Feature Friday: Privacy

The Gotham Gal and I went out with friends last night. As can happen, we got talking shop towards the end of the night. And specifically we were debating the significance of Snapchat. The debate was about whether the feature that makes Snapchat special (you know your photos won't end up on Facebook) is the basis for a standalone app and business. My view, having lived through this debate with Twitter and Foursquare, is that mobile apps are features in the mobile OS and that Snapchat can and likely will own this feature in the leading mobile operating systems even though institutionalized copycats (ie Facebook who copies everything) can and will copy it. The irony that Facebook has copied a feature that is specifically designed to avoid Facebook is precious in and of itself.

But I digress. The thing I want to talk about here is the emergence of privacy as the defining feature of the next breakaway app on the social internet. What does this mean for where we are and where we are going? Is open social out and closed private in?

At times like this, I like to talk to my kids and their friends. Here is a typical college aged woman I know. She uses Twitter, Instagram, Cinemagram, Foursquare, iMessage, and Snapchat. And Facebook too. She uses each of them for what they are good for. Each of them is on her home screen - one click and she is sharing something with someone. Each app offers a different graph - that she has curated specifically for that app - and each app offers a different type of engagement. If it is something silly that she wants to share with a friend but would be mortified if it ended up on Facebook, its Snapchat. If it is something she wants out there broadly, it is Twitter. If it is something she wants to share with a wide group of curated friends, it's Instagram. She has a private Instagram account so she controls who follows her there. She is a sophisticated user of social media. She was on Facebook in middle school and has grown up with this stuff. She knows how to use social media and she adopts whatever is useful to her. Snapchat is useful to her. Privacy is an important feature at times and she is happy to have an app with that as the central value proposition.

So that is my way of saying that I think privacy is an important feature and kudos to Snapchat for figuring that out. Further they invented a mode of engagement (the photos self destruct) that is new and novel. And the result is they are on the home screeen of millions of mobile phones and that number is growing by the day.

I expect we'll see a rash of copycats and other approaches to leveraging privacy as the central value proposition in the coming months. I am not sure that is the right thing to learn from this though. I think the right thing is to think about what other features are missing in the mobile OS and figure out the right mode of engagement to implement that feature. That is what Twitter did with status, Foursquare did with location, Instagram did with photo sharing, and Snapchat did with privacy. That got each of them on the home screen. Figure out what the next thing is.

Comments (View) /   posted in mobile, Web/Tech

Amour

The two best films of 2012 that I saw were both French films with subtitles, Amour, which I saw last night with the Gotham Gal, and The Intouchables, which we saw when it came out last summer.

The Intouchables is a joyous film about two people in need coming together to enrich each others' lives. It is uplifting.

Amour is not. It is a gut wenching account of an elderly husband caring for his dying wife. The film made me deeply uncomfortable. There were scenes I couldn't even bring myself to watch.

It is said that great art makes you uncomfortable and if that us true Amour is great art. I dreamed about the movie and woke up with it on my mind. I am blogging about it now. I can't get it out of my brain so I am hoping that by writing it down I can move on.

Amour means love and I guess caring for a dying spouse is the greatest act of love one can make. I can tell you that I am not looking forward to that part of our marriage and I got a fast forward to it last night. It was painful but ultimately deeply moving and powerful.

I would say you should go see it but honestly you might not want to. I am not sure I would have chosen to see it had I known what I was in for. But I am glad I did.

Comments (View) /   posted in Film

MBA Everydays

Tom Eisenmann is a professor at Harvard Business School. He published this "best of the startup blog posts of 2012" the other day. Go take a look at it. It was a revelation to me when I saw it yesterday. I tweeted it out right away.

We are witnessing an important change in education. The practicioners are creating curriculum that the schools are leveraging. But more importantly, everyone is leveraging it.

Hacking education indeed.

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The Fiscal Mess: Death By A Thousand Cuts

Whomever came up with the term fiscal cliff to describe the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the simultaneous sequester of across the board spending cuts did not do us any favors. I honestly had hoped we would get both. But that was never going to happen once it was framed as driving over a cliff. Who wants to do that?

