New Rule: Find the thing people are going batshit crazy about. You're then able to leave the guessing world and understand what really turns people on, and then figure out how you are not going to fight it, but encourage it and work hard to help people solve problems.
Last night was one of those crummy October nights in New York. It's noticeably becoming darker earlier, and the rain was coming down just hard enough to entice you to actually begin your descent from the office and pursuing your evening, yet not hard enough to romanticize staying on your ass and doing work. The lobby of my building doubles as an event space for 25-50 people, usually technology
meetups, fundraisers, launches. On this terrible night, I watched people pour into and fill the space. It was the Pintrest Food meetup for NYC. Taking pictures of food right? I saw gorgeous women and mutant looking nerd men. I saw a friend walk in who is starting their own ice cream biz. Later that night, when I finally decided to enter the rainy streets I walked past the audience in full view, and saw faces alight, engaged, excited. I swear I felt like I entered another vortex. I felt like I missed something critical by not knowing enough about Pintrest. I felt so inspired I couldn't contain myself. How cool that I could be present for a scene that I absolutely knew was on a rocket-ship to outer space. New Rule #2. When awkward people are unashamed to smile about something publicly, they're in the company of other early adopters. A passing look at my friend's face and it was like she was delighting in a humorous anecdote by Tony Robbins. I think there was a picture of a muffin on the screen.
You won't hear me groan with puzzlement about (lazy, dumb, useless) people are that they could be interested in something that seems too low brow, too damn simple, too intrusive, too basic to be the next big thing. Did you fight facebook? Did you think long and hard about buying a mobile phone in the late 90's? Was having a Creative Labs MuVo Nomad just fine, for months, for you? Who needs an iPod anyway? Guilty of all of the above.
Things are changing so fast for me and this industry that about two months ago a serious VC guy teaching a class about startup jobs still felt compelled to encourage the students that creepiness around finding people on twitter is something we can all please move past. A few months ago, I didn't have a twitter account. Today I can't live without it.
I was programmed professionally in a domain where if you can't profit on it personally and immediately, then the information is not worth having, therefore it's just much easier to dismiss trends. On wall street, the mentality is typically about how much can one "extract" from the system, not how much value can one put in and gain personally and professionally by using their own talents and skills. You never hear anything even close to someone saying in the startup world "I have a few friends that are looking out for me and will take care of me." Yet so many people in this industry looking out for each other and supporting them and encouraging them. Investors and tech all-stars promote innovators, who are possibly going to disrupt their own products. Is that the sign of an immature industry or a new paradigm in American Business?
This is a table you might be familiar with... Everett Rogers presented this, the adoption curve, in his work "diffusion of innovations." I submit that securities professionals, those who manipulate and affect the prices of pretty much every public instrument anyone has ever traded, are typically very slow to adapt to technology both professionally and personally. I was affecting stock prices during the dot com bubble through the financial crisis, and lived in the late majority part of the curve for my whole life. I wasn't alone. What matters is that I believe we are about to reach the chasm of how investment information is consumed in this country, and many of the upstarts in the social investing space are very focused on how to leverage this. People moved away from traditional brokers years ago, some people left the market altogether- but don't fool yourself- people won't research investments the same way ever again.
Trading mentality is built around the polarity of right or wrong. The guy with the opposing position is always wrong. There is no room to see his point of view. How can I trash my competitor, and never admit defeat. Yet wall street is dying. The attitude of closed mindedness, not sharing, not adapting, has run its course. What's much more powerful is the feeling of having connected our trusted peers to help us drive decisions. That's why we're building something that enables people to interact with each other to determine whether information is useful to them. Whether it's cupcakes on stock ideas- It's the direction most people are heading towards.
"More than anything else, it was the social power of peers talking to peers about the innovation that led to adoption of the new idea." - Rogers
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