YakShaving

{there is nothing NSFW about this post, but now that I have your attention…}

In the past five years, much of our domestic discourse regarding education and education reform has revolved around STEM training, so that the US can manufacture more scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians. For a long time, I agreed with this predominant position because it made lots of sense on face value.

After completing degrees in both technology and “math” (computer science and an mba), and what could also be called an “art” degree (design), I find myself disagreeing with the emphasis on STEM learning in a vacuum. As automation accelerates and makes our lives filled with less repetitive work, the need for more creativity and innovation in our day-to-day careers will only increase. While there will always be a need for liberal arts majors to help communicate and express new ideas, that’s not exactly what I’m referring to here. It’s universally necessary to be able to think creatively and solve problems more than ever (Even for “nerds” with STEMmy backgrounds like computer science). Maybe training in the arts and other similar creative domains can contribute more organic growth to the economy and advances in the sciences and technology than we’ve ever thought before.

I didn’t come up with the acronym “STEAM“. I’m not entirely sure who did, but the idea of focusing on the arts has been discussed before by many before me, including John Tarnoff in this Huffington Post article. Here’s a short clip:

“A” skills in the 21st century actually apply to a larger, broader segment of the workforce than STEM skills. America’s competitiveness is equally distinguished by its creative industry productivity and exports, from movies, TV and games (traditionally the highest-ratio export business in the nation) to architecture (Bilbao Guggenheim, anyone?) to the myriad of leading writers, designers, graphic artists and others who use their imagination to create new products and services — and the infrastructure of creative enterprise managers (producers, editors, financiers, marketers) that support and run their businesses. This cadre, that sociologist Richard Florida defined in 2002 as the Creative Class, represents approximately 30 percent of the United States workforce. In contrast, a quick look at NSF statistics indicates that science and engineering makes up approximately 10 to12 percent of the United States workforce.

This past weekend, I was a part of Chicago Startup Weekend. We (Some friends, my brother, and I) gave a solid college try at launching a minimum viable product (MVP) to help foodies connect to personal chefs and aspiring food entrepreneurs called BigStove. We did hone our message and are working on taking some important validation steps after putting up some landing pages.

The general idea behind StartupWeekend is that you work on an idea all weekend and launch/pitch at the end. Think TechCrunch50, except you build the MVP in a weekend. Pretty awesome way to work and validate your idea.

Thought I’d take a second to reflect overall on the experience:

On Personal Leadership:
- I realized a lot about my personal leadership style in a very short period of time. Having an undergraduate CS background, and a graduate degree in design and business sounds great and is helpful, but what’s better is being able to find people who are amazing at what they do and having trust that they can do a helluva better job than I can.

- Being an individual contributor as a leader is helpful when it can be managed well. It indicates that you care enough to get your hands dirty. However, remember to choose battles wisely. We didn’t need >2 people working on setting up the backend/Django. As an aside, we should have known that the “contest” wasn’t about actually building something, it was just about pitching. Only one of the other teams appeared to actually have something built besides for us.

On Startup Teams:
- I realized I mostly like working with people who DO stuff, and BUILD stuff. Talk, and ideas are cheap. Especially ones that aren’t informed by user research/talking to people.

- It takes people a while to understand that user research is about finding unique insights about how people operate and their unarticulated needs. When you have vague notions of what you want your product to be ALREADY, then this user research is harder to do. You tend to have a radar for points that substantiate what you intend to build. This happens all the time in larger companies when managers are undergoing new “innovation” efforts.

Desired/Undesired Behaviors for Startup Teams:
The great thing about startup weekend is that it’s a great place to test out how a team is working. In a sense, it’s by far, the best place to “interview”. Experience high stress, move quickly, get done a bunch of stuff over a short period of time.

Desired:
– Integrity. Being able to trust all the members of your team is important. Don’t do things that put that integrity into question. Though I forgive and forget a lot, matters of integrity are pretty important.
– Solid work ethic. Working with some people is an absolute pleasure because they just have an intense curiosity to just GET IT DONE and show the results of what they’ve done after they’ve done it. The work is inherently valuable and takes the team to a new place.
– Don’t be afraid to pitch constantly, it helps refine the message. Agree to a pitch as a team and then try it.
– Disagree and Commit. It’s okay to disagree, but once everyone is on board with the same plan/vision, commit and move on.

