Arwen's novel shoots to the top of the charts!

Resurrection is #3 #1, behind ahead of the latest book by George R.R. Martin.

Get yours on Kindle, Trade Paperback or Audio Book here!

Bezos on the long game

From a great interview in Wired by Steven Levy:

Our first shareholder letter, in 1997, was entitled, “It’s all about the long term.” If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.

In some cases, things are inevitable. The hard part is that you don’t know how long it might take, but you know it will happen if you’re patient enough. Ebooks had to happen. Infrastructure web services had to happen. So you can do these things with conviction if you are long-term-oriented and patient.

Pure gold.

Remote Indonesia

    Photo: Dave Collyer

Challenging the Mundane

Some of the best business ideas are borne from the dull and boring. A simpler way to take credit card payments: Square. Easier access to town cars: Uber. Sensible dental insurance: Brighter. Notes synched on all computers and devices: Evernote. Renting unused office space: eVenues.

And now, a better thermostat: Nest.

This is what happens when a bright entrepreneur decides not to take an everyday inconvenience for granted. How many ordinary problems do we live with that we'll one day say, "I can't believe we used to..."?

Here's a few off the top of my head:

• Traffic lights that stay red when there's no crossing cars
• Logging into social networks and seeing stuff from people we don't care about
• Alarm clocks that suck; it's the first thing we look when we wake up and last thing we look at before we go to bed, and it's ugly and still thinks it should be programmed like a 1980's VCR
• No way to tell which water bottle belongs to whom at home, with guests, when playing basketball, etc. (yep, I said mundane), resulting in massive waste globally
• The hundreds of billions of spent each year to pay people to prepare tax returns, a total waste
• The 99% of boats that sit in harbors unused 99% of the time
• The billions spent by advertisers reaching people who are totally outside their target audience
• Paper money, a model left over from centuries ago

And countless other troubles and inefficiencies small and large that vex and hassle us on a daily basis, and which we assume are just a given. In solving these problems, entrepreneurs will build hugely valuable businesses. For example, Square looks like a simple device to scan a credit card, but it opens the door for small merchants to manage their customer relationships like never before, and Nest seems like a better looking thermostat but could allow consumers and producers of energy unprecedented control over their costs.

The trouble we take for granted today could turn out to be a billion dollar opportunity for the entrepreneur who sees things differently.

Sunset in Santa Barbara today

Had to pull over and take this shot, which doesn't do justice to the dropping

into the Pacific on a gorgeous 85 degree day in October on the California coast.

Unaired Think Different Ad from 1997 with Steve Jobs' Voice

I met Steve at the Apple campus shortly after this campaign was launched. A lot of companies had tried the "we're different" message in advertising before, but Steve followed it up with the courage to actually be different, often in the face of deafening criticism.

Steve Jobs created the most valuable company in the world

I remember the first time I met Steve Jobs like it was yesterday.

It was 1998, and Steve had returned to Apple the previous year. The first Internet gold rush was under way, and EarthLink was signing up the masses who wanted to get on the Internet for the first time. A long time Apple user, I had worked hard to make EarthLink the best ISP for the Mac, and I guess Steve had noticed, because he asked us to come up to Cupertino and meet with him. Steve walked into the conference room in jeans and flip flops and introduced himself. I told him I was an Apple fan boy since forever and asked him to tell us what his strategy was for the company. Steve got up on the white board and drew out his plan, confidently explaining how he was drastically simplifying Apple, cutting it back to four computers: a desktop and laptop each designed for home and business. And then he proposed to to make EarthLink the default ISP for Apple's new home desktop (the iMac) and eventually all Apple products.

As a result of that meeting, EarthLink became the first ISP presented to a new Mac user as soon as they turned on their computer for the first time. Apple later invested $200 million in EarthLink and one of Steve's most dedicated and insightful lieutenants, Phil Schiller, joined our board.

Today, as he steps down as CEO to battle problems with his health, many people are sharing Steve stories. Here's one from me: It was a hot August evening in 1998, and I was living in a little rented house in Toluca Lake, California. The phone rang, and I picked it up. "Hi Sky, it's Steve Jobs." After quickly getting over how he'd gotten my number, I asked him what was up. It turned out that one of EarthLink's PR team had gotten a little overly excited and briefed a reporter on our new partnership in advance of the press release. Steve had gotten wind and politely asked me to reign them in. I told him I really appreciated the heads up, and I'd do that right away. Steve gave me his home number and told me to call him if I ever needed anything. This was a guy who had at least 10,000 employees at the time.

