(this is totally unrelated to anything I’ve blogged about before)

A friend sent me a link to an old article on SFGate.com about the environmental impacts of having children.

Two delightful excerpts:

“Hall and his colleagues found that a single new American born in the 1990s will be responsible, over his or her life, for 22 million pounds of liquid waste and 2.2 million pounds each of solid waste and atmospheric waste. He or she will have a lifetime consumption of 4,000 barrels of oil, 1.5 million pounds of minerals and 62,000 pounds of animal products that will entail the slaughter of 2,000 animals.”

Wow.

Another gem:

“In terms of energy usage alone, [which is] a convenient measure of environmental impact,” Knight says, “the average Ethiopian uses one 310th of what we use. So when an American couple stops at two kids it’s like an Ethiopian couple stopping at 620.”

This makes me wonder at the irony of passionate environmentalists driving around a couple of kids in their Prius’. It also makes me wonder if every single dollar we spend on environmentalist causes oughtn’t be redirected to things like birth control education, birth control research, and free vasectomies.

The right to freely reproduce is so sacrosanct in this world (and especially in the US) that people get REALLY uncomfortable when discussing (or even thinking about) the relative immorality of reproduction.

RELATIVE. I’m not going to go so far as goofiness like the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. I’m all for continuation of the species. But can we set aside our love of sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood and think about the consequences of our actions?

One parting thought. When I talk a bit about the fact that my wife and I don’t have any plans to have children, most parents sadly shake their heads. “You don’t know the joy that you’re missing” or “You’re going to be so lonely when you’re old,” are common responses. From what I can tell from this article, there is no apparent relationship between having children and happiness/contentment/satisfaction (the only exception being if you WANT to have children but cannot).

(for the record, I eat meat, drink from paper cups, drive when I feel like it, and occasionally don’t recycle. So I’m throwing stones from a bit of a glass house, here)

With much pageantry and fanfare, the 2012 Olympics logo has been unleashed upon the world, and it appears to be a disaster. It reminds of another logo debacle back in my home town.

My favorite bit of coverage on the logo is (predictably) from Seth Godin, who talks about the accompanying quote on the press release:

“This is the vision at the very heart of our brand,” said London 2012 organising committee chairman Seb Coe.

“It will define the venues we build and the Games we hold and act as a reminder of our promise to use the Olympic spirit to inspire everyone and reach out to young people around the world.

“It is an invitation to take part and be involved.”

What the HELL does that even mean?

It reminds me of the book I’m reading (and continue to be bowled over by)… “Made to Stick” by the brothers Heath. One of the stickiest passages in the book is when they talk about John F. Kennedy saying “”I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” The Heaths suggested that nowadays a statement like that would’ve gotten thoroughly mangled by corporate wordsmiths to read more like “The United States will leverage our aeronautical expertise and our commitment to scientific excellence to achieve what we feel is a laudable goal for this decade. Our actions need to reflect the promise of our established national brand. The support this brand, we invite the world to watch us and be inspired as we begin the 10-year process of getting to the moon.”

When you start throwing around big money for branding and having your corporate spin doctors pile on the double-speak, it can feel pretty damn manipulative. And now that anyone can voice their opinion on these wonderful intertubes of ours, the people who feel manipulated can let you know how they feel. Well, as London 2012 organising committee chairman Seb Coe says, “It is an invitation to take part and be involved.”

Human beings are pretty hardwired for instant gratification. We’d all be healthier and happier if we went to the gym regularly, ate right, brushed our teeth, went to the dentist, avoided overexposure to the sun, etc. Instead, we sit in front of the TV because it’s easy and entertaining. We eat fattening food because it tastes damn good.

To search engine marketing equivalent to sitting on your ass in front of the television with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s is PPC (pay per click) search engine marketing. Don’t get me wrong– I understand that wrangling Google Adwords can be hard work. There is a lot of skill and science there. But it isn’t necessarily the most healthy way you could work to market your company. In fact, with all of the attention and competition that you find in Adwords, it’s oftentimes a pretty lousy deal. And, for the businesses that don’t have a strong viral component, it’s a flow of visitors that will stop the instant you stop spending the ad dollars.

