I created this blog on wordpress as a platform to share my passion: early stage technology companies, and I encouraged my friends to do the same. They started blogging with Tumblr about their passion: music, fashion, and art.
Now I always envied how stylish their blogs looked but I was happy with what I have on wordpress and I invested a lot of time in the learning curve. However, yesterday I was feeling spontaneous and wanted to start blogging about music that I like. I was going to do some research on how to add a SoundCloud widget onto my Wordpress but I thought this would be a perfect chance for me to check out Tumblr.
My God, was it easy to set up. It was so easy to set up that I accidentally set up 2 domains and couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to delete one of them since I was at work. The domains are www.jeffreylu.tumblr.com and www.jefflu.tumblr.com and I can’t decide which one I want to keep yet because both of them have music content on it already. Admittedly, the design isn’t great right now but it literally took me 5 minutes to set up both sites.
To me, Tumblr is like a cross between Wordpress and Twitter. It takes me less than a minute to load songs and videos up. I have to give the Tumblr team credit in building a product that’s both extremely stylish and relatively customizable but extremely intuitive and easy to use. The combination of style and function makes it a very sticky product. It’s been 2 days and I think I made over over 10 posts already. Even their landing pages are awesome. I try to keep these lessons in mind when creating landing pages and calls to action for consumers.
Anyways, I learned this morning from one of Tumblr’s investors that they hit a few major milestones this past month, one being 1 billion page views. I wrote in an earlier entry, questioning whether a company should focus on building great products first without a business model and try to scale, or build a product with a proven business model and then try to scale. Tumblr and Twitter are examples where if you focus on scale and succeed, you are inevitably going to hit a home run.
Congrats to hitting these milestones
*Edit* I had an after-thought in terms of monetization. Why doesn’t Tumblr add a “buy” function to their music player and partner with a vendor like Amazon or iTunes? Just a thought.
Congratulations to Jon Sposato, Darrin Massena, Mike Harrington and the rest of the Picnik team! Google announced the acquisition of the company last Monday (3/1). Picnik, the online photo editing service, is based in Seattle and was one of the last clients I worked with at my former employer, Cascadia Capital.
Some impressive stats on Picnik at the time of acquisition:
Over a billion images have been edited on the site
No institutional capital, bootstrapped with $1M of total funds raised
Feb 2010 Unique Visitors: 16.8M, Feb 2009 Unique Visitors: 8.8M
Profitable since we started working with them last year around March or April
When I met the team last year, I was struck by how the personality of the team really shone through the product. Jon is incredibly stylish and his background prior to Picnik was with Microsoft, managing the only team that was allowed to work off-site of the main campuses in a hip office in Pike’s Place Market. Jon, Darrin and Mike’s background has been with game development and consumer facing applications. This definitely explains why Picnik is so fun and damn easy to use.
I really love this article from TechFlash, reporting on the email that spawned Picnik. It’s a very thorough and well thought out business plan but an email like this is probably sent thousands of times a day. It’s extraordinary to see the execution of that plan and finally the fruition of all the years of blood sweat and tears manifest itself in the form of a successful exit.
“I’m a huge believer in getting a million people, getting them engaged, and then building a business model on top of that. I knew I wasn’t planning on really trying to work on a business model until later.” – Reid Hoffman, CEO and Founder of LinkedIn
I got this quote from a recent CNNMoney piece on LinkedIn and struck a chord with me. I feel like I’m meeting two types of people who work in and around Internet businesses:
1. Someone who believes that many Internet businesses have gotten away from running businesses with clear monetization models and are just great products (i.e. twitter, digg, facebook)
2. Someone who believes that the Internet is an opportune platform to build great products and if that product fills a need that’s great enough for enough people, the monetization model will naturally come
Wokai delivers an internet microfinance platform that allows individuals to provide Chinese microentrepreneurs with loan capital. Our organization acts as an intermediary in this process, transferring funds from contributors abroad to microentrepreneurs in China through our field partners.
Who does Wokai support?
A typical Wokai microentrepeneur is a female rural inhabitant, living on less than $1/day. Her microfinance loan, ranging from $150-$300 dollars, provides her with the capital to start a small business. Her business varies by location, raising sheep in a rural grassland or operating a small fruit stand in a city center.
With her income, she accumulates savings, which allows her to allocate money towards long-term investments like education and health. By the end of her loan cycle, she has experienced increased financial independence, bolstered self-confidence, and a strengthened sense of community.
I read a post today by Larry Cheng of Fidelity Ventures today that really resonated with me. The post is about what motivates people to work. I’ve been thinking a lot about my career these days and contemplating if I’m motivated and realizing my potential at my current job. I’ve been thinking about what motivated me for a while and I came up with 3 things and in this order of importance:
1. Being challenged and learning – When I reflect on my favorite times at work; when I was excited to wake up and get to work asap, it was when I was doing things that were HARD. It was when I had to do things that I had never done before and sometimes under immense time pressure to get it done and get it done right. Unfortunately, I can only think of 1 or 2 instances that this has occurred in the past 6 months.
2. Increased responsibility – I think this motivator is somewhat tied to the 1st one. Once you’ve done something that’s higher up in the “stack”, you want to keep doing it. So it’s a combination of improving one’s position in the company and being challenged with bigger and more challenging tasks.
3. Money – Money is actually the very last factor for me. I find it unfortunate that management seems to forget this. More often than not, employees are motivated by more than money. Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos gets it. He realized that creating an entrepreneurial, collegial environment that encouraged learning allowed him to build a best-in-class customer service team for below market pay and benefits.
I’d like to end this post with an except from Larry’s post:
After hearing this and many other answers through the years, I am left with the impression that there’s a reason people work that sits above all of the specific reasons they give and ties them all together. While at any given moment, answers like money, learning, enjoyment, or others may feel like and may in fact be the dominant reason – I think they all tie into a more subtle, constant, overarching reason why people work. The impression I have is that people work because it gives them a sense of significance that would not otherwise be there.
I think many times in my career, I have forgotten this point. We think by organizing the right comp structures, the right bonus plans, etc. we are “motivating” people. But, really, I think the better motivator and long-term retention vehicle is to give someone a sense of significance. If someone feels significant, many other “important” things become secondary. Given that, maybe I should change my question to: What gives you significance? Never mind, that’s way too hard to fit that into an hour interview.
My name is Jeffrey Lu and I was born and raised in the Boston, MA area and went to undergraduate business school at Emory University in Atlanta. I am a former investment banker with experience covering early-stage, emerging technology companies. I am currently the Business Development Manager at HealthCare.com. More About Me
Audio: Em helped me rediscover this song… heard it again this weekend at a bar. Probably my favorite DMB song... http://tumblr.com/xjy77oiopTWEET2010/03/08
Audio: I had to listen to this song after my buddy Sam had such a glowing review of this song. I would have... http://tumblr.com/xjy777x49TWEET2010/03/08
