Lessons Learned From Mark Jacobstein

Mark spoke last night as part of a week-long entrepreneurship conference at Stanford sponsored by ASES. Two things that really stood out from his speech were:

1. Pay attention to surprising successes, even if they’re small

When Mark was running Small World Software, there was a die-hard group of about two million fantasy sports players who—get this—would play on paper, calculating all the statistics and scores by hand (obviously this was before Mark brought fantasy sports to the Internet). What tedium! Point is, if there were that many people who would play on paper, there would surely be many, many more who would play on the web.

2. If you can make it so that the customer doesn’t see the money leaving their wallet (i.e. they don’t have to take out their credit card), they will pay for your service

Loopt does this with their “social mapping” software by charging subscribers $3.99/month, but it just appears on their cellular phone bill like any other feature, such as voicemail or text messaging. Genius. Pure genius.

Speaking of Commencement Speeches…

I somehow happened across one by Guy Kawasaki at Pali (weird coincidence…), I particularly liked one of his points:

#10: Live off your parents as long as possible

When I spoke at this ceremony two years ago, this was the most popular hindsight-except from the point of view of the parents. Thus, I knew I was on the right track.

I was a diligent Oriental in high school and college. I took college-level classes and earned college-level credits. I rushed through college in 3 1/2 years. I never traveled or took time off because I thought it wouldn’t prepare me for work and it would delay my graduation.

Frankly, I blew it.

You are going to work the rest of your lives, so don’t be in a rush to start. Stretch out your college education. Now is the time to suck life into your lungs-before you have a mortgage, kids, and car payments. Take whole semesters off to travel overseas. Take jobs and internships that pay less money or no money. Investigate your passions on your parent’s nickel. Or dime. Or quarter. Or dollar. Your goal should be to extend college to at least six years. Delay, as long as possible, the inevitable entry into the workplace and a lifetime of servitude to bozos who know less than you do, but who make more money. Also, you shouldn’t deprive your parents of the pleasure of supporting you.

Exactly what I’m trying to do…

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005

Google Wanted To Get Sued?

On the surface it seems counterintuitive, but this post by Michi Kono makes a very compelling argument for YouTube’s $1.65B acquisition price in terms of the opportunity cost to Google of not owning the legal, most popular online video site.

Rather than trying to rehash the (very interesting) argument, I highly recommend reading the full post.