Chris Dixon

Note: Google was kind enough to invite me to give a short talk at their Zeitgeist conference earlier this week. It was a really interesting conference and I got a chance to meet a lot of people I admire. For my talk, I decided to use material from some of my blog posts over the years that I thought might appeal to a broader audience. Unfortunately, I was still recovering from a nastly cold/flu so I didn’t deliver the talk as well as I’d like.  Below is the text.

Today, I wanted to talk about some of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the years from my experiences as an investor and entrepreneur.

1. If you aren’t getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren’t ambitious enough

My most humbling and educational career experience was when I was starting out in the tech world.  I applied to literally hundreds of jobs:  low-level VC roles, startup jobs, and various positions at big tech companies.  I had an unusual background: I was a philosophy undergrad and a self-taught programmer. I got rejected from every single job I applied to.

The reason this experience was so useful was that it helped me to develop a thick skin.  I came to realize that employers weren’t really rejecting me as a person or on my potential – they were rejecting a resume.  As the process became depersonalized, I became bolder in my tactics. Eventually, I landed a job that led to my first startup getting funded.

One of the great things about looking for a job is that your payoff is almost entirely a max function – the best of all outcomes – not an average. This is also generally true for lots of activities startups do: raising money, creating partnerships, hiring, marketing and so on.

So, every day – to this day – I make it a point of trying something new and ambitious and getting rejected.

2. Don’t climb the wrong hill

I spend a lot of time trying to recruit people to startups, and I’m surprised how often I see smart, ambitious people who get stuck in fields they don’t like because they sense they are making incremental, day-to-day progress.

I think a good analogy for escaping this trap can be found in computer science, in what are known as hill climbing algorithms. Imagine a landscape with hills of varying heights.  You are dropped randomly somewhere on the landscape. How do you find the highest point?

The lure of the current hill is strong.  There is a natural human tendency to make the next step an upward one.  People fall for a common trap highlighted by behavioral economists:  they tend to systematically overvalue near term over long term rewards.

This effect seems to be even stronger in more ambitious people. Their ambition seems to make it hard for them to forgo the nearby upward step.

The lesson from computer science is: meander some in your walk (especially early on), randomly drop yourself into new parts of the terrain, and when you find the highest hill, don’t waste any more time on the current hill no matter how much better the next step up might appear.

3. The next big thing will start out looking like a toy

A majority of the top internet companies a decade ago are barely in existence today.  How did this happen?  These companies weren’t complacent – they were run by smart executives who were constantly aware that they could lose their lead.

The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a toy.  This is one of the main insights of Clay Christensen’s “disruptive technology” theory, which has been widely studied but I think is still rarely applied because it is so counter-intuitive to conventional management practices.

Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” their users’ needs. The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading incumbent of the time, Western Union, chose not to acquire telephone technology because they didn’t see how it could be useful to businesses and railroads – their best customers. What they failed to anticipate was how rapidly telephone technology and infrastructure would improve. The same was true of how mainframe companies viewed the PC, and how modern telecom companies viewed Skype.

The list of top internet companies in 10 years will look very different than that same list does today. And the new ones on the list will be companies that snuck by the incumbents because people dismissed them as toys.

4. Predicting the future of the Internet is easy: anything it hasn’t yet dramatically transformed, it will.

The Internet has gone through fits and starts – a bubble, a crash, and now a revival.  Pundits are speculating that another crash is coming. Regardless of what happens in the near term, what we do know is that every year we will continue to see more and more industries succumb to the transformational power of the Internet.

Already transformed: music, news, advertising, telecom. Being transformed: finance, commerce, TV & movies, real estate, politics & government. Soon to be transformed: healthcare, education, and energy, among others.

Thus far the US has led Internet innovation. There are things the US can do to keep this lead, including: exporting the entrepreneurial ethos of Silicon Valley to the rest of the country, and allowing talented people to go where their skills are most needed – for example by changing US immigration policies.