The smart Adwords folks will carefully craft a funnel that goes all the way to a “conversion” – whether it’s a sale, a user signup, or whatever. Say you’re selling a widget online for $50, with a 50% profit margin (walking away with a clean $25 per widget– not bad!). All you have to do is make sure you pay less that $25 per buyer and you’re making money with Adwords.

Unfortunately, here are other widget sellers out there. They might be sitting on a huge supply of widgets that they have to unload at a loss (meaning that they can bid more per click than you can). They might be backed by VCs, who are hollering at them to drive up sales (even if it’s at a loss). Maybe their profit margins are higher than yours, allowing them to comfortably bid higher. Maybe their funnel is more effective than yours. Or they might just not be bright enough to know how much profit they make on a per-widget basis (“We might lose money, but we’ll make it up on volume!”).

So what’s the best alternative to Adwords?

It’s good old fashioned organic traffic. Being “linkworthy”. Search engine optimization. Burying your customers in service to the point where they are fanatical about recommending you to their widget-buying friends. Building compelling content on your site/blog so that people will link to you (this is a subset of SEO nowadays, really).

It’s not as fun, not as easily measurable, and it’s not NEARLY as instant as pay-per-click marketing. It’s the lifestyle equivalent of eating your veggies and taking a brisk jog a couple of times a week. Sadly, most businesses don’t have the discipline to invest time and money in efforts that generate healthy organic traffic. It just doesn’t provide the short-term shot in the arm that CPC does.

Brian Halligan (of Small Business Hub) offers some pretty compelling arguments for investing in SEO:

1. If you rank high for organic results, it is (typically) long lasting. So, the time/money you spend helping yourself move up the ranks is relatively persistent while the PPC campaign is money spent over and over again.
2. Organic results are clicked on a lot more than paid results, especially for well educated crowds. I read a study that showed dramatic differences as you moved from high school eduction to associate degrees to bachelors to masters to phd’s. The more educated your prospect, the less likely they are to click on an advertisement. If you are selling to high school students, you should buy cpc ads. If you are selling to engineers or professors, you need to think more about seo because that’s where the volume is.
3. Organic clicks convert at least as well as paid clicks. Marketing Sherpa’s Search Marketing Benchmark study of 3,217 marketers showed that organic clicks converted at an average of 4.2% v. 3.6% for paid.
4. Often times searchers visit your site more than once before self-selecting into a form, whitepaper, etc. We track this data carefully at HubSpot and notice that a decent portion of the leads we get are from people who have visited the site through multiple searches over multiple months. Organic search campaigns have more latency.
5. Marketing Sherpa reports that in the b2b environment, less than one-fourth of b2b buyers to look to paid listings in their first try at accessing information.
6. Many think of Google as a search company, but I think of them as a modern media conglomerate with an ultra-efficient mechanism for selling advertisements that work particularly well in the longtail. Like other media companies, Google benefits from efficient pricing of advertising. As more and more niche companies start to advertise on Google, their prices will become more efficient and their rates will become less and less attractive relative to other media outlets.

So do yourself a favor. Head over to SEOMOZ (my personal favorite SEO resource) and spend a few hours reading their free stuff.

(and be sure to eat your veggies)

I am a big proponent of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) at Jobster… I find the elusiveness of it exciting and the economies of scale interesting.

Anyhoo, I’ve always tried to “own” the search phrase “Tony Wright” in search engines. I have a big leg up (owning the tonywright.com domain), but I have some stiff competition. My arch-nemisis is a UK politician who shares my name. He’s written about and linked to (by name) several times a week, so I don’t have much hope of being the number one result.

Recently, much to my horror, a new Tony Wright has flashed onto the scene… And this guy is (get this) trying for the world record of sleep deprivation (11 days, if you’re curious).

There has been some interesting discussion of late about the relationship between youth and successful entrepreneurship. It started with a from-the-hip post by Fred Wilson (which he later elaborated on).

After looking at the chart posted on Valleywag, it got me wondering about how old a fella has to be before he ought to get out of the business of startups.

After reading Fred’s musings and the (damn insightful) blog entry by Clay Shirky, I feel (at the ripe ol’ age of 35) less anxious about the whole thing. Of course, I might just be feeling young because I took the last couple of days off to pal around with my 70 year old father.

