Ideas and Form

A big part of my job is recruiting, yet we haven’t hired a single engineer at Coursekit. The cry you hear from entrepreneurs, that hiring is impossible, is true. But only partially. 

You see, we’re looking to hire extraordinary people. The brightest in the world. People who can help us build a company. People who want to devote themselves to something world-changing. They’re motivated, brilliant, and they share our passion. 

I don’t think there’s a shortage of computer science graduates. Hiring the best people, by definition, will always be a challenge.

When we speak to a candidate, we want to be blown away. I don’t care about your experience or your degrees. Have you created something incredible? How hungry are you? Would I want to work for you? 

We’re trying to extend class beyond the lecture hall, to change what education looks like online, to make classes about people again. We want to power every class, school, student, and educator, while building the largest academic network.

We won’t let the bar drop.

It’s tough, but I’m confident that we’ll build the team we need. 

If this speaks to you, and you’re looking to make a difference, email me at joseph (at) coursekit.com. 

Tonight, for the first time, I feel that strange, deep sadness for someone I’ve never met. It’s the sadness people feel when their favorite musician passes away, when a captivating president dies. It is a unique sorrow, of both selfishness and altruism. 

Steve Jobs is not dead. But he has famously said that there is no Apple Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs the Person. They are one. Apple was as much in Steve’s DNA as he was in the company’s. He would only leave Apple if he was leaving this earth altogether. His life is his work.

I was probably around 8 years old when I discovered Steve Jobs. Steve answered the question of what I want to do with my life. It all made sense. We’re here to make a difference. To create something extraordinary.

I’m part of the Apple religion. I love their products, yes, but more importantly, I try to look at the world in “The Apple Way.”

Having a Mac in 2000 was weird, as a third-grader. Everyone had PCs, and gradeschoolers want to be like everyone else. But my dad persisted. “We’re a Mac family,” he said. And then I fell in love with the company. It represented the things that I wanted to be: different, creative, smart. 

Steve defined that vision. The press speaks of him as a tech mogul and the man who reinvented the music business. But I bet Steve doesn’t think of himself that way. It’s not about the money. It’s about building amazing things and changing the world.

I’ve dreamt of meeting him, but that doesn’t seem likely. Whatever wisdom of his is available online has inspired and guided me.

While his story as the leader of Apple is certainly his biography, his influence extends far wider. He personifies startup culture and a generation of innovation. The idea that one person can start something extraordinary. The idea that the entrepreneur is an artist. 

Whatever happens, he will live on in the millions he’s inspired. Thanks, Steve.

Let’s look at three things that happened in technology in the past 8 days:

1. Facebook introduced Messenger, a potentially game changing communication platform.
2. Twitter added Activity and a more robust @user tab, adding much-needed transparency to its deep social graph.
3. Google bought Motorola, a radical move that can have massive implications in the mobile space.

Each of these can have a profound impact in how millions and millions of people communicate and consume and create. It’s amazing how fast things move in this business.

Lately, I’ve felt that Twitter and Tumblr are a lot more engaging, and generally a lot cooler, than Facebook. In this case, I’m talking more about the content than the product. While I’m sure this has to do with the relative “insider” nature of the younger services, there’s a fundamental difference in the experiences.

While they’re all “social,” Twitter and Tumblr are personalized consumption environments, whereas Facebook feels more like a public space for everyone you know. You choose what you want on the former, and the latter is a smattering of the thousand people who reach that increasingly-low threshold that is Facebook Friend Status. Of course Tumblr’s cooler, to me: it’s only about things Ilike. 

The beauty of asymmetric following is that you only follow who/what you’re interested in. As obvious as that sounds, it’s not true of the largest of social networks. 

It’s actually an interesting idea: the most engaging social networks may be those that aren’t necessarily the most “social.” Social, in the same way a party is social. What proves to be key is the personal, even private, experience of navigating a social network. 

