All the best Mr. Fishkin

Rand Fishkin is probably the most quoted person in online marketing. If you've been working in marketing you've probably seen his face, one of his Whiteboard Fridays videos or read a quote of his in a trends report. He's a proper SEO geek. He's a legend. He has his own memes.

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There are many things I learned from the Wizard of Moz (the online marketing software company he founded and run for several years). I like that he practices what he preaches. He seems like a hands-on person that has done many times what he's talking about. I like that he constantly seems to be learning and exploring. And I like that he shares what he learns, in his own quirky way.

He announced this week, in a brutally honest way, that he was leaving the company to do other stuff. I highly recommend you to read his article. Farewell to him. Here are 3 paraphrased quotes that resonated with me.

About empathy as a founder.

“The best skill I’ve developed and the one that’s served me best as a founder, a CEO, and a marketer is empathy. Being able to put myself in the shoes of other people and imagine their pain, their problems, their workflows and speed bumps has been invaluable both on the product side and in creating content. ”

About customers versus important people 'in your boardroom'.

“At Moz, weighting powerful, important, high-profile people’s opinions higher than our customers opinions inevitably led to doom. Dumb. When building a company, customers (and potential customers) > almost everyone else.”

About magic tricks that don't work.

“Tricks, hacks, and individual point solutions never made a big impact for us (and honestly, they’ve never made a big impact for any other company I’ve worked with or advised, either). For years I thought that the one right move would accelerate growth or the one right feature would make everyone love our product. But in fact, it’s when the whole became better than the sum of its parts that magic happened. ”

The Pitch by Jenny Lefcourt

I'm leaving this here because I'll need it in a few days – I might be working on a big pitch for a growing startup. This is a great video about pitching your company to get funding. There are tons of them online. I have to say it's refreshing that it's not an old man with grey hair in a black suit. Kudos to Jenny Lefcourt for putting together this great presentation.

Silence

NOBL Collective is a new 'organizational design, management consulting, and leadership development' service company. They're a bunch of smart folks. I try to read a lot of their stuff. Their latest newsletter has an interesting take on silence and its value in an organization & meetings in general. Here's an excerpt:

“The key to better discussion? Silence.”

One of your most important jobs as a leader is to make sure that everyone in your team has the opportunity to contribute—but too often, meetings and brainstorming sessions are dominated by the same voices. To encourage more people to join the conversation, one of our favorite techniques is alternating rounds of silent, independent writing with open discussion. It’s so simple it seems obvious, and yet, every time we’ve done this at a client offsite, participants have thanked us for introducing this type of facilitation. 

Read the full text here

p.s. I'll add that: if compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world, silence has to be the ninth one.

Study Hard

This is a beautiful quote by Richard Feynman on how you should go about studying something new. I personally took that approach to learn how to do my job, how to play music and bunch of other things. I never thought about it that way. It certainly works better than anything else I've tried (school included).

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”
— Richard Feynman

And some context via Quora:

A Shift (Back)Toward Decentralization

This is a great tweet & video about why people are excited about decentralization.

Takeaway: we've centralized so many things on the web that it's getting harder and harder to innovate if you're not one of the top 5 players in the ecosystem. Basically, Facebook controls what you read. Amazon controls what you buy. YouTube/Netflix controls what you watch.

All the hype about decentralization (read: blockchain) is because it has the potential to bring back the excitement of the 90's – the feeling that you as an individual can build, contribute, etc. on the network that is the Internet. I'll dare to say – this actually looks like the Web 3.0.

Google's New Manager Training Slides

Google shared it's New Manager's training deck. It's full of interesting nuggets on how people 'work'. I sent to a few of my partners and collaborators last night. I think it's a keeper if you're an entrepreneur, a manager or just someone interested in how we, humans, work together.

Disclaimer: I made a carbon copy to my Google Drive so I can embed it here. This content is from rework.withgoogle.com (the "Website") and may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with the terms of use set forth on the Website.

The Crypto User's Pain Point

I'm on an endless quest to better understand what cryptocurrencies mean for my generation and the next ones. We can't deny that it got tens of thousands of millennials interested in finances and money – something banks have been trying to do for decades.

Thomas Lee of Fundstrat, who was lead equity researcher for JP Morgan, shared a great document that he presented at the recent Up Front Summit 2018. It's a bit heavy but skimming through the first slides will reveal an interesting story about trust and Millenials.

