Robi Ganguly’s Big Ideas

We all face challenges in our lives, big and small. How we face them and deal with them defines us: to ourselves and to others.

The way in which Nick Vujicic faces his challenges inspires me, I hope it inspires you as well.

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I do a lot of thinking about the economy, the stock market and how to build great businesses. Like Howard Lindzon says, Twitter’s killed my blog too, but I need to remedy that. Let’s combine some humor (not mine) and insights (hopefully mine ). Here are some interrelated observations in my head right now:

• As I work on building ideas & companies of my own while watching politicians, media pundits and anal-ysts (they charge people for predictions they don’t follow or stand behind, WTF is going on here??) futilely attempt to make sense of what’s going on in the midst of our globe’s financial tornado I think to myself: these guys are talking too damned much.
• Credit was built on trust. When credit was invented it was highly controversial for a lot of reasons, but one was because of something we seem to have forgotten: money is based on trust as well.
• I don’t think any of us should trust a single bank until they can prove to us that they’re trustworthy again, individually and in aggregate. The Government’s actions aren’t fucking helping make us trust them any more, so their involvement is mostly absurd. The trust we’re talking about isn’t trust that they’ll lose all our money, it’s that they don’t know what the hell they’re doing it and are COSTING US ALL MONEY. I don’t trust them to not gamble all of our aggregate profits away.
• Profitable companies that have massive amounts of cash, no debt and high margins should be getting reamed for hoarding their cash unintelligently, as many of them are doing. Profits are to re-invest in your business, your ideas and your future.
• Assets and people are on a fire sale right now, why aren’t winner companies investing? Microsoft, Google, eBay, Yahoo, et al are announcing layoffs and basically indicating that they’re either: a) afraid of using the word “fire” and lying about layoffs or b) making decisions in reaction to the stock market, as opposed to making decisions based on plans and opportunity. To which I say: you all need to step up to the plate and be leaders right now.
• If you’re pissed off, bummed out, frustrated or just plain confused, remember one thing: you can work harder. Step up and be a leader in your own life.
  

Last night’s South Park episode was funny and unrelenting in pointing out the stupid pyramid of lies we see around us. I recommend watching it and thinking about it in the context of our ongoing credit crisis.

South Park - “The Pinewood Derby”

A few choice quotes:

Dedicated to Iceland’s defunct economy: “Hey guys, Finland’s dead…. Hey guys, somebody better break the news to Norway, they were pretty close.”

To all of the politicians and bankers who think they should talk about transparency but not actually provide it: “And if I’m not honest now, I’ll have to keep this lie going on forever and it’ll just grow and grow.”

To anyone who thinks that “solving” the credit problems facing our globe isn’t within our power: “There is no space jail and space cash is only worth what YOU decide it’s worth. I mean, come on, how stupid is your species?”

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I know, I know, this is my second lengthy video in a row, but this is also a really great piece of video that I’ve been meaning to share out.

I’ve been following Gary V. for about a year now, seeing how he markets himself and his business. I’ve been impressed with his energy, enthusiasm and his really impressive grasp of how to use the Internet to communicate with people and build an audience. The theories in my head often play out, in the real world, through his actions. Watching him gets me fired up to go get more real shit done, so hopefully watching this interview might have the same impact on you

(PS: By the way, he’s not bullshitting about his work ethic and getting through his email. I emailed him recently and heard back within a day, it was pretty shocking.)

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Finally got around to watching this excellent Charlie Rose interview of Marc Andreessen from February and I highly recommend taking the time to watch it yourself. Shut off your TV and take in some thoughtful discussion about:

• Facebook/Twitter/Ning/LinkedIn and what it means to be socially connected in today’s digital environment
• Why Andy Grove and Jeff Bezos are alike
• Why Marc praises Bill Gates, rather than badmouthing him
• What it means for newspapers that they continue to get 90% of their revenues from print (hint, it’s a big obstacle)

Marc’s a very smart guy who’s been part of much of the Internet’s development and evolution. If you’re at all involved in online business and innovation, I highly recommend the 54 minutes.

