So everyone's pissed at Path it seems. Well, everyone in our little bubble. My dad uses Path, he doesn't care that you are saving his address book for him. He just wants to know how I've been.  

What happens here is quite ironic though. This one feature we are up in arms about is the one feature that actually makes Path work. It's quite brilliant and helpful actually.

Facebook figured out that you need to be friends with ten people before you were hooked. They built a team around it.

They also started with your college email address. A close enough graph that was searchable. Then the flood gates happened after they opened it to everyone. Hence the Facebook problem, too many friends.

If Path, like everyone else, used Facebook to find your friends the entire model would have been broken. Facebook isn't friends.

Let's take a look at why this functionality is so important.

Early adopters join. They are the over sharers, the friend request people, etc. They create and curate. They don't have a cold start problem. My dad does. He's timid to share and even more timid to friend.

So, I join Path and add enough people to make me happy. My dad joins and he's scared to add anyone. 

My address book provides a notification to me that isn't like all these other apps that spam me because of Facebook. Signal to noise is lost and I quit. Thus, it tells me to add my dad as a friend and not the latter. The people on the system need to help the new people get value from the system. The magic is making the new user, my dad, feel welcome without him having to ask for friends. They come to him. Magic. But it has to be people I care about, just enough. It grows from there. Ala the phone book. 

It's the psychology of why this thing works. People need to feel welcome and wanted. Path nails this in every aspect of their product. It's all about feedback. You do something, feedback, do something, feedback... It's great product design and they have some of the best.

Progress -> Feedback -> Repeat

This is the best way to create a first user experience that makes every person joining Path feel welcome. You join and people want to be friends with you. Close friends. Magic. Without this first user experience, a wasteland would ensue.

When we built Gist, we ranked your contacts by source and it makes sense that phone number is weighted higher than the others.

So the dilemma. Don't pull your address book and you'll be lonely without feedback on your pretty picture or use Facebook and you'll be just that. Facebook but prettier.

I'll take Path as it was, is. Its brought our company, our friends and our team closer together. Sometimes too close, but that's the point. If you think you own your contacts in the first place then you're silly, we've been stealing them to the cloud for years. The internet, if used malicously, would probably screw us all. This feature benefits us all. Me as a user and Path as a company.

Your contacts should be the least of your worries, you can find them all in your permanetely saved contact book of the world, Facebook.

I'll take the Path way, just enough.

I found this oldie behind the scenes of Steve Jobs after he was kicked out of Apple and decided to start NEXT. The video is well worth the 20 minutes to watch and I've written a few of my favorite quotes from it below. Enjoy!

"More importantly than building a product, we are in the process of architecting a company that will hopefully be much, much more incredible, the total will be much more incredible than the sum of its parts. And the cumulative effort of approximately, ya know, 20,000 decisions that we're all going to make over the next few years are going to define what our company is. One thing that made Apple great was that from the early days it was built from the heart, not from someone who came in and said I know how to build a company… dot dot dot dot dot dot dot. Unfortunaltely, we didn't always use our heads and we can do better in many respects because we are wiser and smarter and know more and those kinds of things but one of the most important things, one of my largest wishes, is that we build next from heart. the people that are thinking about working for us or buy are products feel that and we're doing this because we have a passion about it. We're doing this because we really care about the higher educational process. Not cause we want to make a buck, not cause we just want to do it to do it."

"There needs to be someone who's sort of the keeper and reiterator of the vision. When there's a ton of work to do and it looks like a long ways, it really helps when there's someone there saying well we're one step closer and the goal definitely exists. The vision needs to be reiterated."

"George, I can't change the world. I don't wanna hear just 'cuz we blew it last time we're gonna blow it this time…"

"I forgot how much work it is to start a company. It's a lot of work."

"Marketing's out of line. There's too many people in marketing."

If you took ten people at random out of the big galley and put them in a boat by themselves, they could probably go faster. They would have both carrot and stick to motivate them. An energetic rower would be encouraged by the thought that he could have a visible effect on the speed of the boat. And if someone was lazy, the others would be more likely to notice and complain.

But the real advantage of the ten-man boat shows when you take the ten best rowers out of the big galley and put them in a boat together. They will have all the extra motivation that comes from being in a small group. But more importantly, by selecting that small a group you can get the best rowers. Each one will be in the top 1%. It's a much better deal for them to average their work together with a small group of their peers than to average it with everyone.

That's the real point of startups. Ideally, you are getting together with a group of other people who also want to work a lot harder, and get paid a lot more, than they would in a big company. And because startups tend to get founded by self-selecting groups of ambitious people who already know one another (at least by reputation), the level of measurement is more precise than you get from smallness alone. A startup is not merely ten people, but ten people like you.

Steve Jobs once said that the success or failure of a startup depends on the first ten employees. I agree. If anything, it's more like the first five. Being small is not, in itself, what makes startups kick butt, but rather that small groups can be select. You don't want small in the sense of a village, but small in the sense of an all-star team.