I recently replaced my no-brand contact lens case with one from Bausch and Lomb. When I used it I noticed that its wells were significantly deeper than those of my old one. I don’t know for sure, but it seems like B&L makes them larger so that people use more solution; chances are, it’s solution that they make. 

While it’s slightly annoying, it’s certainly clever. I got over it quickly, but it got me thinking about the differences between corporate America — the P&Gs of the world — and the tech economy. 

Large, publicly traded corporations in the US are all about optimizing. Every little bit. Even the $2.99 contact case. But the most successful tech companies have the exact opposite mantra: give the product away for free, monetize later, lavish employees, perfect the user experience at all costs. 

It makes sense. We’re still in the early days of the internet and we simply haven’t reached the point of market saturation where squeezing every cent out matters. More important is building huge networks and keeping them engaged. The costs — no matter how expensive they seem – are nominal compared to how they scale. 

MG Siegler on TechCrunch:

But again, that’s not even the real story either. The real story is the number briefly highlighted in Dediu’s chart above, but more fully explored a few days ago here: Apple captured two thirds of available mobile phone profits in Q2.

Take a moment to let that sink in. Apple now controls over 66 percent of all the profits amongst the major players in the mobile space. HTC, RIM, LG, Sony-Ericsson, Samsung Motorola, and Nokia combined for the other 33 or so percent of profits in the space (with a few of them: Nokia, Motorola, LG, and Sony actually losing money).

Apple, the company “losing” the great mobile race to Android, is destroying all the Android manufacturers combined when it comes to profits. You know, the money you get to keep at the end of the day. In business terms, really the only thing that matters.

I’m a big Apple fan,  but this post really misses the point.  The only thing that matters is not short term profit. Android wasn’t built to make money from the start. It was made to be a ubiquitous smartphone OS. Google gives it away for free so that it can own a huge percentage of OS marketshare. This share is immensely valuable, and can contribute to Google’s revenue significantly in the future.

Before I go there, let’s take a step back and look at the economics of Android. Google started it as a side project. The company makes billions of dollars from its search product. But it’s constantly looking for the next Search-caliber business. So it spends a lot of money building ancillary projects that have a remote chance of hitting, and a remote chance of making money. Android hit. Why? Because it was almost as good as iOS, because any manufacturer could use it, and because it was free.  

Another thing that’s often overlooked is that Android really doesn’t cost Google that much. They aren’t manufacturing hardware, and software scales. The investment size should be put in perspective. Maybe they’re losing opportunity cost, in the short term, but they’re not losing money because of dead inventory. 

While I wish that Apple continues to own a large portion of mobile OS market, I don’t think it’s possible. Siegler focuses on the US and how with Verizon and iOS 5, Apple can stay ahead. I don’t buy that. The world is a lot larger than the US upscale smartphone market. The simple fact is that an OS on one premium product, the iPhone, with just a handful of distribution points at lofty prices, can’t beat an OS that’s on hundreds of devices, everywhere, at every price point.

Siegler says that this doesn’t matter because Apple captures a huge percentage of today’s overall market profits. It does matter. The iPhone wins because of the App Store. People buy iPhones so they can get Apps. If 70% of people are on Androids, developers are going to develop for that platform. That ends up affecting device sales.  

In fact, Apple has shown us that mobile devices – phones and tablets – are not just the future of application distribution but the future of content distribution: magazines, books, music, movies. That’s why it’s taking 30% of in-app sales and subscriptions. I think Apple believes that this could be a huge business for them in the future. 

Ultimately, this all comes down to the idea that mobile devices are the future of computing. Actually, it’s not really mobile devices, per say, but mobile touch operating systems. I’m confident that iPad-like computing will surpass desktop computing. If that’s the case, and market share trends continue, than Google stands to own the platform that most computers run on. That’s powerful.

