Everyone is Not Listening
Congratulations to Zoom ($ZM) on its IPO today.
Its stock is up over 70%.
Did I buy any shares?
No.
Will I eventually buy shares?
Very likely, but the company, in less than one trading day, was able to eclipse the value of American Airlines ($AAL), among other small-cap and mid-cap companies, so I’ll wait a month or two until things calm down.
Meanwhile, Pinterest ($PINS) also debuted today.
It would be impolite to downplay what Pinterest has accomplished over the years as Jeff Jordan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, wrote today:
“Pinterest’s design and user experience, under co-founder and chief creative officer Evan Sharp’s direction, was unlike anything else that we had seen on the Web at the time. The product was (and is still) at heart a set of pictures on the screen. But instead of having the pictures live in a fixed grid, they were set free to float on the page and utilize whatever space they needed based on their unique shapes. This simple design tweak was — and is — mesmerizing, setting a new bar for software design. The design encouraged collecting as a core user behavior, with Pinterest users putting great effort into carefully curating their visual collections.”
Silicon Valley has spun the tale that every successful company was co-founded by a brilliant CEO salesman and a savant CTO wizard.
But, in the real world, whether a company exists in the tech or not, success needs a team with more than two or four members.
Shane Parrish wrote about this in the latest Farnam Street blog:
“Building a team is more complicated than collecting talent. I once tried to solve a problem by putting a bunch of PhDs in a room. While comments like that sounded good and got me a lot of projects above my level, they were rarely effective at delivering actual results.
Statements like ‘let’s assemble a multidisciplinary team of incredible people’ are gold in meetings if you work for an organization. These statements sound intelligent. They are hard to argue with. And, most importantly, they also have no accountability built in, and they are easy to wiggle out of. If things don’t work out, who can fault a plan that meant putting smart people in a room?
Well… I can. It’s a stupid plan.
The combination of individual intelligence does not make for group intelligence. … ‘A’ players provide a lot more than raw intellectual horsepower. Among other things, they also bring drive, integrity, and an ability to make others better. ‘A’ players want to work with other ‘A’ players. Accepting that statement doesn’t mean they’re all ‘the best.’”
Sometimes, software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a sounder investment.
Social media et al. can be pretty fickle…
“We are on the verge of another Me Decade. History repeats, but always with a twist. People are overwhelmed with information. They can’t make sense of it. They’re trying to figure out how to tune it out.
Yes, you have the coastal baby boomers with their anti-smartphone campaigns, but ignore them, they just want to get back to a past that will never come back. Your smartphone opens your life, makes it easier, and it’s all personalized to you. This is the personalization that will become prominent in the twenties.
I’m not talking about tech personalization, robot personalization, algorithm personalization, this personalization will come from the users themselves. They’ll choose the info they want and the people they want to connect with. And it will be relatively few.
The internet allows us to reach everybody, but everybody is not listening.”
