Chris Dixon

Over the past year, Comcast and other broadband providers have been forcing tiered data plans on customers. The New York Times recently speculated that these plans might be part of a strategy to stunt the growth of internet video.

The best way to figure out what these companies are really doing is to read Wall Street analyst reports. For example, here’s what a prominent Wall Street analyst recently said:

Most cable companies we met with have embraced tiered data plans, with tiering starting to move to total monthly usage rather than tiered speeds. The minimum tiers are set higher enough at this point that they impact only 1%-2% of users. However, we believe the concept is to establish an early precedent of usage tiers and then let the average consumer usage patterns move in their direction over time, as usage is growing 60% per year. This puts in place an effective long-term hedge against internet video. [emphasis added]

- Goldman Sachs research. “Americas: Communication Services”, May 23, 2012

In 2011, Comcast generated $55B in revenue and $8.4B in pre-tax profits. Goldman rates the stock a “buy” because Comcast “pushed through rate hikes on both video and broadband access across two-thirds of the [customer] base in Q1 2102″ (Goldman Sach, “Comcast Corp”, May 2, 2012).

Until last week’s announcement of the new Surface tablet, Microsoft had taken the same approach to mobile devices that they had with PCs: build the software themselves and let partners build the hardware. Google took a similar strategy with Android but then reversed course when they acquired Motorola. Apple’s integrated strategy was once widely ridiculed as a repeat of their losing 1990′s desktop computer strategy, but is now being copied throughout the industry.

There is a trade off between integrated and non-integrated approaches to building devices. The non-integrated approach lowers costs, but adds friction between components that compromises performance. Consider this anecdote from Microsoft’s previous attempts to build tablets with hardware partners:

The H.P. tablet was thick, the Intel processor it used made the device hot, and the software and screen hardware did not work well together, causing delays whenever a user tried to perform a touch action on its screen. “It would be like driving a car, and the car not turning when you turn the wheel,” the former H.P. executive said.

- ”With Tablet, Microsoft Takes Aim at Hardware Missteps,” New York Times

What is the difference between mobile devices today where the integrated approach is winning and desktops PCs in, say, 1995, when the non-integrated approach dominated? The best way to understand the difference is through the lens of Clay Christensen’s disruptive technology theory*. When a new category of device first launches, it is usually not “good enough” for most customers. Chistensen illustrates this with a famous graph:

According to Christensen, technology gets better at a faster rate than customers’ demands on technology do (in the graph, the black line goes up faster than the other lines). Eventually, new device categories become “good enough” (the black line crosses the purple/blue lines), and customers become unwilling to pay significantly higher prices for improved versions of the device. At this point it doesn’t make sense for manufacturers to invest in greater performance if customers won’t reward that investment. Instead, manufacturers should spend the “performance surplus” on making devices less expensive. The best way to do this is to let different companies produce the core software and hardware components, i.e. to switch from an integrated to non-integrated approach.

If you believe Christensen’s theory (and most senior people at large technology companies do), the interesting question now is: when will smartphones and tablets be “good enough” (respectively) for non-integrated to beat integrated approaches? My guess is it will be at least 5-10 years before customers are no longer willing to pay significantly more for faster bandwidth, more features, longer battery life, increased storage, faster processors, etc. But no one really knows.

It isn’t hard to see how Google, Microsoft and pretty much everyone but Apple missed the key difference between PCs and the new generation of mobile devices. Christensen himself missed it:

Christensen’s most embarassing prediction was that the iPhone would not succeed. Being a low-end guy, Christensen saw it as a fancy cellphone; it was only later that he saw it also being disruptive to laptops.

- When Giants Fail: What Business has learned from Clayton Christensen, The New Yorker. [paywall]

Seen as high-end smartphones, iPhones were “sustaining” innovations (above the blue line) that would only appeal to the highest end of the market. Seen as low-end laptops, iPhones were disruptive innovations that would eventually subsume the PC business. With support from the iPad, they seem to be doing exactly that.

* If you aren’t familiar with Clay Christensen, this talk is a great way to learn about his theories.

