Dontae (sic)

History of Social Media

Last month (June 2016), I had the privilege of doing a General Assembly Alumni Dinner talk. Haven’t done many events like this so it was a great experience and great practice. My notes from the talk are below:

Effectively, my awareness and embrace of social media / social networks began in early 2004 when The Facebook arrived at Stanford

• This is strange given that Black Planet launched in the late 90s / early 2000s (and I was on the platform… with a fake account shortly thereafter)
• And of course MySpace started contributing to growth of the social media pie in late 2003 / early 2004…”Tom was everyone’s friend and something about that was nice”); it introduced my peers and I to the language / etiquette of social networking.
• OG was SixDegrees in 1997 but modern era began with Friendster in 2002, MySpace and Hi5 in 03, and Facebook in 04. Fun fact of Silicon Valley small world, Friendster took off in Asia and was sold to investors there before closing in 2015. The founder is now CEO of Nuzzel, an awesome social reader/newsletter service.

The power of belonging

• Eventually I would begin spending an inordinate amount of time sending friend requests to strangers from other schools. But at the beginning, before general access was granted I used features like Facebook Courses and labored over which would serve as my profile photo.
• Because you belonged to a group, the platform catered to an identity that you cared about → It made you (or at least most people) comfortable with giving information about themselves; both passively and actively

But the importance of “belonging” and its impact on engagement predates Facebook

• Everything from BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) to ListServs to Forums had backed into a sense of identity and a some semblance of belonging; even if your online personality was vastly different from your offline personality
• What existed - at least on some level - was a gift economy → “I give things to this community without any explicit or implicit trade agreement being entered” In other words I give just to give and others give just to give and we all benefit → holy fuck, we just found true unadulterated altruism
• This concept is/was present in file sharing; potentially even things like Open Source software
  

How did we get hooked? How did we get to where we are today?

• FB in its infancy planned to monetize “Flyers” and a P2P marketplace (txn fees)
• This was an EASY business model. Users of the service were accessing via Desktop. People were neatly grouped by school, age, etc. We were sitting ducks, yet not even this presented the fullest potential of social network. All of this stuff was happening “inside the box”, which made context harvesting easy but also meant it was limited.
• So rewind a bit further to the mid-90s and you begin to see the earliest version of cookies appearing. You can also look to the 90s when services like Prodigy were beginning to intro banner ads; given that memberships fees just wouldn’t cut it.
• Yahoo was also rolling out some of the first keyword-based ad units in the mid 90s.
• By the time the dust from the dot.com boom was beginning to settle, Google was perfecting it’s PPC ad platform and beginning to print cash.

• Yahoo was actually first to this party. But their implementation of a traditional auction structure ignored the importance of quality – of both ad and consumer – which lent itself to Google and it’s quality store dominating
• But to be clear, although Google derived a tremendously dominant position in the market based off of a focus on relevance & quality → it lacked key information about “who a user was” and the types of previous intent they’d shown via information shared and past online behaviors
• There had to be a way for FB to leverage all of the context it harvests (name, age, gender, education, region, friends, etc.) and begin further layering details onto its already robust targeting capabilities.
• That’s when Facebook, and other social media sites, began to deploy an everywhere or always logged in type of strategy. Before Facebook Connect, you hopped online and stepped into a virtual box. A self-contained space in which you interacted with your friends.
• But imagine the value that could be derived from having a view of what users were doing outside of that box?
• Ostensibly, FB created products for other developers to pull from its social graph and pre-populate information, etc. - to make web and mobile development easier.
• However, this shift also represented the productization of users. In exchange for sharing photos, liking posts and keeping up with friends for free, we get the ability to bundle up your information and sell it on the open market to the highest bidding brand.
• Between 2006 - when ads were first introduced and 2007 - when demographic targeting was first introduced, FB was fixing its sights on becoming an advertising powerhouse
  

Is it really the web we lost? (What does this mean for consumers?)

