My predictions My thoughts and predictions on technology and business, and sometimes strong ones at that

As I currently work at a startup I have a small stake in the company. When talking with one friend of something I have been working with someone with on the side, the question came up over if this was a conflict of interest. I was actually quite shocked to hear the question at first, not only did I expect them to do likewise, as I know many that do. The full on conflict of interest statement just shocked me. Being at a startup it does make it slightly more of an interesting statement, but I received similar comments sometimes at my former Fortune 100 employer. I’ll start with that place and then migrate to the startup environment.

I could not disagree more being an employee at some place, and working on additional things being a conflict of interest. In short you are an employee, not property, your best interests lie with yourself. Sure its great if you believe in the company and what they do, but in our generation you are not attached for life to the company you work for. The company has claim on what you do between 8-5 with regards to work, sure if you do things that may damange a company brand or your effectiveness to do business its fair for them not to retain you, but simply doing additional work in your spare time? Hardly!

Now as we move on to the startup atmosphere, where it’s pretty standard that when becoming employed you receive some amount of equity in the company. In most cases with not being a founder this stake is of relatively small size. Sure you could consider Google where I believe it was over 400 employees that were made millionaires by their IPO, but these situations are very rare. The equity receive normally vessts over a period of time, and from my perception is simply equivilant to a portion of your pay no more no less. Sure it does make you feel more of a sense of ownership, but does not extend to the full extent of the business owning you.

As an employee you’re being paid to perform a job, they don’t have full claim to what you do on your time.

While I may or may not know how to be successful in silicon valley, I feel pretty confident that I can point out a few ways to not be successful in valley terms. What follows is my thoughts on how you can best limit yourself to own, run, or be involved in the entrepreneurial spirit of the valley.

The first is keeping yourself in a bubble, by not diving into the new technologies, new services, and new age of the web there’s little possibility you can be at the next steps of it. While I concede you don’t always have to explain it or understand it, you at least need to use it. The prestigious attitude of standing against something just for the sake of it won’t get you very far when people attempt to find you and communicate and can’t. There will be few individuals in the future similar to Jobs and Ellison that are a box of mysteries that no one has access to. Instead you will simply filter out noise that is relevant, but regardless your presence will be felt. It’s not only about making your life easier with useful tools like mint or dropbox and thinking about the next useful utility, but also about communicating and relating to others. Final thought … facebook be on it, twitter use it (don’t understand it, don’t explain it, just use it), friendfeed (jury’s out, but you better know what it is).

The second biggest thing you can do is to be patient. So many seem to sit around, wanting to have their own big thing, but are waiting for that one great idea to come to them. In most cases something probably does, the only problem is they’re not seasoned or practiced at building something. Yeah a few get lucky on the first try, but as a whole for those that are successful its due to persistence and not patience. Waiting for the right time in the market, the right time in your life, or just the right idea is wasting time you can’t get back. If you truly want to run something, start running something, and when the right idea does finally come along you’ll be prepared to build it up and run with it.

Third thing you can do is not to network. Yeah it’s easier than before to build a product and get people to adopt it because of the web, but that doesn’t mean you can do it on your own. If you want to have a great idea with a lot of potential go to waste, sit at home on a Friday night, work away alone and you will have no worries about having too much traffic or too many users. Most likely your idea will only appeal to you and miss various features and miss the needs of some of the users that would have been happy to tell you what they wanted.

Fourth, spend all your time networking. So you go to the events, meet the people, know people to fund you, have a great idea, and finally decide you’re going to actually start working on a product. The same night you sit down to code, you read of your product launching with someone else. With less funding, less knowledge, and less experience, all because they’ve actually been working on it. It’s a fine balance, but err on the side of not having every connection that you will need for a successful launch, and instead having a working demo or product to show to the connections that you do have.

Twitter is great for a few key reasons, first let me highlight the two key uses I feel it has in the enterprise.

1. As an asynchronous instant message or status message. Companies are constantly reporting status back and forth. But when someone asks for status I don’t always have bandwidth to give it, then when I’m available to give it, not everyone is free to hear. Instead why not cut down the meeting times and I simply publish messages only to those that its directed at, then they consume when they’re ready to. Additionally a twitter-like ability would be easier to control. This would allow twitter to be present where IM is still currently banned in some organizations. Yes, it may be hard to believe, but some companies still don’t trust their employees to use IM as an effective communication tool.
2. Ideation! When I have a fraction of a thought I don’t know what to do with it. When I have a complete, full-fledged out thought, I have a blog post about it. However if I’m thinking about how I don’t like the shape of a soda can or how I think email should be improved I have no medium to communicate that, except ad-hoc conversations. With twitter I say that email should be improved, but I’m not sure how. Then tens to hundreds of users give their input on why they feel its broken, and my thoughts start to become more solid. By simply limited users to 140 characters it changes the psychology around my posts, and allows content to be created on twitter, verses simply published such as on blogs

So with those key uses, what about adoption. So what if it has these great uses, if no one really buys in. Well while what I’m suggesting is twitter-like functionality, which could really be delivered by a lot of providers or a custom solution. I’d like to examine the growth curve of email and IM within the workplace, but will do that in a later post. The keys to twitter are the character limit, the one to many conversation as a default (with options for direct public messages, and direct private messages), and finally open access. I can read and publish to twitter from my phone, IM, the web, the desktop, or other sources. This only simplifies the number of sites I have to go to, and well my life.

As I write this, I write only from my vague knowledge of where revenue’s come directly from. However, I do hope to back this up in the future with more numeric backing. My title of the post may be quite strong and negative, but I feel it has reasonable ground to stand on, based on one simple principle. A corporation should stick to and focus on it’s core business, and exhausting resources outside it’s core business could end up costing them their business.

As it is, Google’s primary revenue comes from advertising, they’re the primary source for advertising because of their search engine. While some may say their core business is data, I disagree, as how are they making money off of data. Data simply allows them to better target their ads. With Google’s attitude of “Do no wrong” they are unlikely to profit from the consolidation and sales of such data.

Meanwhile Google is exhausting their resources with little to show for it. Google over the past 5 years has been hiring some of the top talent within Silicon Valley. Paying good salaries for individuals that are supposed to be some of the best software engineers in the industry. I’m not suggesting that the individuals are not sharp, but what has Google truly produced from within it’s own walls? Google has bought many of it’s out lier products, i.e. Google Earth, Google Spreadsheets, Picasa, and others. First if they are to go into these areas they should strictly focus on acquisitions and have a smaller developer base.

Though from my perspective Google should not be investing in any of the three products mentioned above. While cool and arguably good products, how does Google plan on making money from these? If they are exhausting resources and effort into these products, at the expense of improving both search and ad’s they’re not focusing on their core business as they should be

Finally, if Google is not pouring into these two areas, search and ad’s, it only takes being beaten by one to be unseated. As soon as a company is able to do search better, or ad’s better Google will lose the majority, if not all of their revenue. While they may be able to stay around after someone else has become a dominant player, it will only be as a very small fraction of what they currently are.

I’m not predicting that Google will be gone in 8 years, but unless they really start to devote to their core business and quit wasting resources on un-needed areas they will have something to worry about.