Firing is awful. You can try to avoid it, but even the most selective founders make serious mistakes. Here are a few things I’ve observed about firing:

1) The good people bounce up, the bad ones bounce down. I was told this by my boss once when he was firing one of my friends. At the time, I thought this just made him feel better about himself. Over time, I’ve seen the wisdom in what he said. Some people who get fired react by fixing their weaknesses. Others spiral down.

2) Do it early. If you think you’re going to fire someone over the next six months, you probably will. Don’t wait too long. Too many founders do. It’s better for management and employees if it happens fast.

3) It’s awful. You’re in control of a situation that will meaningfully hurt someone. It’s an awful place to be. The fired person will go home and tell his/her family about how terrible it was. It was your fault. Perhaps your mismanagement caused it. Who knows. You’ll question it, and perhaps you are right to do so.

4) The other choice is firing everyone. You’re the founder of the company. If you run out of money, you’re forced to fire everyone. If you don’t fire the bad employees, you risk everyone else’s jobs. It’s an impossible situation.

5) The feeling is more likely to be mutual than you think. Most of the time, the person getting fired was already about to quit. The antipathy you feel is likely reciprocated. It’s surprising how often this happens and management doesn’t see it coming.

It would be great if startups were all about growth, hiring, and success. But the reality is that founding a company is a brutal job and lots of the pain gets passed down to employees. Creative destruction sounds nice in textbooks, but in the real world it means telling friends to go home, stop getting paid, and find new jobs.

“When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” – Picasso (via Ribbonfarm)

When I was a kid, I tagged along with my grandfather who was an oboist in a big city symphony. I was struck by the dramatic discrepancy between the culture of the audience and the culture of the musicians. Before the show, the audience attended fancy events, and talked in abstract terms about classical music. After the show, the musicians played poker, told jokes, swigged bourbon, and traded tips about the best places to get parts for their instruments.

In the context of startups, it’s convenient to read the Picasso quote as a tidy summarization of the difference between critics (VCs and the tech press) and practitioners (entrepreneurs). There is some truth to this. When entrepreneurs get together, they tend to talk about tactical details. VCs and the press talk about trends, markets, and other abstractions.

But Picasso was just being modest. He thought about the meaning of his art far more deeply than his critics did. The same is true of great entrepreneurs. “Cheap turpentine” is important, but so is “Form and Structure and Meaning”. The best ideas emerge from the interplay between the two modes of thought.

Warren Buffet once said:

Buy into a business that’s doing so well an idiot could run it, because sooner or later, one will.

This is a useful way to understand the meaning of “equity value”. You learn in finance that equity value is the overall value of a the stock (i.e. equity) of a business, which in turn is the present value of all future profits. Of course with startups the future is extremely uncertain, leading to a huge variance in valuations.

In perfectly competitive markets, all profit margins tend toward zero. So equity value is a function of the degree to which you can make your market inefficient by making your business hard to copy (so called “defensibility”). If your defensibility depends solely on having superior people, you have what VCs call a “service business.” In a competitve labor market, service businesses tend to have low margins and therefore low equity value. A popular saying about service businesses is “the equity value walks out of the building every night.”

Different types of tech businesses exhibit different relationships between capital, revenue, profits, and equity value. Enterprise software companies tend to require lots of capital to get to scale but command high equity values once they do, partly because enterprises are risk averse and like to adopt the most popular technology, leading to winner-take-all dynamics. Adtech companies tend to be quick to revenue but slower to equity value, and sometimes risk becoming service businesses. The equity value of consumer internet companies vary widely, depending on their defensibility (usually networks effects and brand) and business models (e.g. transactional vs ad supported). Biotech companies require boatloads of capital for R&D and regulatory approval but then can generate lots of equity value, with the defensibility coming primarily from patents. (Patents introduce market innefficiencies, but, proponents argue, are necessary to create sufficient incentives for entrepreneurs and investors). E-commerce companies generally require a lot of capital as well, since their defensibility comes mostly through brand and economies of scale.

The idea that founders take on “risk” is a misleading generalization. It is far more informative to separate the specific types of risks that founders assume, including:

- Financing risk: You can’t raise money at various stages because you haven’t hit accretive milestones or your space isn’t appealing to investors.

