. In otherwords, eBooks scale.

The other article I recently encountered was an interview with the ShoeMoney guy. I just found it interesting how he was able to build consumer marketing businesses. He originally built a site around mobile phone wallpaper and ringtones, and then tried about a million different ways to monetize it. Nothing earth shattering, but it was interesting to hear the process of how he built the business.

Anyhow, both the articles made me think it would be an amazing learning experience to write an eBook and learn the customer acquisition economics inside and out. It would probably be a cheap education!

Are US social networks communist and Chinese ones capitalist?

2009-04-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me the other day that on Facebook, it doesn't matter how much money you have. The service is free and taking advantage of all of its features is free too. In fact, it's quite difficult to tell who on Facebook is rich and who is poor; we are all equal citizens in the Facebook commune.

In the real world, it obviously does matter how much money you have. Moreover, it is easy to tell who is rich and who is poor. People send signals about their affluence from their clothes, cars, housing, and almost all the physical goods they consume. Facebook, on the other hand offers almost no clues into your financial status because there is almost nothing to consume.

While US social networks appear to have achieved a near Utopian existence, Chinese social networks are capitalist hotbeds. The Chinese social network Qzone earns nearly a billion dollars a year from the sale of virtual goods. On this social network, it matters how much money you have; the affluent can purchase more scarce virtual goods to decorate their profiles and the poor cannot. If you are poor in real world China, you are poor in social network China. How is that for communism?

Our experience on Facebook today may be the garden before the fall. As virtual goods offer perhaps the best way to monetize social networks, I imagine it will be tempting for Facebook to taste the (virtual) apple. If that happens, I think we'll look back on these early days of social networking fondly.

Did Google just kill LinkedIn's biggest feature?

2009-04-21T14:31:00.000-07:00

Interesting new feature from Google - people search! Now you can create your own public profile on Google. When you google your name (or someone else's name) you will see specific profile search results that include your Google profile.

When you Google most peoples' names, usually their LinkedIn profile comes up. Going forward, I guess this will be replaced by your Google profile. This is probably a net-negative for LinkedIn and other vertical search engines that specialize in "people search". Will sites like ZoomInfo, Spokeo, Pipl go by the wayside?

Official Google Blog: Search for "me" on Google

Google + Freebase = Structured Data Goodness

2009-04-20T14:15:00.000-07:00

Pretty neat to see that Google is using Freebase to add structured data to the news. It looks like Google is using the semantic webs service to understand when a particular news story is about a book, movie or TV show.

For example, if you search for Philip Roth you can see a timeline of his books from Freebase. You can click through and find related topics and even buy the book from Amazon.

I wonder if we are starting to see the emergence of sites that actually "aware" of the type of content they are producing and how it relates to other items on the web.

Google News Blog: Introducing Google News Timeline

This struck a chord

2009-04-16T16:45:00.000-07:00

I actually think I saw Eric talk my last semester at the GSB when we did the IMVU case in Andy Rachleff's class on aligning startups and markets. The case (and Steve Blank's book) were really instrumental in shaping my thinking as we designed Personforce. Get a product in the market fast and iterate based on customer feedback was the overall gist of the IMVU case.

Eric has a great post about renewable/predictable revenue that demonstrates compelling customer-level economics versus revenue that is a result of inspired salesmanship.

It made me think very hard about where our revenue comes from and figure out what camp we're in. The short answer is we started off in the salesmanship camp, now we're a bit of a hybrid, and hopefully we're moving into the predictable revenue camp. Eric's post below definitely struck a chord with me.

Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Omid Kordestani (business founder at Google) steps down

2009-04-16T14:27:00.001-07:00

An interesting note in today's Google earnings announcement was that its business founder, Omid Kordestani is stepping down. Omid was a Stanford GSB alum and he spoke at the school one time when I was there.

When Kordestani got to Google, they had no revenue and no business model. He experimented with a lot of different revenue models at Google before they figured out that text link advertisement was a winner. If they hadn't figured that out, it's unlikely Google would be anywhere today.

The Google founders had a great technology insight - links can be used as a voting mechanism to rank search results. Kordestani had a breakthrough business insight- when someone is looking for something, it's a heck of a time to serve them an advertisement. Other companies (like Overture) tried similar things, but Kordestani really proved that monetizing search intent was a "homerun".

---------------

Recent Developments – After ten years of building and managing our global sales and partnership operations, Omid Kordestani has decided to hand over the reins to Nikesh Arora, currently President of International Operations, and take on a new role as Senior Advisor, Office of the CEO and Founders. Continued growth is essential to our future success and no one is better placed to advise on new revenue opportunities than Omid, the business founder of Google. In his new role as President, Global Sales Operations and Business Development, Nikesh Arora will have responsibility for all Google's revenue and customer operations, as well as marketing and partnerships. He has a proven track record at Google, having spent the last four and a half years building our European operations into a substantial business.

Social Networks and Finding a Job

2009-04-14T12:16:00.000-07:00

I spoke to my friend Christian today about a paper he was writing for a class at HBS about how social networks were affecting job search and recruiting sites.

Some random points I jotted down about my thoughts on how social networking will affect finding a job:

1. Social networks offer reach and targeting. That makes them equally useful to a company's marketing department as recruiting department. In that way, social networking isn't differentially impacting recruiting more so than other functions.

2. Social networks don't attract users that have "search intent for jobs."

3. Search sites (vertical search, Google) are probably more disruptive to the industry in my opinion.

4. LinkedIn is monumentally useful for job search, but isn't really a social network in my opinion. LinkedIn is a big database of contacts so it's useful for finding people.

5. Candidates find jobs through people with which they have strong ties (friends and family), loose ties (friends of friends), or no ties (strangers). Job boards specialize in finding the jobs in the "no ties" department so are less affected by social networking. Social networking can increase the number of people in the "loose ties" group though.

6. New information such recommendations and people's social networking "fingerprints" may become part of the job application.

Endless entertainment at Google

2009-04-10T14:10:00.000-07:00

A very neat post on the Google blog. I think a lens like this would provide endless amounts of entertainment:

Official Google Blog: Will it lens?: "We've got more details and more pictures of our results on Alan's personal blog. If you have ideas of other things we should try lensing, we'd love to hear suggestions."

Kumo.com showing up in my google analytics

2009-04-08T09:52:00.000-07:00

Rumor has it that Microsoft will be launching a new search engine called Kumo.com. This morning when I was checking the Google Analytics of this blog, I noticed that Kumo.com was referring traffic to the this site.

See source #6 in the chart below. Not sure if this means anything (or if it's always been there), but it stood out to me. Does this mean Kumo.com is about to launch? Your guess is probably better than mine.

Are paid job postings sites dead?

2009-04-07T12:39:00.000-07:00

Running Personforce has caused me to think about whether employers will continue to pay money to post jobs in the future. There are a lot of reasons to think they won't. That has significant implications for the recruiting industry and means that sites like CareerBuilder and Monster might not be around in a few years.

1. All job postings are available through Google for free. If a company can post a job to its own site and people can find it through Google, it is less likely to pay money to post a job to a big site.

2. All job postings are available through vertical search engines like SimplyHired or Indeed also. Companies can post jobs to their own websites and they'll show up in vertical search engines as well as a google. Another reason not to pay to post jobs.

3. Any job site can offer an index of all the jobs on the web through Indeed, SimplyHired, or Google's API. On Personforce you can find all the jobs on our network + about 2 million more posted on the web. This means almost any site can offer more job postings than Monster.com or CareerBuilder.

4. Big job sites don't offer the ability to target specific population. Sites like Facebook or TechCrunch give you a much better ability to target exactly the kind of jobseeker you want. Big sites might offer applicant flow, but don't really offer any way to target desirable audiences.

5. Craigslist is free or mostly free.

That's not to say that paid job postings are definitely going away. However, I can't really think of any countervailing forces that will prevent these trends from further growing.

Twitter Report: Most of my followers are spambots

2009-04-06T15:09:00.000-07:00

Well, a couple of weeks ago we started twittering at Personforce. Well, we haven't started twittering exactly. We mostly just publish some job listings on it and a few random tidbits. We haven't really started engaging in "conversations" per say.

Without really doing anything on twitter, we seem to be picking up a few followers every day. I'd say these followers fall into two categories: spambots and kind of spammy marketers. The spambot types don't appear to post anything, they just follow people. The marketers mostly twitter about twittering. They tend of have names like Tweet4Traffic and GreatAbs. Some people appear to just post links to ther sites and i'm not sure if they are humans (or dancer).

Well, that's the two week twitter report. We haven't quite connected with any real people yet, but let's wait and see!

You can follow Personforce here.

SEO caused Get Satisfaction to do bad things

2009-04-02T13:27:00.000-07:00

This week, the company 37 Signals railed against the website Get Satisfaction for misleading users into thinking that Get Satisfaction was handling the the customer support function for 37 Signals. Get Satisfaction helps companies set up their own customer support and feedback function. A company can pay Get Satisfaction to get an nice customer feedback page on GetStatisfaction.com where the company can provide customer support.

However, Get Satisfaction set up customer feedback pages for companies that didn't want one (or pay for one). In this case, Get Satisfaction set up a page for 37 Signals (without its permission) that implied that customer support issues about 37 Signals products could be addressed from this page.

Users would Google the term "37 Signals customer support" and the Get Satisfaction page for 37 Signals would come up. Users would leave customer support requests thinking this was official channel to reach 37 Signals. Of course it wasn't, so these requests when unanswered by the company. When 37 Signals found out their customers were being misled in this fashion, they were furious.

So why would Get Satisfaction set up fake customer support pages for companies that didn't want them? I think this is a classic case of companies doing bad things for the sake of search engine optimization (SEO). The company realized that they tend to show up on the Google Results for "customer support" so they set up a bunch of pages that people might google: Customer support of Comcast", "Customer Support for 37 Signals", etc.

I'd hard to believe that Get Satisfaction would have created these fake pages for any other reason than to get increased traffic from Google. It definitely makes me think more carefully about the implications of trying to create content to get more search engine traffic.

Stanford GSB Acceptance Phone Call

2009-04-02T12:17:00.000-07:00

I guess it's the round 2 notification day for Stanford GSB. A neat thing about the school is the head of admissions calls informs you personally about your acceptance. For those of us that attend the school, the phone call is a long-cherished memory.

To all the applicants out there, good luck getting the phone call! And if you don't, may you receive many fat envelopes.

Rest in Peace Microsoft Encarta

2009-03-31T14:16:00.000-07:00

Microsoft announced this week it was shuttering its Encarta service. In the analysis about the decision, most people are rightly pointing out that Wikipedia simply made Encarta obsolete and ineffective by comparison. In effect, Wikipedia was the "Encarta-killer".

However, Encarta was one of the first steps in making the world's information freely available to everyone. Before Encarta, a set of encyclopedias cost thousands of dollars. Having a set was a beyond the reach of most people. Encarta came in and made all this information available to anyone for $60. Overnight, the economics of information changed. Encarta was the "Britannica- killer".

One of the transformative shifts in our society is that information is becoming free and widely available. Microsoft Encarta was an important step along the way as we move from information being expensive and scarce to free and plentiful. Rest in peace Encarta.

How to start a company in 5 steps (legal & admin stuff)

2009-03-25T11:13:00.001-07:00

Where starting Personforce, I was overwhelmed by all the legal and administrative tasks required to start a business. I thought it might be helpful for folks looking to start a business to have a little checklist of the things you have to do. This is the order we did things and is not legal advice.

How to start business in 5 steps - the legal and adminstrative stuff you need to do

1. Incorporate

Choose legal structure and name. Are you going to be a C-corp (good for startups seeking funding), S-Corp (good for cash flow positive businesses), LLC, or sole proprietorship. There are lots of good websites you can use to get this. You need this to get a certificate of incorporate

2. Apply for an Employer Identification Number (EIN)

3. Get a bank account

You need an EIN before you can open a business bank account.

4. Elect a board of directors

File the documentation about who is on your board of directors with your registered agent (the entity that helped you Incorporate.

5. Allocate founders' shares through share purchase agreement.

Basically, someone has to own the company. Allocate share that the founders need to purchase. Set a vesting schedule for the shares.

