Gripes and Grins

Grin: Revisiting Incentive Learning & a Recap of Grockit 2011

About a year ago, I moved from Outspark to Grockit.  I remember joining the team knowing that the product had a ways to go, but the people are outstanding. 

A year later, we've done some amazing things in terms of furthing social learning: Grockit for Good tranformed Grockit into a 1-for-1 company; Grockit Answers uses video to make asynchronous social learning a reality; Grockit in Facebook lets you create private study rooms with friends; Grockit SchoolMatch helps students find the right schools for them; and Grockit is working very closely with Georgetown University to provide students and alum with online test prep. 

And, the team at Grockit has grown and proven to be more oustanding than I first understood.  Together, we've attracted another round of financing, launched an open-source project to improve our adaptive learning algorithm, and partnered with Startup Weekend and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create StartupWeekend.edu. 

Grockit has a lot in store for this year, including working with some high-profile private K-12 schools to provide more data points supporting Grockit's efficacy in social learning.  And, I'm totally loving my work. 

Recently, I was approached by a Peter Thiel Foundation Fellow researching incentives-based learning.  Peter was an investor in Gazillion's Smartycard, a founder's fund investment. Working with the Peter Thiel Foundation Fellow has been very stimulating.

Over the last month, I've spent several hours discussing and rethinking the lessons learned in nearly two years of working on SmartyCard as a game division, and then as a potential "spinout" of Gazillion.  The mental exercises have really reinvigorated my thoughts about incentives and payments in educational games, sites and services. 

There's a real opportunity to create an incentive structure for learning in high school.  But increasingly, I'm convinced the application context in which incentives are provisioned needs to be viral -- somewhere like Facebook.  And, incentives need to appeal to ego -- the developing super-id that feeds off of social reward and "knowing" and "helping". 

Finally, I've come to realize that friends are an acceptable currency for millenials.  Offers are too.  There's one other currency that people are starting to understand -- user-generated-content.  There's going to be a beautiful little collision at that intersection, I'm looking forward to seeing it happen.

Grin: My new favorite thing is studying leadership

I used to joke about leadership books as I strolled through the Red Carpet club or Borders Books.  I used to joked in a snide, all-knowing twenty-something manner, with just a hint of trademark Gen-X apathy. Obviously, I didn't go to business school.

The ironic thing was that I was actually studying leadership, I just didn't know it yet. I was comparing startup culture leadership to college and professional sports.  I just had no idea what I was processing, certainly I didn't appreciate leadership or processing leadership at the time.

When I was in my twenties, I worked at WebTV for Steve Perlman. I was early too.  A lot of good mid-level managers one pay grade above me struggled while working for Steve.  I loved working for Steve.  I managed to forge a fast mutual respect with Steve that even now persists, despite the fact that I see Steve very infrequently, usually at an event or in SOMA. 

Recently, Ashlee Vance from BusinessWeek reached out to me to comment on Steve as a leader. It started a retrospective that fits within my current leadership study of Roy Gilbert, Grockit's CEO.  The two are very different.  The two are very different from another great founder-leader I worked with, Raymie Stata, now the CTO of Yahoo!.  In fact, there are very few similarities between all three.

The thing I learned most from Steve was how to learn in a founder culture.  Skepticism is a good thing.  But, in a functional top-down organization, the follower has to work at listening, internalizing founder thought processes and have the ability to suspend disbelief at times in order to achieve goals that seem unrealistic.  Steve taught me all of that.  That's why I chuckle when I see or hear someone quote Perlman disbelievingly or disparage Steve's hyper-distilled skeptical comments on "laws" of science and technical limits.  Sure Steve believes in himself.  But, he has earned the right to believe others will follow him too.  It's not ego, it's knowing what works, for him, and everyone that is willing to listen and believe in him.  That's  how top-down management succeeds, IMHO. 

Now, there's a lot of people that get religious about bottom-up startup culture.  But, in my experience, that's a harder culture to create and sustain, very fragile, and exposed to external factors and internal employee dynamics. I believe that if you are to succeed as a key contributor, you have to be able to take direction and collaborate with top-down managers.  I may be wrong, but that's my experience talking.

