Peter Christensen

Observations After A Month At Groupon

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About a month ago, I started working at Groupon. It has been a pretty exciting month since then. Here are some random observations based on that time:

1) Groupon is working on exciting technology problems. Big scale, big data, multi platform, etc. The problem space is straightforward but the scale and importance of every part of the system makes it a worthwhile challenge.

2) Groupon has a principled approach to software development. Pair programming as needed, small, focused teams, meaningful code reviews, sensible testing, operations and deployment options, etc. The team is a mix of permanent employes and long-term consultants, and they support each other. It helps that the consultants come from one of the most excellent companies in Chicago. The product roadmap for the coming year shows a legitimate need to balance short term business needs with building a platform to support continued growth into the future.

Groupon’s technology work isn’t bleeding edge or particularly innovative. It is extremely well done application to a profitable problem and has scaled from a team of inital whiz kids to a medium sized team better than any place I’ve worked or know of, and signs are that it will continue into the future.

3) By a quirk of seating, I sit right behind the CEO, Andrew Mason. I occasionally overhear him talking so I have a tiny bit of insight into the higher up business decisions. Let’s just say that if you’re competing against him an the rest of the exec team, good luck to you. I think a lot of people are fooled by how he comes of as a goofball in his interviews. Don’t get me wrong, he is a goofball, buthe is also a savvy business leader. He knows what’s going on with us, our competitors, the technology, the business, etc. If you still insist on getting into the deal space, build a small niche based on personal relationships, because the chance to be a big player in the deal business is gone and it will not be relinquished.

If you’re interested in more about what it’s like to work at Groupon, leave a comment or email me. If you’re a talented developer interested in working here, email me now.

How To Recruit Developers

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I received a nice email today from someone living outside a major metro that wanted to do a startup but couldn’t find a developer. While I’m no expert on recruiting, I do read a lot. Here’s the response I sent him, slightly edited and cleansed of incriminating info, that can hopefully help someone else.

First question: are you yourself a developer? If not, you’re probably in trouble. You won’t be able to properly evaluate the work done by a developer you hire, and you probably don’t have a network of developers you can talk to.
I would recommend the following things:
  1. Attend all the developer social events you can. User group meetings, hackathons, etc. You’re more likely to find startup-interested people at a Ruby or Python user group but you’re trying to find a specific developer, not a demographic, so don’t be choosy at first. Do some research beforehand on the speaker and their topic so you can participate and ask useful questions. Offer to help the organizers – running these things is a pain in the butt so it’s easy to curry favor by helping out with mundane things. This will give you some credibility within the group which is useful as a non-developer. Even if you don’t find a cofounder, you will make some technical friends that you can use to help you “sniff-test” people you hire/recruit elsewhere.
  2. (if you’re not a developer) Learn to program. You won’t become great, but you do need to be competent. You can build a demo of a product without having a ton of experience. I would recommend either Python/Django or Ruby on Rails. Python is a little cleaner and more consistent, but Rails has a lot of tutorials and a platform called Heroku that makes it super easy to deploy and run a website. Buy this book: http://pragprog.com/titles/rails4/agile-web-development-with-rails and work through it until you’re satisfied with what you have. You should now be able to make a decent website and have some ability to evaluate other developers’ work.
  3. When you find someone, give them some small, finite, measurable deliverables that you pay for (cash or equity) upon completion of each piece. They’re auditioning as a developer, but you’re also auditioning as a boss/partner. Employing a person, let alone taking them on as a partner, is a big commitment, and you want more due diligence than a couple of emails.
  4. Pay. Microeconomics works, so the more money you can offer, the deeper your pool of candidates you’ll have access to. If you want people to believe your stock is going to be worth something, you’d better show some convincing proof. This goes doubly outside of Silicon Valley.
  5. Move, or allow telecommuters. No one is going to move to a somewhat isolated town of 350,000 for you until you’re an established company. Groupon could open an office there and people would flock to it. They won’t do that for you or me. The big tech markets of NYC, SV, Boston, Seattle, Austin, etc have the deepest technical talent, but they also have tight labor markets for developers. Big metros like Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, or Los Angeles have lots of technical workers without the startup culture. Also consider smaller places with high levels of technical talent – Columbus OH, Portland, Research Triangle NC, Pittsburgh, Ithaca, etc.
  6. Consider applying to the SproutBox program (http://www.sproutbox.com/ ). They take a higher % of equity than other incubators, but they co-build companies with you, providing developers and other resources beyond just a little $.

