Media /// Forward

BGov envisions an expansion well beyond the company’s core financial clients to congressional staffers, agency officials, lobbyists, trade organizations and corporations around the U.S. — willing to pay for what the company sells as the most thorough look at the business ramifications of the Capitol hustle.

“There is immense value for our clients in this detailed information,” said Chris Walters, one of the executives overseeing the startup. With $600 billion in government discretionary spending up for grabs each year, such detailed information makes a modest “information investment” more than worthwhile, Walters said.

— Bloomberg covers the nation’s capital behind a high pay wall - latimes.com

MBAs and Entrepreneurship/Startups

My Social Media and Entrepreneurship class this semester has hosted a bunch of great speakers, and almost every week the topic of MBAs in the entrepreneurship world has come up. Some of our guests have MBAs (Chris Dixon, Fred Wilson), some don’t (Perry Chen, Scott Heiferman), but regardless, each time the issue comes up there’s I’ve observed a fair amount of tension. Maybe it’s because CBS is known as a finance-heavy school and the conversations would have been different at Stanford or Haas.

I think it boils down to misconceptions on both sides. 

Which brings me to the below reblog from Whartonite Seeks Codemonkey, one of my favorite Tumblrs. What does it say about MBAs? That they (I guess I should say “we”) think they are hotshots with tons of good ideas and, when it comes to tech, they just need some programming peons to execute their grand visions.

Some of us probably are like that. In my experience, most are not.

On the entrepreneur/startup side, there seems to be a particularly New York bias against MBAs: a great encapsulation can be found in this Quora thread. The top ranked post in the thread is this comment: 

Are you sure you want to break into the NYC startup scene?

If you really did, it seems you would have already moved to NY and gotten to work on it.  You wouldn’t be considering delaying it by 2-3 years to go get more education.

Essentially: “Get some real experience. The opportunity cost (buzz word!) of school is too high.”

Chris Dixon admitted that he downplays the MBA he got from Harvard, but he and Fred Wilson (who went to Wharton) went on to discuss the value that an MBA can provide, when coupled with experience either at a startup or in a fast-growing (i.e. not mature) part of a tech company, like Amazon. That an MBA offers valuable skills is proven by Fred’s weekly “MBA Mondays” column on his blog, which covers basic finance, accounting and other topics taught in business school. (One could, of course, learn these skills without going to school, but I don’t want to dive into a pros/cons of an MBA here.)

Most interestingly, Chris discussed going into entrepreneurship and thinking of it like a career, taking place over the course of 30 years.

Above all, I think a lot of tension between MBAs and entrepreneurs stems from an age-old problem: they don’t always speak the same language. Example: one of my classmates likened the micro-donation principle behind Kickstarter to a securitized mortgage: contributions come from a wide range of people, so the funding for a Kickstarter project is, in a way, securitized (since numerous investors have pooled contributions to fund one entity). But Perry and Scott weren’t really sure what he was saying when he was talking about it in class.

Hopefully MBAs and entrepreneurs (not that they’re mutually exclusive: we have lots of examples in our class) will be able to close this gap as more MBAs join start-ups or found their own companies, and spend time in both worlds.

Please add your own perspective in the comments, if you’re so inclined.

whartoniteseekscodemonkey:

Peanuts or Less. Srsly? 

Could you possibly refer me to a programmer/application expert? I need a dedicated soul who would be willing to work for peanuts or less.

Thanks- ‘all about the sweat equity’ 

Mr. Met works for Carlos Brito. Who knew.

brewyork:

Big Apple Brews in center field is one of the few spots left in Citi Field where anything resembling craft beer remains.

It wasn’t long ago - last season, to be precise - when Citi Field had the upper-hand when it came to beer selection at New York’s ballparks. And while the selection is…

I’m sure that when they designed the business model for HBO it wasn’t with the intention of pleasing writers, but it’s a happy consequence.

—

Aaron Sorkin

Sorkin apparently took his new show to HBO because it focuses on quality over ratings. Seems like HBO is doing a good job of combining content and distribution pieces: HBO Go and the HBO brand are big draws for content producers.