What I'm living now -- it's different, and fascinating all at once.  Grockit is a truly interesting and an inspiring place to contribute and cooperate.  And, after all of the pre-Grockit hype I heard on Roy Gilbert, I have to say that he is an impressive operator.  In my late 30s, having developed the ability to recognize leadership and acts of leadership, my life and work have become so much more interesting. 

Here's the really interesting thing: My leadership style hasn't changed all that much.  But that doesn't mean I'm not learning.  Studying leadership is engrossing.  I hope everyone takes the time to observe their manager's leadership style. 

Grin: SF EDU Startup Weekend Micro Documentary

Things have been tremendously busy at Grockit.  We have a lot of news to announce in the near future. But, I just want to share a bit of the SF EDU startup weekend experience  with everyone.  See the micro documentary below, and make sure to follow#sfedu.

 

 

Huge Grin: SF EDU Startup Weekend

It’s nearly midday here at Grockit HQ in lovely SOMA.  It’s more than just free street parking making me smile today.  Aside from the Card 9 victory over CSU Fullerton last night, it’s judgment day here at SFEDU Startup Weekend.  We have 14 teams vying for prizes and an spot at the The Founders Showcase in what I know to be the first of multiple SFEDU Weekends.

To say the weekend is a success is an understatement.  Even before anyone gets funded or officially launched, the ideas, the atmosphere, the energy all point at ongoing success.  And, I happen to know that there will be future events as well.  That’s right, edu startup weekends will be serialized thanks to generous funding lined up by Grockit founder Farb Nivi.  More will be announced very soon via the Grockit blog, but for now, I’m really enjoying this event and looking forward to updating this blog with news about the winners. 

And, just in case you feel slighted or angry that you didn’t get an invite to be a participant, judge or mentor (mentor’s are getting a lot of love right now), I can’t really apologize – this thing became sort of a big deal late last month when the media started to take an interest.  As an organizer, I wish we could have sold more tickets or invited more judges, but we'll make it bigger and better next time.  And, we'll make an effort to boost the prize values as well.

Huge thanks to EdSurge team for taking notice, and a huge thanks to Audrey Waters for encouraging us.  Also, huge thanks to my fellow organizers, Shana, Ahmed, Farb and Dan Clemons, and all of the speakers at SFEDU startup weekend.

Here’s a photo from opening night pitches. 

Gripe: MacApp Store Issue Solved by Install Disc

Since my last post, I received two helpful and responsive email solitications from the iTunes Support team.  I generally rate the iTunes support team as good.  I'm still not sure why iTunes Support is interfacing with customers that have MacApp Store fail issues.  The important point is that these folks were helpful and willing to try anything I suggested, such as resetting my logins and logging in to replicate my experiences. 

The end result is that I was assured that creating a new and different appleID (not my current appleID associated with iTunes) would fix this issue.  I'll never know if that "solution" would work because I chose to simply by the iWork install disk a week ago and move on with my life. 

So there you have it: Digital Right Management objective acheived with a less-than-awesome customer experience.  

So, does this moment signal the end of Apple exceptionalism?  For me, yes, for others, I'm sure some would say that this minor friction should be easy for me to overlook.  I had that attitude for many other instances of less-than-good Apple design over the last four years, so I understand it.  Bu, others (and I know them) stopped worshing at the alter of Apple around iTunes 4.0, which was widely adopted, but a much-maligned U-ex. 

For me, the bottom line is that Apple still makes my phone, pcs, and, extensibly, controls the way I consume, buy and share digital media.  But, recently, my switching costs for Apple products stopped including "product affinity".  And, that's a dangerous spot when you're operating a massive business predicated on premium-priced products and existing customer affinity. 

Grin: I joined Grockit!

I recently joined Grockit as the VP of Marketing.  It all happened really fast, so I thought I'd post a short (relatively short) explanation. 

When I left Gazillion last Spring, I knew I wanted to return to the intersection of games and education.  I just didn't think an opportunity would come to me so quickly after my SmartyCard experience.