• Anil Dash posted and spoke about the “Web We Lost” 3 or 4 years ago.
• Web services - at least the free ones - were all about utility. They were all about this “gift” notion. The web was free! Right?
• The web was an orgy of sorts. All about sharing. All about togetherness. All about free. Digital stuff wanted to be free.
• Free fades without profit to help a platform prevail. The pure “gift economy” model wasn’t sustainable. As such, neither was the notion of true and pure “community” on the web.
• So the options: A) You create enough value to charge a fraction of your total addressable market or B) You grab eyeballs, you create dependency and you harvest content that can be sold to advertisers with deep & robust pockets

How will the virtual communities of the future be built? (What does this mean for developers?)

• WE’RE all still waiting for the NEXT big thing - as far as business models go - to come through and take the internet by storm
• But until then, you have to think about what will and won’t make social networks (FB competitors and/or future successors) feel authentic. What will or won’t make people feel like they belong.
• And, potentially more importantly, how will your community lend itself to brands telling authentic stories. When FB allowed advertisers to use my friend’s photos – it was CREEPY. But I damn sure clicked to understand why Bobby or Suzy were unintentionally endorsing some product. It was meant to feel authentic and it did – only for us the later find out it was deceptive. It hit closer to home either way.

Takeaways

• There is certainly nuance and complexity that this statement glosses over. But as we navigate the digital communities of today - web based, mobile based or bases somewhere in the virtual ether - we should be aware of what makes those engines run. We should know the price of admission.
• Now I’m not saying run for the hills and go off the grid. I’m saying that there is a framework that governs how we live out our social media experiences.
• As the old adage goes “If you’re not paying, you’re the product.” Lots of debate over how you want to define this relationship between you the consumer and a platform like Facebook. But you get the gist.

Leaving Tomorrowland

For nearly 6 years of my adult life, I’ve been able to work for a company that has consumed the globe’s present and is quite literally building its future. It’s a portal to information. It’s a portal to productivity. It’s a portal to joy.

I’ve been blessed to be able to work with some of the smartest, friendliest and most driven people on the face of the planet. I’ve got to play my small role in building some of that access; distributing some of that joy. The numbers don’t lie. And I haven’t even begun to take inventory of the fact that I’ve spent the last 18 months of my life working with Google’s virtual reality team. With its efforts, the company seems poised to transform the world of tech AGAIN by building another $1 billion business that changes the facing of computing. No big deal.

So that makes it bittersweet to leave the company in search of greener more nascent pastures. But that’s exactly what I’m doing. In a few short days I’ll begin my journey at IFTTT hoping to build cloud connectivity rules for the future. The team is a fraction of a fraction of a percent of Google’s workforce. The perks aren’t as plentiful. But the hunger to change the world is raw and it’s palpable. And the opportunity for learning/failing are incredibly high!

You don’t have to tell me the odds of this company being THE ONE in the age of dwindling unicorns. But this company is THE ONE that I’m hitching my wagon to while venturing out into the unknown.

I’ll be based on Market Street in San Francisco. If you’re ever in town and want to grab lunch, let me know! Otherwise, wish me luck in my new endeavor. And remember…if this doesn’t work out, I may ask to sleep on your couch.

Coloring Outside The Lines #3

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THE MORE YOU KNOW

Monique Woodward joins 500 Startups (Link)
Woodward becomes the first African American partner at the fund! Send her your congratulations @MoniqueWoodward

Google for Entrepreneurs backs Tech Inclusion (Link)
@WayneSutton and @mbrianaepler have some financial support from Google to assist in their efforts to help woman and people of color achieve tech equity.

Fundraising woes for Black female founders (Link)
@WayneSutton and @mbrianaepler have some financial support from Google to assist in their efforts to help woman and people of color achieve tech equity.

A to Z resources for women entrepreneurs (Link)
@SBAgov curates FREE resources for women entrepreneurs in the making and for those looking to scale.

Get Ethics with Our Ethnics (Link)
Rent-A-Minority is funny. It’s definitely stings a little, but still funny.

VOICES FROM THE COMMUNITY

A Letter to College Students (Link) 

Michael Seibel pens a latter to college students for the YC blog. Forward to any folks you think would benefit from reading.

Richard Kerby asks, “Who is A VC?” (Link)
Men lie. Women lie. Numbers don’t. Kerby suggests that VCs have an open and honest conversation about its lack of diversity.