Readers, do you have any other recommendations for an unfunded, unheralded startup trying to find a developer?

iPads are awesome!

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I’ve had my ipad for a couple months now and I love it! This is the first long thing i’ve typed on it so it’s taking me a while and I’m having to fix a lot of typos. But other than that, it’s great!

Most of the obvious things have been said already, so here are some things I’ve noticed but haven’t heard:

1) I bought a DODOcase and it is a wonderful iPad case!It looks great, feels much more comfortable in my hand than the iPad by itself, and it had kept my iPad looking brand new. My only complaint is that the corner foam pads don’t hold the ipad in very well when you’re laying down and the case is vertical or facing downwards.
UPDATE 8/12/2010: DODOcase mailed out a new set of corner pads. I haven’t put them on yet but apparently they are listening 🙂
2) there’s not a great pdf reading solution that i’ve found. Any pdf that’s formatted with wide margins is a problem. iBooks doesn’t preserve zoom across pages so you have to rezoom every page. Goodreader preserves zoom but doesn’t turn the page the same way when the pdf is zoomed. Converting PDFs to epub with calibre can mess up page formatting and stick page headers and footers in the middle of pages (this is probably because the ebb and PDF pages wre different sizes.)
3) My kids love it. Of course they love the Dr Suess books and games, but their absolute favorite? The Elements, especially the song at the beginning. No more “Twinkle twinkle”, their lullaby starts out with “there’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium…”

There’s lots more to say but it has already been said. If you use a computer to entertain yourself, then an ipad will entertain you even better and I would recommend without hesitation that you buy one.

Everybody Hates Jason, or Why We’ll Never Have Robot Cars

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[I had written a better, longer version of this but then WordPress barfed on it. Enjoy the shoddy, hastily retyped version.]

This week, more details came out about the TechCrunch extortion scandal (too boring and non-eventful to link to). The extortee Sam Odio emailed Jason Calacanis explaining that he was the one involved. Jason forwarded the email to someone whose style I find so distasteful that I don’t even want to mention let alone link to them. The backlash against Mr Distasteful and Jason Calacanis was fast and furious – the comments “Calacanis does not seem worth trusting based on this.” and “When did Calacanis ever seem to be worth trusting? He’ll do anything to get attention.” became two of the top 25 highest voted comments on Hacker News, ever. Lots of people just don’t like Jason Calacanis.

This seems wierd to me. I’ve never heard anyone say “I know Jason Calacanis personally and I don’t like him” or “I’ve worked with Jason Calacanis and he’s horrible.” Ever since Jason expressed an interest in GeekStack, I’ve asked people I know how it was working with him, and it has been overwhelmingly positive. For example, last week I emailed him asking for a lawyer recommendation, and he emailed me back within 2 hours with an introduction. I’ve written before about why I think it’s useful for tech entrepreneurs to listen to Jason Calacanis. It’s only people that know of him that hate him (I’m sure there are people that know him and dislike him, I’ve just never heard them speak up).

The short story of what happened is:

  • TC reporter asks for a MacBook Air in exchange for coverage
  • Sam (founder of Divvyshot) hems and haws about it, flustered by the direct extortion
  • Story breaks with limited details
  • Jason writes about it
  • Sam writes an email to Jason confessing his role in it
  • Jason forwards an email to Mr Distasteful
  • Mr Distasteful threatens to expose Sam
  • Sam comes clean, tells story
  • Everyone piles on Jason for forwarding the email

Jason added some details on Hacker News

  • He gets 400-500 emails a day
  • This email was not clearly marked as confidential
  • He didn’t know what Mr Distasteful was going to do with it

Sounds like a simple misunderstanding that we can all learn lessons from:

  • When you want something to be confidential, put CONFIDENTIAL in the subject and first line
  • When emailing a busy person, have useful subject, short body, and clear ask at the end
  • If something seems “hot”, think twice about who you tell about it

Jason and Sam both made some faux pas here, but they’ll both survive. And despite this, Jason does tons to help entrepreneurs. TechCrunch50 has sped lots of great companies on their way to success, TWiST has taught lots of entrepreneurs and helped others directly (yours truly included), and Open Angel Forum has connected 10 (soon to be dozens) of startups with the best angels in the business. This is in addition to the small throwaway things that he does in private, like helping me find a lawyer. This is all in addition to his day job.

