Jeff Stern

I will eventually waste much time on this page

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:23:16 -0500

The Fukuro-sage’s urine has a powerful smell that can disorient humans and render insects and small animals unconscious http://english.mashkulture.net/2009/10/20/the-anatomy-of-japanese-folk-monsters/

The packaging is even more stunning than the verbiage

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:33:46 -0500

“Our packaging is made of molded paper pulp and a bio plastic made primarily of corn. We use these materials because they are interesting to look at, and they are compostable—which means one day, they might become part of a large tree. Maybe you can cut down that tree and make it into a speedboat.

The packaging for Help Remedies is beautiful and biodegradable. Their copywriting is smart and funny. Their website shows you one of their packages biodegrading, or offers help if you are bored.

"In talking to older people who’ve had good lives, inevitably half of them will say, “The..."

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:15:17 -0500

“In talking to older people who’ve had good lives, inevitably half of them will say, “The most significant thing in my life is that I’ve been extraordinarily lucky.” And when you hear that you know you’re hearing the truth. It doesn’t diminish their talent or industry. You can have all that and fail.”

- Cormac McCarthy in a great WSJ interview

but hey, I'm a professional amateur

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:37:12 -0500

“I know I’m late to this, but hey, I’m a professional amateur. May I be that for the rest of my days.” -TaNehisi Coates

Amen.

Zenph!

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:47:53 -0500

Kip Frey was one of my favorite professors at Fuqua. He was smart, savvy and very practical. He has been involved in fascinating stuff like Turner purchasing Castle Rock, professional wrestling during the NWO years, and the early days of online auctions. And I just found out that it was announced Friday that he’s leaving Intersouth Partners to become CEO of Zenph.

The name was familiar, and a quick search of my Gmail shows that I saw an announcement about the company on a local listserv over a year ago. I sent a copy of this announcement to a friend, suggesting we go on a tour. I never got a response, and forgot about it until now…

TOPIC: I got the tour & demonstration at this place yesterday…
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.music.chapel-hill/browse_thread/thread/c8e360f18cf439bc?hl=en
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Wed, Apr 9 2008 7:24 pm
From: DJ Golf

www.zenph.com

Big house in north Raleigh with a mini-concert hall containing 4
concert grand pianos rigged with their hardware & connected to laptops
- I got to basically sit in a room and hear Rachmaninoff, Glenn Gould
and Art Tatum play piano live. Read this review for a better
explanation of what they do than I can give…

http://www.zenph.com/pdf/Zenph%20-%20The%20Audiophile%20Voice%20Oct%202007.pdf

What really made my jaw drop to the floor was the demo of their new
“upright bass” - a thing that looks like “V…GER” from the first Star
Trek movie (geek check) and was made by somebody in Germany. They
played me an old Oscar Peterson recording with the piano & drums in a
pair of Magnepans and the bass separately reproduced on the gadget -
if you didn’t look you’d bet money that Ray Brown was standing there
playing bass.

Fun stuff. They told me sax & drums are next. When they figure out
how to do this with acoustic guitar, I want to hear Robert Johnson.

I <3 Brizzly

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:49:34 -0500

Brizzly.com is a web service that allows you to view Twitter and Facebook feeds from the same page, even if you have multiple accounts. So I can toggle between my personal twitter feed and the TEDxRDU feed with ease, and Brizzly does some nice common-sense things like highlighting all of the messages I haven’t seen yet.

The reason I’m writing about Brizzly right now, though, is the way that it allows users to explain Twitter’s trending topics. People are generally pretty straightforward in their explanations, but occasionally gems like this explanation of #WeCoolAndAllBut come through:

This type of tweet strongly implies that the subject is viewed as a close acquaintance or friend, but despite this favored status, certain behaviors will always remain taboo.

E.g. “We cool and all, but I ain’t letting you in my apartment while I’m at work.”

In this context, “we” is an American way of saying “we’re”.

^Not “American”, but “Ghetto”. “We” Americans generally hate that speak.

In this context, “speak” is an American way of saying “way of speaking”, provided you ignore Orwell’s contributions to the English language, e.g. “newspeak” etc (Orwell was British)

^ Orwell was also an author of several novels. He was known to enjoy a pipe.

^ Pipes are conveyances for tobacco consumption.

^ ‘Conveyances’ has four syllables.

^ I’ll four syllable your mom.

^ Mom is a palindrome.

^ Mom is spelt Mum in the UK

"Essentially, Twitter left a ball and a stick in a field and lurked on the sidelines as its users..."

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:59:22 -0400

“Essentially, Twitter left a ball and a stick in a field and lurked on the sidelines as its users invented baseball.”

- Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter | Magazine (via fred-wilson)

"Profit was the rule behind every choice we made. Although the end goal was always acquisition, my..."

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:01:01 -0400

“

Profit was the rule behind every choice we made. Although the end goal was always acquisition, my attitude was (and still is) that the best way to get yourself acquired is to be profitable. Profits prove the business is operating well. Profits validate the market. Profits make minimum valuation easy. Profits mean the buyer converts balance-sheet money into bottom-line profit-and-loss money — a trade every large company wants to make.

Most of all, profits mean you don’t need to sell, which gives you the ability to walk away from a deal. You have little negotiating power in any deal unless you can happily walk away.

On the other hand, I knew I would only be happy building a genuine, great company, where the product solves a real pain, where customers are given white-glove service, where “tech support” is the only sales force, where we leave the world a little better than we found it, and where every employee is smart and gets things done and is trusted with any decision.

”

- Jason Cohen, again from his excellent Rich vs. King in the Real World post, which you really should read in its entirety. There’s a simple graph in there that’s extremely powerful. Great stuff. Via @ruby, who is Jason’s cousin and a non-profit tech rockstar.

"In short, although the goal was “Rich,” I achieved it by behaving like the goal was..."

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:57:54 -0400

“In short, although the goal was “Rich,” I achieved it by behaving like the goal was “King.” I don’t know why people find this contradictory; after all, acting like “King” means building a long-term, sustainable business, and that’s exactly the kind of business that gets acquired.”

- Jason Cohen, in a GREAT post about why he sold his company. The the “rich”/”king” dichotomy is from Noam Wasserman’s HBS-related blog. Jason’s post is really worth reading in its entirety.

"I enjoyed Freakonomics, as I enjoyed the fifty or so imitators that followed. Yet, they are to..."

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:51:33 -0400

“

I enjoyed Freakonomics, as I enjoyed the fifty or so imitators that followed. Yet, they are to economics what Friends is to culture. And ultimately, they represent the trivialization of a great system of thought. Instead of improving that system of thought, they apply already questionable assumptions to what are socially the lowest-value uses.

Those assumptions are what demand reinvention — not broader application. Economics needs fundamental reinvention — not trivialization. That’s going to take a new era of geeking out, getting philosophical, and re-examining the basic assumptions on which econ is founded. Freaking out is fun, but getting constructive is where the future of economics lies.

”

- Umair Haque continues to amaze me with his ability to Godinize the most complex issues of our day.

"I need you guys to understand that what we’re trying to do is hard. And I want you to be..."

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:09:27 -0400

“I need you guys to understand that what we’re trying to do is hard. And I want you to be excited by that. I want you to be energized by that. Because if it was easy it would have already been done. If it was easy it wouldn’t have been worth all the effort to get here.”

- Barack Obama, in a political speech, but with a message that ought to be embraced by entrepreneurs (okay, it ought to be ebraced by everyone, but it should resonate with entrepreneurs in particular).

Not price-sensitive, but service-sensitive

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:57:15 -0400

A HBS blog post by Peter Bregman yesterday talked about why his experience at an upscale gym caused him to cancel his membership. While he was perfectly willing to pay higher monthly fees and other additional fees than he would have to elsewhere, he was quick to leave when faced with corporate policies rather than actual customer service. This led to some cross-industry research showing:

“It turns out that if customers liked an organization’s products or services enough to recommend them to others, then that organization could raise its prices, even in a down economy, without losing any of its customers. But if the organization downgraded the customer’s experience, then not even lower prices would prevent customers from abandoning it.”

This is particularly important in thinking about memberships. If a member is not price-sensitive, that removes a huge barrier to renewal and therefore increases the customer’s lifetime value incredibly.

I'm so very excited to see the Arkestra tomorrow

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 17:18:21 -0400

I'm so very excited to see the Arkestra tomorrow

"Still, there’s an element of this society that enjoys this debate…Some of us desperately..."

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:14:58 -0400

“Still, there’s an element of this society that enjoys this debate…Some of us desperately want black people to acknowledge that we are not our forefathers. Some of us desperately want white people to acknowledge that the spirit of those forefathers still haunts the land. We enjoy having this fight. We get something out of it—just not a health care bill.”

- Ta-Nehisi Coates on his blog at the Atlantic

Experimenting with Kickstarter and Google AdWords

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:04:51 -0400

Robin Sloan, of snarkmarket, is writing a new book. He’s using Kickstarter, a micro-patronage model. I love Kickstarter - it allows artists to have some assurance of commercial success (or breakeven) before embarking on a time-consuming project, and allows fans a greater degree of connection to the artist and his/her process than ever before (without compromising the artistic vision or integrity the way the old patronage model could).