Felecia Hatcher is fighting the good fight! (Link)
Felecia Hatcher chats with rolling out about her efforts to train and equip entrepreneurs of the future.

Sign up for Women Enterpreneurship Startup Digest (Link)
Great reading list curated by @babsielee and my partner-in-crime @lilsg31

BE SEEN - UPCOMING EVENTS & APPLICATION DEADLINES

SF City and County Startup in Residence Application (Link) – due soon!

Register to attend The Ability in Tech Summit this May! (Link)

The Startup Grind conference is taking place in Redwood City on February 23rd and 24th (Link)

Broadening The Pipeline: Strategies for Diversifying Your Workforce (Link)

Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Summit (Link)

Have something cool and/or relevant to share? Drop me a note at dontae.rayford@gmail.com.

Coloring Outside The Lines #2

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The More You Know

Voices from The Community

Slack’s Erica Baker shares her thoughts on diversity and inclusion (Link)
@ericajoy

Judith Williams talks about her diversity efforts at Dropbox (Link)
Follow her progress @dropbox

Be Seen - Events

Have something cool and/or relevant to share? Drop me a note at dontae.rayford@gmail.com.

Three Types of Advice

Age and a few gray hairs automatically signal an uptick in the number of requests for coffee chats that one receives. Having lived through and seemingly survived a countless number of reorgs, a revolving door of leaders, and a spectrum of roles and responsibilities most certainly puts one in a position to share their thoughts. Nevertheless, a large sample size of life and professional experiences does not necessarily equip one to give good advice.

As I’ve begun to take inventory of those instances in which I’ve sought advice and of those in which I’ve been sought out to share my views, there have been at least three types of advice-giving styles that I’ve focused my energies on avoiding.

“Listen to me, I’m projecting!”

Without question, being asked to share advice with a friend or colleague is flattering. You feel important. And by virtue of feeling important, you feel as if you should have important stuff to say. However, some advice givers find authority and comfort in such conversations by casting themselves as the antagonist in the situation.

“If I had this opportunity at your age, I would do X, Y and Z.”

If the recipient fancies themselves to be a disciple of the advice giver, the “projecting” approach may be appropriate! However, given the likelihood that advice is being sought from multiple individuals, the risk of advisor/mentor whiplash increases significantly.

“I don’t know much about this, but I do know…”

If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. If you don’t have anything relevant to say, you’ll probably try to create some analogous tale that draws from your own personal experiences.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes this can be a very effective methodology! Yet, many run the risk of conflating issues and alluding to similarities that don’t actually exist. The process by which an advice seeker chooses their next job likely has very little to do with how you decided what the eat for breakfast!

Sure, that “analogy” method isn’t always that bad. But unless one is well-versed in telling the same tale and having their mentee respond positively every single time, this approach poses a significant risk of crashing and burning. So proceed with caution!

“Well let’s dig into this a bit more to explore what you really want!”

What exactly does the advice seeker want to take away from their session with you? I’d reckon that the majority of advice seekers already know what they want to and will do before showing up at your doorstep. Many seek advice for the purpose of reinforcing decisions that they’ve already made in their heads.

If this “mind is already made up” assessment is true, advice givers are will be most useful if they challenge assumptions and better understand the inputs that are governing the recipient’s decision-making process.

Are you optimizing for money? Are you optimizing for experience? Are you optimizing for title? Or, maybe you’re optimizing for commute?

This isn’t necessarily a time to play devil’s advocate exclusively. However, the infusion of some questioning that counters the recipient’s worldview can help to distill their true motivations and can assist the advice giver in understanding what type of feedback will be most useful. It always helps to meet the recipient on their terms and lead the conversation in directions that they either consciously or subconsciously want the discussion to go.

Sure, with this method you still run the risk of confusing the shit out of them. But if executed appropriately, you’ll ensure that you’re providing input that is relevant.

So what’s the best approach?

I’m obviously biased toward approach #3. But that’s only because it suits my advice-giving style and mimics the type of advice that I like to receive. These sessions should interactive and help provide a framework by which decisions can be made.

