Silicon Valley Himalayan Expedition

Chickens and eggs

Mike Arrington at Techcrunch blogged about Mozes Friday, and raised the possibility that Mozes may be dealing with the classic chicken and egg problem.  The good news is that most entrepreneurs are used to dealing with the question regardless of the business. Whether it comes to raising capital, hiring employees, building product or finding customers, you learn pretty quickly not to care which comes first - you just go and get chickens and eggs all at the same time.  At a higher level however, when it comes to the business model, it's a critical question.

I spent the six years prior to Mozes in the b2b world, having started a company in March of 2000 specifically around b2b commerce.  You may remember Chemdex (can't link to it, but a great case study here) or any of the 2,000 or so companies like it back then.   Despite the promise of massive success if every buyer and supplier agreed to play together in a vertical market, merely assuming it would happen because it made sense if it did proved to be a pretty ugly assumption.  Like Chemdex and a few others at the time, we had to learn at our company that the best way to survive was to prove value in some small but important areas, and then be relentless in demonstrating and replicating that value across the targeted market.

I recently told an investor that I'm not a believer in businesses that can only be successful at massive scale.   It reminds me of the old Saturday Night Live commercial for the  company that made money by changing a dime into 2 nickels and a nickel into 5 pennies.  Massive scale will of course mean massive success, but a company must be successful at the most basic level before it can be massive.  One of the things I love about what we are doing is that we can enable smaller community activities - such as Maker Faire this weekend.

The point isn't that we are going to go after every upcoming cool county do-it-yourself science fair in the world (as cool as that would be).    In this particularly case, we are getting the chance literally to observe our product in action and learn from that experience to advance forward (plus, it's kind of cool having a Microsoft Mobile sign tell folks to text Mozes for more info).  The real target market we are pursuing is different, but our goals are built around demonstrating small-scale value that will translate across larger market opportunities.  Whether that's chickens or eggs first, I must admit I can't really say.

The future of wireless

As an entrepreneur, it is often hard not to get carried away with possibilities for the future.  Many, not all, entrepreneurs have a strong passion to do something different and creative, and it's not just about money.  The idea of instigating change that may affect a large amount of people 5 or 10 years out can be exciting in of itself.  If you do want to make any money, however, it's pretty important to think about how you can improve the present lives of people around you.

As I walked around the CTIA conference last  week, I was struck by how many companies were pitching "the future of wireless".  There is just  something so wrong about that theme, which I feel has hung around the wireless market for 10 years.  Everytime I encountered the concept, I kept thinking to myself - why don't any of these companies want to be the present of wireless?  It is no wonder that the 250 location based services companies of 1998 have been replaced by the 250 of today.

When I was selling enterprise software for my previous company, I kept reminding myself and the sales team to sell in the context of present conditions, and not the future promise.  We were definitely introducing some very new concepts to some old style folks, and it was not uncommon because of our own excitement by the future to get carried away with all things we might one day be able to do for the customer.   I soon realized that it is almost always impossible to sell the future to anyone because by definition it doesn't exist.   The minute you paint a picture for what the future could be like, you are on an immediate downhill ride when it comes time for the customer to start really evaluating how you compare to it.  The quickest path to close any sale was to solve an immediate problem that customer was having today.

It's not that the possibilities for the future don't exist or shouldn't be discussed at all: they do entice people to enter into discussions in the first place.  It's just that what really matters to people who matter to a business is how you can affect and improve their lives today.   It was a great reminder for any mobile company:  if you want to be the future of wireless, you better make sure you are 100% focused on what you can do for people today.