Most importantly, we have too many people pursuing careers in banking, law and consulting. I personally encounter this bias all the time when I go to college campuses to recruit for startups. We need to convince the upcoming generation to innovate and take risks in sectors that have a direct impact on the quality of peoples’ lives.

So my advice is:
1) get rejected more
2) climb the right hill
3) create an amazing toy
4) grow that toy into something big that transforms an important industry

From my friend Charles Cella at the excellent patent firm GTC Law Group. (email from them published with permission)

REVISIONS TO UNITED STATES PATENT LAW
As you may be aware, the Senate passed the America Invents Act (AIA) on September 8, 2011. This act will create sweeping changes in US patent law once signed by President Obama, who has stated his intention to sign this bill.

The AIA will create significant changes to the law, and we wanted to take a moment to inform you of some of its most important provisions.

First to File System:

The United States will move to a first-to-file system instead of a first-to-invent system. This will put the US in closer alignment with rest of the world in determining priority of invention based on the earliest date a patent application was filed with a patent office. There is a limited one-year grace period related to public disclosures made by the inventor.

Further, the long-standing procedure to prove a prior invention, i.e., interference proceedings, will be replaced with “derivation proceedings” to determine whether an inventor of a first-filed patent application derived the claimed subject matter without authorization from an inventor named in a laterfiled application.

Post Grant Review:

There will be a nine-month window for challenging a patent on any ground. Review may be granted upon a showing that it is more likely than not that at least one of the challenged claims is unpatentable. After the window of post-grant review has passed, patents may be challenged on the basis of patents or printed publications only. Under a new transitional post-grant review process that applies to certain business-method patents, only parties who have been sued for infringement or otherwise charged with infringement (the recipient of a cease-and-desist letter, for example), may petition for review.

Patent Related Provisions:

Patents will not be granted to any strategy for reducing, avoiding, or deferring tax liability, or to claims covering human organisms. There will also be a 15% surcharge added to all patent-related fees and patent-maintenance fees, beginning 10 days after the date of the new law’s enactment.

Prioritized Examination:

The USPTO will be authorized to proceed with a program for a fee-based prioritized examination, which may be a useful tool for clients who are interested in an expedited examination for particular patent applications. This will cover applications for original utility or plant patents, and will take effect ten days after the date of the enactment of this Act. Initially, only 10,000 applications will be accepted in any fiscal year. Accordingly, space in this program may be limited, and it may be best to apply for this program earlier in the fiscal year.

My (non-expert) analysis:  seems to me this doesn’t fix any of the very serious problems in our current patent system.  First-to-file seems to reward companies with the resources to file many patents.  The post grant review seems to imply you should to monitor every patent issued and challenge them within 9 months. I don’t see how any organization without massive resources could do this.

What belongs in common to the most people is accorded the least care: they take thought for their own things above all, and less about things common, or only so much as falls to each individually. – Aristotle *

A major policy goal of capitalist countries in the 20th century was to encourage home ownership. It is widely believed that owners take better care of their homes than renters as they have much more at stake financially. There is also evidence that home owners are happier, healthier, and participate more in civic and political life.

The desire to create an “ownership society” led to some smart policy decisions like the mortgage tax deduction and some bad decisions like hazardously low interest rates that contributed to the housing bubble. Home ownership is a noble goal even if home ownership fueled by excessive debt can be disastrous.

Entrepreneurs figured out a long time ago that the benefits of having equity in your company are similar to the benefits of having equity in your house. Silicon Valley expanded this concept by making it standard to grant equity to non-founder employees. It’s no coincidence that Silicon Valley continues to innovate and create jobs while the rest of the economy is stagnant.

Some people think we are in a startup bubble, and that once the bubble bursts people will run back to the supposed safety of non-startup jobs. I’d prefer to think we are at the beginning of a movement to create a true ownership society, where people own stakes not just in their space but also in their time.