Trust your impulses, they have served you well. Remember, though, how many times they told you to shut-up, and the successes that have come from that. You are young, close your mouth. Pent up that energy and that passion and pour it all into a single indulgence of the tongue. The payoff will come from a combination of scarcity and selectiveness. Tone it down, too much noise.
The more I look at this Facebook situation, the more I am convinced that the fatal error came in attempting to change user bases, not in the poor advertising decision. I wrote this in June about coffee shops:
Some customers are better than others, and it’s those customers who are always right. They can’t all be because they don’t all want the same thing. With an alarming regularity the needs of one group collides with another–the choice then is whose side to take? I say you take the ones who will make you the most money. You don’t keep it quiet because it’s the “right thing to do,” you do it because that’s what the customer is demanding.
They traded their core audience, college students, for the press and hype of the tech crowd and then were surprised that there was no loyalty. The TechCrunch 50,000 has been on Facebook for 6-8 months–they don’t have anything vested in the network. They’re not even the ideal usergroup for the service. So of course they turned against it and of course they’re trying to kill it now. One of comments on the last post was right, the backlash against Facebook within the college community is far less. It doesn’t matter, ultimately, because they’ve made the switch and left those people behind.
Tucker for instance is working with a company that can turn the Rudius collective into a social network. But that creates a deeply troubling problem: How do you maintain the community that you got you there in the first place? Undoubtedly, he could significantly increase the messageboard traffic if he lifted the draconian moderating process and let people post whatever and however they wanted. In the process though, he’d lose the loyal and talented people who built the community with him. In this case, the original audience is also the customer that is “always right” and they should be listened to. Those are the ones that make you the most money–because they actually care. And in a future where the physical costs of switching are a mouseclick, caring is all you have.
Note: I’m not sure you can fault someone for swapping a long-term, sustainable strategy [which I would also tag as “meaningful” and “real”] for a $15 billion dollar valuation. That’s his price and it’s probably a lot higher than most of ours.
I tore this book to pieces. My copy is overflowing with tabs. Seneca was a really interesting figure too. Like Hays said in my interview with him, “not being a tyrant was something he had to work at one day at a time” and often, Seneca lost that battle. He was the Cardinal Richelieu behind Nero. He sat back and enjoyed the spoils of his student who had clearly lost his way—at least Aristotle didn’t profit from Alexander’s lust for power. Nevertheless, the book is profoundly insightful, it calls you to action, and it has that ‘quit your fucking whining—this is life’ attitude that so defines the Roman Stoics.
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I put the quotes into the Quotes section, but here is Seneca on some important topics:
On doing more than consuming:
He should be delivering himself of such sayings, not memorizing them. It is disgraceful that a man who is old or in sight of old age should have wisdom deriving solely from his notebook. ‘Zeno said this.’ And what have you said? ‘Cleanthes said that.’ What have you said? How much longer are you going to serve under others? Assume authority over yourself and utter something that may be handed down to posterity. Produce something from your own resources.
On endurance:
Life’s no soft affair. It’s a long road you’ve started on: you can’t but expect to have slips and knocks and falls, and get tired and openly wish–a lie–for death.
Show me a man who isn’t a slave; one who is a slave to sex, another to money, another to ambition; all are slaves to hope or fear. I could show you a man who has been a Consul who is a slave to his ‘little old woman’, a millionaire who is the slave of a little girl in domestic service. And there is no state of slavery more disgraceful than one which is self-imposed.
On book quotes:
There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with. I shall send you, accordingly, the actual books themselves, and to save you a lot of trouble hunting all over the place for passages likely to be of use to you, I shall mark the passages so that you can turn straight away to the words I approve and admire.
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