Perhaps even more interesting, though, is Robin’s experiment with Google AdWords. His main character is to be “a Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century” and he created an AdWords campaign to test what would be the best name for his lead character (based on how many people clicked through on a given name).

via Noah Brier

Failure Factories

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:57:00 -0400

When I was in college, I knew lots of people who said “I’m on the 5-year plan,” or who took a year off from school. I had no idea that graduation rates at major public universities were so low now (33% of UMass freshmen expected to graduate within 6 years)! Having worked for many years in and around education, it has always seemed that the most valuable interventions come in the early years and in the areas with most need (least resources). Higher Ed always seemed to be a bit messed up, but not in need of major fixing - if anything it seemed that investment in more (and better) community colleges was a more crucial need. However, the New York Times article linked above really opened my eyes, particularly in terms of the misalignment of college missions and financial incentives:

“In education, the incentives can be truly perverse. Because large lecture classes are cheaper for a college than seminars, freshmen are cheaper than upperclassmen. So a college that allows many of its underclassmen to drop out may be helping its bottom line.”

I recently had the opportunity to meet Christopher Gergen, co-author of Life Entrepreneurs. His company does trainings around living an entrepreneurial life, thinking of yourself as a mission-based business. Sort of a cross between social entrepreneurship and self-help. He mentioned that while he has had some success in selling training to corporate customers, he prefers the education market (particularly higher ed) because there is greater personal impact and alignment. Having seen these graduation rates, I certainly see a need for *something* that can improve these stats, and I’m all for entrepreneurship education as a tool for personal growth/improvement.

Facilitating strategic thinking

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 14:20:11 -0400

I really like this simple framework to facilitate long-term strategic thinking: Vijay Govindarajan’s 3-box model (a portion of text selected below, visit the link for diagram and additional explanation)

“Actions companies take belong in one of three boxes:

Box 1 — manage the present;
Box 2 — selectively abandon the past; and
Box 3 — create the future.

Box 1 is about improving current businesses. Box 2 and Box 3 are about breakout performance and growth.

Many organizations restrict their strategic thinking to Box 1. This tendency has been particularly acute in the past two to three years, as most leaders have emphasized reducing costs and improving margins in their current businesses.

But strategy cannot be just about what an organization needs to do to secure profits for the next year. Strategy must encompass Box 2 and Box 3. It must be about what a company needs to do to sustain leadership for the next ten years. In fact, the central task of an organization’s leaders is to balance managing the present with creating the future.”

via Noah Brier who posts about its relation to Gawker Media

Love this idea - “put pocketing” takes former...

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:54:28 -0400

Love this idea - “put pocketing” takes former pickpockets and pays them to stealthily put money into peoples pockets. There is not any advertisement or other marketing collateral attached to the money - the only indication are some signs in the area (pause at 1:23 for a still). Talk Talk, the company sponsoring this effort, has their logo rather small on the signs, and does not emphasize their brand in the video they’ve produced. They seem to get that something so novel will get people talking, and wanting to know who would sponsor such a thing. (found at Coversation Agent)

This is a good reason to blog...

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 17:20:58 -0400

“The other interesting epiphany I had while writing the post was that I actually do my best thinking while writing, which I’m not sure is actually a new thing. I find the act of explaining my thinking takes me much further than just going through things in my head.” - Noah Brier

This is the sort of epiphany that has me saying “duh” and then realizing that it’s the same for me, and I ought to take action based on that.

Jeff Stern

I will eventually waste much time on this page

The packaging is even more stunning than the verbiage

"In talking to older people who’ve had good lives, inevitably half of them will say, “The..."

but hey, I'm a professional amateur

Zenph!

More Brizzly trending topic pith

I <3 Brizzly

"Essentially, Twitter left a ball and a stick in a field and lurked on the sidelines as its users..."

"Profit was the rule behind every choice we made. Although the end goal was always acquisition, my..."

"In short, although the goal was “Rich,” I achieved it by behaving like the goal was..."

"I enjoyed Freakonomics, as I enjoyed the fifty or so imitators that followed. Yet, they are to..."

"I need you guys to understand that what we’re trying to do is hard. And I want you to be..."

Not price-sensitive, but service-sensitive

I'm so very excited to see the Arkestra tomorrow

"Still, there’s an element of this society that enjoys this debate…Some of us desperately..."

Experimenting with Kickstarter and Google AdWords

Failure Factories

Facilitating strategic thinking

Love this idea - “put pocketing” takes former...

This is a good reason to blog...