Now, the future is nowhere near clear. The last time Apple took this strategy in the OS game, on desktops, it lost because of market share. This time it’s different and can’t be squarely compared. iPhones are relatively cheap. They’re by far the best products on the market. Network effects can work it their favor. And, importantly, Apple has a huge head start on the app and content distribution side. It also owns the tablet space. So it is possible that they retain a large percentage of the market, but I think that market forces will make it difficult.

The other thing to mention is that by making Android completely open, Google may have pinned itself into a hole that makes it hard to ever monetize Android. The company doesn’t charge developers to be on the Android Marketplace. Further, Google doesn’t even control the points of app/content distribution. Amazon opened an Android app store. There’s a very real chance that people do all their shopping and downloading through a non-Google store.

The question is: can Google make money on a completely open platform? Well, they do it now, on the web. 

Apple’s latest desktop operating system is a big deal. When the company announced Lion, I thought the iPad-inspired enhancements were gimmicky and underwhelming. But after using it for a week, I’ve realized that this latest OS is truly the start of a profound shift from the classic desktop OS to the world of gesture based computing. 

Swiping between full screen apps. Zooming with your fingers on the trackpad. Double tapping the mouse for Mission Control. These things make the experience better. It’s quicker to use, more pleasant, and most importantly, it’s more intuitive. 

We know that iOS represents the most natural computing platform in history. Instead of directing a small black triangle on a screen that’s 12 inches away from your hand, you just tap whatever you want. 

The challenge has always been: how does this control mechanism translate to desktop computing? We know that touchscreen desktops won’t work because our arms will tire from holding them up throughout the day. What Lion shows us is that there can be an intuitive, natural way of using a computer by gesturing – even if you’re not touching the content itself. 

They reversed the direction of mouse scrolling! Crazy! But really, they needed to. With Lion, Apple is trying to change the user experience metaphor that has governed OS design since the 80s. It was a symbolic move, but one, to me, that ties together the new interaction paradigm – you interact with the content, not the OS. 

Lion - at $29 - seems like an incremental upgrade. But I guarantee that it will prove to be one of Apple’s boldest moves in defining how we interact with computers of the future. 

While I don’t remember the first dotcom bubble, I know that it was the result of wild exuberance for this new thing called “the Internet.” The Internet (but really the world wide web) would change the world, and you could get a piece of it. Just call your stock broker. No one really understood what it was – just that it had the power to change every part of your life. 

This proved to be the problem. While the net did fundamentally change the world, it did so in ways people didn’t expect. It fell short in most areas and skyrocketed in others. Online economics played out differently. Web pages became web apps. The internet of the late nineties brought great things – Amazon, Google – but it completely missed the real power of the internet: social. 

While people understood that the internet was a network in which anyone in the world could connect to anyone else, the early internet was way more about businesses, or “web properties,” interacting with people than people connecting to people. I guess this thinking was inherited from the centuries-old logic of professional (as if) publishers feeding content to stupid consumers. 

But Facebook has shown us the true power of the internet – what we call “social networking.” It can facilitate revolutions and put people in business. It turns amateur writers into journalists and basement hackers into wizzy entrepreneurs. When you combine identity systems with content creation and the right relationships structure, magic happens. 

In fact, I’d argue that the social internet is much larger than the dotcom internet. Humans are social creatures. Our lives are our relationships: at home, at school, at work. Social networking augments our existing relationships and helps us create new ones. 

I think we will see a very similar parallel play out in the financial markets. We’ve gotten a taste already, but there’s much more to come. Social networking is magical – but it’s magical in the same way the dot-com era internet was magical. We know there’s tons of potential to build great businesses, but we don’t know how those businesses will actually look. 

I’m not worried about companies like Facebook. Facebook should be valued at $100B+, with its 750mm active users. The problem comes in with irrational exuberance that will follow hundreds of other businesses. 

But the last thing I want to see is people discounting the ideas of social networking. While I’m sure the markets will react erratically, the fact is that by giving people a presence in a network with a defined mission and the tools to create and engage, amazing things happen.