The larger a group, the closer its average member will be to the average for the population as a whole. So all other things being equal, a very able person in a big company is probably getting a bad deal, because his performance is dragged down by the overall lower performance of the others. Of course, all other things often are not equal: the able person may not care about money, or may prefer the stability of a large company. But a very able person who does care about money will ordinarily do better to go off and work with a small group of peers."

In a recent interview, Mark Zuckerberg gave a lot of advice for people looking to start a company and I found a lot of great moments from the talk. Here are a few of the notable quotes; 

"Most companies mess up by moving to slowly and trying to be too precise"

"You want to make mistakes by messing up equally on both sides. We make mistakes by moving to slowly and moving to quickly. That way we find ourselves in the middle" 

"We do this on hiring too. If you have too high of a success rate on closing candidates then you are probably paying too much."

"The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world moving so quickly, the only risk is not taking any risks."

"We are an extremely technical company."

"Having the people steering the product also understand the technical hurdles of what they are suggesting."

"I just think that we cared more. We just kept going and wanted it to exists. We just built it for ourselves."

"I think a company is actually the best vehicle in the world to help align a lot of people to effect the world. You can reward people."

"When you are engineering, you never do the same thing twice. When you're building a company, you basically just have a lot of 3-5 person teams. It's engineering up and down across all employees."

"Growth group. The best thing we did was realize that when you show up, your friends are there. We didn't want to just build features and hope people would find them… You have to choose if you want to centralize or de-centralize them. When you want things to work, you centralize them. You give them that focus and you make them make it happen. It's not about more features, it's about getting people to do more of the small things you want them to do…"

"You needed to find 10 friends which gave you enough content in your news feed which brought you back to the site. The point of using Facebook isn't about using all these apps, it's about finding and sharing with people you care about…"

"Once you get a core product that you are happy with, focus on what makes people come back and do more on the first user experience."

"I turned a lot of people over after the acquisition offers at hundreds of millions/billions of dollars. It showed me that people wanted something different than I did. I wanted to build a company."

"I was just really skeptical of VC's… still am."

"There's a 1000 things going on at any given time but there's like 1 or 2 that really matter. Focus on those."

"You can be so bad at so many things but as long as you stay focused on your customers you can get through all those things."

"You don't get judged by the mistakes, people don't remember those things, they remember what you did right and use today."

"I think you need to do stuff that you are passionate about. The companies that work are the ones people care about and have this vision of what people want to see in the world…"

"If you do a company and it goes even moderately well then you are doing it for at least 5 years so you might as well like it…"

"Everyone will build on top of our platform and connections and it will be a losing strategy to not build on top of it."

"If I were starting a company now, I probably would have stayed in Boston. The culture out here (Silicon Valley) is a little bit to short-term focused for me."

"What would you do that is different than everyone else solving this problem? Doing something that's different you could fail miserably but if you are doing what everyone else is doing then how can you win big at that? There's probably ways to gain different advantages and feel better in different ways just by doing everything a little different."

Here's the link to the video of the interview http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/298692604

I've always been curious to why things take off...

One thing I think about a lot is the one thing that made them different at the point in time at which they hit true growth.

I think one main similarity between them all (besides timing) is adding a level of transparency on previously opaque information before anyone else.

• Facebook added transparency to your relationship status before anyone else.
• Twitter added transparency to your current status before anyone else, making the world and perceived celebrities feel like everyone else.
• Foursquare added transparency to your current location before anyone else. (although don’t consider this a major success or long term behavior)
• eBay added transparency to collectibles you always wanted before anyone else.
• Craigslist added transparency to your neighbor’s garage before anyone else.

If you are going after massive market in the consumer space it may be worth asking;

What are you making transparent that didn't exist before?

Here at Zaarly, it's money. Job creation. Changing the economy.

One killer feature

When working with startups, Ferriss sees one problem popping up over and over. "The biggest weakness I see is companies getting focused on implementing new features," he says. "That’s the biggest waste of time that I see. They have a viable product that people are paying for and instead of identifying their cheapest avenue for acquiring profitable customers or focusing on polishing the product they already have, they focus on adding ten new features.

"Mike Maples is one of the angel investors I most respect in Silicon Valley. He says the startup that perfects their one feature and is the best at that is usually the startup that wins. It’s not the startup that’s an 8 out of 10 on 10 features. It is the startup that is 10 out of 10 on one feature — that just kills it. And you see it over and over again. They might have other features, but they absolutely kill it on one feature.

"And I think that’s where many startups get derailed. They feel like they are not profitable enough, because they lack just one more feature. They have people asking for this one feature. And, in some cases, it makes sense if everyone is bitching about something to fix it. But if you are constantly chasing the vocal minority, you are never going to be done building your product. And you will constantly be a 5 out of 10 on all of your features and you will run out of money. Or you will just have a product that really isn’t that awesome. That’s a pretty shitty fate too. Focusing on just one or two features is really important."

