Thoughts

If you read one thing today…

I read a lot of what Paul Graham writes and while I don’t always agree with him, I believe the following are among the four most important paragraphs he has ever written (from How to Do What You Love):

Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don’t take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you’re producing, you’ll know you’re not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you’re actually writing.

“Always produce” is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you’re supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. “Always produce” will discover your life’s work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.

Of course, figuring out what you like to work on doesn’t mean you get to work on it. That’s a separate question. And if you’re ambitious you have to keep them separate: you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.

It’s painful to keep them apart, because it’s painful to observe the gap between them. So most people pre-emptively lower their expectations. For example, if you asked random people on the street if they’d like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you’d find most would say something like “Oh, I can’t draw.” This is more a statement of intention than fact; it means, I’m not going to try. Because the fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehow got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the next twenty years, they’d get surprisingly far. But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say “I can’t.”

Found on FFFFound

The Society for More Creative Buzzwords…

Old Writing

“Fixing” Technology Meetups in Chicago

I found this while browsing through one of my old attempts at a blog and decided to move it over here since Jelly Chicago is getting really close to the “ideal” that I laid out a while ago….

From Feb 22nd 2008…

Last night I attended TechCocktail here in Chicago, a great event that makes you feel good about some of the exciting things that are sprouting up in this city. However, while it was great to see such enthusiasm and turnout for a technology event here in Chicago, my disappointment with technology based meetups will continue.

As I see it there are several problems with the popular meetups. There is too much noise at these events (and I don’t mean the audible kind).
There are so many people there doing so many different things that it often becomes difficult to have any sort of meaningful or worthwhile interaction with them or to contribute something meaningful or worthwhile to others.

It seems often that the sheer size of the event and, in turn, the different goals each type of person has for the night ends up fighting with the premise and ideals the event had in the first place.

Some people come for the free beer and to have a good time, some come to find people to work with and share ideas, some come to catch up with each other, and some come to demo their latest product or site. Add to that those who come to pitch you (and those that come to hound you and pitch the same crazy idea that they’ve been hounding people with at every tech meetup since the dawn of tech meetups) and you get a pretty awkwardly interacting mass of people.

Hardly a place that generates anything other than excitement for the tech community in the area which is a great thing but doesn’t do a whole lot for the other 361 days of the year when the event is not happening.

So not being one to let things sit, I’ve been doing some thinking about how to fix them and how to create meetups that are functional, productive, and worthwhile. Still less intense and focused on one group of people than a BarCamp or an Unconference but still an improvement upon the large scale meet-and-greets.

So what would make these events productive? I think I’ve narrowed it down to several key factors all related to the idea that the best business relationships emerge from meaningful real-life interactions:

Increased Frequency - Its difficult to form meaningful relationships with people you only meet in passing and speak to briefly a couple times per year.

The ability to be productive - The ability to show someone something or elaborate on an idea is key and its just not optimal to whip out a laptop or brainstorm in a large and crowded space.

Filter out the Noise - While a large group of people may seem optimal for meeting new people its actually quite difficult especially when that large group of people is compressed into a short time. Lets face it, a series of elevator pitches is not a conversation

Less Self Interest - If the idea is to grow community, then sponsors shilling for exposure, people trying to sell you things, and people trying to randomly network are counter productive

More Community Ethos - Like I’ve stressed, you’re there to learn from and interact with others who are doing cool things, not figure out how they’re useful to you or what you can get from them.

Its funny but the best solution I’ve thought about seems to come from the support group model, i.e. they meet frequently, have some form of accountability for like-minded or like-interested people, and they allow for personal interaction and meaningful relationships within medium sized groups.

The solution I had been tossing around is sort of a founders anonymous, a weekly or bi-weekly meeting of people perhaps in a coffehouse backroom (yes I know about OpenCoffee and ChicagoBeta but the sponsors and the pitches there sort of throw me off) or rotating through company conference rooms where people begin to know each other over time based on the cool stuff they’re making and only indirectly on the businesses they’re trying to grow. Realizing this, there is also no incentive for people to show up, I’ll give a hat tip to techcocktail and bring beer into the mix…

It seems like the ideal setting would be a “founders hour”, a biweekly time after work at a local bar where founders could wander in and get to know each other over a relatively quiet drink and with a frequency and intimacy that allows for work to get done and meaningful relationships to be built.