What does this have to do with Robot Cars? Just like the preconceived distrust people have for Jason keeps them from seeing the good he does, the distrust people have for technology that takes power away from humans will prevent us from using robot cars. Even if they perform 100x safer per mile, every accident will bring headlines like “2 More Die Due To Robotic Failure”. Fear will keep a net beneficial technology that saves lives from being adopted. Ok, it was a stretch of a point to make, but it was a really fun headline to write.

Good thing Jason has thicker skin than the robots!

Build Your Own Mentor (or Why One Hour of Mixergy Isn’t Enough)

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Lots of people read, liked, and shared my post about Mixergy yesterday (thanks to @prague360, @brentcapello, @kicauan, @technophilis, @antest, @monocat, of course @AndrewWarner, and others for spreading the word). The outpouring of appreciation for Andrew’s work was voluminous and well deserved, and so I thought I’d add some extra thoughts that didn’t make it into the original post.

I knew about Mixergy long before I became a big fan. One of his interviews would get posted at Hacker News, I’d recognize the name and click through, then find a video to download and usually it would end there. I’m a copious podcast listener and one of the greatest moments in my podcast-listening life was when the iPhone OS 2.0 (3.0?) added a “2x” button to podcast playback. This lets me listen to twice as much audio in the same amount of time. But it doesn’t work for video. So Mixergy interviews, while they sounded nice, were already long and because videos can only play back at normal speed, it feels twice as long. This meant Mixergy was a curious footnote and nothing more.

I finally listened to one when I just couldn’t say no to the interviewee (I think it was Jeffrey Kalmikoff of skinnyCorp) and was pleasantly surprised. It was my first exposure to Andrew’s interview style and it was so much more deep and informative than anything I’d heard before. This made me much more ambivalent (no, it doesn’t mean apathetic) about the amount of content Andrew produces once I knew how great it was. But I couldn’t keep up with it and didn’t watch another video for almost 6 months.

The magical moment was when I was reading the HN comments for one interview, someone posted a link to the audio for the interview, and I eventually found that there’s an iTunes-subscribable feed of the audio of all the interviews. This meant I could listen fast and have each interview dropped onto my iPod every day. Since then (around Christmas) I’ve listened to every interview and I realized there’s something different about listening to all of them vs just one. Listening to any given interview will give you some good insights and exposure to one person’s ideas. Some are particularly useful for dealing with a specific topic (like Law 101 for Startups – btw Andrew, many, many entrepreneurs become paralyzed by legal uncertainty and the cost of finding good answers – this was 100x better than reading web pages about law that are either too general or untrustworthy) but usually you don’t get a life-changing experience from one interview, just some spectacular anecdotes.

Listening to 10, 30, or 50+ interviews gives a whole different perspective. You move from anecdotes to data. Andrew goes into such detail that you basically have raw data on a bunch of successful companies, kind of reading business case studies in MBA school. Nobody tells you what you have to do to be successful, but you can weigh your situation against the situation and decisions made by so many others. I’d imagine it’s like the value Paul Graham and YCombinator provide. YC has graduated hundreds of companies and so they have a statistical level of experience with software startups and product development. When pg or any of the YC partners give you advice, it’s not just based on brains or hunches, it’s shaped by more experiences than any single person could accumulate. As detailed as he is, Andrew doesn’t know his interviewees as well as YC knows their companies, but Mixergy is free and open to anyone who takes the time to listen.

For an investment of 30 minutes a day, you learn enough to bounce your own ideas off of a stable full of entrepreneurs. You sort of become your own mentor. If you have access to a real life startup mentor like Paul Graham or Dave Cohen (of TechStars), by all means, use them as much as you can, but if you are locationally challenged, not ready to dive into a startup, not connected, too young, etc, let Mixergy be your mentor. You can come up with reasonable excuses for not moving to Boulder or Mountain View, but if you can’t or won’t take the free, unlimited mentoring that’s available at Mixergy, you’ll be walking blind with only your own untested entrepreneurial instincts.

Critical Fans (or how Mixergy did the Impossible)

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I’m a regular reader of Hacker News from the beginning. For those of you who don’t know it, it’s a community site where people post, vote on, and comment on links that are of interest to hackers. A corollary of that is that people want to find new stuff. For instance, I don’t subscribe to TechCrunch or any of the general tech news sites, I just read the good stuff that makes onto the Hacker News homepage.