Also: all of HBO’s growth is now coming from overseas distribution: domestic subs flat around 40M, international subs up to 42M, from 28M in 2007.

And: “Game of Thrones” is getting 50% more per episode than “Sopranos” did from international syndication.

Does this mean that the market for “premium content” in the US is topped out? I don’t think so. It’s just that additional growth is likely to be via HBO Go and other digital platforms.

‘Thrones’ Unites Thrusts of HBO’s Strategy - WSJ.com

New Yorkers lose their minds when it comes to brunch. Crain’s recently reported that we make 35% more Google searches per capita for “brunch spots” than any other city. And while we feel personally persecuted waiting 10 minutes for the F train, we happily endure Soviet-style lines for a stack of pancakes.

—

Amazing NYC stereotypes article.

That line in the photo? I see it every weekend from my apartment.

The Brunch Exceptions - WSJ.com

Three Perspectives on Culture & Innovation

Over the past few weeks I’ve been lucky to see a few great guest speakers at school:

• Jack Dorsey, Head of Product, Twitter; CEO, Square
• Nathan Estruth, VP, P&G’s Futureworks
• Phil McKinney, CTO, H-P’s Personal Systems Group

Consistent across each of the talks was a discussion of the ways these leaders contribute to fostering and managing innovation — which seems to have a lot of commonality from Fortune 500s to startups — and how entwined innovation is with culture. 

I found a great encapsulation of this in Dorsey’s response to a question about focusing on barriers to entry at a startup’s inception: he doesn’t.

“The biggest competitor for any startup at the beginning is themselves,” Dorsey said; a nugget even more salient in the context of what McKinney said is his main preoccupation at H-P: fighting off “corporate antibodies” who would quash innovation in favor of the status quo. Which is to say, some of the biggest challenges in entrepreneurship are internal.

At P&G, Estruth repeatedly noted that because the company never hires outsiders its corporate culture is uniquely uniform: employees can “finish each other’s sentences” no matter where in the world they are. That enables Futureworks to hand projects off to individual business units with minimal friction. (He admits that, as a trade-off, he has to fight against “groupthink” as well.)

Under some definitions of competitive advantage, superior internal capabilities is a big one — especially in the fast-changing worlds of digital media and technology. That Dorsey would focus more on the workings of his teams than McKinney and Estruth is not surprising, given the much smaller sizes of Twitter and Square vs. H-P and P&G.

Indeed, the challenges of how to manage internal teams diverges when talking about organizations of massively different scale. Dorsey talked about his role as an “editor” at Square and at Twitter, “reviewing, asking clarifying questions, etc.” I interpret this as saying that, because management can see more clearly across a smaller organization, everyone on Dorsey’s teams are moving in generally the right direction and they just need to be guided occasionally.

McKinney, on the other hand, said his other major initiative at H-P is to get everyone at the company — tens of thousands of people — to treat innovation as part of their job and not something concentrated with management. He’s put in place a number of systems to help, including a central repository for ideas from anyone in the company. It attracts 2,500 submissions per year.

There’s a saying I like that I think sums all this up (often attributed to Peter Drucker): “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

In February, more than a third of all online-display ads in the U.S. appeared on Facebook, according to comScore Inc. That’s more than three times as many as its closest rival, Yahoo Inc., had.

—

Impressive. Wonder how much of the volume has to do with low price?

Making Facebook Ads More Buyer-Friendly - WSJ.com

Charging for digital news is no panacea. It’s a platform for a growth, and the beginning of a new business model. Most newspaper company CEOs have done the math, and with the current trajectory of print ad decline, modest digital ad growth and no digital circulation money, they have no hope of sustaining their businesses into 2015. That’s a bleak, but fair, conclusion.

—

Extremely well said. The NYT’s paywall is a beginning, not an end — unless tragedy befalls the company before it can adequately build on this beginning. Hopefully, the paywall also means that NYT’s management understands the dire situation they’re in (hey Carlos Slim!). 

Onto the next question: what will the pricing be? Any margin of error on pricing and the situation may deteriorate even more quickly. Again, hopefully the Times will be open to adapting quickly if needed.

Imminent NYT Pay Fence Divides World into Core Customers — and Others - Ken Doctor - Seeking Alpha