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Been meaning to share this for a while. This sums up a lot of what I think about the world:

Hat tip to Brad Feld, who said the same thing a while back and introduced me to the video

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Windows support.

That’s right, they should support Windows – for developers.

What Apple is doing with its App Store and the iPhone OS revisions is creating the market for developers who create and sell mobile apps… on Apple’s platform of course. Learning from the PC battles, they’ve quite obviously focused on the idea that more apps = more ways to meet consumer needs and therefore, it should result in more revenue for Apple from their primary customers: Consumers.

Given that dynamic, it makes very little sense that only those with Apple machines (and yes, some folks on Unix/Linux..) can develop iPhone applications. Since the predominant operating system is Windows, doesn’t it make sense that you should support all of the developers who are on Windows? (I know, I know, since when does Apple make sense to anyone but themselves?)

In all of the blogs and reporting covering the lead-up to today’s announcement, I’ve been pretty shocked that this issue hasn’t been turned into a larger piece of the conversation. Apple’s addressable developer market is MUCH smaller than it could be. Ultimately, the other players in the market are all going to be competing for developers alongside Apple.  Although Apple’s device and platform might be much better, if they’re not supporting Windows developers, they won’t be tapping into the largest pool of developers.

What’s really interesting about this glaring lack of Windows support is how easily we can draw parallels between this situation and previous Apple products and their associated growth. If we just pull up the unit sales charts for the iPod and for Mac computers over the past several years we can point to inflection points that coincided with providing support for Windows.

Here, take a look at the iPod sales chart:

On October 16, 2003, Apple announced the release of iTunes for Windows, which meant that Windows PC owners could now purchase and manage their iPods (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/oct/16itms.html).  I’ve highlighted that quarter above and while I won’t say it was the ONLY thing that led to a change in the iPod’s sales trajectory, it certainly would appear to have coincided with a new sales trend. Up until that point in time, the iPod was really just a blip on the MP3 market radar.

Next, let’s take a look at the sale of Mac Computers:

During the first week of April, 2006, Apple announced that it would release a piece of software it called “Bootcamp” on its Intel-powered computers. Bootcamp was meant to enable the use of Microsoft Windows on Macs, a pretty wild idea at the time. I decided to purchase some Apple stock, based on that announcement, hypothesizing that it would increase the addressable market for Apple computers and boost their sales. Taking a look at the absolute growth in units sold, that hypothesis has been proven out nicely ☺ (note, I no longer own that stock).

I want to be clear: I don’t think it’s fair to attribute either iPod or Mac sales growth solely to Windows-related accessibility. Instead, I’d like to suggest that being accessible via Windows is clearly beneficial and could prove to be transformative to Apple’s ultimate goal: iPhone and iPhone-related sales.

As an investor, an iPhone owner and someone who’s working on mobile app development, I look forward to the day when Apple looks at these realities and agrees with me :-).

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I’ve always wanted to do a road trip across the United States of America. Tomorrow, I’m finally going to get the chance to do so. My girlfriend, Katie, and I are setting off tomorrow from her family’s home in Sarasota, FL and we’ll be on the road for a little over a week before coming to a rest in Seattle, WA. I’m pretty excited about driving through a large swath of the Southern part of the United States and getting a small chance to see what it’s like. If you’ve got any recommendations for stops we might want to make along the way, please let me know. Our route currently looks like this, but we might make some detours for compelling reasons

View Larger Map

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I’ve been writing on my blog about today’s election and the nature of politics for over a year now. One of my earliest posts was one called, “This is What Politics Looks in America Looks Like Today.” I discussed how difficult it is being a politician in the United States today and how my childhood ambitions to become President had been squashed by the viciousness of the political process.

I sit here in Las Vegas, NV, volunteering for the Obama campaign and I can say something that astonishes me: Barack Obama has changed my mind. His campaign has made me think differently about politics and my own future.

