Snapchat & Sharing With Discretion

I've written in the past about the fact that Google+ is trying to fix social networking. While they’re not doing it very successively, the concept behind Circles is a powerful one. It allows users to easily share with discretion; i.e. to share certain updates and photos with selected groups (or circles) of friends. If Facebook favors 'open social networking', and Google+ is promoting 'discreet social networking', then Snapchat is promoting 'private social networking'.

From Wikipedia, Snapchat is:

a photo messaging application. Using the app, users can take photos, record videos, add text and drawings, and send them to a controlled list of recipients. Users set a time limit for how long recipients can view their photos, up to 10 seconds, after which it will be deleted from the recipient's device and the company's servers.

Sounds like something James Bond would use.

Snapchat was started back in September 2011 by a couple of Stanford guys. It now has around 200k monthly uniques, a $50 million valuation and users are sending 50 million 'snaps' a day.

Snapchat's success is a clear indication that there's a market for privacy. Social networks that don't facilitate the ability to easily share with discretion would be smart to take a closer look at Snapchat.

Productivity Tips

I came across some really good productivity tips this past week. One group in a great post from Matt Heinz and the other in a post from Erin Schulte from Fast Company. I'll add two things to their lists that have worked really for me:

1. Each morning I write down my top three priorities for the day. That is, the top 3 most important things that I need to accomplish that will help me get to where I want to be. I actually capture these in the Chatter app in Salesforce.com, but you could capture them anywhere. Then, at the end of each day, I update the Chatter post confirming that I got them done. You'd be shocked at how productive you can be if you only do the 3 most important things on your list each day.
2. To prevent myself from spending the day responding to incoming streams of messages, I work 'offline' for large portions of the day. I put on my headphones and close all web browsers and switch to "work offline" mode in Outlook and go to work. These are typically the the most productive parts of my day.

I'm sure I have others but those two stand out as things that have really helped me ramp up my productivity in recent years.

2012 Music

I’m not going to post my ‘most listened to music’ list like I did last year. For a variety of reasons my music wasn't syncing to my Last.fm profile for the entire year so the data isn't accurate. That said, here are some great artists that I hadn't listened to all that much (or at all) in the past that I listened to quite a bit last year.

• The Lumineers
• The Shins
• Iron & Wine
• Hayes Carll
• Angels & Airwaves
• Townes Van Zandt
• The Felice Brothers
• Whiskeytown
• Beach House
• My Morning Jacket
• Band of Heathens

I also discovered a genre called post rock. It’s very relaxing and great to listen to while you work. Some of the bands I like include The Six Parts Seven, This Will Destroy You and Marconi Union. Check out this somewhat depressing but very inspiring video that recaps the events of 2012 -- the soundtrack playing in the background is a great song by This Will Destroy You.

I also listened to a lot more of the stuff I listened to in past years, including:

• Ryan Bingham
• Steve Earle
• Radiohead
• Mumford & Sons
• Micky & the Motorcars
• Reckless Kelly
• Bon Iver
• James McMurtry
• Bob Dylan
• Uncle Tupelo
• The Avett Brothers

Some new, some old -- 2012 was a good year for music.

The Downside Of Good Reporting

It turns out that, even today, nearly all of the big checks in the ad industry are still being written for big, broadcast marketing efforts (television ads, radio ads, billboards on the side of the highway, etc.).  You might find this surprising given all of the conversion-based marketing channels that have popped up over the years. Advertisers no longer have to worry about not being able to track their ad spend. Marketing has become measurable. Google can tell you how many leads they drive to you so the problem of wasted ad spend should be over. So why are marketers continuing to spend on the big, hard to measure stuff? In many cases, the reason is that lots of ad buyers are really out to do one thing: avoid getting fired. So they’re very reluctant to take a risk on something that can be tracked. Many would rather their boss see a beautiful ad on the highway on her drive to work as opposed to a report showing that the new marketing campaign failed to drive a positive ROI.