Bam, 5 easy steps to start you business. Once you raise money, start making money, or have a payroll things get a little more complicated, but that's basically all you need to do in the beginning.

Stanford GSB Interview Questions

2009-03-25T10:53:00.000-07:00

When applying to the Stanford GSB, a bunch of my friends came up with common interview questions for the admissions process. At Stanford, you have to be interviewed to get accepted. They interview only about 25% of applicants so getting an interview is a good sign! Hopefully this non-official list of Stanford GSB interview questions helps:
--------------------

Stanford Specific Questions

Tell me about your background. Why do you want to change from your current career? What do you want to do? Why? And how will the Stanford MBA help.

Why do you want to go back to school?

Why Stanford?

Clubs you’d be interested in joining at Stanford?

What other schools did you apply to and why Stanford?

If you don’t get an MBA offer, what will you do?

What value you can bring to Stanford?

What are your Long-term/Short-term goals?

Leadership / Team Work

Tell me about how you dealt with someone who was terrible to work with and how you handled it

Tell me about a leadership experience you’ve had.

Tell me about a time you’ve failed – what did you do?

Tell me about a time you were in a team and achieved a great outcome

Tell me about a time when you displayed leadership.

What is you leadership style?

Other

A book you’ve read recently and what you learned from it.

What books have you read that were unrelated to work?

Tell me about something you are interested in outside of work – why does this excite you?

What questions do you have for me? (this was w/ about 15 minutes left, so is important to have good questions)

Business School Interview Questions & Tips

2009-03-24T14:22:00.000-07:00

I was going through my old files and found tons of business school interview questions, tips, and pointers. Most of this stuff was passed around various email lists at Stanford GSB, HBS, Wharton, Kellogg, and Columbia.

Anyhow, rather than keep this information locked up, I thought it'd post it here so anyone can use it to prepare for there interviews. I'll do it in a few posts which information about specific schools.

Here is a great compilation of generic business school questions you should be ready for in your interview:
-------------------------------

Discuss your career progression.

Give examples of how you have demonstrated leadership inside and outside the work environment.

What do you want to do (in regard to business function, industry, location)?

Why the MBA? Why now?

Describe an ethical dilemma faced at work?

Describe your career aspirations?

What would you do if not accepted?

What are your long- and short-term goals? Why?

Why are you applying to business school?

Why does this school appeal to you?

What is an activity you are involved in? Why is it important to you?

Talk about experiences you have had at work.

Why are you interested in a general MBA program?

Why did you choose your undergraduate major?

Discuss yourself.

What contributions would you make to a group?

Name three words or phrases to describe yourself to others.

What is most frustrating at work?

How would co-workers describe you?

Describe a typical work day.

Have you worked in a team environment? What were your contributions to the effort?

Discuss any experience you have had abroad.

How did you choose your job after college?

What do you do to relieve stress?

It's two years after graduation, what three words would your team members use to describe you?

Describe a situation where you brought an idea forward, and it failed.

How do you define success?

What would you do if a team member wasn't pulling his own weight?

Is there anything you would like to ask me/us?

Have you faced a situation at work where you had to convince your colleagues

describe your idea of a manager

What character will you chose that represents your long term professional goals?

Describe an interesting experience from work

How will you contribute to your class?

Tell me about a problem you faced at work and how you resolve it.

What has been difficult/challenging about working in teams?

What extra-curricula activities are you going to participate in?

Why this school? Why now?

How are you in a team setting?

Describe a time when you worked with a team and the team didn't see eye to I on an idea. What did you do to make it work? What didn't you do to make it work?

How I will use my current skill set in my next career after business school?

If someone approached me with an idea, would I take the risk of developing the idea if they would not?

What is something from your past that you wish you would have done differently and why? The experience can be from work, school, other activities, or from your personal life.

Who is a client you admire and why?

Since submitting your application, how have you continued to take leadership roles?

With all of your experience, why do you need an MBA?

What makes you think that you are prepared for the academic rigors of XXX?

Which of my skills would help me most in my post-MBA career.

Tell everything there is to know about yourself.

How do you see yourself in 10 years

What should I remember you?

Tell me about your past experiences, don't tell me about your accomplishments as your resume details those, but more your thought processes as you went through those experiences

If you are in a situation where a team member is not pulling their weight on the team what would you do?

Describe how you have dealt with a difficult person you had to work with

Starbucks Refill Policy is Now Worse!

2009-03-24T11:03:00.000-07:00

Part of my daily routine is a cup of delicious coffee at Starbucks. I pick one up on my way to work and then get a refill a couple of hours later for 50 cents (or free if you have a registered starbucks card). The staff by our office is extremely friendly and the experience is great.

Unfortunately, as of March 25, 2009, Starbucks is eliminating free refills (and 50 cent refills) unless you consume the coffee within 1 hours while at the store. The Staff at my local Starbucks broke the news to me last week.

I guess the company is trying to come up with ways to penalize its best customers. I was calculating that because of their prior refill policy I would go to a Starbucks about 50 times a month (2x per day, 25 days a month). Generally I would just buy a coffee (or get a refill) - but about 1/3 of the time I'd upgrade to a higher margin item like food or an espresso based drink.

Under the new policy, I have no incentive to come back in the store for a second time during a day, so I'll probably start going to Peet's in the afternoon. My visits to Starbucks will drop from 50 times a week to probably about 25 times a week. Starbucks will have 1/2 has many touchpoints and opportunities to sell me things.

Looking at these numbers I'm struck by two things. 1) Starbucks is penalizing their best customers who often evangelize about their brand. 2) I go to Starbucks way too often. I should cut back. Seriously.

I feel like we should start twittering

2009-03-17T16:45:00.000-07:00

I still can't bring my self to set up a twitter account for myself, but we did set one up at Personforce.com.

You can follow us at www.twitter.com/personforce. Like resurrecting my blog at Silicon MBA, setting up a company twitter account is more an experiment in understanding how social media works than anything else. It seems like everyone else is doing it, so I we should just start twittering.

I'm not sure exactly what we'll do it, probably broadcast recent job listings, blog posts, and "witticisms". We have 10 followers so far, 8 of whom are spambots.

The Principal-Agent Problem & AIG

2009-03-16T14:45:00.000-07:00

The employees have gone wild!

I think that's the root cause of this current financial crisis. Basically, employees at financial institutions like AIG took on some big risks in hopes for a huge payday if the bets turned out well. If bets went sour, then the shareholders (or taxpayers) are left holding the bucket.

If we're going to rehabilitate the economy, we need to reaffirm the core capitalist principle - businesses exist to enrich their shareholders, not their executives. Just because asset prices are rising, employees have very little entitlement to share in the upside.

Economists describe this problem as the "principal-agent" dilemma. Owners hire managers to run their businesses. Managers, however, tend to promote their own interests above those of the owners when unchecked. In scenarios where shareholders have weak control over the management, the management inevitable will misbehave by:

1. Taking on excess risk
2. Creating excess volatility
3. Benefiting from the upside of these risks
4. Leaving equity holders or the government to cover downside

Shareholders need to assert their rights over irresponsible management to prevent the inevitable re-occurence of these financial bubbles. When the Obama administration tries to strip AIG derivatives traders of their bonuses, I view this as a fundamental reaffirmation of our capitalist system that prizes equity-holders rights above managerial compensation.

Adsense can undermine your message

2009-03-12T15:34:00.001-07:00

I put Adsense on this blog a couple of months ago to better understand how online advertising and monetization of content works. It's still a bit of a mystery to me if/why people click on advertisements so I thought perhaps I could learn by minor experimentation. The downside of using these ads are it sullies the purity of your site while simultaneously not making you very much money (based on the traffic of Silicon MBA anyways).

One weird thing I've noticed so far is that adsense can seriously undermine the message of your post. Yesterday, I wrote about critizing FreeCreditReport.com for engaging in a predatory business model. Today, I open up the post and my site is full of advertisements for FreeCreditReport.com and other online credit led generation services! My message about criticizing it's business model is a little undermined, don't you think?

I imagine this happens a lot. If you write a negative review about some company or practice and then ads endorsing that company or practice start showing up. I wonder how many vegans write blogs financed by ads from Omaha steaks?

Perhaps as Google Adsense gets smarter and understands the semantic meaning of the text, this sort of mistargeting won't take place.

How Acai Berries could save the New York Times

2009-03-11T17:14:00.000-07:00

I was struck by two articles I read today about Acai Berries and what is says about why newspapers are failing in this digital age.

Via a link on Hacker News, I found an post on Black Hat SEO about a fellow that makes $15,000 a through Google adsense. The basic formula was 1) Pick a valuable industry 2) Create content in that industry 3) Take steps such at people find this content through Google 4) Profit when people click on valuable advertising.

The fellow gave an example of creating a site about Acai berries and how he makes $5 everytime someone clicks on a link on the site. After setting up the site, he basically has very little to do and makes some nice passive income. People who coming to his site have "purchase intent" for things regarding Acai Berries and therefore are valuable leads for advertisers.

That same day, the New York Times has an article about Acai Berries. It's a well researched, intelligent piece about Acai Berries. Because the New York Times is such a reputable source, many people will find this content through search engines when they are seeking Acai related products.

How does the New York Times monetize this valuable content? Through flippin ads about Ralph Lauren clothes! It's nuts, this is possibly the worst way to make money from this content. The people who are reading this content are interested in Acai Berries - serve them some ads about Acai Berries. Of course the New York Times has some Google Adsense advertisements on the page in the lower right hand corners where no one would have click.

It seems the little guys might understand internet advertising business models better than the big guys like newspapers. Newspapers need to understand:

1. Many people will find their content through search engines
2. Many people who see their articles will have purchase intent regarding that content
3. This is not ideal advertising space for "branded advertising"
4. This is ideal advertising space for products related to that purchase intent.

Newspapers - learn it and love it; these are the rules.

The FreeCreditReport.com Business Model & Ethics

2009-03-11T16:39:00.000-07:00

The internet is full of scams and deceptive practices centered around "recurring billing solutions". While technically not fraud, how many businesses make their livelihood by convincing consumers they are getting something free (or a one-time fee) but in reality charging the unsuspecting consumer every single month for the service? The best recent example are all the "stimulus checks" websites out there today.

I call this the FreeCreditReport.com business model. Credit reports are actually available for free, but not through this company. Their entire business model is built around convincing someone to sign up and then making it very difficult for them to cancel. This business a pure wealth transfer between the unsuspecting and the predatory - it creates zero value for society.

The current push among Web 2.0 companies to move from a "ad-supported" to a "paid-subscription" business model. I hope that as people make this transition, the companies take care to avoid this predatory model. In the jobs space, I see companies are increasingly charging job seekers monthly fees to access "exclusive jobs". I hope that these services are providing real value and not just taking advantage of people's insecurities about finding work right now.

The world doesn't need another FreeCreditReport.com. I hope entreprenuers will remember that as they design their businesses. Moreover, I hope the ad network and websites (like Google, Yahoo, Facebook) will work hard to make sure that they deceptive business are not allow to advertise on their grounds.

Google Checkout raises prices

2009-03-11T12:50:00.003-07:00

When we first started using Google checkout, it was free. Then they raised the price to 2.2% + $0.20.

Now Google is announcing a massive price increase. A tiered structure that penalizes the vast majority of merchants. See below.

---------------

Hello,

We're writing to let you know that on May 5, 2009, Google
Checkout's transaction processing fees will be changing. We'll be
transitioning from our 2.0% + $0.20 per transaction rate to a new
tiered fee structure, where the rates will vary depending on the
dollar amount of your monthly sales processed through Checkout.
The rate you'll be charged beginning on May 5, 2009 will be based
on your sales processed through Checkout during the month of April
2009. Each month thereafter, we'll continue to use the prior
month's sales volume to determine your transaction processing
rate. For more details about the new rates, please visit
http://checkout.google.com/seller/fees.html

We'll also be discontinuing the AdWords free transaction
processing promotion on May 5, 2009. Any AdWords transaction
processing credits accrued during April 2009 will be applied
towards transactions that occur on May 1-4, 2009.

