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An Acknowledgement
In a world of platitudes, it is truly a testament to a man’s greatness when every tribute upon his passing is as unique and individual as the man himself.
Today, I’d like to acknowledge how Steve Jobs impacted my life and the lives of every member of the Pontiflex team in a very fundamental way.
Steve Jobs invented smartphones and mobile apps. All of the 59 people who work for Pontiflex work for a mobile app advertising company. If there had been no Steve Jobs,Pontiflex wouldn’t have been able to take off. In fact, if there hadn’t been a Steve Jobs, there wouldn’t be as many entrepreneurs who are bold enough to try and change the way things are done. And if the Mac, the mouse, Pixar, the iPod, iPad and iPhone weren’t enough, that’s one more reason to acknowledge his remarkable innovation and thank him.
Here are three great Steve Jobs videos that one can go to time and again to draw inspiration, to learn or simply to admire.
Steve Jobs on Branding
Steve Jobs – the 1984 Ad
2005 Commencement Speech
Three Ingredients to a Successful Startup Recipe
Its a little-known fact that successful startups run on 3 things:
1) Goodwill
2) Venture cash
3) Tacos
All 3 things are easy to come by, if you know where to look.
Next Stop – the Power I
There was an exciting development in the field of online advertising yesterday.
For those who missed it, Power Eye places an icon in the top right corner of an online advertisement. Consumers who mouse over the icon will get a view of all the data that was used to target the ad. They will also be provided with the option to opt-out of future targeting by those companies. Companies that will participate in the launch of Power Eye include industry heavyweights like AT&T, Microsoft and American Express.
The effort is commendable in the way it addresses pressing problem of transparency. Power Eye lets consumers know why they are being served a particular ad. If they are uncomfortable with what they see, they can opt out of the ad. Power Eye opens a line of transparent communication between the advertiser and the consumer – which is a good thing.
It’s a positive development to see the advertising industry tackle the issue of privacy head on. But given how important an issue privacy is to the future of our industry, one can’t help wonder what could the advertising industry be doing better to ensure that consumers feel comfortable wading the ocean of advertising they find themselves submerged in.
A 2009 Harris Interactive survey provides a clue. The survey revealed that 96% of consumers were comfortable receiving messages and offers from advertisers they chose through email. The implications are clear. Advertisers need to stop thinking of themselves as merely advertisers. They need to think of themselves as marketers. Instead of merely broadcasting advertising messages, they can send timely and relevant messages to consumers in a venue they trust – be it their email inbox or a social network fan page.
Permission based marketing puts the consumer in charge, making him/her a Power I if you will. It enhances relevancy. It bolsters trust. And ultimately, increased trust and relevancy is what will cause our members of Congress to unarch those angry eyebrows, and keep our industry free from excessive regulation in the long run.
How does Apple Keep Winning? Because it’s a Giant Startup
Late last week, Apple reported $13.5 billion in revenue for the first quarter of the year. You might be forgiven for thinking that it’s a huge multinational corporation. But here’s why – despite its impressive earnings – Apple is more like a startup than you might think. In fact, it’s the key to its success.
- It takes risks and is willing to absorb failure. Apple takes big leaps, and is okay with a fair bit of skepticism. We’re seeing it now with the iPad. But that’s not the only one. iAds is also untested. Like a startup, Apple is risk-seeking. It’s willing to release not completely finished products to test out markets. Often times, it works out. When they released the iPod in 2001, there was no shortage of critics. It was too expensive, it wasn’t compatible with Windows. Apple stuck to its guns and pushed ahead.To say that the media has come around is an understatement. The iPod is widely credited with revolutionizing the music industry. Successful startups can also be ahead of the market. When DoubleClick entered the ad space with third party ad serving technology, there wasn’t a lot of awareness about the importance of a single platform for buying, managing, and optimizing display ads. Why not buy directly from individual publishers? Now, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in the industry who doesn’t agree that third party ad serving and analytics have been instrumental in the maturity and validity of online advertising.
- It does more with less. Like startups, Apple’s innovation isn’t scattered. It’s focused on creating a strong, adaptable foundation to grow from. It uses flexible, open technology to build what it can, and only develops proprietary versions of products when it needs to. Among big companies, Apple’s support and leveraging of open source products and standards is matched probably only by Google (e.g. instead of developing their own proprietary version of a browser engine for Safari they leveraged WebKit; the original OS X is based upon the Mac kernel which is itself based on open source FreeBSD). Unlike Microsoft which created proprietary versions of web server (IIS), web browser (Internet Explorer), and mail server (Exchange), Apple provides open source version of those development tools: Apache web server, Postfix mail server, etc. Apple’s philosophy of open technology and selective proprietary development is very startup like – pick your battles, focus on those that count.
- Its CEO acts like the founder. Startups tend to be centralized and personified in the media by their founders. When you think of Apple, you immediately think of Steve Jobs. He’s not just the public face; he’s singular visionary behind most of its innovations, and its operations. Like a startup founder, Jobs is involved in product design and all company divisions. Picture the startups that have recently turned into big companies and more often than not, there’s a strong connection between that company and its founder. Take Hunch and Chris Dixon, Demand Media and Richard Rosenblatt, or AdMob and Omar Hamoui. All of these companies have strong, passionate leadership who have a commanding media presence. In contrast, most big tech companies are faceless. IBM, with more patents than any other U.S. technology company, was at one time associated very strongly with the Watson family. Today, IBM is not synonymous with a particular person – it’s a huge corporation whose identity comes more from its products than from any one spokesperson. Obviously there are downsides to the cult of personality. But for a startup traversing the minefields that lay between obscurity and broad adoption, having one bold leader often trumps watered down decisions by committee. (More on the importance of Co-Founders in a future post).
- It has “vision” and creates new categories. Startups see holes in the status quo. They disrupt current categories and create new ones. They exist to be game changers. Apple does the same thing. It saw a gap in the mobile market and, instead of working within existing confines, it created a brand new market of consumer smart phones with the iPhone. It’s rare to see an established company create new categories. More often than not, they do it via acquisition of startups (e.g. Google’s acquisition of Android). It’s this ability to see an opening and use that to create entirely new categories that sets Apple apart from its competition. We see the same thing in the startup community: Pointroll with rich media, Etsy with handmade goods, and so on.
So there’s more than one reason (actually four) why Apple is a startup. And as for the $13.5 billion in revenue? Sometimes, numbers don’t tell the full story. But unlike most startups, I guess they won’t be needing to raise capital any time soon…
Zephrin Lasker,
CEO & Co-founder, Pontiflex.
Arun Krishnan
Jason Penta
zlasker
Roshan Bangera
Jordan Cohen
eadlman
Geoff Grauer
Jerrie Gullick
Jon Beardsley
Nick Herman
Stacy Huggins
Tiffany Sumner
Avantika Banerjee
Daniel Egan
Lisa Khan
pontiflexrob