A lot about being a great manager is knowing how much or how little detail to focus on. Howard Schultz has said, "Everything matters," and Steve Jobs certainly embodies that idea. But to me, it's as simple as, whether the outcome is accomplished directly or through your team, a great manager truly cares about everything. Steve truly cares about every detail of the user experience, far more than anyone I've ever seen, and he has an indomitable combination of being unrelenting and right.

Steve's legacy already spans generations. My 9 year old daughter isn't prone to idolize anyone, let alone me or the founder of a computer company. Last night, she asked me if I knew Steve Jobs, and when I nodded my head, she said, "cooooooool."

Home

Taken at Santa Monica Beachfront

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Tales from the 2008 market crash

Apple was at $98.27.

Oops.

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My 8 year old just downloaded a VOIP app onto her iPad, got herself a phone number and left me a voicemail

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I want one of these for my lawn...

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How I survived the Valentines Day Massacre of 1995

It was early 1995, and EarthLink was in one of its earliest growth periods. We'd just moved from our first 800 square foot office in Los Angeles to a 3,000 foot space down the hall in the same building. Even then, we quickly filled the new office, and people were sitting at desks in the hallway. We were adding subscribers at a rate faster than we could handle, sometimes growing 10% a week, and our systems were straining under the demand. We were barely managing to keep up.

Then, on February 14th, 1995, our main subscriber database — the file that held the usernames and passwords — got totally corrupted, and suddenly, we could no longer authenticate our users when they dialed in. (It was modems in those days, remember.) EarthLink was completely down. Fortunately, we had a back-up tape at the office that was only a few days old. Our engineers went to load the tape and restore our system. We would be back on in an hour, still a horrific outage, but survivable. Then, we discovered that the back-up tape was damaged and totally unreadable. We were dead in the water. If we couldn’t figure out how to get the data off that tape, EarthLink would be out of business, and I would be back to running a coffee house.

I put the word out to everyone I knew for a data recovery expert. An EarthLink customer referred me to a firm in San Diego, and within minutes, the damaged tape was speeding south in a car. We fielded calls from angry customers while waiting anxiously for news. Many hours later, we received word that although some of the data was was lost, most of the information on the tape had been taken off bit-by-bit and reconstructed. We were saved! The recovered file was loaded onto a hard drive and driven (there was no Gobbler back then) back to EarthLink's offices in LA. Our engineers stayed up all night and got us back online.

At EarthLink, February 14th, 1995 became known as the Valentines Day Massacre. We survived, and although our customers were rightfully angry with us, I think they also sensed that this was the early days of the Internet. Stuff didn't "just work" the way it does now. The next day, our modem banks were once again full of happily connected EarthLink customers. And I was back to figuring out out to hire and expand faster to keep up with demand.

Like many start-ups, there times in those early days at EarthLink when we were up against seemingly insurmountable obstacles. But we knew we had something that people wanted, so we kept going, forging ahead despite it all. Being successful, especially in a start-up, is all about perseverance. 

For a future post: How we blew up our building's power transformer and ran EarthLink for two months on a generator in the parking lot.

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Surfing in Indonesia

My last trip was with a great group of friends aboard the Indies Trader IV, captained by Indo surf pioneer Martin Daly. Finally got around to posting some of the best pictures here, all by the incomparable surf photographer, Dave Collyer.

Madison Avenue still hasn't caught up to Main Street

This has always been one of the most poignant comparisons in the Internet world, updated recently by Mary Meeker. TV has 31% of consumer media time and 39% of ad spending. Print gets 12% of consumer media time but a massive 26% of all ad spending. The Internet? 28% share of US consumer media time, yet a paltry 13% of ad spending. When looked at globally, that gap is worth $50 billion. This is an imbalance that won’t last.

Read the full presentation here: http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/16/ten-questions-internet-execs-should-ask-and-answer/

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A smart tour through the evolution of modern education

Sir Ken Robinson’s speech nails it. Although marketing by pharmaceutical companies has also been a big factor in the ADHD “epidemic.”