Fees are the same for all payment types (Visa, MasterCard,
American Express, and Discover) and there are still no monthly,
setup, or gateway fees. For cross-border transactions, there will
be an additional 1% fee assessed per transaction. To learn more
about Google Checkout fees, please visit
http://checkout.google.com/seller/fees.html

Google is committed to the continued growth and development of
Checkout and to helping merchants increase sales by driving more
leads and higher conversions. Advertisers who use Checkout have
the opportunity to display the Checkout badge on their ads, which
has proven to be an effective way to differentiate ads and attract
user interest. Checkout users click on ads 10% more when the ad
displays the Checkout badge and convert 40% more than shoppers who
have not used Checkout in the past.

For more information about this change and how it affects the
product, please read our post on The Official Google Checkout
Blog: http://googlecheckout.blogspot.com/2009/03/google-checkout-fees-in-2009.html

If you have any questions, please visit our Help Center at
http://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?answer=134473
Thank you for using Google Checkout.

Sincerely,
The Google Checkout Team

MBA rankings (that are actually right)

2009-03-06T10:26:00.000-08:00

Whenever, I look through the business school and mba rankings produced by magazines, I'm struck that the rankings are stupid. It's as if they just randomly selected criteria, scored the schools along the criteria, and then said here are the rankings folks!

The problem with this approach is it is wrong. The two reasons it are wrong are 1) The criteria are arbitrary 2) The variance in the results (the fact that the rankings change ever year dramatically) is completely unexplained and probably wrong.

Since I've noticed a lot of the traffic to this blog is by people looking for information about MBA programs, I'm going to give you my opinion about business school rankings.

I think better approach rankings schools would be to ask the question - what schools do people want to attend? Using a statistical method called "conjoint analysis" you can look at what schools did people get in to, and based on that choice set, where did they choose to attend. If someone chooses Stanford over Wharton, you can rank Stanford over Wharton. If someone chooses Wharton over Tuck, you can rank Stanford and Wharton over Tuck. With a large enough data set, the preferences are fairly stable.

As my data set, I'm going to use my "vague memory" of what business schools my peers decided to attend based when I was at Mercer Management Consulting (now Oliver Wyman). I'm also not actually going to perform the analysis (that is beyond the limits of me and this actual faux data), but instead guesstimate the results based on observed behavior. I hope another institution (maybe someone like McKinsey that would have large data set) would perform this actual analysis some day. This is of course biased by the time at Stanford GSB and all my other biases since this guesstimate is essentially a qualitative assessment.

MBA rankings by Silicon MBA

1. Stanford
1. Harvard
3. Wharton
4. Kellogg
5. Tuck
5. MIT
5. Chicago
8. Columba
8. Berkeley
10. NYU

There you go. You'll notice they mostly fall in bands/tiers. Again, this result is heavily based on my own opinion, but my opinion is informed by observations of what business schools prospective applicants actually choose to attend.

Facebook takes on Twitter!

2009-03-04T10:54:00.000-08:00

Facebook's announcement to allow 1-way following of friends amounts to a direct assault on Twitter.

If you haven't heard, Facebook members can now have as many friends/followers as they like. Moreover, the can allow people who they don't know to follow them without having to reciprocate.

What has made Twitter popular is it gives anyone the ability to broadcast to the world. Facebook is now opening up this feature to its 175 million active users. Will users start using Facebook as a broadcasting platform? The companies has a few advantages over Twitter:

1. 175 million users is huge head start
2. With Facebook you can broadcast more rich and interesting information since you're not constrained by 140 characters.

Hitherto, Facebook has just been used to connect people who know each other in the real world. Will it take off as a broadcasting platform? Only time will tell.

SEO for Job Sites - a Race to the Bottom?

2009-03-03T13:39:00.000-08:00

Google is the starting point for most people's navigation of the internet. For hr, recruiting, and job sites, this is no different. As a result, job sites focus intently on SEO (search engine optimization). SEO broadly refers to making the content on your site accessible to search engines (ie The Google!).

People Google the term "jobs" about 150,000,000 times a month. Because of this, almost all job sites want their pages to show up for common (and long tail) search terms. The result is that job search sites are all following the same best practices and focusing more on the question "will Google find this content?" than on "is this good content?"

Try searching for any job-related search term on Google. Try the term "miami jobs". Look at the first 10 sites; they are all following the same employment SEO formula, have similar page titles and meta data, and show the same jobs. Not one of the results gives you a website that is generally that useful or unique for someone conducting a Miami specific job search. This pattern continues for almost any job-related search, no matter how obscure.

I don't want to call the results spam, but they are just not interesting. Many sites out there have great content, but it seems the industry is focused more on gaming the Google SEO guidelines and less on producing interesting content. The result is that most sites are pretty much repackaging the same ole crap, competing against each other in a race to the top of Google, but to the bottom of the job seeker experience. More and more, all the job search sites out there are just starting to look the same.

Google, to its credit, recognizes that when sites create content for the sole purpose of search engine optimization, the quality of search results goes down. I wonder how Google will adjust it's algorithm to ensure fresh interesting results for career sites. It certainly will create a ripple in the industry.

13 point checklist for startups

2009-02-24T14:50:00.000-08:00

Paul Graham at Ycombinator recently published a great essay entitled Startups in 13 Sentences. The essay stands out for its elegant simplicity - clearly a lot of experience and data are neatly reduced to these thirteen tips about starting a company. Like all aphorisms, the tips don't apply to all companies and all situations, but they are surprisingly robust in my opionion.

The tips are great advice for someone thinking about starting a startup. I think it's quite useful as a diagnostic tool for all startup founders as well. Go through each of the 13 points and rate yourself on a A-F scale. Based on the the results, what would you do differently? What are you you doing well and where can you improve?

I went through the excercise for Personforce and found it illuminating. I'll spare you the results, but it definitely highlighted areas where we can improve.

Here's an abbreviated version of Paul's startup tips that you can use are a scoring sheet:

1. Pick good cofounders: ___

2. Launch fast: ___

3. Let your idea evolve: ___

4. Understand your users: ___

5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent: ___

6. Offer surprisingly good customer service: ___

7. You make what you measure: ___

8. Spend little: ___

9. Get ramen profitable: ___

10. Avoid distractions: ___

11. Don't get demoralized: ___

12. Don't give up: ___

13. Deals fall through: ___

Definitely read the full version with Paul's explanations here before taking the test.

Email fax by RingCentral is amazing

2009-02-17T17:50:00.000-08:00

When we started Personforce, I was amazed at how much faxing went on in the industry. Before this experience, I had used a fax machine maybe once or twice in my entire life. After we launched though, I was paying usurious rates to the Stanford GSB practically every day to send and receive faxes to and from clients.

When I graduated from school and started Personforce fulltime, one of our first purchases was our own fax machine. For a while I was pretty happy about it. Whenever the fax machine starting ringing my ears perked up - it was generally the sound of a new order coming in, which was very exciting. Actually, lots of times it was spam telemarketers which was quite disappointing.

When we changed offices we had to change telephone lines so I revisited our fax service. We decided to try out an email fax service (efax) because it just seemed like the modern thing to do. RingCentral seemed reasonably priced and full featured so we choose them.

It turned out switching to RingCentral has been an incredible experience. The software is well designed and easy to use. You can very easily replicate all the core features of sending and receiving faxes.

The best part of RingCentral is that it puts your fax "in the clouds". That means I can access it from my laptop, anyone else's computer, from my phone, or from any device that can connect to the internet. Now when I get a fax I can check it out on my iPhone whereever I am. I'd contrast this to having to physically go to the Stanford GSB fax terminal after class and see if anything came in.

The other great benefit of email fax services is that they cut down on paperwork. All your documents come to you digitized so there is no need to phyically file documents. I almost never need to file paper documents anymore now.

Anyhow, I highly recommend putting your fax in the cloud. I don't know much about other services but we're quite happy with RingCentral. I particularly like the nice "ding" sound when a new order comes in.

Getting your MBA online? I'm skeptical.

2009-02-16T16:23:00.000-08:00

As part of a side project, I recently tried researching online MBA programs.

First off, I learned it's really hard to research almost anything in the online education space because of the vibrant lead generation business. Basically, there are a lot of companies that are willing to pay a lot of money for customer leads of prospective students. As a result, there are lots of spammy sites about online MBA programs that just try to get you to click on their advertisements.

As a rule, if a company is will to pay a lot of money for a customer lead, they are generally taking advantage of their customers. That got me thinking, is getting your MBA online worth it?

First of the pro's. An online education is accessible to lots of people because it's flexible around your schedule and personal life. Also, you can avoid the time-consuming application process for a traditional program. Some employers will increase your pay scale if you can check a box saying you have an MBA, so it seems worth it if you work at one of those places. Finally, I assume these programs actually teach you something about accounting, finance, operations, and strategy, and learning is generally good.

However, I think the bad certainly outweighs the good. First off, you're deprived of most of the benefits of the MBA - the network of alumni and the signaling effect associated with your school's brand. Second, a lot of the learning in an MBA program (specifically in areas like Strategy) is experiential; I'm skeptical that can be recreated online. Finally, these programs charge you an arm and a leg; it seems like highway robbery for a product which has very low variable costs.

What I would suggest is that instead of getting an MBA online, you should get an accounting degree online. I think most of the concrete book knowledge in the MBA program can be captured through accounting and finance. Moreover, accounting is the sort of thing that you can probably learn online well and that a deep knowledge of makes you immediately marketable. Just my two cents!

Reflections on Entrepreneurship from Stanford GSB

2009-02-15T21:43:00.000-08:00

Going through an old notebook of mine, I found a page of things I had learned about startups and entrepreneurship from my time in the MBA program at Stanford GSB. I wrote it on 6/12/07, about a week before i graduated. I culled these from things I learned from various classes, lectures, meetings, books, and during the early days of starting Personforce.

Entrepreneurship is about building something with little to zero resources
Do rather than analyze. Err on the side of speed than precision
Building a company is an iterative process. Test and learn.
There is a mental inflection point when the startup moves from idea to actual business
The micro-details of the product, the sales pitch, the contract matter.
There is a way to solve any problem. There is a way to sell anything. It might just be harder than you are prepared to work.
Differentiated businesses require lots of hard work
Do the dogs want to eat the dog food?
Your sheer force of will is a competitive advantage
Work with people who have different skills but similar values to you
You have to give equity away to make the pie larger
You have to strike and scale while the iron is hot
Successful entrepreneurs are just normal people
You need to commit to something to succeed. Good things start happening and it provides focus. "Throw your cap over the fence"
Little is gained by secrecy, good things happen when talking to smart people
Act weak when you are strong. Act still when you are about to move.
Little companies can crush competitors
Achieving public success has an irrevocable price
Don't add costs to the business
To succeed, you need to be contrarian and right
Selling into existing markets can be easier to sell to. Creating new markets can be powerful.
Great businesses create an impact far in excess of the capital invested in them.
Every early decision has strategic and ethical implications
Before every fork in the road, ask your self exactly what it is that you are trying to accomplish

Perhaps at a later date I'll write about which of these points I found to be true, especially true, or not sure true in starting a business.

LinkedIn is Not a Social Network

2009-02-15T21:40:00.001-08:00

LinkedIn is a fantastically useful service, but I'm not sure I'd call it a social network. LinkedIn's rich database of contact information is a highly valuable business tool, but the company's value as social network is limited.

In a social network, you get utility from fact that your friends are on it. On Facebook, I can see the pictures my friends upload, get invited to events, and generally keep in touch with my network. If I were on Facebook with a random set of people I didn't know, I'm certain the service would be of little value to me.

On the other hand, I get almost no utility from having "friends on Linkedin". Sure, it's a nice way to store the contact information of professional contacts, but I can do so in Outlook, through Plaxo, in an excel spreadsheet, or on my phone; each of these options is only marginally less useful than LinkedIn at saving people's contact information. LinkedIn has some value as a social network, but it pails in comparison to its value as business tool to find contacts.

LinkedIn's primary value is as a giant database of contact information. It allows you to get in touch with the right person, at the right company, at the right time. It's hard to emphasis how valuable this is (or will can be) for facilitating sales, hiring, and business development. If you are a paper salesman in Scranton, you can look up the contact information of who is the purchasing manager at the local law firm, send them a message, and then hopefully connect. If you are a recruiter, you can find people near you that have the skills that your client is looking for. Before LinkedIn, you were reliant on your own network of contacts or cold calling into the main company line and working your way through a phone tree blindly.