Obviously, no one approach is perfect and you may find yourself utilizing multiple approaches for any given conversation. Regardless of how things unfold, know your style, embrace it and work on getting better at it! Not unlike other skills, advice giving requires practice and attention to detail.

And no matter what your takeaway from this piece is, never forget that advice giving is not about making decisions for someone else. It’s about listening and doing your best to share constructive input.

The onus is on the recipient to determine what the hell they want to do with any advice that you share!

2014: Reflections on Modern Day Race Relations

2014 had the potential to be a relatively basic year. Aside from my own personal feats of vacation, graduation and relocation, the year seemed to be progressing uneventfully. 

However, events over the past 6 months have stirred American disquiet. How could the oft incorrectly perceived Greatest Country in The Known World once more find itself ensnared in a painful debate about race? And, regardless of fault or guilt or motive or any other element pertaining to individual incidents - videotaped or otherwise - how the American system could continue to show strong indications of a lesser value placed on black lives. Which would in turn suggest a lesser value placed on my life. 

Before Ferguson, I was an MBA student globetrotting around the world. I sat in classrooms with classmates attempting to rationalize the meteoric rise and quasi-fall of Bitcoin. I sat in bars hurriedly flipping through Tinder profiles and speculating as to whether or not the rise of apps like Yo signaled the 2nd coming of the dot com bust. 

These things felt meaningful at the time. 

After Ferguson, it’s been interesting to see the debate unfold. Facebook and other forms of social media bring out the best and worst in folks as they try to articulate their race-related frustrations. Like-minded followers hit Like buttons or retweet the wittiest or most poignant retorts. Others still, spew hateful remarks when commenting on the loss of live. At times, I’ve opted to tune out all sides of the debate in favor of face-to-face dialogue. There’s no hiding behind a keyboard to be done when humans actually interact. 

No one wants to see black men killed. No one wants to see cops killed. No one wants to be killed. 

Despite those truths, I still had to ask myself if I was at risk. I couldn’t help but to question why as a young black professional I’m unable to escape the visceral reaction I get when a cop hops behind my car. I couldn’t help but to wonder how much my life really mattered at all.

Now that we’ve rung in the New Year, I’ve seen plenty of speculation about what 2015 will mean in technological and business terms. The year of VR! The year of cheap gas! The year of increasingly inflammatory comments on social networks! But very little about how the resurgent American discussion on race will continue to unfold. 

News networks make a living by appealing to one camp or another. Unfortunately, there are few making an effort to create a dialogue that is constructive and willing to acknowledge how America’s ugly history of race relations continues to rear its head in 2015. Black people are mad. White people are mad. And apparently, cops are really, really mad. 

But until we can all find a way to stop screaming “I’m 100% right and you’re 100% wrong”, America will continue to fall short of its potential to be a truly diverse and inclusive society. The advancement of this dialogue is something that I hope all Americans continue marching towards over the next 12 months. 

the increasingly lazy consumer

You can have it all!

Okay. Maybe I’m exaggerating just a tad bit. But with all of the click baiting going on in the world, who can really fault me?

At any rate, over the past month I’ve grown increasingly alarmed/delighted by the sheer number of services that are but a few clicks away. Since moving into a bachelor pad in Oakland’s Lake Merritt area, I’ve come to realize just how little that I actually need to do in order to live a fully functional, fully adult life.

When my laundry starts to smell bad, I can call on the services of Wash.io to obliterate the funk. When my stomach starts to rumble, I’m no longer locked into the Seamless platform. Instead, I can try rely on services likeSprig and Spoonrocket to give me that farm-to-table feel. If I’m feeling extra fancy (a “treat. yo. self.” type of moment), I can count of my friends over atTryCaviar. (And for better or for worse, VCs keep investing in food delivery services)

Prior to moving into my place, I began to preemptively dred the process of transporting furniture to and fro; up and down unforgiving stairs. But then I remembered that I could hit a few buttons to hire a TaskRabbit and avoid the pain of attempting to bribe my friends to help me with manual labor! And I’ll probably use them twice more in the next 30 days as I continue my efforts to make my house a home.