Every once in a while, some writer ends up having every thing they write posted to Hacker News for a while. (Well, there are lots of people who get everything they write posted to HN but the problem I’m about to describe only affects those that write frequently). Whether it’s a flurry of good writing, or exposure to new readers that get excited about their archives, they can end up with several links on the front page, or something of theirs posted every day of the week. The problem is that for the HN readers that already have an opinion about this writer, these links are noise. If you like the writer, you’ve already subscribed to their blog, and if you don’t like them, you don’t want to see them every day. So tension builds, snarky or negative comments get posted, and then there’s a backlash against links to that writer. After the backlash, the links from that person slow down and once again, only the best of their stuff gets posted rather than everything they write. I’ve seen it happen with Coding Horror, Seth Godin, 37signals, TechCrunch, and others.

This brings us to Mixergy. Mixergy is a site with daily interviews of successful entrepreneurs. The interviews are broadcast as live video, then available for download in audio or video format later. There are a couple things that make Mixergy special. First, Andrew Warner gets excellent guests. In addition to many big names in tech and enturepreneurship, he finds a constant stream of people with interesting and valuable experiences that you’ve never heard of. Second, it’s very well produced – interviews are at the same time every day, there’s a calendar of upcoming events so you can plan ahead to watch ones you’re interested in, the video and audio recordings are up later that day, and there’s a community-produced transcript for each episode. Third, there’s a strong community that participates in the interviews, suggests and connects new people, and pushes Andrew to continually get better. But the biggest strength by far is Andrew himself.

Most podcasts are somewhere between god-awful and tolerable. The “best” ones are still generally a couple of guys shooting the breeze with maybe something resembling a plan. But Andrew researches each person he’s going to talk to, prepares questions in advance, sends the questions to the interviewee, and has a pre-interview talk with them, including going over which questions won’t be answered (like finaicial figures). Despite all the preparation, Andrew probes for and chases down whatever interesting tidbits come up in conversation, then works his way back to the plan. Nothing gets past him or left out by him. For instance, when he was interviewing Rahul Sood of Voodoo PC, he was very meticulous about the timing of Rahul’s entrepreneurial activities as a teenager, including when he bought an old house in Calgary that he ended up selling later for $1M. If you listen to Andrew talk to someone for an hour, you’ll feel like you’ve known that person for years. And after 200+ interviews, he has his technique down pat.

Those are all great, but the thing that really makes Andrew special is how gracious he is. Listening to him talk makes you feel like he’s shaking your hand, but the really nice handshake where they put their left hand on top of your clasped rights. He’s extremely polite and thankful to all of his guests, his listeners, community, and sponsors. He seeks out, graciously accepts, and implements feedback he receives on his site and other forums. He’s truly a class act, one of those people you want to hate for being so good, but there so good that you can’t help but like them. I haven’t met him but I’m sure if I did, he’d make me feel like a million bucks and that he was the lucky one to get to meet me.

Back to Hacker News, there has been a Mixergy backlash building because his interviews have been posted every day for the last couple of weeks. People were starting to get agitated, but then something amazing happened. One person asked:

Serious question: is Mixergy considered a worthwhile site? Haven’t I seen it dissed on HN before?

I was worried that people were going to pile on, but then 10 people responsed, all positive, some extremely so. Here’s a sample:

I think it’s a life-changing site for sure and you get to hear from industry veterans first hand about a lot of relevant info. What more do you want?

They’re always really useful interviews. It’s like having several more long chapters in the “Founders at work” book.

If there was a Pulitzer for startup interviews, I’d expect Andrew Warner to be nominated.

I’m counting on Andrew’s insightful interview techniques so that he can “conjure” up from interviewees all the knowledge that they’ve build along their entrepreneurial experience so that we can learn from their successes and even failures.

Wow! Google could open source their search algorithms and I don’t think they would get as ringing praise as that from the HN crowd. Andrew, if you’re reading this, please know that you’re doing something very special as Mixergy and there are many, many people who appreciate it. Keep it up!

If you’re not Andrew and you’re interested in entrepreneurship at all, listen to a few of his interviews. While each person’s story is unique, hearing many of them helps you pick out common issues, pitfalls, characteristics, and opportunities. Mixergy lets you walk in the footsteps of giants, rather than fumbling in the dark.