Undesired:
– “Management” mentalities. There’s little scope for project management for the span of a weekend. Just build stuff. Even if it’s a map of what you think needs to be done.
– The Blame game. It’s too easy to blame other(s) on the reasons why something didn’t work or you didn’t get done what you needed to get done. This is a deleterious behavior and doesn’t convey personal ownership. Startup teams work best when people PRIVATIZE LOSSES and SOCIALIZE WINS, not the other way around (e.g. Awesome job on this data model, guys….. Sorry I F%@$% up our Q&A session, I know what I’ll do next time)
– No man is an island. Cliched, but prima donna “artistes” don’t carry the team. Unfortunately, I was harsh on a team member for doing this. Luckily, the team member was my brother, so no love lost.
– Passive Aggression. * I didn’t notice this much this weekend but I have with startup teams in the past. There’s no room for facetious passive aggression in this environment. Better to be aggressive, provide reasons for why you believe the way you do. This really gets to me.

On Lean Startups
– The importance of “getting out of the house” is immensely valuable. We’ve met 23 people across 5 food markets in 3 cities. We’ll talk to more in order to drive them to our landing page and see how easy it is to convert/gauge interest. We’ll only build if there’s verifiable interest.

On Startup Weekend:
– The Startup Weekend, Mark/Chris,et al did a great job at putting the weekend together. Enjoyed spending time with most of the other teams/entrepreneurs there that were building businesses.

- Regarding the “contest”, I thought some of the ideas were great — I especially liked RemnantRetail — and thought that they should surely have won. Amazing that some of these companies / visions are developed in a weekend — It takes some TC50 companies a year to get where they are to launch. I also really liked City Murder. Think there’s a huge oppty for “real” social games that I’d maybe actually feel like playing (I’m not a gamer). I thought it was bizarre that the second place winner was literally partners with one of the judges, but I’m not surprised, this is Chicago after all.

Nan Hu, Paul A Pavlou, and Jie Zhang wrote about J shaped distribution curves for product reviews in ACM. I found it interesting because it cuts across behavioral economics, technology, statistics and visual communication.

For some time now, I’ve been interested in how companies can (or already do?!) positively or negatively use user generated content about products (often in the form of reviews and or star rating systems) to essentially change whether or not a future consumer will purchase.

Here’s me trying to make sense of this research visually:

I always thought this was weird that the decision-making factors for purchasing a product differ widely depending on consumer type, and naturally, the type of product. They also depend greatly on whether the product was evangelized to them in the first place by a friend, and even how much they paid for it.

I suspect that for digital electronics, product reviews and ratings play greatly into the product purchase decision.

Designing a clever product review system with an intent to render unbiased information about true product quality is in the best interests of an online retailer when they have good products available. For instance, when Amazon.com offers a panoply of products (both good and bad) as long as the profit margin is relatively the same on good and bad products, they make out well either way. Their best interest is served by being an unbiased merchant with a superior shopping experience so that I become a repeat customer. Transparency wins, all the time, hands down (I say this after spending a better part of the afternoon on TheFunded.com learning)

There are some other interesting behavioral trends in the data:

• People pay more attention to extreme reviews than moderate ones. (Why is that? I mean, I do it too, but I don’t exactly know why… Sometimes I even go so far as to sort for the worst reviews). I suspect that some people are risk averse buyers. They want to make sure that they know what the worst possible experience could be that someone had who bought the product. People never assume that they will be the extremes (at least I don’t think they do)
• The study authors claim that in order to enable full transparency, you have to provide this additional data, other than the average (which is given now): standard deviation, the two modes of the bimodal distribution of product reviews, and product price (to overcome purchasing bias).
• There are other things that are floating around in your head when you make a purchase that have a direct impact on what you post back to the site right? See my hacked figure. Surely there’s way more. Really, both consumers and companies are deceiving themselves if they think there’s a positive, beneficial qualitative feedback loop between product utility and product reviews

There’s only so much time in the day, but this is super interesting research. There’s a business underlying all of this waiting to be created.

via huffpo

I guess they’re down but not out. They certainly don’t show you much, but check this out:

The Courier user experience presented here is almost the exact opposite of what everyone expects the Apple tablet to be, a kung fu eagle claw to Apple’s tiger style. It’s complex: Two screens, a mashup of a pen-dominated interface with several types of multitouch finger gestures, and multiple graphically complex themes, modes and applications. (Our favorite UI bit? The hinge doubles as a “pocket” to hold items you want move from one page to another.) Microsoft’s tablet heritage is digital ink-oriented, and this interface, while unlike anything we’ve seen before, clearly draws from that, its work with the Surface touch computer and even the Zune HD.

Gizmodo Gallery

This is completely unrelated to bettr@, but I was looking through my notebook for stuff from the WFS conference and remember listening to a discussion about subvocalization and intercepting signals from the brain before they hit your vocal cords.

This technology could be pretty awesome in due time. Some pretty amazing possibilities here, including never having to listen to an annoying overly loud voice again.