The size of the gathering also helps to act as a filter as theres no room for hucksters and hangers on, if they don’t have something meaningful to contribute to the conversation they’ll eventually just stop coming or people will stop talking to them.

No sponsors, no pretense, no pitching… just cool ideas and the intent of fostering a tech community. I’ll keep thinking but I would like to announce my intention to start something like this here in Chicago and anyone who is interested should drop me a line to brad at unchartedventures with the .com and the @ of course.

Old Writing

Finishing the Bottle

One of the first tech startups I got truly interested in and worked with was a wine recommendation engine named Tastevine.com and the parent company of Tastevine had a pretty cool wine blog called Grape Thinking.  I wrote one widely regarded post there on Marketing to the Millenial generation and two other well-recieved posts about the wine industry in general.  In the interest of consolidating things a bit I’ve copied them below…

(May 17th, 2007) Marketing Wine to Millennials, a letter from Generation Y:

To the Wine Community at Large:

I write to you as a firmly established member of what is typically called “Generation Y” and I have a bone to pick. Mainly it is a result of a recent phenomenon in the community, one I like to refer to as the “dumbing down of wine.” It seems to be an increasingly popular opinion that in order to bring wine to younger and newer audiences, wine needs to be brought down to “our level”. Unfortunately for the marketers it is almost instinctive by now that we will reject most things that people attempt to target to us. We like to adopt things ourselves. Look at the successes and failures in mainstream viral marketing. Most things that succeed do so because young people want to have them, not because they were told they need to have them.

Wine doesn’t need to change the way it is, but it does need to change the way young people are told about it. Some believe that wine has to be trendy or cool or fun or marketed like beer and hard alcohol to become popular with young people. They point to trends in marketing in music and magazines and tech gadgets and tailor their wine approach to these same tactics. The problem is that they are missing the ways in which wine has a competitive advantage.When it comes to young people, wine will never win a competition with beer or hard alcohol on trendiness or shock value or sex appeal. It’s like marketing a horse by telling people its a cow because you think cows are what people want.

I’d like to let you in on a little secret about young people. Just around the time we reach legal drinking age we also start to have a desire for sophistication or a desire to be seen as an adult. We’ve done a lot of moving on from our teenage years and, contrary to popular belief, the majority of us are not a bunch of binge drinking, hard partying, pierced, and tattooed hooligans as we are portrayed in the press. The majority of young people today are smart, ambitious, inquisitive, and above all we’re sophisticated and discerning consumers (even if we’re not yet, we like to think so). This is where wine can compete. Make us feel sophisticated, after all this is one of the ways it is marketed to adults. Wine is a complex and beautiful drink with a great history and a great culture. This is something a lot of the Millennial Generation would love to learn about but the marketers don’t think we want to learn the story. Sure we have our idiosyncrasies and like cool stores, but most of all we want to be treated like the adults that we are. We don’t like to be talked down to, we are willing to ask if we don’t know something, and we certainly don’t like it when older people feel they have to dumb stuff down for us.

Truthfully, members of Generation Y shun wine because:

1. the price point of good wine is a bit high
2. no one has really attempted to market wine to us in the middle ground (Meaning someone needs to meet the Millennials with a good wine at a decent price and speak to us at a level somewhere between wine kindergarten and hoity-toity wine college).

I feel I may be getting a bit drawn out, but for now I’ll leave you with this:

• We hate when marketers treat us like we have no attention span or sophistication. Speak to us like the adults that we are and please please stop the race to the bottom when it comes to marketing wine to Millennials.
• Stop dumbing it down to broad-reaching food pairing suggestions and one flavor wine descriptions. We are interested and we want to learn. If you want to sell us wine then be willing to teach us and to take time with us. Part of wine’s appeal is it’s complexity, let’s not lose that for the sake of selling out.
• Finally, if you want to integrate some of the things we enjoy like social networking and other technological concepts, why not get a member of our generation to help you. Please don’t have a member of an older generation try to create products for us without our input. Remember how cool you thought some of the things your parents created were?

I would like to say that I do appreciate the strides that are being made in the wine world. Hopefully with a little input from young people the incredible culture that is wine can spread even further.