I consider a few things in thinking about this:

• The news media of our country makes it hard to communicate nuanced and complicated arguments to the population.
• The majority of people don’t have the time or interest to sift through the noise, lies and attacks that are typical of political campaigns.
• The reality is that many people vote on single issues and are susceptible to a political environment that dampens dialogue and increases anger, frustration and division.

Despite this situation, Obama and his campaign have managed to run on a platform of positive change and unity. Defying the pundits and my own skepticism, he has motivated not just thousands, but HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people to volunteer and to donate… to ACT.

It’s estimated that the Obama campaign has over a MILLION volunteers today, Election Day. That’s simply amazing.

THIS is what we need in this country. We need leaders who show us that through action we can make our lives, our community, our states and our country better. We need leaders who both tell us and inspire us to do our part, to do more than we think that we are capable of, in every community across the nation.

Although the polls are still open and I don’t know how this election will turn out, I am hopeful, regardless of who is elected. I am hopeful that this campaign has woken its volunteers AND others who have lived in skeptical reluctance to the idea that they could make change happen by taking action. That by being honest, positive and focused on the achievement of common goals that we all can accomplish great things together.

YES

WE

CAN

It’s not just a campaign slogan. It’s truth. The truth that together, we are more than just our wants and needs. Together, we can become our hopes and ambitions.

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Amazon has come a long way since its early days as “just” an online bookseller. Having been introduced to the company in its infancy (back when it was a plucky Seattle-area Internet business), I’ve followed the company fairly closely over the years and really come to admire it. Whether it was its early forays into personalization or the way it went about executing against its vision regardless of Wall Street’s fickle and unrealistic expectations, the company has convinced me that it has its head on straight and is building for the long run.

Given that I spent several years working on the advertising business of Yahoo!, it’s only natural that I would take some of that experience and apply it to my thoughts about Amazon. In doing so, I’ve developed a point of view on how Amazon could leave their mark on the online advertising space.

First things first, Amazon brings an existing set of strengths built on an understanding of the online customer that should shape any offering that comes from them. As I see it, that implies some core principles for Amazon advertising:

1. Personalization matters: Look across the landscape of online companies and ask yourself this: does any company do it as well as Amazon? If you’re an Amazon customer, you get recommendations from them while surfing the site that are generally quite good. More impressive though, is the fact that the times when they choose to email me a recommendation, they’re often right. This leads to us a second, and related point.
2. Be conservative with your recommendations: Many people see the advertising space as a question of ,“How do we get advertisers to buy against our inventory?” Amazon’s email recommendations come infrequently and, as a result, hold more weight in my inbox. I believe them to be conservative in choosing when to promote a product and if I’m right, it’s one of their great strengths. In approaching the advertising opportunity, they should be thinking about the question, “When are we justified in creating inventory and who gets to advertise against it?”
3. Your customers are your salespeople: Jeff Bezos said in an interview last year with Charlie Rose that, “The Internet is a word-of-mouth accelerator.” EXACTLY.  Amazon Associates is perhaps the web’s most popular and acceptable affiliate marketing program.  Amazon Web Services has grown up around enabling this activity in a very robust way, with a huge variety of endpoints that sell products for Amazon. There is huge power for the future of commercial communications (marketing, advertising, customer service etc.) in this model.

Given those principles and adding in my perspective that just copying existing ad models isn’t that interesting for Amazon, I believe that there are 2 initial areas where the company could focus its time:

1. Open up the recommendations process to paying advertisers, particularly those in the media space
2. Revamp the Amazon Associates program to more easily involve ALL of Amazon’s existing customers AND extend it to appeal to all digital consumers

In short, I believe that Amazon has an opportunity to really change Internet advertising by embracing the idea that personalization is a problem best solved en masse. Creating a marketplace around personalization, such that advertisers can influence it to make recommendations better and consumers can benefit from positive outcomes they’re already driving has the potential to change online commerce.

