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. 

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: 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. 

Grin: I joined Outspark

In May, I joined Outspark.  This news explains why this blog has been relatively quiet and I nearly disappeared from industry social functions.  Joining a startup requires a huge time investment, but Outspark has lived up to the hard-driving, hard-working reputation that stood out even amongst startups.

Who is Outspark?  Historically, Outspark has been that quiet company that periodically pops up with a big game partnership or stuns a conference audience with specifics of game economics and audience behavioral details.  More specifically, Outspark is the premium free-to-play games company founded in 2008 that has done three consecutive up-rounds in some of the hardest venture raise times, ever.  Recently, Outspark's game identity has shifted from early hits Fiesta and Secret of Solstice to the up-coming games Divine Souls and Fists of Fu that provoke "gamer pubs" editors to declare "Free to play has grown up!"

Before I explain how and why I joined the team at Outspark, I just want to finish my chapters on SmartyCard. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Gazillion working on SmartyCard. I joined the team to reunite with Rob Hutter, founder of Gazillion. I really connected with the SmartyCard team, and I have so many new friends from the entire experience.  But, even as SmartyCard was a critical success and favored by millions of families, SmartyCard's destiny is to be added to a tween-focused media company or a traditional educational publisher's portfolio.  I can't really say much more about that, but I am very sure that Rob Hutter will continue to pursue and invest in learning and earning as a motivational factor in tween-focused games and media.

So, why did I join Outspark? The short answer is the Outspark team.  Initially, I was attracted to the success of Outspark's micro-transaction-fueled business. Secondarily, when I saw the games Outspark is unveiling now - Divine Souls and Fists of Fu - I started to see and believe that Outspark had smartly built on initial successes, and took the time and effort to find high-quality games with the potential to be real hits.

But again, the real clincher for me was the team. The entire Outspark team is impressive, including the other recent arrivals like Steve Sims, a veteran of EA and Nvidia and Deepak Gupta, a veteran of Technology Crossover Ventures (invested in Netflix).  I made a personal connection with Outspark founder Susan Choe.  I see in Susan the same qualities that I first saw in Raymie Stata (CTO of Yahoo), Michael Cerda (founder of Threadbox, now of MySpace) and Steve Perlman (founder of Moxi, WebTV and OnLive).  Founders are obsessive, effusive and committed to their businesses and anyone that really believes in the vision.  These qualities are attractive to me.

So, how has it been?  So far, so good.  Applying my web marketing bag-o-tricks to Outspark has helped create some additional lift in traffic, new users and registrations.  And, I'm really digging the late night hours and bringing together a new marketing team. But, the best is yet to come.  The U-ex designers and engineers at Outspark are working with me to reshape the web user-experience and reinvigorate the large, thriving game communities totaling ~6.5M players. And, the PMs and GMs in Steve's group are helping define some really compelling promotions, social apps and games that will give people even more reasons to play.

So, what's ahead? MMO RPG's are the original social games.  People play and connect in MMOs -- not like the asynchronous messaging and sharing mechanics found in SNS games.  I want to help players connect, play and create, because at Outspark, people come for the games, but they stay for the community.  The future of successful games companies will evolve from efforts to enable organic game communities and encourage player creations that shape and promote games.  Stay tuned to Outspark.  We're doing something special.

Grin: Threadbox acquired by MySpace

A colleague sent me this link a few minutes ago.  It seems Threadbox was acquired by MySpace.  Per my earlier post, I'm a huge fan of this service and looking forward to seeing what MySpace does with the technology and the team.  A huge congrats to Michael and Ben.

Grin: Three new ideas in media discovery that you need to follow

I'm back from my annual bout with blog fade.  Several startups have asked me to blog on their product ideas, and I'm sharing three ideas that you need to be following -- KoiTunes, Threadbox and Zoodles.  

Zoodles is close to my heart.  Early child development and education has been a part of my identity for the last two years thanks to the popularity of SmartyCard.  Last summer I met with Zoodles founder Mark Williamson, whom I'd met three years ago when he was heading product marketing at Dash -- a networked GPS that was acquired by RIM.  Zoodles was in an early stage of development when I first saw it last summer, but I was in love with the idea of Zoodles and hopeful that Mark could put together a round of financing and execute well. About a month ago, Gina Aumiller let me know that Zoodles had closed financing, and I had the distinct pleasure of looking at Zoodles again. 