With that in mind, in your early conversations it's important to understand where your prospect sits on this topic. My take is that high performing companies and individuals want to measure their performance and the performance of their vendors -- so that they can intelligently expand (or limit) partnership growth. If they are reluctant to measure success, they may not be the right partner as growing the relationship will typically be much more difficult.

Be cognizant of the fact that your partner might be hesitant to be measured. Try to get them to open up a bit on the topic -- it'll help you get a better sense of whether or not they're the right fit.

Taxes

The two most significant taxes that Americans pay each year are a tax on their income and a tax on their investment. The income tax is a tax on people's labor. Firefighters get paid for fighting fires. Teachers get paid for teaching our kids. And CEOs get paid for driving their company's strategy. Depending on how much they get paid, they pay a portion of that pay to the government. The tax brackets break down like this for a family:

• 10% on taxable income from $0 to $12,400, plus
• 15% on taxable income over $12,400 to $47,350, plus
• 25% on taxable income over $47,350 to $122,300, plus
• 28% on taxable income over $122,300 to $198,050, plus
• 33% on taxable income over $198,050 to $388,350, plus
• 35% on taxable income over $388,350

So a father that is raising his kids and working as a firefighter putting out fires and adding direct value to society through his work making $150,000 is paying 28% of the value of his labor to the government.

The investment tax -- capital gains and dividend taxes -- taxes something different. That taxes a bet.

When someone invests in Facebook and the value of the stock increases, or the company pays out some of their profit in the form of a dividend at the end of the year, the profit that the investor made is taxed. This is passive income -- the investor is just sitting there watching the money come in. He's not necessarily adding incremental value to society on top of his investment (in most cases).

There's nothing wrong with this -- investment is critical to a prosperous economy -- and the investor should make as much as he possibly can on his investments. But because he's adding less direct value to society, if we're going to tax him, we should tax him at a higher rate than we tax direct, value-creating labor. Simple, right? Right.

But we don't do that. Here are the current rates:

• 20% on capital gains
• 15% on dividends

So the investor that makes $150,000 per year in capital gains pays 8% less than the firefighter does for his labor.

And this is why our tax code is backwards. This is why Warren Buffet's assistant pays a lower tax rate than he does. This is why, in 2009, the Americans with the top 400 incomes (who made, on average, $202 million per year) paid a lower tax rate than you did. One quarter of them paid less than 15%, and more than half of them paid less than 20%.

We have to fix this. I'm not going argue what the tax rates should be (at least not today).  But I am arguing that we have to flip the structure so that tax rates on labor are lower than the tax rates on investment. It's just backwards.

In his controversial New York Times article, Buffet suggested the following solution:

I would suggest 30 percent of taxable income between $1 million and $10 million, and 35 percent on amounts above that. A plain and simple rule like that will block the efforts of lobbyists, lawyers and contribution-hungry legislators to keep the ultrarich paying rates well below those incurred by people with income just a tiny fraction of ours. Only a minimum tax on very high incomes will prevent the stated tax rate from being eviscerated by these warriors for the wealthy.

Of course this won't fix the entire fiscal mess and I think we need to go a step further and flip the tax structure so investors pay a higher rate than workers regardless of their income. But Buffet's plan is a step in the right direction of creating a fairer tax code that incentivizes the activity that leads to greater prosperity for the country as a whole.

CEO Pay

According the AFL-CIO, the average Fortune 500 CEO made $12.9 million in 2011. After taxes, that's about $430,000 per month -- or $198,000 every two weeks. CEOs at big companies get paid a lot of money -- and my sense is that the top priority for most of them is to do whatever they can to keep those checks coming.

That's an important thing to remember the next time you're asking one of them to take a big risk on your product.

Margin Call

Over the holidays I watched the movie Margin Call (for the second time).

The movie is a fictional depiction of an investment bank crumbling during the 2008 financial crisis (it was likely inspired by the real life Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers). The story revolves around a brilliant, young analyst in the company's risk management group. One night he discovers that the company has over-leveraged itself through an over-investment in synthetic CDOs and MBSs. Throughout the night and into the early morning the analyst's discovery makes its way to the highest levels of the company. The movie is a depiction of how the company handles the crisis.