And the list just goes on and on. So many startups (and mature companies) in the marketplace are relentlessly attacking services layer. From food to tasks to shopping to cleaning to transporation. And everything else in between.

All Good Things

Unfortunately, the abundance of companies competing for bandwidth with service plays may spell looming disaster for the vast majority of these companies. Speaking with a number of employees working for these companies, it has become clear that Person X is unlikely to make a comfortable living from a 40-hr work week driving for Uber. Or, from a being a weekend warrior working for TaskRabbit. In fact, each of the service providers that I’ve encountered in the past month has shared stories about how platform changes have cut into their earnings (TaskRabbit) and how they are forced to take on multiple positions (Driving for Uber and working for TaskRabbit).

These sector has become attractive for investors because it has unlocked new layers of convenience that consumers are increasingly willing to pay for. However, if these companies fail to properly allocate revenues to these new modern day workforces (increasingly diverse, increasingly fragmented, increasingly casual), I fear that we’ll see labor backlashes that make on-demand service models financially untenable and that cause VCs to wish they would’ve stuck with placing their bets on photo and messaging apps.

Human-powered Tech FTW!

After weeks of speculation, Google finally announced that it has acquired Songza. The New York-based company carved out a segment of loyal followers by compiling highly curated playlists for just about every mood/scenario/state-of-mind possible. Seriously — check out how extensive their collection is!

While many are discussing the company’s role as a strategic chip in the larger music wars between Google and its competitors, I think the move represents something slightly more nuanced.

To me the move symbolizes a legitimization of human-powered solutions in the the era of “Man v. Machine.” With a countless number of firms touting the ability of machines to do things faster and smarter, it is nice to see a formula focusing on doing things slower and on a smaller scale be met with success. Before Songza, I’d abandoned the genome-driven stations of Pandora. I briefly flirted with Slacker, only to grow disenchanted a few months after downloading the app. And, a few of my good friends may recall, I boycotted Spotify vehemently for reasons unknown to me today. 

It wasn’t about taking a moral stance on the state of the music industry. In fact, I can make a strong case for naming myself the biggest dial-up downloaded in the history of Napster, BearShare, Kazaa, etc. Instead, I simply wanted an answer to a very basic question: which other artists do you think I’ll like given my listening habits?

It’s not just about BPM or production teams or song writers or genres. The lines are a lot more blurred than that. Therefore, no matter how much I trained my Pandora station, it couldn’t come close to providing the value that a person with similarly expansive musical palate. As I professed to one of the Songza co-founders on a stormy night at SXSW 2013, the degree to which the streaming service had satiated my desires for discovery made for almost religious listening experiences. 

Extending the human-powered approach

So what does this all mean for the world beyond your 3.5mm jack?

To be honest, I’m not really sure. But thinking about the possibilities is quite exciting. Look at the home dining space. A number of companies are trying to bring the culinary skills of a highly-curated few to your dinner table. Be in the form of chefs telling you how to cook awesome stuff (Plated) or chefs showing up to your doorstep and cooking awesome stuff for you and your friends in YOUR KITCHEN (KitchenSurfing). 

Now think for a moment about how technology can extend a similar experience. At first glance you might laugh at this WeMo powered crock-pot from Belkin. To be honest, I laughed. 

But think about the ways in which connected devices in your kitchen — and in your home in general — can change the way that we function. I’d wager a bet that in the near-term future, it won’t just be about power saving and other rudimentary things like that. Instead, connected technologies have the potential to bring highly-tailored, exclusive experiences into your kitchen. 

One day, Michael Mina is going to devise a set of recipes capable of being executed by a connected-kitchen. Instead of making reservations months in advance, I’ll be able to discover highly-desirable recipes via platforms capable of seamlessly delivering the “human touch.” It won’t be up to me to turn off the crock-pot or make sure that the rice doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pot. Emerging tech will enable very high-touch, human-centric activities such as preparing a flawless gourmet meal to reach the masses in ways never before seen. 

Beyond the near-term hope of gaining ground in the realm of digital music, I trust that companies like Google (and companies like Belkin for that matter) see the value of incorporating curation and aesthetics into many of the solutions they release going forward. 

Anywhere else you can anticipate human-powered tech making a big splash?