UPDATE: Read the followup about how to Building Your Own Mentor here

A Closed Apple Platform is Inevitable But Temporary

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A big thanks to Chris Dixon for writing “Should Apple be more open?” I was going to write basically the same thing but he saved me the trouble. If you don’t understand what he’s writing, read The Innovator’s Solution. The short answer is that see how the primary criteria customers use to choose a product changes over time because technology improves faster than customer needs.

Dang it, now I’ve started writing so I might as well say the other thing that people haven’t been saying about the iPad. If you can spell “vim” or “emacs” or “ssh”, this computer isn’t for you. It’s for people who don’t use computers much because they’re hard to use. I think this could be as important as the original Macintosh for changing the way people use computers for the next 30 years. Computers as we know them are a super optimized expression of 40 years of progress. (No, seriously, name one thing we have now that wasn’t in Engelbart’s 1968 demo besides more horsepower.) This is wild speculation, but I think the iPad demo could be a similar moment, an expression of another path for computing. Obviously hardware makers think so because everyone with a soldering iron is pushing whatever flat, keyboardless device they threw together in time to ride the iPad media wave.

But to those that already heavily use a computer for specialized tasks, we’re the ones who need to be scared of the Innovator’s Dilemma and Innovator’s Solution. The axis of choice has already shifted away from power to price, and it is in the process of shifting from price to convenience and usability. Arguably there’s no way to fix the major problems with complexity and security that modern OSes have without breaking decades worth of legacy apps. So a clean break, whether it be iPhone OS, Android, ChromeOS, or other, is likely to be the platform of the future? Which one? iPhone OS is clearly the new platform for the immediate future and the iPad is only going to strengthen that, but the convenient, touch-based media consumption model of computing will go through a similar cycle of plausibility, power, price, then convenience. When it shifts from power to price, an open platform will gain advantages over a closed one and Apple will either loosen up or become a profitable niche player in mobile computing as well as legacy computing.

EDIT: Someone else also did a better job of writing what I wanted to: iPad: An Apple for Mom. Thanks, Daniel!

Followup Questions to Strategic SEO for Startups

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Anyone who is doing a startup should be reading Patrick McKenzie’s blog MicroISV on a Shoestring. He’s an American living in Japan and in his spare time over the last few years, he has built his Bingo Card Creator product into a business that has allowed him to quit his day job. He has done this through ruthless efficiency, analytics, SEO, and iterative learning from experience. While Eric Ries of Lean Startups fame talks about the big picture and vision, Patrick gives a boots-on-the-ground account of his experience. The fact that he can support himself selling Bingo Cards has led me to refer to him as the reductio-ad-absurdum of the ability of the Internet to support any product. If he can make it selling bingo cards, your startup can succeed. So if you haven’t already opened his blog in a new tab to read after you finish this, do so now.

His latest post, Stategic SEO for Startups, is a classic Shoestring article. In the longish article, he describes the basics of SEO, why some common conceptions about it are wrong, how it can work to your advantage if done right, and the hallmarks of good startup SEO. Again, read his article but the main takeaway is that you do better by ranking high in lots of specific, niche keywords that relate to your product, and the way to rank high is to start early, iterate, and get links back to your site. Clearly he knows what he’s doing because I’ve already linked to his business blog and his product.

But to show him I really understood the article, I’m responding to his thinly veiled request in the very last article: “I do try to write most people who ask for advice (odds are better if you ask good focused questions, let me get a blog post out of it, etc)…” So Patrick, in the spirit of mutual SEO building, here are some good focused questions that you can answer publicly. If and when you answer them, I’ll happily link to your answers:

  1. In the past you’ve talked about outsourcing your content creation to your “army of freelancers”. What did that consist of on your end? My guess is you looked at terms and topics people were searching for (you mentioned “baby shower bingo” once) and then sent a job to your freelancers to come up with 80 or so baby shower words that you feed into your card generator and sample bingo card landing pages.
  2. How do you analyze and rank your SEO strategies? I see your sample card landing pages have an id that they pass to the registration page so you know how the different landing pages are converting. What other methods do you use to determine which SEO methods are most valuable to you?
  3. Your Bingo Card landing pages allow you to programatically generate tons of pages from content in your product. What other tips do you have for getting lots of good SEO content for a low investment of time/money?