I'd say that 99% of the value of LinkedIn is that people on it are NOT my friends. In fact, the fact that I can only freely see the contact information of my friends is a clever "freemium" strategy by the company -- I have to pay up if I want to view the information of people who are not my friends.

By calling its self a social network, LinkedIn got its users to sign up, invite their friends, and populate the database. Calling its self a social network has been a great marketing technique to get users to build a data asset. In fact, companies that have marketed themselves as large databases of contacts (Plaxo, Jigsaw) have been far less successful than LinkedIn.

I think LinkedIn knows that its primary value is as a business tool to connect people who don't know each other but who should do business with each other. The company is still in the preliminary stages of developing this tool, but it one of the most valuable data assets in the world today.

Business School Acceptance Rates Will Be Brutal

2009-02-13T13:59:00.000-08:00

When I got my MBA at Stanford GSB, I think the acceptance rate was around 12%. We all felt like we got in by the skin of our teeth.

In 2008, the acceptance rate at Stanford GSB was 8%. At Harvard Business School (HBS) it was 14%, and at Wharton it was 17%. Yikes.

For everything I'm hearing, this year is looking brutal. Round one results came in a few weeks ago and it looks nasty. I've heard of a lot of people that got rejected or wait listed at Stanford GSB that I think ordinarily would have gotten in; you know the type - saved babies while working at a top tier private equity firm, ran a hedge fund out of their ivy league college dorm, etc.

I guess it's not suprising that acceptance rates are low -- everyone is trying to wait out the recession from the sidelines at school. Not only that, but private equity firms, hedge funds, banks, and consulting firms have fewer job openings, releasing a flood of candidates into the market.

If I had to guess, in 2009 the MBA acceptance rates will be brutal. Here's my guess: Stanford GSB 6%, HBS 11%, Wharton 14%. Best of luck to everybody applying this year.

Text Links Ads + College Newspapers = BAD

2009-02-11T15:22:00.000-08:00

Through my capacity at Personforce, I've gotten to know the college newspaper industry reasonably well. It's a delight to work with the students and faculty at these fantastic training grounds for journalism and media management. I can't say enough good things about the caliber of the people at these institutions and the journalism they produce.

Working with college newspapers , I'm struck that perhaps a pernicious force has infiltrated these otherwise sterling institutions - inadvertent influence-selling through text link ads.

In today's media landscape, it's very important to understand Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and make sure you abide by ethical online practices so that Google will find you. Google is the starting place for where most people find content. Jeff Atwood discusses that after launching his startup StackOverflow, he now gets 83% of his traffic (over 3 millions visitors!) from Google. So in today's media landscape, it's important to play by the rules or you'll get black listed and shut out of most of your traffic.

Almost all search engines use links as a currency to measure a website's authority. If you get lots of good inbound links from high profile websites to your website, Google rewards this by giving your site a high Page Rank. A high Page Rank means that people are more likely to find your content through Google. The more people can find your content, the more traffic, the more revenue for your newspaper.

One thing that struck me though is that most college newspapers have very low page ranks in Google. Even more startling - their page rank keeps falling. This was extremely surprising to me for a variety of reasons. First, all of these institutions publish first rate, original, sophisticated content. Yet somehow they have page rank of 4, the same as a mid-level blogger. Second, almost every college newspaper has been publishing online for over 10 years, but from Google's perspective they look like a brand new publication of questionable authenticity. Heck some of these newspapers have been around for over 200 years!

So why is this going on? Digging around the answer is clear - text link advertising. For some bizarre reason many college newspaper have insidious text link ads all over their websites. Text links ads are when an advertiser pays to have a link on your site so they can get some of your "google authority" and look like they have authority because your newspaper is linking to them. In essence, the advertiser wants the newspaper to link to them so their company shows up higher in search results and they willing to pay for it.

Virtually no reputable newspaper, blog, or publisher accepts text link advertising today for a big reason - when you sell a text link you are selling your influence. It is the technical and ethical equivalent of publishing a favorable article about a company in your newspaper because they paid you to do so. Ethical issues aside, Google thinks less of newspapers that do this and punishes them tremendously.

Matt Cutts, a Google search engineer and evangelist for the company writes:

Google (and pretty much every other major search engine) uses hyperlinks to help determine reputation. Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and link-based analysis has greatly improved the quality of web search. Selling links muddies the quality of link-based reputation and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results.

Remarkably, Matt Cutts specifically calls out college newspapers for selling text link ads:

When the Berkeley college newspaper has six online gambling links (three casinos, two for poker, and one bingo) on its front page, it’s harder for search engines to know which links can be trusted.

When text links ads are sold without using the "no follow" attribute, Google knows you are doing this and penalizes the newspaper as a less reputable source:

If you want to buy or sell a link purely for visitors or traffic and not for search engines, a simple method exists to do so (the nofollow attribute). Google’s stance on selling links is pretty clear and we’re pretty accurate at spotting them, both algorithmically and manually. Sites that sell links can lose their trust in search engines.

So if any college newspaper is wondering why it has a 4 or a 5 page rank instead of a 6 or a 7, this is probably the answer. Most likely some company is taking advantage of students who think text link advertisements are a conventional form of advertising. In reality they are the purest form of payola and taint a site's reputation. The New York Times, Washington Post, or any newspaper wouldn't touch them with a 10-foot pole.

Given the prevalence of all these text link ads for college newspapers, my next question is where are they coming from? Who is taking advantage of the students at these colleges?

An experiment in audience building

2009-02-10T14:17:00.000-08:00

As an experiment in audience building, I started a blog call The Police Jobs Review. I'm trying to see if I blog regularly about a fairly narrow subject, what exactly happens. A few things to note:

1. I don't know much about Police employment and issues
2. I'm trying to write most days
3. I try to scan the current events about police and work and see if i can comment on it
4. I don't plan on marketing the blog, participating in social media interactions or anything

It's a pure experiment. Let's hope I can blog enough to keep it going!

FanBridge, stop spamming the crap out of me

2009-02-05T11:06:00.000-08:00

Every day I get about 3 or 4 pieces of spam from FanBridge, the email delivery service for bands.

Normally email delivery services like Constant Contact, iContact etc make sure that you opt in to the list before they deliver email from their customers to you. They provide the valuable service of mail deliverability by ensuring that users want to receive these emails.

FanBridge claims on on it's website that users must opt in to receive messages, but this is a bold faced lie. So FanBridge, how about it? Will you stop spamming the crap out of everybody?

Tax cuts and police employment

2009-02-02T15:51:00.000-08:00

Covering how tax cuts for business affect police employment over at the police jobs review. Obviously, we don't solve anything, but its an interesting example of the prisoner's dilemma.

College Rankings for Law, Politics & Government

2009-01-27T14:49:00.000-08:00

Personforce produced a new way to look at College Rankings. Basically it creates way to measure what schools are ranked best for a career in politics or law.

Hope it produces some interesting insight! Republished below with permission.
-------------------------------

At Personforce we help connect employers with students at the top universities in the country through our network of college job boards. In that capacity, we're interested in the question - what are the top universities and how do you rank them?

Rather than measuring an arbitrary set of metrics, why not look at what schools best prepare their students for the careers they want to pursue? This post examines the question: if you are interested in politics and law, what schools produce alumni that seem to excel in that area.

As a proxy for success in the field of politics and law, we use acceptance to Yale Law School. We are using this because Yale Law seems to produce a disproportionate number of Presidents, Supreme Court Justices, legislators, and partners at white shoe firms and is very difficult to get in to. Oh, and most importantly, Yale publishes a list of what undergraduate institutions each of its graduates attended.

First, here is a dump of the number of students each undergraduate school has contributed to the current Yale Law student body:

Yale University - 82 students

Harvard University - 66

Stanford University - 33

Columbia University - 30

Princeton University - 24

Brown University - 17

Dartmouth College - 15

University of California at Berkeley - 15

Duke University - 11

University of Michigan at Ann Arbor - 11

University of Pennsylvania - 11

Williams College - 11

Amherst University - 9

Northwestern University - 9

University of Notre Dame [Indiana] - 9

Cornell University - 8

University of California at Los Angeles - 8

University of Chicago - 8

University of Virginia - 8

Georgetown University - 7

Swarthmore College - 7

University of Texas at Austin - 7

Wesleyan University - 7

Brigham Young University - 6

Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 5

New York University - 5

University of Toronto [Canada] - 5

Washington University [Missouri] - 5

Wellesley College - 5

Emory University - 4

Howard University - 4

Johns Hopkins University - 4

Middlebury College - 4

University of Georgia - 4

Arizona State University - 3

Boston College - 3

Fordham University - 3

National Taiwan University [Taiwan] - 3

Oberlin College - 3

United States Naval Academy - 3

University of Maryland - 3

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - 3

University of Southern California - 3

University of Washington - 3

University of Wisconsin at Madison - 3

American University - 3

Bard College - 2

Columbia University [Barnard College] - 2

Hebrew University of Jerusalem [Israel] - 2

McGill University [Canada] - 2

Morehouse College - 2

Ohio State University - 2

Peking University [People’s Republic of China] - 2

Rice University - 2

Université Panthéon-Assas Paris II [France] - 2

University of California at San Diego - 2

University of Delaware - 2

University of Iowa - 2

University of Mary Washington - 2

University of Missouri - 2

University of South Carolina - 2

University of the South - 2

Univerzitet U Pritini [Yugoslavia] - 2

Vanderbilt University - 2

Wake Forest University - 2

Washington and Lee University - 2

Whitman College - 2

Albertson College of Idaho - 1

Alma College - 1

American University in Bulgaria [Bulgaria] - 1

Aristoteleio Panepistimio Thessalonikis [Greece] - 1

Austin College - 1

Bar-Ilan University [Israel] - 1

Bates College - 1

Baylor University - 1

Benedictine College - 1

Biola University - 1

Bowdoin College - 1

Brandeis University - 1

Bryn Mawr College - 1

California State University - 1

Calvin College - 1

Chulalongkorn University [Thailand] - 1

Claremont McKenna College - 1

Colgate University - 1

College of William and Mary - 1

Concordia University [Canada] - 1

Denison University - 1

Depauw University - 1

East China University of Politics and Law [People’s Republic of China] - 1

Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen [Germany] - 1

Ewha Woman’s University [Republic of Korea] - 1

Fairfield University - 1

Gettysburg College - 1

Gonzaga University - 1

Gordon College - 1

Grinnell College - 1

Hamilton College - 1

Hampton University - 1

Harding University - 1

Haverford College - 1

Indiana University - 1

Ithaca College - 1

Kansai University [Japan] - 1

Lahore University of Management Sciences [Pakistan] - 1

Lewis and Clark College - 1

Louisiana State University - 1

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München [Germany] - 1

Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg [Germany] - 1

Masarykova Universita V Brnó [Czech Republic] - 1

Minnesota State University - 1

Mount Holyoke College - 1

National Law School of India University [India] - 1

National University of Singapore [Singapore] - 1

North Carolina State University - 1

Ohio Wesleyan University - 1

Pennsylvania State University - 1

Pomona College - 1

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile [Chile] - 1

Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo [Brazil] - 1

Rutgers, State University of New Jersey - 1

Saint Olaf College - 1

Santa Clara University - 1

Sarah Lawrence College - 1

Sookmyung Women’s University [Republic of Korea] - 1

State University of New York at Buffalo - 1

State University of New York at Stony Brook - 1

Sveuilite U Zagrebu [Croatia] - 1

Tel Aviv University [Israel] - 1

Texas A & M University - 1

Thammasat University [Thailand] - 1

Touro College - 1

Tsinghua University [People’s Republic of China] - 1

Tufts University - 1

Tulane University - 1

Universidad de Buenos Aires [Argentina] - 1

Universidad de Mendoza Law School [Argentina] - 1

Universidad de Palermo [Argentina] - 1

Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro [Brazil] - 1

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul [Brazil] - 1

Università degli Studi di Sassari [Italy] - 1

Università degli Studi, Pisa [Italy] - 1

Universität Zürich [Switzerland] - 1

University of Alberta [Canada] - 1

University of Arizona - 1

University of Auckland [New Zealand] - 1

University of California at Irvine - 1

University of California at Santa Barbara - 1

University of California, Santa Cruz - 1

University of Central Arkansas - 1

University of Colorado - 1

University of Denver - 1

University of Florida - 1

University of Haifa [Israel] - 1

University of Illinois - 1

University of Massachusetts - 1

University of Minnesota - 1

University of North Carolina at Asheville - 1

University of North Texas - 1

University of Northumbria at Newcastle [United Kingdom] - 1

University of Oklahoma - 1

University of Oxford [United Kingdom] - 1

University of Pittsburgh - 1

University of Pugent Sound - 1

University of Saint Andrews [United Kingdom] - 1

University of Texas at Dallas - 1

University of Western Australia [Australia] - 1

Vassar College - 1

Wuhan University [People’s Republic of China] - 1

Yeshiva University - 1

It's a interesting list. As you would expect, schools like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford top the list. However, schools like Michigan out-perform schools like Amherst, mostly likely because they are about a gazillion times bigger.