I’ll add some more detail to these ideas.

The first area of focus:

Open up the recommendations process to paying advertisers, particularly those in the media space.

As I mentioned above, Amazon is already routinely sending out product recommendations, notifications of forthcoming product releases and suggesting products I might like while surfing the site. To my knowledge, these recommendations are currently “pure”, generated algorithmically. I believe that with a very conservative approach to the opportunity, combined with a LOT of testing and the institution of robust feedback mechanisms (a customer should always be able to say NO and tell Amazon when it’s doing a bad job), Amazon could upgrade its accuracy by inviting advertisers to compete to show up in the recommendations.

An example of this: Say that you bought Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking a few weeks ago. Imagine that you had previously bought his book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference as well. Now, normally, the recommendations engine at Amazon would most likely notify you in a few weeks that Gladwell has a new book coming out Outliers: The Story of Success.

This is a pretty good process and does a lot for the consumer, but there’s an opportunity to improve the consumer’s knowledge about an author they probably like a good bit while making some money for Amazon. You see, Malcolm Gladwell isn’t just an author, he’s a writer for the New Yorker as well. The New Yorker, being a for-profit publication, is interested in having more subscribers and readers of its content, so it stands to reason that if they could work with Amazon to reach loyal purchasers of Gladwell’s books, they would take advantage of that opportunity. Again, it would be really important for Amazon, in creating this opportunity, to be conservative in its application and highly focused on soliciting feedback from its customers about the recommendations, but done well, it should add a whole new (and welcome) dimension to the Amazon customer experience.

Remember, this is but one example of how this could be applied. It should be noted that you can think about this with regards to other forms of media rather easily (digital music, video and television make perfect sense). From a process perspective, Amazon could experiment with this concept, refine the technology and the user experience and then reap the eventual rewards that would accumulate as the feedback loop on the recommendations makes Amazon’s database much more intelligent than competing systems.

Moving on…

The second area of focus:

Revamp the Amazon Associates program to more easily involve ALL of Amazon’s existing customers AND then extend it to appeal to all digital consumers

In the last year, Amazon has introduced some enhancements to its Associates program that makes the process of sharing links and recommendations far more easy and powerful. However, the opportunity to expand this program to every single one of Amazon’s customers strikes me as a no-brainer that’s not being fulfilled. Right now, in order to be an Amazon Associate, you have to be aware of the program, navigate to its location on the site and go through a sign-up process that is relatively intimidating for the average customer. The goal should be to make every Amazon customer an Associate at the outset.

Every time a customer shares a product, they should be given a unique link that attributes any sales to their account, at the very least giving them future purchase credit. Instead of focusing massive amounts of attention on just the developers, as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and others are doing, Amazon has the opportunity to expand past the developers to the end consumer. Of course the company should be enabling the developers and the Amazon Web Services offerings are exceptional.

BUT, the opportunity to enable others is much more larger than just  the development community:

In our emails, IMs, Twitters, Facebook messages, blog posts, comments and all other forms of digital communications, we are influencing others to take action and make purchases. Amazon’s Associates infrastructure could hold the key to really unlocking the value in these small moments of influence. In so doing, they stand a strong chance of mobilizing the world’s largest distributed sales force: the consumers. Implementing this idea certainly carries a great number of risks around fraud, spam and general abuse, but because Amazon has dealt with many of these issues already in releasing and maintaining their products, they have exceptional opportunity. This idea really deserves much more discussion on its own, but I think that you can ask yourself a few questions here to really think about Amazon’s opportunity here:

• Who else can successfully run the experiments in this arena that connect consumers and commercial action?
• Who else offers the infrastructure and support to developers that could quickly extend the compensation model for consumers to to other sites?
• Who else can work on this area without risking cannibalization of their existing lines of business?