- Brad Maier

As embarassing as the nickname VinoBandito is, I thought it was funny then…More great stuff in the comments: http://grapethinking.com/guest-post-brad-the-vinobandito

(June 7th, 2007) The Importance of the Small Wine Merchant:

One of the things I like the most about wine is the small shops that sell it. Yes there are big distributors and outlets, but it is amazing how important and interesting the network of small shops can be. While they may not have the selection of the larger stores, the small shops are communities that prove invaluable when it comes to learning about, talking about, or finding wine. If you are looking to learn more about wine, visiting your local merchant is a great way to do it and maybe make some friends in the process.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that wine has been so slow in coming to the online table, is that it has always had the feel of a small and networked community in the real world. Much like the social communities now found on the web, this wine shop network is one of the few places in business today where they will make every effort to go out of their way to help you. As someone who is relatively new to the depths of wine, I’ve found it incredibly important to pick the collective brains of the owners of a small network of shops around where I live. Sure, some shops are better than others and you do have to experience a lot (visiting a lot of wine shops might not be the most terrible thing in the world), but by frequenting the shops near me I have been able to pick up on the knowledge of the staff and this has helped me accelerate my learning curve a great deal. I’ve also been pleasantly surprised by the recommendations of wine store staff.

Typically I’m skeptical when a store employee recommends a product to me. Perhaps it is the entrepreneur in me that wonders why they are telling me to buy this specific product and what’s in it for them. I can honestly say, though, that most of the people I’ve met who work in or own a wine shop do it out of love or passion, they genuinely love to share their experiences and their new finds; much like members of today’s online communities. Sure, some shops may get special benefits from pushing a certain wine (that’s good business) but on the whole I’m rarely disappointed by wines that the shops recommend to me.

When it comes to the wine shop I think it is important that a wine newbie find one they’re comfortable with. The shop can become a knowledge resource for you as you learn and the experienced staff there can become friends and mentors on your journey into wine. While you might pay a little more at your local shop than you would at a big box outlet, the knowledge you can gain and the people you can meet more than makes up for the money you would save by shopping elsewhere. The next step of course is to successfully transition this wonderful real world community to the world of web 2.0. Thankfully advances are being made with the advent of sites like Corkd, Calwineries, and Tastevine, which approach different segments of the younger market.

Now if someone were to ask me for my opinion on how the small wine shop could do a better job of staying in business, I’d take them back to my previous post. The details I’ve previously outlined apply as directly to the wine shop and the entire wine community as they do to the producers themselves. If any members of the wine community are still a bit unsure of how to make the leap or are interested in making the leap, feel free to contact us.

(July 9th, 2007) Why You Shouldn’t Knock Wine in Tiny Bottles:

I’ve been struck by something recently when walking around my local grocery store. The small bottle of wine is becoming more and more prevalent, no longer is it relegated to the low rung wines and airplane bars. Why is the small bottle important? Because it could represent a drastic but important change in the wine industry and with it a whole new group of buyers, not to mention increased sales figures for wineries.

The current traditional 750ml bottle size presents several related problems; mainly because it is a lot of wine for less than 3 people to consume. As a result it becomes relatively expensive for two people or less to drink. This is increased by the fact that you’re paying for wine you may not end up drinking if you don’t finish the bottle quickly enough after opening (depending on your stance on how long wine truly keeps). Switching to a smaller bottle would allow for more purchases by single people and it would bring the price point of good wine down to a more approachable level, bringing me to my next point…

As new people come to wine they don’t necessarily have the knowledge to always make the correct decision when it comes to a wine purchase. It becomes an unfortunate circumstance when someone spends a lot of money on a wine that is a wrong choice for their personal taste preferences (see www.tastevine.com). The small bottle allows for experimentation. Case in point, what is one of the most popular choices at a wine bar? The wine flights because people don’t trust their knowledge of wine to put all their money in one basket and people like variety. Its much more interesting to purchase a flight and experiment than it is to pick one bottle and drink it all night.

As an extension of that, the real advantage in wine sales with young people in America may come from the all-american six-pack model. Why aren’t wines being sold in small bottle flight-packs? You’d be dealing in a medium that young people know, keeping the price points low, and allowing new wine drinkers to experiment while mitigating the risk (and price) of picking a bad bottle. Sure there’d be increased costs of production but it is my belief that the resulting increase in sales would more than make up for it, not to mention the goodwill and brand loyalty you’d gain with young people. It may not be possible for the smallest of boutique wineries but for the mid-level to major level producers it seems like benefits of attempting it will far outweigh the costs. Have you seen an increase in small bottle prevalence where you live?

Awesome

Bonjour Monde!

I have been meaning to get a blog that I consistently update and share cool things on for quite some time now.  This is it.  Welcome!