So, as a final step we need to control for the size of the undergraduate institutions. Pulling the undergraduate data from Freebase and Wikipedia and dividing through, we create a ranking of undergraduate schools where students have the best chance of attending Yale Law School. We index these results to 100 (since the % on their own are meaningless) to present:

College Rankings for a Career in Law or Politics

1. Yale University - 100

2. Harvard University - 64

3. Columbia University - 49

4. Williams College - 36

5. Amherst University - 35

6. Stanford University - 32

7. Princeton University - 32

8. Swarthmore College - 30

9. Dartmouth College - 23

10. Brown University - 19

11. Wesleyan University - 16

12. Wellesley College - 14

13. Duke University - 12

14. Middlebury College - 11

15. University of Chicago - 10

16. University of the South - 9

17. Whitman College - 9

18. Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 8

19. Washington and Lee University - 7

20. Bard College - 7

21. Northwestern University - 7

22. University of Pennsylvania - 7

23. University of Notre Dame [Indiana] - 7

24. Oberlin College - 7

25. Georgetown University - 7

26. Johns Hopkins University - 6

27. Columbia University [Barnard College] - 6

28. Washington University [Missouri] - 5

29. Morehouse College - 4

30. United States Naval Academy - 4

31. Rice University - 4

32. University of California at Berkeley - 4

33. Emory University - 4

34. Cornell University - 4

35. University of Virginia - 4

36. Howard University - 4

37. American University - 3

38. University of Mary Washington - 3

39. Wake Forest University - 3

40. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor - 3

41. Fordham University - 2

42. Boston College - 2

43. University of California at Los Angeles - 2

44. Vanderbilt University - 2

45. New York University - 2

46. Brigham Young University - 1

47. University of Texas at Austin - 1

48. University of Southern California - 1

49. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - 1

50. National Taiwan University [Taiwan] - 1

51. Hebrew University of Jerusalem [Israel] - 1

52. University of Georgia - 1

53. University of Toronto [Canada] - 1

54. Peking University [People’s Republic of China] - 1

55. University of Delaware - 1

56. University of Maryland - 1

57. University of South Carolina - 1

58. University of Wisconsin at Madison - 1

59. University of Washington - 1

60. University of Iowa - 1

61. University of California at San Diego - 1

62. University of Missouri - 1

63. McGill University [Canada] - 1

64. Arizona State University - 0

65. Ohio State University - 0

And so Yale University comes out first in our rankings of schools that prepare you for a career in law and politics. A few observations based on the data:

1. Attending a top 10 (or in particular a top 2) school in the ranking gives a huge advantage in terms of likelihood to get into Yale Law.

2. Yale Law seems to gives a disproportionate number of spots to its own undergrads. A student at Yale is 66% more likely to get into Yale Law than a student at Harvard?

3. Schools like Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore do really well in this ranking! If you are interested in law and politics, it looks like they rank ahead of schools like MIT, Stanford, Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, Northwestern. It makes me wonder if US News is doing a disservice to liberal arts schools by ranking them separately from universities.

Anyhow, there is no need to put too much stock in the results. It was an interesting and quick exercise based on some assumptions (reasonable ones hopefully) that produced a dramatically different ranking than other methods. It would be fascinating to produce similar analyses for the business and medical professions. Thanks for reading and if you are looking for a job, you can of course find jobs in law and policy on Personforce.

Job search in a recession

2008-12-10T16:16:00.000-08:00

Over at Personforce we just posted a guide to getting a job in bad economy. I'd encourage you to check it out our post about finding a job in a bad economy.

Also, we've enhanced our job search on Personforce. Please check it out:

Search jobs on Personforce

iPhone for Small Business

2008-07-18T15:24:00.000-07:00

Over at the Personforce blog, i wrote a review on how well the iPhone worked for small business and startups. Check it out here: iPhone for Small Business. Reprinted below with permission.
------------------------------

At Personforce a lot of us are using the new Apple iPhone 3G for work and for fun. We thought it might be useful to give a short review on using the iPhone if you are a small business. After all, in a small company or startup your phone is your lifeline and you don't have a lot of resources, staff, or time to waste fiddling around with a new device.

Overall, we think the iPhone is awesome for small business. There certainly are huge negatives, but the pros really stand out. Most notably:

1. Your computer in your pocket. Unlike any prior PDA, the iPhone gives you true mobility by giving you remote access to all the functions of a computer. Because of the fully functioning web browser (combined with Google Apps) you can view any document, look up anything on the web, log in to your company's accounting systems, and of course make make a phone call from anywhere. You can basically set up your office environment so that there is nothing you can't do when you're on the road. This is a great leap forward in productivity!

2. Web Browsing. You can look up anything anywhere anytime. On the whole internet. Enough said.

3. IMAP & POP3 connections. While a Push email service for the SMB space would be a welcome addition, the iphone's IMAP connection is actually pretty good. As a result you can very confidently use your google apps email account from the iPhone. On the otherhand, the Samsung Blackjack routinely failed to work with google apps and was a constant source of frustration.

4. Apps make commuting better. You can listen to Pandora radio on the bus, play some iPhone games on a plane, and surf the web while you're in line at Starbucks. My favorite app so far is built by Muse. It won't be publicly available for a couple of weeks but we managed a sneak peek and wow! We'd have to say the one downside of apps in general is you can't do anything else while using them, so surfing the web or checking your email is out of the question.

So, the iphone is great, but there are some huge cons that a small business should consider:

1. Calendaring. Seriously, the calendar solution is not good for the iPhone. Your appoints are buried several clicks away and you have to actively be checking to see what's on your plate for the day. We really need a solution that somehow shows you the upcoming (or at least number of) appointments you have that day on your home screen. Moreover, there is no good way (on a PC at least) to sync you Google apps calendar with your iPhone.

2. Checking your email on the sly. Say you're in the middle of a dinner party or driving down 280, and you just need to take a quick peek to see if you have an email (don't email while driving!); it's really hard to check for a message quickly. You have to pull out the phone, unlock it, open your email (and maybe wait for it to load). The phone is so slippery eventually you'll drop it while doing this some time. I'd compare with with traditional devices where you just pull out the phone and take a peek.

3. Battery life. If you mess around with the phone and use its features throughout the day, the battery will die around dinnertime. This could lead to an absolutely cataclysmic event - no phone or email access. Yikes.

So, that's our perspective on the using the iPhone if you're a small business. Overall, we think it's a huge leap forward for making small business more productive from the road. Not only that, but it's very fun and enjoyable to use.

Personforce Re-design

2008-01-09T13:21:00.000-08:00

Hello there Silicon MBA readers! Apologies that this blog has fallen by the way side. Now that I'm no longer in business school and have moved out of Silicon Valley, the blog name no longer seems apropos.

Any how, wanted to share with you our new redesign of the Personforce website. Please check it out at Personforce.com.

Please feel free to send me any feedback!

Rohin

Another Job Board Test

2007-07-25T10:33:00.001-07:00

Job Board Listings

2007-04-23T21:46:00.000-07:00

Interesting site for a jobs

2007-01-26T09:40:00.000-08:00

He're a little thingy we put together with The Stanford Daily. Check out our featured employer, "HOT or NOT".

http://stanforddaily.personforce.com

Excellent Quote from Goethe

2006-12-09T22:57:00.000-08:00

Graham Weaver, who founded a very successful fund (Alpine Investments) when he was in business school, came to speak to a class of mine the other day. He related a remarkable quote from Goethe as he urged us to take the plunge and commit to a road less travelled. The quote really reasonated with me so enjoy!

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back-- Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."

Loan Consolidation & Insurance is a Yummy Business

2006-11-29T20:00:00.000-08:00

Dudes, below is a listing of the most expensive google keywords. If you click on google ads related to these things, the companies pay around $50 to google. Crazy! I'm going to run an experiment where I start putting google ads on this site to verify if this is true. Shocking, no?

school loan consolidation - $69.16
college loan consolidation - $68.35
car insurance quotes - $66.88
school consolidation - $66.29
auto insurance quotes - $65.90 c
ollege consolidation - $64.04
student loan consolidation rates - $60.14
sell structured settlement - $59.82
sell annuity - $58.92
federal student loan consolidation - $58.58
auto quotes - $58.09
auto insurance quote - $57.99
student consolidation - $56.96
student loan consolidation - $56.91
student loan consolidation interest rate - $56.52
consolidate student loan - $54.61
san diego dui attorney - $54.56
car insurance - $53.16
structured settlement - $52.96
consolidate school loans - $52.88
student loan refinance - $52.44
consolidation of student loans - $52.43
consolidation loan rate - $52.04
citibank student loan consolidation - $51.85
car insurance quote - $51.80
consolidate student loans - $51.23
private student loan consolidation - $51.05
lasik new york - $49.86
student loans consolidation - $49.82
private loan consolidation - $48.95
insurance quotes - $48.78
teleconference services - $48.72
the art institute of seattle - $48.68
federal loan consolidation - $48.61
plus loan consolidation - $47.74
student loan consolidation programs - $47.58
bad credit equity loan - $47.46
houston criminal attorney - $47.44
student loan consolidation calculator - $47.19
cash settlement - $47.12
consolidating student loans - $47.09
orlando culinary institute - $46.84
student loan consolidation program - $46.77
orlando culinary institute - $46.69
consolidation loan - $46.54
loan consolidation - $46.54
ditech - $46.32
auto quote - $45.77
sallie mae student loan consolidation - $45.69

Dear Readers

2006-11-29T19:47:00.000-08:00

Hello! Long time no posting!

My apologies for my deliquency, but very few of you noticed my absence so I guess we're cool...

In the next few days, I'm going to use this blog as a bit of a "sandbox" to test things out of so watch out!

Also, maybe pretty soon I'll put some info here on the business I'm starting. In the meantime a few of my classmates launched these companies in the last few weeks:

www.url.com
www.ugenie.com
www.agloco.com

Smell ya later,

rohin

Hamish's Latest Column

2006-09-12T16:52:00.000-07:00

My friend Hamish has a regular column in the Financial Times that chronicles his time at Stanford Business School. In his latest column, he has an excellent discussion of why he wants to be a truck driver instead of a hedge fund manager.

Check it out, booyah!

Stanford GSB Diary

Deep Thoughts from Andy Rachleff

2006-08-30T21:52:00.000-07:00

My classmates Julio and Matt kicked off their excellent podcast, iinnovate, with an interview featuring Andy Rachleff, co-founder of Benchmark Capital and GSB professor. Benchmark is perhaps best known as the sole VC investor in eBay as well as a major investor in Webvan.

During the school year, I had an opportunity to attend a “meet the professor” dinner with Andy and a half dozen or so classmates. The dinner really stood out as one of the best learning experiences I’ve had at the GSB. Andy has a way of capturing complex business ideas and translating them in pithy, well-crystallized statements. After the dinner, there were about four of these concepts that I mulled over for weeks; the more I thought about them, the more sense they made. He covers some of them in his interview with Matt and Julio, but I thought I’d share.

Product-market fit is everything
According to Andy, the sole driver of a start-up company’s success is how well the product fits with the market need. Put in a different way, are you making the dog food that the dogs want to eat? If you get this right, you can afford to mess up everything else. The logical extension of this, according to Andy, is that execution doesn’t matter if you have the market fit in place. I’m not sure if I agree with that last statement though. It requires quite a bit of execution to develop the product, understand the customer need, re-engineer the product, communicate the value proposition, figure out the pricing, develop a distribution channel, and bring the product to market. When I prodded him on this, I think he classified all these activities as part of establishing the “product-market fit” and not as execution.