Clay states:

I’m old enough to know a lot of things, just from life experience. I know that music comes from stores. I know that you have to try on pants before you buy them. I know that newspapers are where you get your political news and how you look for a job. I know that if you want to have a conversation with someone, you call them on the phone. I know that the library is the most important building on a college campus. I know that if you need to take a trip, you visit a travel agent.

In the last 15 years or so, I’ve had to unlearn every one of those things and a million others. This makes me a not-bad analyst, because I have to explain new technology to myself first — I’m too old to understand it natively. But it makes me a lousy entrepreneur.

“A Lot of Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing”

One thing that struck me about the “unlearnings” that Clay brings up is that they are pretty idea-centric. That is to say, these are the sort of learnings that could keep you, as an entrepreneur, from hitting upon the “big idea”. As I’ve mentioned before (liberally quoting from folks who are smarter than I am), ideas aren’t necessarily in short supply. While I’m sure many startups fail for lack of a good idea, I’d wager the majority fail from poor execution. Methodologies, strategies, and staffing levels that work at Fortune 500 companies simply don’t fly in a small company. The careful modeling, planning, and PowerPoint wrangling that you learn in business school really isn’t a great way to invest your time when your business model might need to change dramatically in a month or two. And I’d wager that the more experienced you are (and the more confident you are in your hard-won wisdom), the less likely you’re going to be able to adapt to working in a small business environment.

I want to explore this a bit more, but (given that I’m buried under a pile of email) it’ll have to wait for another blog post.

In the startup world, people oftentimes use the term “runway” to describe the amount of time we have before we run out of money and need to be profitable. I just read a quote which I think is a lot more appropriate (and creates a greater sense of urgency).

“An entrepreneur who’s just left his day job is like a guy who jumped off a cliff and must assemble his airplane on the way down from a bag of parts.

That airplane is revenue and profit. You need to build that airplane before you hit the ground.

The bottom line is: TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!!! Do not waste a minute of it surfing the web, IM’ing, blogging, hanging out at Starbucks, networking with interesting but useless people, or ANYTHING that does not contribute to building that airplane. After the airplane is built and you’re flying, then you can relax a bit and do more of the stuff you enjoy.”

Love that.

(apologies for the lack of gender neutrality in this entry– idea girls exist too…)

I had a colleague the other day refer to me as an “idea guy”. I’m sure they meant it as a compliment, but I winced when I heard it. As a guy who tends to lurk in entrepreneurial circles, I often run into self-identified “idea guys” (usually, they are in “stealth mode”, which I generally find similarly ridiculous)– and virtually every time I do, I tend to walk away shaking my head. Here are 5 quick reasons why your startup doesn’t need an “idea guy”:

1. Everyone is an idea guy. Well, strictly speaking, that’s not the case. I’ve met plenty of folks who aren’t interested (or aren’t good at) the strategy and tactics of software/product development. There are plenty of engineers out there who just want interested technology to fiddle with and couldn’t care less what the grand plan is. There are plenty of designers who just want a good set of design specs so they can make pretty pictures or highly usable prototypes. There are plenty of salesfolks who don’t give a darn what they are selling. So what makes an idea guy an idea guy? Usually it’s the simple fact that they don’t have any other skills to bring to the startup.

2. By virtue of the fact that they consider themselves an idea guy, it quite likely means that they are convinced that their ideas are better than yours (or anyone elses). Of course they are! They are an idea guy! The big problem with this is that startup ideas need to change… Very few startups stick with the exact same idea. How excited is an idea guy going to be about shifting to a new idea that he didn’t generate? Not very exited, as it turns out.

3. Ideas are relatively valueless… because smart people say so. Don’t believe me? Here’s what Paul Graham has to say (though I think the argument about the “sellability” of ideas is pretty weak). Don’t believe Paul? How about Guy Kawasaki? One one my favorite quotes from Guy when he was asked how an entrepreneur could keep their idea from being stolen. His response was “”You could discuss it with no investors, show it to no customers and never hire employees….” (see it in context).

As a test, approach a dozen venture capitalists. Explain that your primary skillset is “idea generation”. Do your best to defend this and give copious examples of your genius. Go home and wait for the phone to ring.