GeekStack is very close to starting playtesting and once there’s some feedback coming in there I’m turning my attention to SEO, marketing, etc, so this is on my mind. Thanks in advance – you’re one of my favorite startup writers and every time I see a “MicroISV on a Shoestring” article on Hacker News of in Google Reader I know I’m getting something good.

UPDATE: Sure enough, Patrick responsed within 16 hours and his reply is here: Followup Questions for “Strategic SEO for Startups” Thanks, Patrick!

Why We Should Boycott ComScore

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[I haven’t worked with ComScore but I’ve heard for years from a variety of sources about how their numbers are inaccurate and deflated. In a world with Google Analytics, KissMetrics, and Quantcast, the thought of chargins $10K to collect and report stats sounds like as horrible a monopoly/legacy driven ripoff as anything Oracle or the music business has ever done. I also trust Jason Calacanis because his tireless efforts to help entrepreneurs. With his permission, I’m re-posting this warning about ComScore from Jason’s mailing list.]

Comscore is the technology industry’s biggest bully, and today I’m calling for an industry-wide boycott of their services.

I’m asking journalist and bloggers to stop covering their stats, I’m asking advertisers to not use their services, and finally, I’m asking startup companies to not support their new and widely reported on “$10,000 to get your stats correct” extortion ring.

If I was a stock trader I would short the stock–but I’m not–so I won’t (I keep my money in bonds and angel investments for the record). Also, if you own Comscore shares, I’m not going to tell you that you should sell them, but if I were an analyst–and I’m not–I would probably tell folks to sell every share they had, and as quickly as possible.

Additionally, I’m asking Comscore to drop their “pay for correct stats” model in the next ten days.

Let’s get into why.

Comscore’s Reign of Terror

For over a decade, I’ve railed against our industry’s leading metrics company ComScore with little result.

It all started when I was a journalist in the 90s for the Silicon Alley Reporter. I listened to company after company from Silicon Alley to Silicon Valley complain about how ComScore’s method of counting traffic websites, via a sample of users, was incorrect.

People couldn’t understand why the internet industry, with it’s ability to track traffic perfectly, would ever adopt the failed sample-based methods used on television and radio. Comscore’s ideas were antiquated and unnecessary.

Entrepreneurs would show me their internal stats, which were typically three to five times larger than Comscore’s numbers, and beg me to correct them in the Silicon Alley Reporter.

However, I noticed a pattern: the big companies didn’t complain about Comscore.

Why?

Well, from what multiple people shared with me, you simply had to follow the money. According to these folks it was an unspoken truth for years that if you paid Comscore they fixed your numbers, and if you were a small company and didn’t, well, you suffered. Comscore would probably deny this, but their recent “pay to play” product shows their true stripes.

They screwed me at Weblogs, Inc.

It wasn’t until I started Weblogs, Inc. that I really felt the sting of not participating in the Comscore protection racket. You see, advertisers love Comscore and they make advertising buys based on it.

Our small, but growing blogs, were under reported month after month and Comscore basically told me to pound salt when I complained. It cost me money, and I promised myself that if I could ever support another service that wasn’t based on payola I would.

Here you can see a smoking gun from 2005 when Comscore did a “study” on blogs with Gawker Media as a sponsor. Interestingly, Gawker’s blogs did really well in the study. The only problem was that Comscore’s numbers were different than the SiteMeter traffic that Gawker and Weblogs Inc. were publishing at the time.

Denton privately admitted to me he support Comscore because he had to because of their reputation in the advertising industry. He thought I should bite the bullet as well and get in bed with the bullies. Not my style, sorry.

[[ Some links from 2005 Comscore: Show us the data or get out of Dodge http://bit.ly/4I7S6i and ClickZ: http://www.clickz.com/3526851 – Fred
Wilson throws me under the bus: http://bit.ly/8BpFnh ]]

I publicly complained about Comscore but no one would really listen. Actually Jeff Jarvis did support me: http://bit.ly/8zW0GF

My good friend Fred Wilson, who had invested in the firm, turned away and watched the bullies he invested in pummel me when I complained about Comscore. Fred is outspoken and an advocate of startups–except with Comscore. He’s turned a blind eye while letting his huge venture return in Comscore color his objectivity. In fact, it must be obvious to Fred that Comscore is, in fact, holding back his other startup investments by extorting money from them!

Fred’s been an amazing supporter of mine over the years, but I’ve never been able to get over the fact that he invested in and supported these guys. Fred’s continued support of this company is unconscionable at this point. He needs to come out and say that Comscore charging $10,000 for this product is a pure shake down.