- Product risk: You can’t translate your concept into a working and compelling product.

- Technology risk: You can’t build a good enough or, if necessary, breakthrough technology.

- Business development risk: You can’t get deals with other companies that you depend on to build or distribute your product.

- Market risk: Customers or users won’t want your product.

- Timing risk: You are too early or too late to the market.

- Margin risk: You build something people want but that you can’t defend, and therefore competitors will squeeze your margins.

At the early stage, the main way to mitigate these risks is to recruit great people as cofounders or early employees. You shouldn’t recruit people that will give you a high likelihood of reducing these risks. You should recruit people that give you an unfair advantage. You should try to win the game before it starts.

Startups are hard, and risky. But if you lump all the risks together, you are playing the lottery. Talented entrepreneurs identify specific risks and do everything they can to overcome them.

A key question for founders is when they should try to raise money. More specifically, they often wonder whether to raise money now or wait, say, 6 months when their startup has made more progress. Here are some thoughts on this question generally along with some thoughts on today’s venture financing market.

- In the private markets, macro tends to dominate micro. Venture valuations have swung by roughly a factor of 4 over the last decade. In finance speak, venture tends to be high beta, moving as a multiple of the public markets, which themselves tend to move more dramatically than economic fundamentals. Hence, it is easy to imagine scenarios where the same private company will command 1/2 the valuation in 6 months due to macro events, but it’s rare for a company to increase their valuation 2x through operations alone in 6 months.

- Therefore, when it seems to be the top of a venture cycle, it’s almost always better to raise money sooner rather than later, unless you have a plausible story about how waiting will dramatically improve your company’s fundamentals.

- Prior to the Facebook IPO, the consensus seemed to be that private valuations were near the top of the cycle. Today, FB is valued at up to 50% below what private investors expected. Moreover, the financial crisis in Europe seems to have worsened, and unemployment numbers in the US suggest the possibility of a double dip recession.

- It takes many months to understand how macroeconomic and public market shifts affect private company valuations since (with the exception of secondary markets) private transactions happen slowly. So we don’t know yet what these recent events mean for private markets. According to a basic rule of finance, however, it is safe to assume that companies “comparable” to Facebook are worth up to 50% less than private investors thought they were worth a few weeks ago.

- The question then is what companies are comparable to Facebook. Clearly, other social media companies with business models that rely on display or feed based advertising are comparables. Internet companies that have other business models (freemium, marketplaces, commerce, hardware, enterprise software, direct response advertising, etc) are probably not comparables. The public markets seems to agree with this. Defensible companies with non-display-ad business models have maintained healthy public market valuations.

- One counterargument to the “all social media companies are now worth less” argument is the discrepency between how the smart Wall Street money and smart internet money views Facebook and social media companies generally. The smart Wall Street money thinks like Mary Meeker’s charts. They draw lines through dots and extrapoloate. This method would have worked very poorly in the past for trying to value tech companies at key inflection points (and tech investors know that what matters are exactly those inflection points). In Facebook’s case, Wall Street types look at revenue and margin growth and the trend toward mobile where monetization is considerably worse (for now). Smart internet investors, by contrast, look at Facebook in terms of its power and capabilities. They see a company that is rivaled only by Google and Apple in terms of their control of where users go and what they do on the internet. Smart internet investors are far more bullish than smart Wall Street investors on Facebook. Thus if you believe the internet perspective over the Wall Street perspective, you’d likely believe that Facebook and social media in general is undervalued by the public markets.

Before World War 2, the middle-class in the developed world struggled to afford basic needs. In the post-war boom, standards of living rose dramatically, and people consumed far beyond what they needed. It was the age of conspicuous consumption: a race to own bigger cars and houses, and accumulate more stuff. The mean income in the developed world became sufficient to provide for a comfortable life.

Today, people increasingly realize they own more than enough stuff, and don’t want to pay for feature-rich versions of that stuff. Four blades in your razors are enough. In the language of Clay Christensen’s disruptive innovation framework, the product economy overshot the mass market’s needs.