Margin Call is a phenomenal movie. It's brilliantly acted by some excellent actors (Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, Zachary Quinto, Simon Baker and Demi Moore to name a few). And the suspense around watching management learn what has happened and how they handle it elegantly depicts what were probably real events inside many investment banks at the time. The more senior you were, the less likely you were to understand the financial mechanics behind the crisis.

In what is probably the best scene of the movie, the young analyst (played by Zachary Quinto) is asked to explain what he has discovered to the CEO of the company (played powerfully by Jeremy Irons). Irons' character says to him:

Maybe you could tell me what is going on. And please, speak as you might to a young child. Or a golden retriever. It wasn't brains that brought me here; I assure you that.

That line just about sums up much of the cause of the financial crisis of the late 2000s. The people on the ground were packaging and selling a product that management at our largest and most reputable financial institutions did not -- and could not -- understand.

If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend renting Margin Call.

New Year, New Design

You may have noticed that I’ve redesigned my website. I decided to move to this new theme (the Ari theme) for a few reasons.

• Much cleaner look (lots of white space and fewer widgets).
• Larger font size for easier reading.
• Wider main reading column allows for less scrolling.
• Brighter, more conspicuous hyperlinks.
• Clearer navigation – it allowed me to put the monthly and category archives on the same page.

I’m pretty happy with the change, I hope you like it.

5 Years Of Blogging

Last month marked the fifth year that I've been writing on this blog. As I did last year, I thought I'd post a graph showing the number of posts I've written each month. I wrote 77 blog posts in 2012 (6.4 per month), the most since I started writing -- and the trendline shows that I'm definitely writing more over time, which is a good thing.

One of the challenges I've had with writing more frequently is that I'm always concerned that the quality of the posts will suffer. I'm going to try to worry a little less about that this year and plan to commit to writing 15 posts per month. That's a big increase over last year -- we'll see how I do.

The Problem With Google Health

Google Health, the self-managed patient portal that launched back in 2008, shut down on December 31st. According to Google's blog post, they made the move due to a lack of user adoption:

Now, with a few years of experience, we’ve observed that Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would. There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts. But we haven’t found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people.

Google Health faced the same challenge that EHR (electronic health records) faced in driving adoption among physicians: everyone sees the long term benefit of getting patient information online, but in the short term, it's a lot of work.

In order to drive wide-ranging engagement and adoption of a self-managed patient portal like Google Health, there has to be an instant piece of value in return for the patient's time and effort. That value can be money, time savings, or some other functional piece of value -- the greater the value, the greater the adoption. Case in point: EHR adoption finally picked up after the government provided high value, short term financial incentives to physicians that reached an acceptable rate of usage.

Because Google didn't offer some kind of immediate, tangible benefit to their users they weren't able to drive the wide-ranging adoption they expected. It may sound a bit simplistic to claim that companies have to offer some kind of tangible reward to drive real adoption of a patient portal. But in some cases, it really is that simple.

Looking Back at 2012

2012 was a super busy year for me that included lots of big changes. I thought I'd take a few minutes to capture some of the more notable events of the year. January was moving month. After five years of living on 22nd street in NYC, I moved one block up and two blocks over to the Flatiron neighborhood. I'm glad I made the move; I'm in a much nicer building with a doorman, a concierge, a couple of game rooms and -- most important -- a great roof-deck.

February was a difficult month. In the afternoon, on Wednesday the 8th, my father passed away.  It was a very difficult time for my entire family. But the funeral was a wonderful tribute to his life and I'm proud to say that we sent him out in style. There was a great obituary chronicling much of his life in all the local papers and the funeral drew a large group of family, friends and former colleagues. It included a military funeral ceremony followed by a wonderful reception where we laughed, cried and remembered his life and accomplishments. I know it was exactly what he would have wanted.

February was also the month that I made the difficult decision to resign from Next Jump (after being there for there for more than five great years) to pursue an awesome opportunity with a healthcare technology start-up.