This post has run pretty long already, so I’m going to draw it to a close so you all can digest. What I’d love to hear in the comments is how you react to these ideas and what you think needs to be fleshed out more for discussion. I’ve got a lot more to write about on this topic, so let’s get a discussion going.

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If you’re out there, thinking to yourself that the poll numbers look great and this election is in the bag, STOP.

Stop thinking that you don’t have anything to do in the next 3 weeks. 

I admit, the situation looks rather rosy at the moment, but if you really want to see a President Obama in the White House, I urge you to listen to what the man is saying:

THIS IS OUR TIME 

What do you think that means folks? OUR time.. WE need to be involved. 

"Be the change you want to see in the world."

                         -Mahatma Gandhi

From one of mankind’s greatest philosophers AND one of our most effective leaders comes a reminder for us all: we must make this election go the way we would like.

It’s important to me to see Barack Obama elected. I’ve been doing a number of things to play a part in his candidacy and I have many friends who have been doing the same. Have you?

Some ideas about what you can do to get Barack Obama elected over the next 3 weeks:

1. Familiarize yourself with the "battleground states" of this election: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Colorado, Nevada, Michigan.
2. Talk to your friends in those swing states about the election: Don’t be pushy, but create conversations, have meaningful, in-depth discussions of the issues that matter to you. Avoid hyperbole and emotional, pithy remarks and engage in behavior that is required of a CITIZEN:
   • Look at your phone’s address book and scroll through it. Do you have any friends in those states? Have you not talked to them in a while? Give them a ring. Talk about the election.
   • Open up your email address book and do the same thing - look to see who among your friends are in these swing states. Email them, start a dialogue. Share digital media that you’ve watched, read, listened to or even created about the election that you find interesting and useful in making your decisions.
   • Are you on MySpace/Facebook/Bebo/iMeem/Friendster/LinkedIn/Plaxo? If so, the tools aren’t great, but you can use these services to identify friends who are in the battleground states - take 30 mins and make a list of 10, 15, 20 friends. Reach out to them.
3. Share your enthusiasm for action with other like-minded friends: It’s always more fun to work as a part of a team. Create your own small team of friends who are taking actions to share, discuss and promote the Obama campaign. Pass this blog post on, recruit people to come up with more ideas than the ones I’ve listed here.
4. Donate to the campaign: Here is the link to my donations page (get me past $0 folks!), but you can just as easily go to the main donation page, located here.
5. Volunteer for the campaign: (sign up at: http://action.barackobama.com/page/s/volunteer)
   • Make calls in the coming weeks with local supporters and contact your neighbors: http://my.barackobama.com/page/votercontact/details
   • Hop in your car and head to a nearby battleground state, if it’s feasible for you (SF friends, there are several trips to Nevada planned).
6. Create your own media for the campaign:
   • If you have a blog, write on it.
   • If you go to a rally, take pictures and video of it and share with your friends.
   • If you have artistic inclinations, create your own Obama logo and put it in your email signatures, on your social network profile, in your IM profiles etc.. If you don’t, go find logos here
7. Wear your support for the campaign: t-shirts, bumper stickers, pins, signs.. all of these will help show your support and remind others.
8. Remind all of your friends to vote on election day!

These are just my ideas, please add your own in the comments.

Also, here are some interesting sites to check out along these lines:

http://www.returntoohio.com/ 

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/on-road-grand-junction-colorado.html 

http://thegreatschlep.com/

Finally, for those who are trying to figure out what media to share with their friends, here are some of my favorite speeches/ads/media/articles:

Articles and links:

Attack Tactics backfiring on McCain

Obama’s career timeline, detailing why the experience question is pretty silly

New Yorker on Barack Obama back in 2007

Lengthy piece on "Obamanomics" from August

Ads and Videos:

A recent ad that tells us more about Obama’s background

Obama’s speech on 10/13/08 about the economic crisis.

Inspiring video created for the convention.

Obama’s Speech on Race - "A More Perfect Union": one of the most amazing speeches I’ve ever seen.

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