Objectively, my understanding is that crypto is a financial asset for millennials who distrust banks. The technology behind it, the blockchain, allows trustworthy exchanges between users without the need for a third party.

The crypto user's pain point is simply put, trust: 92 Percent of Millennials Don’t Trust Banks. The market for a product that adds trust in banking is huge and mostly outside of the U.S. And the organizations that deliver such product are new – they are decentralized and have weird names like Litecoin, Bitcoin, Monero, etc.*.

The desire to bypass the middleman was an extremely powerful driver in the growth of e-commerce. And what I'm reading here is that it is also a powerful driver in cryptocurrencies.

And that's the reason why I'm skeptical that banks will simply implement blockchains in their backends systems and that Millenials will line up to deposit their money there. If trust is the pain point, then being a decentralized system and not a proper company is not a bug, it's a feature.

*Since we're strictly talking about money here, I'm excluding cryptocurrencies that are trying to solve other pain points. Ethereum, for example, is trying to achieve something else than adding trust in banking. But that's another story.

Facebook's Great Social Responsability

This was taken from the opening statement of Facebook Q4 and Full 2017 earnings report:

“Already last quarter, we made changes to show fewer viral videos to make sure people’s time is well spent. In total, we made changes that reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day. By focusing on meaningful connections, our community and business will be stronger over the long term.”

Facebook says they do that to encourage meaningful connections between people rather than passive consumption of content. So our time is well spent.

That's great. And I completely agree with that. It's also a social responsibility for a social networking site to do so. Much like it is for a car company to work on reducing the carbon footprint of its car.

But the scary part is that we're not in control at all of what we consume, how we consume it and how much time in our day it grabs. Facebook pulls levers and cut 50 million hours of content consumption/day. And it seems effortless. We're not in control at all.

Do your homework

I enjoyed reading this article title Connecting and Pitching by Joan Wilson. Here's my favorite part. A good reminder to just do your homework.

Founders do your homework.  Know exactly who you are talking to when you enter the meeting, or for that matter before you even reply to an email.  Only ask for other introductions when it feels appropriate.  Feel the room and the tone.  Listen, as pauses are ok.  Don’t ramble.  Shake everyone’s hand and look them directly in the eye.  Put your phone away.  Be on time. Have an intellectual meaningful conversation around your vertical.  Think of these meetings as courtships.  You are courting them as much as they are courting you.

The Construction of the Brooklyn Bridge

I often think about bridges. Especially when I'm tinkering with a problem that I find challenging. It reminds me building a bridge would be much harder. And it's been done many times before. 

What strikes me in the construction of massive structures such as bridges is the gap between the vision and the actual work. You need to be extremely convinced and convincing to get people behind the idea.

I'm not an engineer. I'm not a builder. But I'm sure I can learn a thing or two from the guys who built them hundreds of years ago. 

Here's a cool video I found on Vimeo (a platform where we should spend much more time by the way) about the Brooklyn Bridge in New York.

How Fleetwood Mac Makes A Song

Beautiful video by The Nerdwriter about the importance of craftsmanship and having enough time and money to achieve your creative vision. And when you do – your product (whatever it is) can last much longer. This is Fleetwood Mac recording their classic Dreams.

A deconstruction of Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams," off their masterpiece 1977 album, Rumours. Get 10% any purchase here: http://squarespace.com/nerdwriter Support Nerdwriter videos: https://patreon.com/nerdwriter | Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SubNerdwriter Watch next: [similar video]: [link within playlist] Facebook: https://facebook.com/The-Nerdwriter-3... Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheeNerdwriter Patreon: https://patreon.com/nerdwriter SOURCES Ken Caillat, "Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album" https://www.amazon.com/Making-Rumours...

“They didn’t re-invent the wheel, it did the wheel in liquid gold.”

Intrinsic value of cryptocurrencies

I love Quora. I've been using it since 2013 and I keep on going back to it. Here's my profile.

Now that I know how to embed answers properly, I will start posting some of the stuff I find there.

Here's an interesting take on the intrinsic value of cryptocurrencies and money in general.

Customer Service, Twitter & Millennials

I hate dealing with customer service. But I think it's because I hate talking on the phone.

And I believe the Millenial generation (or whatever the name you give to young folks who grew up with the Internet), customer service is extremely annoying because it never goes through the channels we actually use in our daily life.