Instead we got some small deal that essentially raises taxes on the highest earners and a kick the can approach on everything else. We are going to address our ridiculously high deficit in a series of crisis driven deadlines instead of the rational way, which is to sit down and hammer out a "grand bargain."

I do agree that cutting spending in some sort of brain dead across the board sequester is not ideal. And I also believe that phasing in our bad tasting but necessary fiscal medicine is better for the ecomony and so therefore a more prudent policy.

But here is the deal. We are spending way too much money in our federal goverment and we aren't bringing in enough revenue. The original grand bargain between Boehner and Obama which would have cut spending by $4.5 trillion over ten years and raised about half of that in new revenues over the same time period was the right idea. That would have gotten our annual deficit down to sub $500bn which still seems like a huge amount to me.

Now we are going to do the thing that every CEO tries to avoid, and that is death by a thousand cuts. It is demoralizing to everyone and painful to watch. And because our political system is so polarized and politicized, I can't imagine we will ever get to the $750bn in annual deficit reduction we will need to get our fiscal house in order.

I know that many in this community will point the finger at Obama and cite his ongoing lack of leadership (and his instinct to play politics) on this issue. I think that criticism is fair. But to some degree Obama is being driven to this place by an even worse behavior by the tea party wing of the Republican party who made a silly pledge to avoid raising taxes and now has to live up to it. The elder Bush (who I sure hope is feeling better) made a stupid pledge like that and lost out on a deserved second term as a result. When will the right wing of our government stop making taxes their third rail? And when will the left wing of our government understand that entitlements are a cancer growing inside this country that must be addressed now?

At times like this, I see the value in dictatorships (at least benevolent ones) and parliamentary systems. We need leadership that can address the issue head on and make the hard but necessary decisions to get our fiscal house in order. And we don't have that in this country. In either party. It sucks.

Related articles
What You Need to Know About the Fiscal Cliff Before You Go to Your New Year's Party
President Obama is Responsible for Our Fiscal Mess
Dems' Mystifying New Fiscal Cliff Strategy
What Is the "Fiscal Cliff"?
The Fiscal Cliff Losers: Conservatives, the Tea Party, and the GOP
The 'cliff' deal may not much cut the deficit. Does it matter?
Comments (View) /   posted in Politics

Putting 2012 To Bed

I'm typing this on my phone as our plane is starting to descend into the NY metro area. We will land at JFK within the hour.

I've wanted to write a year end post for days. I actually wrote one and stored it as a draft. But it comes across as a whiny complaint about the shitty year that 2012 was. And it was in many ways a shitty year for me. But the reason I couldn't publish that post is it didn't capture the greater picture that 2012 represents for me.

I moved every year as a kid. Throw away the old. Start with the new. That is etched indelibly in my psyche.

My venture investing career has three phases all roughly 6-8 years long. The first, at Euclid, was software to internet. The second, at Flatiron was internet to bubble. And the third, at USV, has been web 2 to mobile. I have always used a new firm to denote a new investment phase for me. Throw away the old. Start with the new.

And I feel that 2012 is the next demarcation year for me but this time I have to do it in an existing firm with an existing portfolio. That is new for me and I don't have a model for how to do it.

It was reported a few weeks ago that I had not made a single new investment in 2012. That is true. In fact, I have not made a single new investment since the summer of 2011. Fortunately my partners have picked up the slack and we have made a dozen or so terrific new investments at USV during that period.

I have been working on a new investment and I hope it will close in early 2013. So it is likely my 18 month dry spell will end soon. And I am going to treat that dry spell like a new start. I don't want to invest in the same stuff today that I invested in five years ago. I want to do new things, learn new lessons, and share them with you.

The funny thing about 2012 is that our firm made more money in 2012 than ever, with some huge carry producing events. And yet I think of it as a wasted year professionally. I don't like harvesting, I like planting the seeds, and helping them grow into fully flowered plants. That's where I get joy from my job.

So as I put 2012 to bed and think about 2013, I am happy to see this past year enter the history books. I didn't get much joy from it. And I am looking forward to doing new stuff in 2013, learning new things, and working with new people.

Happy new year everyone.

Comments (View) /   posted in Venture Capital and Technology
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