4. Ideas aren’t defensible. Google “First Mover advantage” and you can find all sorts of people debunking that particular myth. Google moved into an established market and clobbered it. Ipods certainly weren’t the first MP3 player. Dodgeball lost out to Twitter. Friendster was sucker-punched by Facebook and MySpace. The first movers spend tremendous amounts of money educating the market and making all sorts of stupid mistakes and the second movers come in when the market is primed and make it look easy.

5. In startup businesses, idea guys run out of things to do pretty quickly. There’s no room in a startup organization for someone to sit around and spew out ideas. Startups need builders, whether you’re building software, hardware, visual interfaces, teams, bank accounts, or audiences. If you’re a founder, you probably need to be good at more than one of these things.

Despite the evidence to the contrary, I feel like every day I run into founder and consultants who think having a million dollar idea is enough to bring to the table. Most of the time, I think this is because they haven’t the faintest clue how hard it is to turn a great idea into a great product or service.

I’m a big fan of Guy Kawasaki’s blog.

Today he has an interview with Penelope Trunk, author of “Brazen Careerist”.

One of the things that really struck me was the following passage:

“Question: How much money does it take to be happy?

Answer: It takes about $40,000. It does not matter how many kids you have or what city you live in—that’s splitting hairs because peoples’ happiness levels are largely based on their level of optimism and the quality of their relationships. So as long as you have enough money for food and shelter, your optimism level kicks in to dictate how happy you are.”

Very very true.

Just read a great article on BBC by way of Slashdot about Web 2.0 (tip o’ the hat to Brian Fioca, who IM’ed me the link) It liberally quotes usability-zealot Jakob Nielsen who, as you can imagine, is not all that enamored with the Web 2.0 movement.

As usual, someone more famous than me summarizes some of my thoughts better than I’m capable of.

What I find strange about Web 2.0 is that we web geeks are losing sight of the fact that the vast majority of people use the internet as a tool. They want information. They want pictures. They want music. They want to buy stuff. They want to search for jobs.

But do they really want to socialize online, just for the sake of socializing?

Certainly teenagers do. I suppose I would too if I had a job that was 8am-3pm, had virtually no responsibilities, and had 16 weeks of vacation time.

There’s a great new study out that says:

• 15% of Americans don’t have an internet connection
• 10% view the Internet as a “hassle” (probably because ever site is trying to get them to join their community)
• About 50% of the population “doesn’t use the internet very much. I’d presume that when they DO use it, they use it as a utility.

To me, the most exciting startups are those that solve problems. That provide a transactional product or service. That, in the words of Nielsen, allow users to “get in, get it, get out”.

I tend to be suspicious of businesses that are trying to create an online “community”. You can certainly build a successful business by doing so. But I think online communities are extremely challenging to build, and they tend to turn off the much-more-massive audience that Nielsen talks about. Amazon would be a LOT less easy to use if they were constantly bombarding me with community features.

Look at LinkedIn. They’ve been around since 2002. They’ve gotten over 28 million in VC and they have a tremendously viral service (WAY before it was cool to be viral!). They are the poster child for social networking for grownups. Yet they’ve only managed to collect 9 million accounts in 5 years (and I’d wager than only a fraction of those are active given that it’s nigh impossible to delete a LinkedIn account).

To this day, I still hear people ask, “So what can you DO on LinkedIn?” I’m hard-pressed to give an answer.

At the end of the day, there seems to be a pretty finite number of adults for whom social networking is at all relevant. And there’s a huge pile of sites that are vying for the attention of these busy users. I’d wager that the only ones who are going to succeed (on a grand scale) are also going to allow the other 90% of the internet audience to “get in, get it, and get out”.

I am, in general, not a huge fan of huge piles of widgets on blogs– I don’t really know why. The only reason that I can think of is that too many widgets offend my delicate design sensibilities. Blogs covered with widgets tend to look like patchwork quilts to me. Even though my blog template is pretty much a slightly-altered version of a free Wordpress template, I like the clean look.

Yet here I am, dropping a second widget on my site… Not only does it happen to actually match my current blog template quite a bit better than the first blog widget I added (sorry Mark!), but it also happens to be one that I helped build.

So, without further ado, I introduce you to BlogBuddy (the gray flavored widget on the right). You can get yours here!

Phil Bogle, CTO at Jobster, was the technical genius behind the widget. See his writeup here.

Blog Buddy is decidedly a beta project– many of the features that I think really will make it sizzle are still to come!