The Groucho Marx Principle
Groucho Marx famously said “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member”. Ain’t that the truth! I think I’ve spent my whole life seeking entrance into clubs of all sorts only to find out they weren’t so hot once I got in. But I digress. Andy’s point was that VCs never want to invest in companies that actually want their money. If the company is truly great, most likely it doesn’t want or need the capital. Though we didn’t really get into it, I think he implied that the flip-side is true as well—beware of any venture capitalist that wants to give you money.

It’s great when a major company enters your market
This was a real eye-opener for me. Most companies live in fear that Microsoft and Google will enter their market and blow them out of the water a la Netscape. Andy’s insight, however, is that more often than not, the presence of the competitor validates the product-market and as a result, actually grows the total market size significantly. So, the start-up may have a smaller share of the market, but now the market is sizable and legitimate. Not only that, but the start-up company gets fantastic free publicity vis-a-vis the entrance of a Goliath company.

80/20 is the mark of a great entrepreneur
Finally, during the dinner conversation, someone asked Andy what was it about the great entrepreneurs that he backed that made them successful. Andy’s response was that they had great vision to see what are the hand full of things that will make or break the business. After they seized on those things, they spent all their time making sure they got them right. It could be something like the pricing model, the “last mile” distribution expense, or building the direct sales force. What’s equally important is realizing, “this other 80% of stuff is crap and I’m not going to spend anytime with this crap because it’s crap” (my own words, not Andy’s).

The dinner ended with me spilling an enchilda all over my pants--but that is a story for another post.

Notes from Australia

2006-08-28T21:26:00.000-07:00

Greetings from down-under! After a 15 hour plane ride and a 3 hour trek in a kangaroo’s pouch (which was rather unpleasant and sticky as it turns out), I am in Australia. My trip to Australia is part business and part anthropologic study. On the latter’s account, I’ve been taking detailed notes on my observations from Australia and I thought I’d share them with you:

The Flight
This damn neck pillow is extremely uncomfortable. Perhaps this is the worst $12 I’ve ever spent. I don’t understand how people can sleep with this thing on. I fear this is going to a very long flight.

Arriving in Sydney
Well, here I am! My neck feels as if it’s been jabbed by a thousand daggers, but my spirit feels as if it’s been hugged by a thousand loving teddy bears! What a marvellous country—McDonalds and Starbucks as far as the eye can see. It’s somewhat disturbing though to see miles of uninterrupted beaches and undeveloped waterfront property. What has this crazy world come to?!

Settling In
Hum dee dum. After a few days in Sydney, I feel like a regular ole Australian. I’ve taken a new nickname (“Thorpedo”), bought some surfing-related t-shirts, and am currently practicing for an upcoming long-bow tournament. Put another shrimp on the barby, eh!

Anyhow, most of these observations will later be published in the Annals of Dingo Affairs, but I thought you might want a sneak peek!

A Tricky Way to Get Web Traffic

2006-08-27T18:16:00.000-07:00

Here's a zany idea for folks who want to attract some traffic to their websites.

As many of you know, there is a very popular news site called Digg.com where users flag (they "digg" them) interesting news stories. The ones that get flagged/digged the most end up going to the front page where millions of visitors read the stories. While it is aimed at sort of a "democratization" of the news, the end result is that some interesting odd-ball articles and websites bubble to the top.

If you wanted web traffic, in theory, you could try to get your friends to "digg" your website so it would be seen by millions of people. The problem with this, however, is Digg has a very efficient and large community of users who digg articles. You would literally need 1000's of people to digg your site to make a blip on the website.

However, a few weeks ago, Netscape.com converted its format to be a copycat of Digg. Netscape is a huge but declining portal (I guess from the days when people used netscape browsers) with millions of visitors per day. However, they have very few "diggers" who flag articles. In fact, all you need is a couple of dozen people to flag your site/blog to make it on the main page and get exposed to millions. It's a temporary anomaly that their readership is disproporationately large compared to the number of people who influence what makes the main page. My guess is you could pretty easily influence what shows up on netscape.com

So, if you're doing something interesting, why start a compaign to get it posted on Netscape.com?

Remember That You Like Pants

2006-08-17T13:01:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,

Tomorrow I shall ride my kangaroo off into the glorious sunset. That is to say, I'll be going to Australia for the next 5-weeks on a secret mission to preserve the global economic order. If all goes to plan, by the time I return, the SP 500 will have risen from 1300 to 1400. If I fail, however, we may plunge into a prolonged global recession. In retrospect, the downside risk of this mission hardly seemly commensurate with the potential upside.

Let me leave you with some tidbits of wisdom to abide by in my physical absence from the continent. First, beware of ner-do-wells who compel you to admit that you "hate pants". Second, remain neutral in the event of a war between England and France. Finally, tend to the children, for they are our future.

My next blog will be posted from the other side of the world, which is a miracle of technology that still blows my mind.

Your humble servant,

Rohin

Waking Up is Hard to Do

2006-08-04T11:43:00.000-07:00

The fascinating thing about the capitalist system is it compels billions of people to wake up each day and go to a job that most likely they find unpleasant. Achieving this level of coordination is a feat no short of remarkable. I feel so sleepy and crummy every morning when I wake up, yet some how I’ll pitch up for work, even if I know I’ll spend the day valuing plain-vanilla coconut derivatives. Tom Wolfe, in Bonfire of the Vanities, captures perfectly how I feel when my alarm sounds in the morning:

The telephone blasted Peter Fallow awake inside an egg with the shell peeled away and only the membranous sac holding it intact. Ah! The membranous sac was his head, and the right side of his head was on the pillow, and the yolk was as heavy as mercury, and it rolled like mercury, and it was pressing down on his right temple and his right eye and his right ear. If he tried to get up to answer the telephone, the yolk, the mercury, the poisoned mass, would shift and roll and rupture the sac, and his brains would fall out.

There are a variety of reasons that motivate people to wake up and go to work, but the end result is stunning—people make things and people stay out of a trouble. On the first point, the entirety of human progress over the last 300 years [or at least improvements in standards of living] can be attributed to productivity gains that have compounded over time. People show up in the morning, maybe a bit disheveled and sleepy, but eventually, after a few cups of coffee, they do something. They improve some code, find a new way to make a product, or if they’re extremely ambitious, write a blog. Over time, these modest improvements compound upon each other in a staggering way. If 300 years ago, you started with $100 in capital and every year just improved it somehow by about 5%, you’d have $225 MM today. If interspersed every 50 years was some sort of productivity revolution (like computers, factories, transportation), before then settling into steady 5% growth, you’d have $1.9 BN today. So if over the course of they year, you just make thing 5% better than last, you’re doing sweet!

The other notable feat of capitalism is that it keeps people occupied. If you’re working 95 hours a week as an investment banker, frankly, you don’t have time to throw Molotov cocktails at your foes. Imagine how pissed your boss would be if you didn’t have the document ready for a client meeting because you had gotten in a fracas with some ethnic rivals. He’d have a frickin’ aneurism!

Boss: Rohin, we’re meeting with Procter & Gamble in 30 minutes to discuss the Gillette acquisition. Is the document ready?

Rohin: Well, no, not so much really. I was hoping maybe you could just “talk to” the main points instead of presenting the slides.

Boss: [face reddening] What do you mean?

Rohin: Well there are no slides really. I was working on the pitch last night and I went out to pick up some sushi for dinner that I planned to eat back at my desk. As I was walking back to the office, I saw [insert rival ethnic group here] folks milling about in front of a Starbucks. I was filled with an uncontrollable rage and started throwing sushi at them. Piece by piece, I flung sushi at them for hours. I even hit one of them in the eye with wasabi! This fellow may have had the last laugh though as he poured a non-fat latte on my Thomas Pink shirt—the dry cleaning bill will not be pretty.

As much as the boss may have sympathized with my cause, I just cost him $7 MM in income this year if we had won the business. That's a house in Westchester with a pool!

So my solution to solving all ethnic and political conflicts – give them jobs as investment bankers or possibly as management consultants or coconut arbitrageurs.

Pitchfork Media

2006-07-28T14:46:00.000-07:00

For those who are interested in independent and alternative rock, reading Pitchfork Media is a must. Without a doubt, it is the most comprehensive, insightful, and influential source of music criticism in this genre. There is an excellent article about Pitchfork by the Kiera Butler in the Columbia Journalism review that I would recommend to anyone with a passing interest in the “business of music”.

I’ve always been struck that Pitchfork is an under-utilized asset. The amount of spending on albums and concerts that it directly influences must be staggering. I spend relatively little on music and concerts (and practically nothing since I’ve gone back to school), but I’d venture that they’ve directly influenced about $100 of my spending per year. They have 160,000 visitors every day. Assuming their visitors come by once a week only, this translates into an audience of 1.1 MM unique readers (this estimate is probably a bit high, but should be in the right ballpark). If my spending is representative of the mean, that means that Pitchfork influences approximately $100 MM in spending a year; this is a huge percentage of the amount of money spent on indie rock albums and concerts.

Yet for all this influence over spending, Pitchfork can’t be making a more than a couple of million bucks a year. They have some rinky dinky adds for t-shirts and links to a music buying website (which I imagine pays them a commission), but the "company" definitely has a garage-quality feel to it.

Pitchfork has a fundamental business problem though. It is successful because it is objective, but it is also poor because it is objective. I’m sure the musical labels, retailers, and concert promoters would pay handsomely to get Pitchfork to steer some business their way. Doing so, however, would completely undermine Pitchfork as a an objective source of music criticism.

Providing information, analysis, and recommendations is an inherently difficult way to make money. Each of the ways I can think of to monetize this information has huge drawbacks:

Option 1: Sell out. As discussed earlier, this has huge drawbacks. However, shopping comparison sites like Cnet.com and shopping.com have very successfully given preferential treatment to vendors in exchange for fees. Google Adwords, has found a pretty neat way to do this as well by placing the sponsored ads on the side. However, empirical research has shown people are much more likely to click through to an advertisement when they have search intent not when they see some add next to the content they are leisurely perusing.

Option 2: Charge for access to information. This is tricky since charging subscription fees narrows your customer reach and therefore your influence. However, Zagats, CarFax, etc have managed to pull this off. It’s way to salvage some of the value you are creating but difficult to really grow this way.

Option 3: Focus on big ticket items. Many information-based car-buying sites do quite well because advertisers are willing to spend a bit to potentially bring in a large chunk of revenue. I really have no clue how this could apply to Pitchfork; I’m just throwing it out there.

Option 4: Get your paws on the rest of the value chain. The value pitchfork creates being spread out record labels, distributors (like Amazon), concert promoters, ticket exchanges (like StubHub). There are so many players getting money off of Pitchfork, it makes nearly intractable for Pitchfork to monetize this value by making financial agreements with these companies. They have an agreement with one distributor site, but that probably only captures a small fraction of the value creation. Pitchfork needs to cast a wide net and make agreements with all of the major parties that are profiting off them. If someone goes to Pitchfork and views a review of new band, Pitchfork needs to be paid if a week later that person buys the album on Amazon or purchases a ticket through Tickets.com or StubbHub. There are easy to implement technical solutions to achieve this, but Pitchfork needs to go out and demand to get money from all these parties. My guess is Pitchfork needs to hire one bulldog, and make he/she antagonizes the heck out of the music industry until they comply. All you need is a few players to agree and the rest will fall in line.

Just this last weekend, Pitchfork put on a massively successful concert in Chicago. This is certainly a step in the right direction, but still the company is only being compensated for a fraction of the ticket sales that they influence in the industry.

An Open Letter to Spammers

2006-07-26T17:20:00.000-07:00

Dear Spammers,

Greetings! Wait, don’t delete this email, it’s not what you think. In fact, I’m not mad at you guys. Sure you fill my inbox with hundreds of ridiculous emails every day, but I’m cool with that. I realize that reaching customers and distributing your product is a difficult and expensive proposition. An outbound phone call (telemarketing) can cost $10-20 per call. Heck, visiting your customers can cost you about $100. Sending an email, on the other hand, is practically free. Spamming just makes good economic sense.

