This is a really good article about the risks inherent in investing in startups. Investing in startups is immensely risky. That’s the game and that’s why VC’s distribute that risk across so many companies.

But it’s even worse for the entrepreneurs. They throw everything they have into one startup. They can’t mitigate their risk, they can just do everything in their power to make it work and sometimes it’s still not enough. 

I like BuzzFeed, it’s one of my daily stops. I love this email that was posted and in someways they remind me a lot of Bleacher Report. While their monitization and editorial strategies are completely different, they’re both building their own self sustaining ecosystems and both are doing well in their respective approaches. 

Respecting our Readers 

We care about the experience of people who read BuzzFeed and we don’t try to trick them for short term gain.  This approach is surprisingly rare.

How does this matter in practice? First of all, we don’t publish slideshows. Instead we publish scrollable lists so readers don’t have to click a million times and can easily scroll through a post. The primary reason to publish slideshows, as far as I can tell, is to juice page views and banner ad impressions.  Slideshows are super annoying and lists are awesome so we do lists!

For the same reason, we don’t show crappy display ads and we make all our revenue from social advertising that users love and share.  We never launched one of those “frictionless sharing” apps on Facebook that automatically shares the stories you click because those apps are super annoying. We don’t post deceptive, manipulative headlines that trick people into reading a story.  We don’t focus on SEO or gaming search engines or filling our pages with millions of keywords and tags that only a robot will read.  We avoid anything that is bad for our readers and can only be justified by short term business interests.

We Build The Whole Enchilada  

Most publishers build their site by stapling together products made by other companies. They get their CMS from one company, their analytics package from another, their ad tech from another, their related content widgets are powered by another, sometimes even their writers are contractors who don’t work for the company. This is why so many publisher sites look the same and also why they can be so amazingly complex and hard to navigate.  They are Frankenstein products bolted together by a tech team that integrates other people’s products instead of building their own.

At BuzzFeed we take the exact opposite approach. We manage our own servers, we built our CMS from scratch, we created our own realtime stats system, we have our own data science team, we invented own ad products and our own post formats, and all these products are brought to life by our own editorial team and our own creative services team. We are what you call a “vertically integrated product” which is rare in web publishing. We take responsibility for the technology, the advertising, and the content and that allows us to make a much better product where everything works together.

Obvious shortcomings of the analogy aside, this was a very clever article. It does make you think about the TSA in a different way and to their credit, they’ve always used social media brilliantly. 

Part of me (a really big part) likes the ideas of companies and agencies “housing” startups and helping them out. But part of me also wonders how successful these efforts will be. 

Startups fail. Most of them never see the light of day. Can an established company actually be of any use to a startup? After watching a few startups fail, will the companies stick with it? I think we’ll see a lot of companies ditching this effort after a few years. 

Granted IDEO isn’t your normal company. It will be interesting to see which companies, or which type of companies prove useful. 

Yes, but American English or British English? 

It feels absurd to be preaching about this in 2012. If you’ve arrived this far in the tech scene without being fluent in English, it is probably through sheer luck, and I have bad news for you: the good times are over. Until China claims the world title – and possibly even after they do – English will still be the operating system of business.

As an American living in London but working mostly with teams across Europe and Africa I totally see this problem and I sympathize. There is a huge English language bias, especially in tech and it’s really, really bad on the Internet. I even know of several tech blogs in other countries that write only in English because that’s the best way they can help their local communities. 

My personal hope is that translation software gets to the point where it doesn’t matter what language something is written in the content is presented in the language the reader needs and that it actually makes sense. We have a way to go until then and as the author points out, until then, non-English speakers are going to have to publish in English. 

The problem with social proof is that it’s just too easy to game. 

This is a really smart way to jump start your ecosystem. 

Years ago when I started TechBoise the goal for the site and the events were to bring together the business people (often the people with the ideas) with the technical people (the people who could make it happen). 

The right chemistry of people is the foundation for a strong tech ecosystem. Money then accelerates growth but without the chemistry it just won’t work. 

Funding the people with the right ideas and then matching them with technical co-founders seems like a  great way to jump start the ecosystem. I’m sure there will be a lot of failures along the way but that’s often what it takes. 

I love stories like this. Great read. 

“PIVOTING” HAS BECOME PART OF THE BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY LEXICON, THE MOORE’S LAW OF STARTUPOLOGY.