Zoodles is important because it's tackling the idea of co-browsing while focusing on early childhood development and education.  If discovery is the new black in Silicon Valley, Zoodles is the equivalent of the "it" designer in youth fashion. 

From my post in SmartyCard, I watched users skew younger and younger, and the issue of how to design for co-browsing loomed large on the horizon for the last two years.  Zoodles doesn't shy from the browser -- a simple AIR client install, and you're off and running. 

In Zoodles, you have a very clean registration, and a very simplistic GUI that beckons the parent and child to click and explore.  Children see the boxes and the mix of content gets them excited.  Parents still control the session, but after a few simple mouse clicks, children start to understand the arrows and they begin to explore.  And, the right content is already there.  It's a great first effort.  I'd love to see parents drag and drop content into their feed, sharing content they feel appropriate and crowd-sourcing more great independent productions for kids.  But, I don't want to overlook what Zoodles has already done because creating something so simple is very difficult.  Check out the screens below for example art, but make sure you get over to Zoodles.com if you have a child ages 2-4. 

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Threadbox is very emotional for me as well.  While I'm very hopeful that my good friends Michael Cerda and Ben Dean will "win" with their attempt to re-imagine email, the emotions I'm feeling right now are more about pain and remorse more than anything else.  In May, I adopted a corporate deployment of Gmail and I've been breaking office furniture ever since. 

You might know that I played a big role in rethinking email at Stata Labs (acquired by Yahoo!), the company that launched "the Google of email" even before Gmail.  So, to watch Google put out such an inferior product with such crappy conversation rendering drives me absolutely insane.  I HATE gmail, about as much as I LOVE Threadbox -- which is to say a lot. 

I started using Threadbox (then CC: Betty) last fall in Alpha, but I was able to use Threadbox at work last March and April during the open beta.  With some 100M power emailers in the known universe, people are universally lost in their email -- they can't find things because integrated search is weak in webmail products.  But, in the last 15 years, a new Internet discovery metaphor has emerged to compete with search-- human association is the new dominant discovery mode thanks to every social network invented (yeah, I'm including eBay). 

What I love about Threadbox is that the default views are threads -- email threads -- and clicking on a person/contact lets me see all of our conversations, private or public.  Threadbox is perfect for me because when I'm digging through thousands of opened and unopened emails, I'm looking for a specific email from a specific person, I'm not just browsing emails.  That's what busy people do -- they dig through email with a purpose, a sense of urgency, and, for me at least, Threadbox is the natural UI for today's power emailer.  For an example of Threadbox organization, see the screenshot of threads between me and Threadbox founder Michael Cerda.

 

Music has been close to my heart forever.  Be it discovering rare wax, chatting up A&R guys at SF music venues or listening to new music podcasters like CC Chapman and Julien Smith, I'm always interested in finding out what other people are listening to.  More importantly, I'm always interested in knowing what three other people are listening to -- those people are Richard Brewer Hay, Matt Marenghi and Tom Damico (founder of KoiTunes).  I've basically figured out that all other "friends" with recommendations aren't really for me.  There are a few folks with good musical taste overlap, like Chris Hanaka and Laurence Scot (of The Famous), but with all my connections to the music industry, I really need a musical filter that just tunes into what Matt, Tom and Richard are sampling and buying. 

I worked with Tom at WebTV years ago.  Tom was the BD head in charge of integrating search into the first Web and TV shared experience to find commercial success.  Somehow, it's appropriate that ten years later, Tom is still focused on media discovery.  Only now, Tom is fully leveraging the twitter channel for microblogging of music recommendations-- one of the most popular subjects in the "twitterverse".  

You need to sign up for Koitunes second beta now.  I used Koitunes earlier this Spring, and Tom's brief beta revealed enough promise and generated enough excitement to impress during some Seattle area startup events.  Koitunes was like tuning into a Pandora or LaLa that my friends were tuning for me.  I could even listen to their recommendations through Pandora or LaLa, which expedited buying, which is nice.  The GUI was a work in progress, but I think Koitunes has massive potential -- especially when extending to services like NetFlix, GameFly or even Amazon. 

The basic point of all of these startups is that discovery and human recommendations are important again. With all of the world's content suddenly accessible, opinions and influence are paramount.  Search sucks again.  Search companies are great at indexing and advertising, but they're losing ground to social nets in media discovery.  Apps have been democratized via iTunes and Facebook, so big market opportunities are interesting to me right now.  I can't think of bigger opportunities than email, music and education, so pay attention to Threadbox, Koitunes and Zoodles.