Do it Fred… you know you want to! 🙂

ComScore Tries to Buy Me Off

This summer the tough guys at Comscore approached me with a clandestine deal after I continued to publicly complain about their methods. The message was clear: if I stopped criticizing them and publicly supported their server data measurement program they would not charge me. The $10,000 it would cost a year for this service would be free for me if I threw my fellow entrepreneurs under the bus.

Their email to me included something out of the a Sopranos episode: “Normally there is a cost to implement, but in this case we will gladly waive the charge if you are interested.” Yeah, and if you’re not interested perhaps you would like to come on a fishing trip with us this weekend.

You bastards think that after a *decade* of me trying to stop your extortion you can by me off by simply waiving some fees? I could easily pay the $10,000 fee today but I will never give you guys a dime. I will remember what you did to me when I was coming up forever.

I’d rather lose half my revenue from advertising as Mahalo grows from a top 1,000 site (2007), to the top 400 sites (2008) and now a top 200 site (2009), and eventually even a top 50 site I hope (2011?)–than give you even one ounce of my support.

I wrote back: “You guys are evil for charging companies–I would never support you. Quantcast and Google are going to crush you guys…. And I’m telling everyone I know to support Quantcast.”

They never contacted me again.

Comscore formalizes their extortion ring

This week you may have read over at the excellent “All Things D” that Comscore is now willing to do real metrics on your website if you give them $10,000 a year. They claim this is to pay for their servers. More: http://bit.ly/6Fqrhe

This after they spent the last decade criticizing the direct measurement methods of their competitors like Quantcast and Google Analytics as being flawed! Now they say pixel tracking–actual measurement on the server side–is the best method. What a bunch of slim buckets.

Could it be that enough publishers and advertisers have told you to go f– yourself in the past year?

Could it be that Quantcast has a product that is 100x better than your service and it’s FREE?

Could it be that Compete.com is secretly testing a server-side testing method like Quantcast’s and is about to kick your ass?

>From where I sit, this is Comscore’s desperate Hail Mary pass to try and save their dying protection racket. Comscore has ZERO value when Google Analytics, Compete.com and Quantcast allow you to publicly and freely track your stats.

Bullies, Ethics & Your Part

As a kid growing up in Brooklyn, I learned that when you or your friends were being bullied there was really only one solution to the problem: punch the bully directly in the face as hard as you can the second they approached you. Like really, the second they come at you–the second the first word comes out of their mouth–punch them in the face. Don’t let them even finish their sentence. If they say “I want your milk money” your fist should make contact right around the
“want” mark.

BANG!

At a young age I tested this technique and it resulted in a couple of multi-day suspensions from school and black eyes, but it is a life-long strategy for success that has never failed me. Do not let yourself or your friends get bullied–ever. Even if you get your ass kicked, at least you got your shot in and you held your ground.

When someone from Comscore approaches, you should tell them to go hell. (Note: do not literally punch them in the face–I’m not advocating physical violence here, I’m advocating voting with your dollar.)

I put up a good fight for a decade but made little progress and frankly got my ass kicked by Comscore in the Weblogs, Inc. days. However, their obnoxious behavior has finally been publicly exposed. This means that we–as an industry–can finally run this bully out of town.

Again, here is what I’m asking for in the Comscore Boycott. Feel free to republish this article in whole at your blog.

The Comscore Boycott: Play Your Part!

1. Startups: Do NOT pay a single penny to Comscore–ever.
2. Startups who are getting this program for free (I suspect a good number): Opt out and tell Comscore to f– themselves.
3. Press & Bloggers: Please do not run Comscore’s inaccurate numbers, and please expose their extortion ring.
4. Advertisers: Do not use Comscore to plan your media buys: use the free and more accurate Quantcast.
5. Google: Please release your version Comscore killer (based on Quantcast’s model), or better yet PLEASE BUY QUANTCAST!
6. Compete.com: Please release your Comscore killer.
7. Stock traders & Analysts: Please think deeply about the potential revenue destruction that Comscore could be facing.
8. Fred Wilson: publicly state that you do not agree with ComScore’s mafia-like methods.
9. Republish this email at your blog.
10. If you have information on Comscore that should be exposed send it to me in confidence (say anonymous up top)

To My “Friends” at Comscore

You know I’m right.