The reason I’m writing though is to offer you advice. Don’t get me wrong, I think you are doing a fantastic job! I just think there are some simple steps you can take to improve your productivity and profitability dramatically.

Let the data be your guide
Click-through-rates for spam are higher than most people would expect. Click-through-rates for the three most successful categories are 5.6% for pornography, 0.02% for pharmacy, and 0.0075% for Rolex watches.

Wow, that’s a pretty amazing rate for naughty pictures. If you assume that emails are evenly sent to both men and women and assume men are the ones that click through (this may be a big assumption, I don’t know), that means dudes click through at a 11.2% rate. What fantastic customer reach! Hats off to you, Spammy McGee!

However, maybe it’s time to stop wasting your energy on all other categories and just stick to this industry? Play to your strengths Spammer Dude!

Be funny!
I actually open spam sometimes just because the message cracks me up. This is a message that I got a few months ago and I sent it around to some of my friends because I liked it so much.

---Forwarded Message---
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2006 15:41:30 +0180
From: "Alvin Coley"
Reply-To: "Alvin Coley"
Subject: Former President Bill Klinton uses Voagra!

Everybody knows the great sexual scandal known as
"Klinton-Levinsky". After the relations like this Klintons
popularity raised a lot! It is a natural phenomenon, because
Bill as a real man in order not to shame himself when he was
with Monica regularly used Voagra. What happened you see. His
political figure became more bright and more attractive. It is
very important for a man to be respected as a man!

See our Voagra shop to enter upon the new phase of your life.
http://ferrurne.com/
--------------------------

While being funny is a great strategy, spammers can do more things to improve the likelihood that I open the message. Having my name in the title, giving me some direct command, or tricking me into thinking it’s a real email makes me marginally more likely to open the email. On the other hand, having bizarre names as the sender (Scanning my inbox: Selflessness C. Acoustics, Deflector D. Inscriptions come to mind), and giveaway titles (pharmacy, Rolex) make me less likely to open it.

Leverage your core asset to create alternative profit streams

This may seem like a fatuous MBA statement, but stick with me here, this is clever. The distinguishing characteristic of a spam is that it annoys the heck out of people and makes people despise the companies that advertise through the channel. Rolex, in fact, is very troubled that its name pops up in everyone’s inbox every day; in the long run, this will deteriorate the brand’s equity.

There are a lot of organizations that are willing to pay money to have someone else’s brand tarnished. [Note to reader: I am not advocating this position. In fact, I don’t think any business would pay to tarnish its competitors reputation through a spamming] Militant non-profit advocacy groups just might be interested!

One example we studied in class was the Rainforest Action Network (RAN). Their strategy was to target companies with strong consumer brands who were somehow related to rain forest deforestation. Basically RAN would tear the company’s brands to shreds until unfavorable practices were stopped. For example, since Citigroup provided financing to many of the forestry companies, RAN launched a campaign involving boycotts, sit-ins, vandalism, protests, all aimed at smearing the Citigroup’s consumer brand. Eventually, Citigroup complied as the smear campaign made it increasingly difficult for the company to sell credit cards and loans to consumers.

Can you imagine if RAN had hired a spammer though? What would you think of Citigroup if everyday you got emails entitled:

“Go to Citgroup.com for ViaGRAH”
“Great Drugs and Credit Cards from Citi”
“Your homeloan has been processed by CitiGroup”
“Important message from CitiGroup regarding your mortgage”
“Please Verify Citigroup Account Information”

Holy crap! Citigroup would be in big trouble [again I am not advocating someone do this! Frankly, I’m a bit surprised that some non-profits actually use analogous tactics]

Anyhow spammers, I hope you find some of this advice useful. If you want to discuss this further, give me a shout! Keep on rocking!

Rohin

What's the deal with...Meetings?!

2006-07-20T15:42:00.000-07:00

I’ve been in a lot of meetings in the half decade or so that I’ve been in the working world. There are of course, bad meetings and good meetings. Bad meetings are dastardly affairs, often involving folks wearing turtlenecks talking for the sake of hearing themselves talk. These sorts of meetings are particularly pernicious since nothing gets done. My friends can attest that I’m not morally opposed to “nothing getting done”, but in the past that has resulted in me staying up very very late making sure stuff does eventually get done.

A good meeting, however, can be an excellent experience. You and your team are trying to make an important point, and the entire meeting is a structured exercise to convince your client/customer/partner that your point is correct. You could be convincing them to enter a new market, buy your product, or give you financing. Generally, your “opponent” in the meeting will resist your rhetorical advances and the meeting becomes a drawn out struggle, not unlike a football game. You advance ten yards, then they push you back a few, you keeping pushing on until you score.

In this kind of meeting, you are either a “lineman” or a “quarterback”. A lineman is responsible for all the blocking and tacking that allows you to advance a few yards at a time. The preparation of the materials, the presentation of the facts, and the defense of its validity all falls to the lineman. Being a lineman is a grueling job and one I know quite well.

Al Pacino described what it’s like to be this guy before a big meeting quite well in the movie “Any Given Sunday” [I don't know why Al was talking about meeting etiquette in a movie about football]:

I don't know what to say really. Three minutes till the biggest battle of our professional lives. It all comes down to today. Now either we heal as a team, or we're gonna crumble. Inch by inch, play by play, till we're finished. We're in hell right now, gentlemen. Believe me. And we can stay here, get the sh*t kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb out of hell. One inch at a time.
….
On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch. Because we know when we add up all those inches, that's gonna make the f*cking difference between winning and losing! Between living and dying! I'll tell you this - in any fight, its the guy whose willing to die who's gonna win that inch.

Frankly, I get tired just thinking about fighting over all these inches! It’s taxing work. In theory, part of the reason for going to business school is to learn how transform your self from the “lineman” to the “quarterback”. The quarterback is the one who has the power to move the ball, 20, 50 yards at a time. He or she might be the CEO, the Managing Director, the Head of Sales. Sure he/she needs all the blocking and tackling in place, but his job is to throw the Hail Mary when the opportunity presents itself. Throwing this knockout punch (sorry to mix metaphors, well not so sorry) is largely a rhetorical technique that the quarterback has perfected. The quarterback comes in many forms, here are a few:

The pensive oracle
This quarterback thinks he’s so sneaky, but I see through his little act. In a three hour meeting, he’ll spend about two hours staring out the window as if to say, “Hey don’t mind me over here fellows, I’m above the fray”. As the debate reaches its crescendo, he’ll turn to the audience and say, “It seems to me [insert obvious thing that everyone in the room can agree on], perhaps we should [insert simple activity that everyone can agree on]”. Amazingly, this seems to quell everyone in the room and set the course for the last hour. During the last hour of the meeting, our friend the Oracle can take a nap with his eyes open.

The visceral character-attacker
I’ve seen this fellow at work during meetings about personnel when you’re deciding whether to hire a candidate. People will be buzzing about, making arguments about the candidates pro’s and con’s. This guy will inevitably be against the candidate and say something like “I wouldn’t hire this guy to mow my lawn.” [This was actually a real quote!] Everyone in the room is instantly silenced. What do you say to something like that... “Well actually, he was a member of the Outdoors Club so he probably could mow your lawn quite well.” It’s very difficult to rebut these character attacks [I think politicians have noticed this fact].

The assured know-it-all
This guy is at the top of his game when there is a bit of confusion in the room. He’ll let Camp A and Camp B flounder over an issue back and forth until they’ve confused the heck out of each other. At this precise moment, he’ll pounce and say with all the smugness he can muster “Back in my ill-informed youth, I was of the opinion of [Camp A]. However, because of [X,Y,Z] I’ve disabused myself of that notion. [Camp B] is well intentioned, but ultimately misguided because of [X,Y,Z]. In fact, the only possible answer is [C] because of [X,Y,Z]”. The most infuriating thing about this guy is he’s usually right and therefore quite effective.

The hop-up excited and draw on the whiteboard guy
Eureka! This quarterback has had a moment of blinding insight that must be shared with the whole room. He runs to the white board and proudly draws a triangle. That’s it, the answer is a triangle! As the audience bathes in the glow of insight, the quarterback further articulates his point with wild gesticulations, further whipping the audience into a frenzy! Oh my!

The homespun wisdom guy
Ah shucks! This gentleman tries to lull you into a false sense of security by pretending to be illiterate. But don't be fooled, this unfrozen caveman lawyer is smart as a whip. This guy has a lot of good quotes, but my favorite is when he uses the Henry Ford quote, “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse”. This is such a good quote on so many levels. I love you homespun wisdom guy! Down with market research!

Anyhow, these are my business meeting role models. Go figure.

YouTube: My Networking Misadventures

2006-07-18T17:43:00.000-07:00

One of the primary skills to learn in business school is “networking”. When I first arrived at Stanford, I was very skeptical of the value and ethical validity of the practice. I pictured greasy men with double chins wearing turtlenecks and sport coats slapping each other heartily on their backs. Sure, this is an odd thing to associate with networking, but I had my reasons. Isn’t networking a substitute for getting by on your own merits? Isn’t networking treating someone merely as a means to an ends? Kant would certainly be displeased by this, if not by the turtlenecks.

I’ve since changed my tune. This isn’t surprising since business school in theory helps you hop from the “bad side” of the fence (no connections and network and having to get by on your own stinking merit), to the “good side” (pass me another martini, chums!).

But a blissful sense of entitlement and short memory isn’t the only reason I’ve changed my tune. What I’ve realized is that people control businesses and opportunities. Networking is in fact the only means to access many of these opportunities.

If you want to become a Venture Capitalist, it would be great if you could just google the term and submit your resume somewhere. Unfortunately, information about opportunities isn't transmitted that way, it's transmitted via people and their interconnected network of relations. You need to get out there and talk to Venture Capitalists, understand their job and industry, and get your name out there. When a job opportunity comes up, maybe they'll think of you because they met you, not because they stumbled upon your resume on Monster. Learning how to network to find a job is the equiavalent of learning how to use Yahoo Finance to look up a stock or Google to find out the origin of the pinata. All these activities are exercises in gathering information as efficiently as possible.

Thus, when it came time to find a summer job, I threw on my turtleneck and started networking. I meet with alums, old clients, friends, friends of friends, fiends, and friends of fiends. I had quite a few misteps (putting the wrong date in my calendar for meetings, forgeting to look at my calendar on days I had scheduled meetings...) but also some fantastic meetings and conversations. While I had a few industries and jobs that I was very interested in learning more about, digital media was not on the list. However, for a variety of reasons (that I'll go into in another post) I became highly intersted in the online video space around the beginning of December.

In the beginning of December, online video didn't really exist. Google had just launched their service, but it was a mismash of garbage that was impossible to navigate. Sharlke, Blip.tv, Vidilife, Vimeo, Putfile, and ClipShack were easy to use, but lacked a critical mass of videos and viewers. One site, YouTube, however, stood out as being both easy to use and having enough videos and viewers that you could find some interesting content.

I dawdled around during Christmas break for a while, and when I returned, I decided to "reach out" to them (AKA network!). There are two things you need in order to network 1) Someone to talk to 2) Something to say. On the first point, sometimes it is easy to find someone to talk to. Generally, there are a lot of people out there who will bend over backwards to help you learn about an industry or company. They are especially helpful if you are a student and by definition not a competitor. However, in the case of YouTube, try as I might, all I had was an email address (jobs@youtube.com).

Sometimes you can get by without a good lead on someone to talk to if you have the second critera, "something to say" (and vice versa). When I say, "something to say" you need to have an bold opinion on some trend of factor that matters to the company. You might go up to the CEO of Dole Fruit and say, "I think Coconuts are terribly undervalued for the following reasons. 1) Almond Joy demand is forecaste to triple in the 4th quarter 2) Hollowed out Coconut shells are increasingly used as spare parts in aircraft repair 3) A lot of the leading hedge fund managers are rumored to be increasing their Coconut exposure."

Having an opinion on the industry at least demonstrates you're interested in the company and you've done some modicum of homework. So, I put on my thinking cap and tried to come up with some interesting things to say to this fledgling company. Below you can see my email and decided whether I had anything interesting to say. In retrospect it looks not.

