April 2014 – The Art of Doing

Confessions of an Angel Investor

Yun-Fang Juan, an angel investor and a former FaceBook lead engineer learns a hard lesson about math.

Yun-Fang Juan, Silicon Valley insider, angel investor and a former FaceBook lead engineer, has seen some questionable ideas turn into gold. You might have heard of them: Google, Facebook and WhatsApp.

The WhatsApp Lesson

Back in 2010, Yun-Fang Juan, a Silicon Valley insider and co-founder of Stealth Startup, was at a Mountain View taqueria with her husband Keith Chiem. The high-powered couple was sharing a meal with Brian Acton, a long-time friend, former Yahoo! colleague and best man at the couple’s wedding. Acton was working on a new messaging app on iOS that he said he could turn into a billion dollar business. The new app had a couple thousand users, a steadily growing user base, and the company wanted to hire more engineers. Acton was trying to recruit Chiem, and Chiem was interested. But with a background in statistics, Juan ran the numbers—doing a back-of-the-envelope analysis. Maybe Acton would be able to build a $100 million company, but she gave his chance of turning it into a billion company a multiple of 0.1%. After taxes, she estimated, her husband’s equity in the company might be one or two million dollars.

Now that might sound like a lot of money to most of us, but Juan who had worked at Yahoo! and Facebook and her husband had already cleaned up with Yahoo! stock and would do so with FaceBook holdings. So Juan told her husband: “If you want to work with Brian because he is a brilliant guy, do it. But it makes no sense to do it for the financial rewards.”

Juan’s husband passed on the offer.

Two months ago, Acton’s little messaging app, WhatsApp, sold to Facebook for $19 billion.

Juan called it an “expensive and humbling lesson.” It reminded her of times in the past when she had seen other business models with what at the time seemed to be limited potential—that is until they went on to become multi-billion dollar companies. Continue reading “Confessions of an Angel Investor”

How to Use the Science Behind Habits to Sell (Anything!) Better

Pete Trainor of SapientNitro has a simple marketing formula: If a behavior leads to good feeling, then repeat.

We often think of our habits as quirky things we do over and over again without really thinking about them–twirling a lock of hair, checking a cell phone on the way out of the subway, leaving the toilet seat up or down. But when we are selling a product or service, those repetitive actions are exactly what we want people to indulge in.

Be sure that when someone plows land in Farmville or clears jelly off the board in Candy Crush–over and over again, because they can’t stop playing–there is the sound of joyous ka-chinging in the Farmville and Candy Crush boardrooms.

So is there a secret to triggering habits in people so that they’ll engage and keep engaging with whatever it is you create? Pete Trainor, Associate Director UX at SapientNitro, believes that there is. And in his recent fascinating SXSW Interactive talk, “The Neuroscience of Success,” Trainor shared some of the principles that he has distilled over the years from psychology, behavioral, and experimental economics and observations of the human animal: himself. Continue reading “How to Use the Science Behind Habits to Sell (Anything!) Better”

The Circle and the Dot: A Metaphor for Life

What does elementary school standardized testing have to do with the rest of us?

What if a school principal told the truth about a test?

Because of the No Child Left Behind Law passed in 2002 our daughter and all of her classmates have spent the last couple of months preparing for tests that may (or may not) measure their intelligence and their ability to think critically.

Our daughter’s teachers have little idea what will be on the test. The test makers have given the schools very few details about what the questions will be or how they will be phrased. It’s something like training for a mystery Olympic event—on opening day you may be asked to pole vault, synchronize swim or run the 440.

The kids will sit their tables, taking these tests for 70 minutes a day for a total of six days.

By the way these kids are in third grade.

Continue reading “The Circle and the Dot: A Metaphor for Life”