As such, I’m asking for complete and unconditional surrender. Make your tracking pixel program 100% free in the next 10 days or the boycott will continue.If you’re a current or former executive at Comscore and you have an opinion on this please send me your thoughts in confidence, and I will republish them to the list without your name.

If you’re a current employee who can’t deal with this any more, please add me on LinkedIn and ask for a LinkedIn introduction to the Google Analytics, Compete.com or Quantcast teams. I will gladly forward talented people from Comscore on to companies I think are more ethical.

All the best,

Jason

Why Transit Used to be Profitable and Isn’t Now

by 4 Comments

I had fun writing this on Hacker News and thought I’d share it here. The question was “How would you make public transit profitable / create more value?” and I answered with this:

It’s a complicated issue, so here’s a little background (I have a Masters in Urban Planning so I’ve read a lot).Streetcar lines (and subways in some places) were profitable businesses, just like railroad lines. But there were a few features that we don’t have today.

First, it was a new mobility technology so it opened up land that was too far away to be developed. There is no such land now in metro areas because highways and have cars make all areas equally accessible.

Second, they were a real estate play as much as a transportation play. Because they opened up new land, the lines tended to go to greenfields where the streetcar companies and their allies owned or could buy land. Take a look at the Brown line in Chicago and watch how it winds – that was a land acquisition issue. This wouldn’t work now because a rail line doesn’t increase the value of land enough since so much is accessible by car.

Third, people rode trains a lot more then than people ride them even now. These trains were extensions off of a very dense, centralized city. Technology and social changes reduced the number of daily rides. For instance, refrigerators meant that women didn’t have to ride into the market every day. Worker benefits (like the 6 or 5 day work week) meant that workers didn’t ride as often. As shopping and employment decentralized, people didn’t have to ride to the city as often. And when people got cars, they had an alternative to the train.

So what can we learn from history and contemporary transit to make transit more valuable today?

First, there must be attractions at both end so the fixed costs in tracks and cars can make money both ways. Early streetcar lines often has amusement parks at the terminus to promote two-way travel. The Las Vegas monorail is a decent modern version of this – there’s something at every stop. Transit lines that end in the suburbs at a big parking lot will be underutilized by definition.

Second, land use matters. All of the streetcars and subways were built before zoning and so the market built what the market could bear by transit, and buildings could be razed and built bigger if demand grew. Housing in transit-rich cities and near light rail in cities with new transit systems if more expensive because zoning restricts how much can be built. In addition to maximum height, massing, and lot utilization, there are also minimum parking limits that mean every house/condo is much more expensive and not affordable to people that would use transit the most. Take a look at the area around the transit stops in Arlington, VA for an example of transit zoning done right – extremely dense development within 1/2 mile of transit stops. It has the lowest car ownership and usage in Northern VA and generates 50% of the county’s property tax in 5% of its land area.

Third is that quality of service matters. Busses in the US suck and are slow because fare collection takes place one at a time while the bus is stopped. Curitiba, Brazil (look it up, it’s the world leader in bus transit) has bus stops where you pay to enter and everyone boards at once. The city has one of the highest rates of car ownership in Brazil and the highest transit utilization in Brazil. On their main bus routes they have 1-3 minute headways so there’s no such thing as looking at a schedule. Other things like priority lanes for buses at stoplights, tech to let the bus hold a green light to make it through, etc help. Bogota Columbia is the other leading bus tech center and both cities do something like 50x the miles of service per dollar as a subway would have cost to build and operate.

Fourth, if there’s lots of free parking at the destination it’s almost always easier to drive. Point to point means the trip is faster and free parking means it costs less. Places in the states that have the highest transit usage (Boston, New York, Chicago Loop, SF) are places where parking sucks or is expensive. Even LA traffic doesn’t keep people from driving because a) the buses are stuck in it too, and b) it’s free to park when you get there.

Basically, any city that’s building a light rail or subway line and not dramatically increasing the zoning around it is throwing money away. For instance, the 2nd Ave subway in NYC probably won’t change much for the $5 billion because there’s no way to dramatically increase the number of people that live in the Upper East Side or Harlem. Without the proper land use, there’s not enough population to drive demand, without demand there’s not enough incentive to provide good levels of service, and without good levels of service people will find it faster to drive.

There’s some more good discussion on the Hacker News thread.

EDIT: And on this thread as well.