From: Dhar, Rohin
Sent: Wed 1/25/2006 10:15 PM
To: 'jobs@youtube.com'
Subject: Stanford project with YouTube

Dear Chad, Steve & the YouTube team,

Just wanted to introduce myself. I'm a Stanford MBA student who is absolutely captivated by your product and user-experience. I very well believe that YouTube is positioned to 1) Drive the success of online video by allowing artists to disseminate and potentially monetize their work (like Google did for the written word) 2) Become a dominant media force, rivaling TV networks as a content distributor 3) Continue to build on its position as the leading video-based social network.

Defining where YouTube wants to go will be critical. Figuring out how YouTube gets there from here is even more critical.

This is a rapidly changing space where converting YouTube's strong position today into success over mammoth rivals like Google and Yahoo will depend on the "blocking and tackling" that YouTube pursues in its business strategy and operations over the next 3 months. Marketing, user experience, content development and organization, advertising decisions all play a role in determining YouTube's future success.

Since I'm currently a student (with a lot of prior business experience), I thought you could use a free resource to help you think about, plan, and pilot test the "game changing" moves that your company wants to make (and help with marketing). I'm very much interested in working with your company on this project. I know you've got lots of very talented people on your staff today producing the best product out there, but I feel I can be an important asset as someone who can help position YouTube to become the next Time Warner (and I who won't put a drag on your company's resources since I'm a student. Plus as a Stanford student, I can help YouTube tap into Stanford's vast array of useful resources for a startup).

I would really like to come by your office in the coming week to meet with someone to discuss this further. I am very impressed by your company so far and would love to help out. Please let me know if you are interested in discussing this further. This is going to be very very big!

Best regards and good luck!

Rohin
---------------------------

Anyhow, in this case, I received no respone from my "attempted networking". Generally it's tough to fire off an email to a generic address and get a respone (though I had quite good success doing this with other companies). Below is the a timeline from when I first heard of YouTube till today, plotted against their traffic data (versus nytimes.com for context). However, even before I "discovered/fist heard of" these guys, Sequoia Capital had already funded them. It just goes to show that in the venture business, you have to be really ahead of the curve to hit a homerun.

I've got some very strong opinions now on the space and how it will develop and what YouTube is doing right and wrong. I'll definitely write about that soon.

Chung is King of Marketing

2006-07-18T13:29:00.000-07:00

Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to write about some of the "ah-ha" moments I've had about important business principles and why they matter. By talking about how I came to that understanding, hopefully I will make the principle visceral to the reader and simulataneous fill up space on my blog. The first one I want to discuss is viral marketing, especially as it relates to the spreading of content.

Viral marketing is a simple principle. You tell one person, they tell all their friends, all their friends tell all their friends. It's like rabbits making babies. The initial growth trajectory of these networks appears exponential, though eventually it will peter out. Companies like Hotmail and Paypal all hardwired this marketing mechanism into their business models to great success.

What I find fascinating is the way great content spreads virally with virtually no effort or careful business planning. Great examples of this are the JibJab video and how the Lazy Sunday video tranformed Youtube.com into a major player in the entertainment industry.

My first experience with great, virally distributed content was the infamous Peter Chung / Carlyle Group email. It was the Spring of 2001 and I was an intern at JP Morgan investment banking. This gem of an email spread to every major investment bank, financial institution, and university in a matter of days. Peter had just left his job at Merryl Lynch investment banking to work at Carlyle in South Korea. This email is what he sent his former co-workers who proceeded to send it around Wall Street (apparently they didn't like him much). It's amazing the how powerful great content is. I wonder what Chung is up to these days? [Note, I edited the curse words slightly by adding the * character]

From: Peter Chung
Subject: LIVING LIKE A KING
Date: Tue, 15 May 2001 20:26:21 -0400
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2653.19) Content-Type: text/plain

So I've been in Korea for about a week and a half now and what can I say, LIFE IS GOOD....

I've got a spanking brand new 2000 sq. foot 3 bedroom apt. with a 200 sq. foot terrace running the entire length of my apartment with a view overlooking Korea's main river and nightline. Why do I need 3 bedrooms? Good question, the main bedroom is for my queen size bed, where CHUNG is going to f*ck every hot chick in Korea over the next 2 years (5 down, 1,000,000,000 left to go) the second bedroom is for my harem of chickies, and the third bedroom is for all of you f*ckers when you come out to visit my ass in Korea.

I go out to Korea's finest clubs, bars and lounges pretty much every other night on the weekdays and everyday on the weekends to (I think in about 2 months, after I learn a little bit of the buyside business I'll probably go out every night on the weekdays). I know I was a stud in NYC but I pretty much get about, on average, 5-8 phone numbers a night and at least 3 hot chicks that say that they want to go home with me every night I go out.

I love the buyside, I have bankers calling me everyday with opportunties and they pretty much cater to my every whim - you know (golfing events, lavish dinners, a night out clubbing). The guys I work with are also all chilll - I live in the same apt building as my VP and he drives me around in his Porsche (1 of 3 in all of Korea) to work and when we go out. What can I say,.... live is good,...

CHUNG is KING of his domain here in Seoul

So, all of you f*ckers better keep in touch and start making plans to come out and visit my ass ASAP, I'll show you guys an unbelievable time.
My contact info is below.... Oh, by the way, someone's gotta start fedexing me boxes of domes, I
brought out about 40 but I think I'll run out of them by Saturday.....

Laters,
CHUNG

Peter Chung
The Carlyle Group
Suite 1009, CCMM Bldg.
12, Yoido-dong, Youngdeungpo-ku
Seoul 150-010, Korea
Tel: (822) 2004-8412
Fax: (822) 2004-8440

Yahoo is Good People

2006-07-18T11:42:00.000-07:00

To all you budding big-shots out there, Yahoo's Chief Marketing Officer Cammie Dunaway is a great role model for how you should treat people. This year, through the Stanford GSB program called board fellows, I had the pleasure of sitting on the board of directors (along with Cammie) of the Silicon Valley chapter of Junior Achievement.

As part of a consulting project I did for Junior Achievement, I emailed several other board members to set up interviews/discussions. Within 5 minutes of emailing Camie, I received an email response from her. Later that week, we spoke as she waited for her flight in the Milwaukee Airport. I was highly impressed by her responsiveness to my request and her level of engagement during our conversation. She is literally one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley; doing little stuff like this makes the worker-bees (like me) feel good and is generally a decent way to behave.

I, on the otherhand, am not really a good role model for responsiveness. Let me repeat Charles Barkley style--I am not a role model. Below is semi-fictionalized account of my email interactions with the organizer of a program in Australia that I'm participating in this summer:

Organizer: [June 1st] Rohin, we're pleased to offer you a spot here in Australia. Please fill out these two forms by June 15th.

Me: [on June 16th] Thanks so much for the offer. Enclosed is the form. Sorry I'm a little late.

Organizer: [on June 17th] Rohin, thanks for the message. Unfortunately, you only completed one of the forms. Could you please fill out the second form.

Me: [On June 25th] Oh my, sorry about that! I will absolutely fill out this form tomorrow.

Organizer: [On July 5th] Rohin, hope you had a good holiday. The fireworks certainly were lovely. Anyhow, I don't believe we ever received the second form. Were you ever going to fill out the second form so we can process your application?

A few days later, I did fill out the form, but I really put the organizer through the ringer to get it. This was odd behavior on my part since the guy was basically doing this only for my benefit. Clearly, this is something I need to work on, but luckily I'm not in a position of any authority.

I took a class this year with John Morgridge, the Chairman and former-CEO of Cisco Systems. He related that his successor, the current CEO, John Chambers walks every visitor he gets down to the front desk at the end of their meeting. Does he have to do this? No, but it's a great way to signal that he cares.

This may be my only post that is touchy feely. As such, this post is dedicated to the one and only Lizzie Fisher!

MBA Bubble-O-Meter

2006-07-17T18:24:00.000-07:00

In the year preceding its decline, Enron was the top employer at Harvard Business School. The following year, that honor went to McKinsey & Company and the consulting industry imploded shortly thereafter.

Generally, if MBAs flock en masse to an employer or industry, that implies that the company is dramatically overpaying relative to the productivity of the labor it is hiring. This, of course, is not sustainable and is a sure sign of a bubble. So, what do the summer internship experiences of Stanford GSB students this year say about the frothiness of certain areas of the economy? Let's begin!

Real estate = bubble.
It's true, I read it on CNN.com; USA Today even had an infographic on it. Sure this platitude is near conventional wisdom, but I thought I'd contribute my own data point. Everyone and their mother wants to get into real estate right now. To be honest, this caught my completely off-guard--I was completely unaware that this was a sexy thing to do. Generally when everyone else wants to do something, I feel like I should do it as well (it's called peer pressure). Did I have a latent interest in real estate investing? Should I drop my resume with Trammel Crowe? What is a Trammel Crowe?

Google = unclear.
The big talk around Silicon Valley interns is about Google's cafeteria. Apparently they have 9 different cafeterias on campus. One intern said the Cafeteria is a "top 5 restaurant in the bay area". Another intern likened it to Thomas Keller's famous French Laundry restaurant in Napa. Like the bean bag chairs of the 1990s this too could be a sign of the bubble. Will Google still be serving lobsters and boar soup 15 years from now? Google has 5,680 employees. If the food is so darn good, maybe the the company is spending $20 per person per day. Over the course of the full year (250 working days) that comes to $28 MM in foregone operating income. Sure, that's a drop in the bucket compared to the $2 BN the company earns today, but I wonder what is going to happen in a couple years when the CFO is $20 MM away from making his EPS targets? Hmmm? No boar soup for you!

On the otherhand, Google has hired some ridiculously talented MBA interns from Stanford and has been very selective in its hiring process. The ability to attract really solid MBAs is somewhat remarkable since the company has a reputation of treating business folks as second class citizens. As if!

Hedge funds = short them.
Unlike real estate, I was aware that this was a sexy thing to do. I was not really that surprised that most of my classmates with deep finance experience (mostly private equity) decided to try it for the summer. What did take me aback was that many of them were joining extremely well capitalized funds where the general partners had virtually no hedge fund investing experience. Now it's perfectly fine to hire inexperienced junior people, but it might be problematic to have no one at your firm that really knows what they're doing. When the yield curve twists and you're long 10 year bills and short 5 year notes who do you go to for advice? Don't come to me, that's for sure! I'm keeping my money in coconut futures, thank you very much.

Small businesses = gold mines of cash.
Unfortunately, MBAs tend not to flock to businesses and industries that are undervalued. As a result this exercise won't really identify any winners you should invest in (though you hedge funders can go long on the S&P and short a REIT, booyah!). Nevertheless, a friend working in the building supply industry tells tales of ridiculous profitability and free soda in the vending machines. My own experience this summer trying to rollup small businesses has led me to somewhat concur. More on this in another post.

Web 2.0 businesses = no bubble yet...
In 1997, Stanford MBAs were dropping out left and right to join such fine establishments as pets.com, Webvan, and some company called Echo Bay Technologies. You do not see a similar get-rich quick ethos pervading the class yet anyways. However, by January 1, 2007, I plan to launch the next big thing that will definitively lead to untold riches.

Hello world!

2006-07-17T12:20:00.000-07:00

Like a crying newborn, cringing at first light and dripping in amniotic fluid, I enter the blogging world of Silicon Valley! With that out of the way, this blog is going to be about consumer internet, healthcare, and life at Stanford.

There is certainly no dearth of quality coverage and opinions on Web 2.0 (and to some degree healthcare). My perspective, however will be differentiated in a few ways:

From Stanford University: For the last 50 years, Stanford has been the epicenter of technology innovation. I want to give you the perspective from the center of the cauldron
As a "business guy": I come from a traditional old-school business background--I've never sat in bean bag chair during a meeting or played foosball in an office. A lot of the hype and activity that goes on around here simply does not stand to reason. I want to bring simple analysis to expose the frivolous fads and identify the areas of value.
As an MBA student: Some pretty interesting stuff goes down at the GSB (graduate school of business). Hopefully I can give you a window into this world.

As for my expectations about this blog, I'm a bit ambivalent. On one hand, I'd love to participate actively in the blogosphere and be a notable contributor/critic. On the other hand, I'm going to be seeking a job or venture funding the next year so I really can't go around being too controversial. We'll see what happens...