Give me a Twitter DM or a messenger channel, and I don't mind going back and forth all day with a customer service rep. It's not that we hate customer service reps, we hate the tools and the channels they use.

This is me asking Shutterstock via Twitter what's up with my bill. And them asking for send info via DM within 30 minutes. And me extremely happy I can do all of that while listening to music and working at the same time. It fits in my workflow. It's pleasant. Plus, all my info is digital, I can screenshot things in a second and attach it in the conversation.

We love asynchronous communication because it fits with our life. That's how we plan our weekends, share info/news and tell our friends and lovers we miss them.

I literally have to schedule days in advance when I'm going to call my ISP or mobile carrier. It's almost stressful. I know I'll be stuck on the phone for a while. Should I do it at lunchtime or while walking or in the car? It's completely unnatural to be stuck 45 minutes. 

Very sad fact: some people my age don't even pick up the phone to break up with their lover. They do it via text message. Do you think they want to pick up the phone to talk to you about their recent monthly billing? Slide into the DM, please!

Working offline

Travelling in rural areas of Sri Lanka reminds me of the pre-mobile era. Not the pre-Internet era but simply the era when Internet was not in our pockets. Not even 20 years ago we truly had to plan our use of the Internet. I remember reading gaming magazines, making a list of video games I wanted to download for the summer, taking a bus after school to the University where my mum was working, sneaking in the high-speed Internet room with a ZIP hard drive and using very efficiently my time there. I made sur I got my games in under one hour.

Now, I rarely plan my use of the Internet or technology. I jump on it and figure it out as I go. And consequently, I waste a lot time doing so. Working offline is not the analog of working online. Mixing offline and online work is simply a smarter way of doing things. 

Here are a few examples I wanted to write down to remind myself of that:

  • In my years working in e-commerce at l’Oréal, I used to mockup a lot of ideas on paper for my boss. He gave me the idea when I was in his office trying to explain what I had in mind for a product launch. He told me ‘just draw it to me on paper and we’ll start from there’. After that I mocked up Excel spreadsheets, websites, emails, full marketing campaigns, etc. just to get feedback on it.
  • When I wrote a thesis at HEC Montréal, I wasted a lot of time staring at a bank word document. My work started to make more sense when I started taking notes of my readings (books and articles) and playing with them physically (by shuffling them) to see how I could make sense of these principles.
  • In my years doing strategy work at lg2, I quickly realized it was more efficient to use a pen and paper to build the framework for a presentation and get feedback on it before putting any work into Keynote/Powerpoint/Word. You site down on a kitchen table, you write one idea per slide and mock up any visual representation needed, and you play with the order. You spot the gaps in your reasoning and you refine your story. You show it to someone and gather feedback. After that you write it down on the computer.

Working offline is not a worst way of working. Working offline means using your brain. Actively.

Working online means guiding the machine to do what you want to do. But you need to figure out that part first.

p.s. this is what I’m doing right now by writing all of this in a text-only Notes document. I will only publish it when I have access to the Internet. There’s no need in wasting 45 minutes of Facebook when all I wanted to do was write a blog post. That’s why I like working offline.

Building your knowledge village

This happened on Twitter a few days ago. I suggested a book to someone on Twitter and he answered back saying he'd read it and would probably re-read again. I caught myself thinking 'why would he re-read it?'.

It got me thinking that the way we learn (at least in North America) tends to favor quantity over quality. And one example of that is that we will very rarely re-read the same books twice. Instead, we go through books, articles and news in a linear way, as if they were mileage signs on a road we needed to keep moving forward on. And I realize this method of learning has its limits.

I don’t remember much from my high school geography class. I don’t remember much from my University’s accounting class. I don’t remember much from the books I read 3 years ago.

Wouldn’t it better to read, re-read, do and re-do the same things over and over? Isn’t it the only way we can truly absorb new knowledge and develop better skills? It feels like once we did something, it’s done. We checked it. But is it really useful in the future?

When I was 15 I wanted to become a professional snowboarder. The main thing I did when I was not snowboarding was watching movies and reading magazines. But I didn’t go through new ones all the times. I watched the same movies, the ones I thought were truly the best, over and over again. I must have watched them a thousand times. And every time I learned something. It’s scary to think that now, I go through a book, a movie or an article and I mentally check it.