An economy of experiences is emerging in its place. Experiences make people happier than products (a fact that scientific studies support). The popularity of experiences like music concerts has skyrocketed compared to corresponding products like music recordings. Apple, the most valuable company in the world, maniacally focuses on product experiences, down to minute details like the experience of unboxing an iPhone. Customers want to know where their food and clothes come from, so they can understand the experiences surrounding them. The emphasis on experiences also helps explain other large trends like the migration to cities. Cities have always offered the trade-off of fewer goods and less space in exchange for better experiences.

The trend toward experiences is important for technology startups. The era of competing over technical specifications is over. Users want better experiences from devices, applications, websites, and the offline services they enable. It is no coincidence that interaction design is replacing technical prowess as the primary competency at startups. People who create great experiences will be the most valuable to startups, and startups that create great experiences will be the most valuable to users.

Suppose you launch your new startup and don’t get the traction you were hoping for. How do you know whether to give up or keep going? This is a tough question. There are lots of examples that support seemingly contradictory theories. Instagram pivoted before launch, and Pinterest refused to pivot for years. Many other startups pivoted too early or kept working on dead-end ideas for too long.

If the pre-product/market-fit phase of a startup is about efficiently testing hypotheses, then continuing to test an idea only makes sense if you have a strong theory about what has gone wrong and how things will improve.

Specifically, you should have a theory about: 1) how to modify your product, 2) how to modify your marketing/distribution strategy, and/or 3) how external events (a new technology wave, cultural events, regulatory change, etc) might make your product take off. In other words, you need a plausible argument as to why the future will be different than the past.

Another way to think about this is using what Jeff Bezos calls the “regret-minimization framework.” Imagine you do give up on your idea. Have you explored most of its plausible implementations? Are you confident that another entrepreneur won’t come along and make it work? You’ll regret it more if you nearly created a big company than if you spent an extra six months iterating.

Finally, beware of the temptation to get distracted by new shiny ideas. When you are deep in the weeds, new ideas seem refreshing but this is usually the false signal of “uninformed optimism” that accompanies all new things.

If you are a founder trying to create a new mobile app or an investor trying decide whether an app has enduring value, it is helpful to separate the ways that people use apps into four categories.

1. Time wasters: Apps that can be used for short bursts when you are waiting in line, etc. The most popular time wasters are games. Some apps are used sometimes as time wasters and sometimes as utilities – e.g. Facebook is both a time waster (checking status updates few minutes) and a utility (sending Facebook messages).

Time wasters tend to be faddish. It is easy to get hooked on new games and also easy to tire of them. If you want to build a big company that builds time wasters, you need to build a machine that builds, markets and monetizes apps, as Zynga has done.

2. Core utilities: As a rule of thumb, core utilities are the apps on your home screen: camera, phone, contacts, texting, calendar, etc. Core utilities map to deeply engrained use patterns that usually existed before modern smart phones. In the past people might have carried around a paper calendar, a standalone camera, etc. Core utilities tend to be very sticky – if you gain widespread adoption for a core utility you can build long-lasting value.

One entry strategy for a startup is to replace a core utility. This is what Instagram did to the built-in camera app. It is unclear whether the “Instagram for video” companies are core utilities (video app replacements) or time wasters. Creating a new core utility that doesn’t replace an existing core utility is very hard. Foursquare seems to have done this for the users who regularly check-in.

3. Episodic utilities: Episodic utilities are apps that typically aren’t on the home screen but are extremely useful in certain situations. Some examples: Hipmunk when buying plane tickets, Uber when you need a car, and OpenTable for making restaurant reservations. Successful episodic utilities target a well-defined situation and then become deeply associated with that situation. Making an app that is too broad or has multiple use situations can hurt you. Because many of these situations involve purchasing, these apps tend to be monetizable.

4. Notification-driven apps: This is an emerging category. Android has had a good notification system for a while, but the iPhone only made notifications useful in IOS 5. People tend to enable notifications for communication apps like email, texting etc. Thus far, notifications for other apps haven’t gotten widespread adoption because, among other things: it is easy to annoy users by over-notifying them, and running non-communications apps in the background tends to drain battery life. Expect this category to grow as apps get smarter about when to notify, and battery life improves dramatically over the next year or two.