March brought some free time as I took a few weeks off before starting with the new company. Early in the month, I took a trip out west. I flew to California and stayed with a friend in Hermosa Beach for a couple of days, then drove to Carmel, Big Sur, San Francisco and ended the trip with three great days of snowboarding in Lake Tahoe before flying back to New York. It was an awesome trip and just what I needed to recharge before starting the new job. Towards the end of the month, I also caught a Celtics game with my Mom and made a quick trip down to Fort Lauderdale for work.

April was a complete blur with the start of my softball season, a bunch of work travel, a bachelor party in Las Vegas and a wedding in Miami.

May included a busy streak of client meetings – I spent nights in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC and Chicago. I also closed my first big strategic partnership at work. And along the way I found some time to catch a great Reckless Kelly concert at the 9:30 Club in DC.

June was a fun summer month. I played a bunch of softball, caught a Red Sox game at Fenway, saw a Felice Brothers concert in Brooklyn and took my first trip to Coney Island.

July was pretty busy. I made a three day trip out to Minneapolis for work. I got to explore the town quite a bit and catch a Twins game. Though the highlight of July was my friend's wedding in Los Angeles. They picked a great spot in Redondo Beach overlooking the Pacific. Here's a shot of some friends and I before the fun started.

August was another busy month with lots of travel. But the highlight was my brother bringing my sister-in-law and my niece up to Boston to celebrate his birthday. We spent a couple days showing my niece some of the Boston landmarks. And we took this shot at Samba Steak & Sushi House, a great Japanese Steakhouse just west of Boston.

September brought my first overnight sailing trip out on the Long Island Sound.  I took this shot as the sun was setting. Great trip.

October brought hurricane Sandy to New York City. I captured some of my thoughts on the tragedy here. I made my first trip down to Nashville to accept my company's Best Place to Work  award.  And I made a trip back up to Boston to get away from the flooding and to catch an awesome Ryan Bingham concert at the Royale Nightclub. I took this shot of the Flatiron building in NYC the day the hurricane started. The streets were empty at rush hour that day, but nobody knew the devastation that was coming to the area at that point.

November was a crazy month. One of my writings was published on a popular healthcare blog. I caught a Patriots game and the Celtics home opener. I also made a trip out to Chicago for work. My Mom came down to NYC for Thanksgiving. I took a couple days off and we kept busy; we saw Lincoln and The Lion King musical, went to the top of the Empire State Building, had some great meals and visited the World Trade Center Memorial. Here's a photo of one of the waterfalls at the exhibit. Someone laid a rose over their friend's name.

December brought me back to Chicago for work and back to Boston to watch a miserable Patriots game in the pouring rain. The month was full of holiday parties. And I was recognized as the top performer on my team at my company's annual meeting. Though the highlight, of course, was spending a week down in Virginia with my family for Christmas.

I'm sure there's lots of good stuff that I'm leaving out, but I'll leave it there for now. 2012 was a good year...but I'm ready for 2013. Happy New Year everyone.

Individual Employee Budgets

The other day I wrote about the fast growing b2e2b business model where enterprise software companies make their product available (often for free) to individual employees. Then – after those employees love the product – they put pressure on their employers to buy the premium version or to buy the product for the entire enterprise. While I believe that this model is going to continue to grow at an extremely fast pace in 2013, there is no doubt that it’s inefficient – i.e. the employee has to go through a bureaucratic purchasing department to buy a tool that will make them better at their jobs.

That’s why I believe that, as we see b2e2b grow, I think we’ll also see this inefficiency addressed. That is, we’ll start to see more budgetary control put in the hands of the individual employee. Many companies – even large companies – already give their employees a cell phone budget. I think we’ll see this kind of control flow down to other productivity tools as well to the point that budgets won't be bucketed by division or group or team -- we'll see more and more money flowing into individual employee budgets.

Of course there are internal compatibility, security and scalability concerns that will slow down this trend, but I think this it's something for enterprise focused companies to watch out for in the coming years.