If I’d have to map knowledge, I’d like mine to look more like a village than a road. And for that, you have to come back often to the same places. Even if it feels less exciting than visiting new ones. Building your knowledge village takes time and it will require forcing yourself to revisit areas you think you know well.

p.s. in 2018, I’m adding on my reading list a lof of basic history, geography and finance stuff I’ve seen in school. Because even if « I did all of this » it doesn’t feel like it in my day to day.

Monthly updates

Monthly updates come in many sizes and shapes. Depending on the kind of work you do, you are often required to update your boss, your team, your board, your investors, your teacher, your representative or even your family on how you're doing. And it sucks to do it. Become when you’re preparing your monthly update, presenting it, getting feedback on it or answering questions related to it, you’re not doing your work, your craft, your art.

Or so you think.

I used to have a love-hate relationship with monthly updates. I was working in e-Commerce and we were required to call and report daily, weekly and monthly sales. I hated that because it took 80% of my time to report things that happened in the past. I felt everyone wanted a piece of my brain. I thought it was a waste of time to communicate to all these people the nitty-gritty details. I wanted to focus on building the future. 

What I failed to see at that time was that 1) writing a memo (see related post on Andy Grove) reflecting on the past was an important part of building the future and 2) communicating frequently decreases the amount of uncertainty and in consequence, the number of information inquiries you receive. The monthly update – which consists of over communicating publicly or privately to a lot of people what’s going on, where are you in your plan and if you need help – is like putting money aside. It’s annoying to do but it pays off to do it regularly. The interested compound.

Reference: there’s a really good section in Jason Calacanis book ‘Angel’ about monthly updates. His pretty honest about it and puts it bluntly: if he doesn’t get a monthly update from one of his companies, he assumes the company is simply not going well. 99% of the time, it means it will run out of money soon. 1% of the time, they’re just too busy doing great things.

I just wrote to my partners at Elevent & Le Buck suggesting we should step up our monthly update game. I will do the same and setup one with my bandmates and partners in The Moonlight Club. And I will do the same with for friends/family/advisors involved at Highlow. The types of update will be different in all cases – ranging from a serious two-pager with lots of number to having a beer and discussing ideas – but the meaning is the same.

Your travel photos matter

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If you're traveling or simply trying a new place in your city, the best tip you can give to a small business owner is sharing your photos publicly on Trip Advisor/Google Maps (or even Instagram, Foursquare or whatever service works in the area/type of business you're in).

I'm in Sri Lanka right now and we are staying in a nice new hotel in a secluded area in the South. In the next 2 years, I'm sure the number of hotels and bed and breakfasts will 2-3x. The place we are staying in just opened 2 weeks ago and we are the first customers. The owner and his team are great and they've been extremely helpful. We pay a fair price for our rooms and we will tip them as well. But we are also planning on sharing a lot of our travel photos publicly on Trip Advisor and Google Maps. It will take about an hour of our time and it will help them secure new business for several months – and maybe give them a headstart before the big hotels come in.

This is an example of a few years ago. I was in Hawaii and rented a surfboard at a local surf school. They took great pictures and I decided to upload them to Google Maps. One of the photos gathered over 65k views in the last few years. Recency matters and the photo is not gathering more views now – but it did its job. New travel photos are now showed to people who search for the place on Google.

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This is what we call building a digital footprint. It's an overused word in marketing. But a digital footprint is essential for hotels and restaurants to survive. A good digital footprint works like compounded interests. A few reviews and photos attract like-minded travelers who will be inspired to share their experience and in return, help more travelers discover the place. And like interests, it works best when you keep adding money (photos/reviews) to the pot.

Your travel photos matter. If you want to help great local businesses you fall in love with when traveling, think about taking an hour to upload them publicly online.

Podcast: The Future of Tech, with Chris Dixon

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I love reading and listening to Chris Dixon. His thoughts on technology, media, entrepreneurship and marketing are well balanced. He's a realistic optimist. In this podcast, Chris talks about 3 megatrends for the next 5 to 10 years:

  • Artificial intelligence
  • Cryptocurrencies
  • New computing platforms
    • Self-driving Cars
    • Drones
    • Virtual reality/augmented reality

And I like how he states very clearly that these technologies are clearly overhyped right now. He reminds us how long it takes for new technologies to reach the masses. And how traditional thinking (1-3 year horizon) is useless when trying to build fundamentally new business models on new technologies. You need a 5-10 years horizon.