SmartyCard was an awesome experience.  The solution was elegant, the people were very talented.  And, even if the company was short-lived, SmartyCard alumni have gone on to do wonderful things at Xbox, Kabam, Google and A Bit Lucky.  All of that noted, I think all SmartyCard alumnus miss going to bed at night knowing that they were working on learning games -- even if we were *only* focused on supplemental education. 

To that last point, when I was approached by Roy Gilbert and Farb Nivi to join the team at Grockit, I pounced.  I'd been following Grockit.  But, I had no idea what kind of ambition, vision and company culture existed at Grockit until I met the team in late January.  The team here is genuinely brilliant.  The company culture is a unique combination of high-velocity, lean-practices and grown-up interpersonal communications. It helps that the executives are so accomplished, and the venture investors are outstanding.  These people are stewards of an awesome service and an awesome company culture.  And, there is so much more here: There's a genuine determination to change and improve how people learn and teach. 

And, it's that revolutionary attitude that gets me up every morning.  That's why I've always worked at startups.  Not for the $ or the drama.  I love big ideas.  Grockit is a big idea.  I'm honored to join this team. 

Now, I have to get back to work:)

 

Grin: BUMPNRUN productions

While I'm taking a little time off to play with the wife and kids, I've been tracking down old friends from Stanford u-grad class of 1995. Here (http://FunnyOrDie.com/m/54k1) are two of the funniests humans alive, on or off of Funny or Die, Branyon Davis (B-Luv) and Kevin Garnett (KG) with their latest, a spoof of Dos Equis ads, featuring the one and only Billy Dee Williams (see FunnyorDie embed below). 

You have probably seen BUMPNRUN work before, as I get a steady stream of updates about humorous ads they've created.  The name BUMPNRUN is a reference to a football defensive coverage technique, where the defenders on wide-outs get in the face of receivers and distrupt their progress up field before they can get into route.  That style of play is tough, it's physical, it's persistent.  That's how these two played, and, fittingly, that's what is required to get your brand of humor some visibility in Hollywood. 

I'm really happy for these guys.  Branyon was the first person I met at Stanford. He started off as a receiver and converted to defense, and because were hobbled with injuries for much of our freshman year, we spent a lot of time wise-crackin, sampling underground rap, and playing tunk. 

KG and I spent a little too much time on a pleather couch one Palo Alto summer, along with Craig Thompson.   We would watch crappy TV with the volume down and do voice-overs to entertain each other.  Trying to make he most out of basic cable, we'd make spoofs, and establish foolish positions, like computer generated images should be outlawed.  That memory is funny when considering all three of us would soon be working in Television -- Craig and I first at WebTV, and now Craig has been at Comcast for over ten years.  KG went right to the content side and never came back.  He is really good at what he does -- follow him at http://bumpnrunproductions.com/

 

 

The Most Interesting BLACK Man in the World part 1 - watch more funny videos

Grin: First Round Capital, funny guys, great holiday e-card

This just landed in my inbox this morning.  I really like the guys at First Round Capital.  They've never given me money, but I really like these guys. Just watch the first 3 minutes if you're short on time, totally worth it.  

 

 

Another game launched yesterday

The team at Outspark pushed out another game --Divine Souls -- our second game this fall.  The PR has been great, and the user uptake is outstanding so far.  In the midst of the sprint, I took a few minutes to do an interview with an overseas games industry veteran.  Check it out. 

Grins: Vaportrail and the film "Race to Nowhere"

Two new things that are making me smile today: Vaportrail and the film "Race to Nowhere".  The film's trailer is below, and for those that followed me at SmartyCard, I have to say this is a really critical issue I see developing early on in the Los Altos School District here in Northern California. 

Now, about VaporTrail. These are my friends and former colleagues at Utterli/RPM Communications, based back in Boston.  VaporTrail is a really interesting idea, and they have a big new national customer to be announced in the near future.  I like these guys a lot, very smart, very forward-thinking about real world solutions for business managers on the move.  Keep tabs on these guys.