"I'm not even friends with most of these people adding me anymore. Then grandma just added me..."

"Over 50% of our Facebook users participate in 1 or more groups per day. Groups are very important to us"

"Do you just like to tell people that you're taking a shit today?"

I just quit my job 4 months ago. Our company, Gist, had just been acquired by BlackBerry and I had just returned from a trip to Iceland.

The day I returned home I had a message from a good friend who I had worked with before who mentioned that he wanted to meet, it was urgent and he would be over to my neighborhood soon. (it wasn't even a question I don't think.)

I was already at a bar having a drink and remembered that before I left for Iceland he had kicked up this new startup, Zaarly.com. I figured it was about that but I wasn't sure.

A 4 hour conversation follows into an agreement that I will quit my job & leave in the a.m. on a flight to Kansas City to meet the team. I felt scared and excited. Most of all though, I felt that I had to do this right. I had to quit right.

I called T.A., my good friend and CEO of Gist, and said we needed to get breakfast. I told him I was quitting. I think I teared up. It wasn't because of being mad it was because he was the reason I had this next opportunity. He is the one who believed in me and brought me on at Gist. He took the chance and now I was leaving. I told him one thing, "I want to do this right. I don't want to leave anything on the table and I want to leave with respect. But, can I do it in 3 days because I have to go to Kansas City today, like in an hour and I don't even have a plane ticket yet."

I spent the next 3 days on the road and returned to finish out what would be my "2 weeks" at Gist.

I can honestly say that today I talk with my past co-workers on a regular basis and have great friends from both Gist and Cobalt that I am excited as heck to hopefully work with at sometime in the future.

So, who knows if I made the right decision at this point in time but in my mind the chapter was already closed when we sold to BlackBerry and it was time to take on my next adventure.

I think we can all agree that we live in a different world than that of our parents generation. It's not a bad thing per say, it's just reality.

I spend a lot of time talking to my parents about their successful careers working a blue collar and sales job at the same company for over 30 years. They both feel blessed and lucky to have had such progress and longevity in their careers.

Then there's me. I'm on my 3rd job. It's both crazy, interesting and maybe some would argue... Not the best way to tackle the career world.

I disagree and so does the older generation that I've had the opportunity to work with over the past few years. Things are changing I think. 

The difference between our generation boils down to one thing in my opinion; connectedness.

The simple fact that we can see and hear everything else out there, talk to anyone across the world in an instant and ultimately be found by any company or recruiter out there will make it hard for any skilled worker to not find themselves with opportunity.

What's fascinating to me is the fact that in the future it won't matter what company you are at or what references you submit for your interviews or who you know at the company.... No, what matters is what you've done. That's it. It's the "Trust Economy."

I won't call your references, I'll find a way to get an intro to your old boss. People at different companies will be one degree of separation between other companies and your legacy and skills are all that matter. If you do a shitty job or you are a pain in the ass to work with then it will follow you forever.

For the record, if my last company had not been acquired by BlackBerry I probably would not have left. I believe in finishing the job at hand. Same thing with my first company, Cobalt Group. I built a concept that became an integral part of a bigger offering and I felt like it was my time to leave there as well. (and you learn that if you aren't in on a startup at the beginning then you really don't gain a lot of benefits if they have an exit...so timing matters and going with your gut.) It's that old "Risk and Reward" thing. Cobalt had a sense of closure and it felt like my job was done there. Also, I've never left a job without another job lined up.

Another thing I believe in more than anything is doing things on the side. I was recruited out of my last job because of teams and groups I had worked with outside of my day job. Starting a company on the side and working on teams at startup weekend events are what led me to this path.

Here's the kicker though, I left both jobs with more friends (I think) than when I started. The future is about building bridges when you leave to the next company. Even if you start your own company, it may not last forever for a number of reasons. 

My favorite thing to do is go back to the office, hang with old co-workers, party with them at events and ultimately create life long friendships with all of them.

That's the only way to do it IMHO and if you don't then just beware, it will follow you with everything else you do in the future.

If you leave, leave right and finish your job at hand. Build bridges not burn them and go above and beyond to always give back even after you leave.

To all my past co-workers, thank you so much for all the love and support you have given me and the pavement that you have laid to set the path that I never knew existed.

Without you, I am standing still and I thank you all for that. You are who you're around and a lot of that time is spent with co-workers so make it worth it. 

The future is one that will follow you everywhere and to quote my favorite Avett Brothers song, The Weight of Lies, "When you run make sure you run to something and not away from... cuz' lies don't need an air-o-plane to chase you anywhere."

Welcome to the "Trust Economy." Welcome to the future.

People want feedback... Regardless if it's a product telling you or your friend's comments, it's the same emotion. Think about everything in life... feedback and how you think you're perceived probably drives every single thing you do. Create moments of progress and success within your product to make people using your product smile, a lot.