Spindle: The Discovery Engine for The Social Web

We’re incredibly-enthused about Spindle.

We’ve been working together w/ Pat, Simon, Alex L & Alex J & the team for about a year. And Biff Labs is now about to introduce the world to Spindle.

Spindle will be all about making social content more discoverable.

The social web is fast-surpassing the indexable web as the most dynamic source of news and information. And as this value shift continues, it becomes critical to surface more & more —  and better & better content.

But most content still goes unseen. And discovery is lacking.

Discovery is ripe for reimaging from the ground up.

And Spindle aims to help unlock the unrealized value of the social web.

Surfacing & connecting to that data — and the people & businesses behind it —  as well as where, when & how it can be used best — is what Spindle will be all about.

Pat & the team are super-passionate about the social corpus.  And the opportunities to create user value.  And so are we.

Pat’s blog post: 

After nearly a year and a half of work as Biff Labs, I’m thrilled to introduce Spindle…

At Spindle, we believe deeply that the world’s most valuable information lies within the social web.

As people have embraced that it’s easier to share through Facebook and Twitter than it is to create and update a website, the social web has become the most dynamic and authoritative source of news and information.

More than 900 million people and over 9 million businesses use Facebook. Nearly 200 million people broadcast via Twitter. The quality of these voices and the breadth of their expertise is truly boundless.

Collectively, they share a stream of updates that can satisfy any interest or inform any decision.

Although this stream is often only a few clicks away, most content fails to reach you when and where it could help you the most.

While it’s easy to keep up with your friends and the few organizations you care about, the vast majority of content is shared by the hundreds of millions of people you are not friends with.

We believe that the social web is fundamentally new… and that discovery needs to be reimagined from the ground up.

Location, device, time of day, the structure of the physical world, your social graph, and your interests can uncover dramatically better content than keywords.

At Spindle, we’re building the discovery engine for the social web. We aim to help you discover interesting and actionable social content when and where it can help you the most.

We still have an enormous task ahead of us, but aren’t going it alone. Through good fortune and many cross country flights, we’re excited to announce a fantastic group of investors: Dave Barrett and Ryan Spoon at Polaris, John Lilly at Greylock, David Lee and the team at SV Angel, Eric Hippeau and everyone at Lerer Ventures, Ray Ozzie, Michael Ovitz, Raman Narayanan, Reed Sturtevant and Katie Rae at Project 11, and Dustin Dolginow and Ryan Moore at Atlas.

We’re not quite ready to reveal exactly how Spindle works, but we’ll be sharing more in the coming weeks and months. If you’d like early access to Spindle, please register on our homepage. You can follow us here and on Twitter. We’ve shared some of our history on Facebook as well.

I’m excited to announce that we’re hiring. If you’d like to help sift the social web and reimagine how people discover social content, we’d love to hear from you. We need help on all fronts and are filling several open positions.

I’m constantly amazed by the content shared on the social web and am excited by Spindle’s ability to uncover it. We can’t wait to share Spindle with all of you soon.

Looking forward to the road ahead…

Be Quick But Don’t Hurry

One of many famous credos of the late, great Coach John Wooden.

Everybody talks about moving at web speed.

As it applies to making decisions about All Things People, there’s no dispute. Web speed has potential to kill.

Team-building mistakes can cause missed opportunities. Bad enough.

Or they can pull a team dangerously away from its goals. Binarily bad.

Talking about team-building every day gets me thinking about speed.

IMO there’s no risk/reward equation as integral to company trajectory as recruiting the people to build around.

The right people.  Special people.

Assembling a management team, a “kitchen cabinet” of valuable advisors, investors and friends of the company.  Setting the course for hiring culture of the employees which follow.

The most important job a CEO has.

Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success” for building great teams is a 50 YEAR OLD IDEA.   At first thought, pretty archaic.

But at second thought, applying his rules to company-making is still incredibly valid.

Level I: The Fundamentals.

• Integrity — can I trust the person to do the right thing?
• Worth Ethic — is the person an overachiever? Will the person go above & beyond to “win”?  To help the team blow away its  goals?
• Loyalty — does the person have a track record of sticking with things as they develop? Or can it be argued that the person is opportunistic?
• Initiative — has the person shown that they make things happen?  Can they “take the ball”?
• Teamsmanship — can the person lead?  Give as well as take? Has the person shown she/he is a teammate as well as a leader? Really?

Brains matter.  Experience around need is key.

Doh.

But without attitude & shared values, aptitude all by itself does not a team make.

Level II: Skills.

• Success — have they been part of building great things?  Have they learned from really strong practitioners? Have they really helped to drive great things to happen? Or were they just “there” when great things happened?
• Experience — DIRECTLY-relevant work which can serve as building blocks to what you’re trying to accomplish? Can you and your team really learn from this person?
• Career — how has the person managed his/her career?  Does the path makes sense?  Has the person been thoughtful – or maybe just opportunistic?
• Talent — what’s the function at which they excel? Are they really SPECIAL?

Level III:  Team Need.

• Right Tools — each company moves through distinct phases during the journey.  Hills to climb today are different than those of tomorrow. Definition of help needed to climb those hills changes also.
• Balance — all exceptional teams have great athletes — and great, versatile role players.
• Projection –  it’s critical to deeply think about skills needed for the company to get started, to experiment & iterate, to grow & to scale. All different challenges.  Different talents are needed to get through the first part of the team schedule – than for the schedule to follow.

Level IV:  Do the Work.

• Talk to A LOT of people about the people you want to bring onto your team.  Find out from other folks what makes the person tick.  And how you might get the most from them.
• Like all big decisions, the first 95% is easy, the last 5% is hard.  Do the work, talk it through with your advisors.  Gut check at the end.

Top Level of the Pyramid:  Select the Best.  Don’t compromise.  To build something really special, select only Special People.

Moving In, Moving Up, Moving Out

Years ago, I worked with an otherwise-great exec who had one nasty flaw. He fell in love easily.

I mean, really easily. Like Theo Epstein easily – the love he feels every time he sees a free-agent shortstop.

In his particular case, the exec’s belief was that there was usually a better exec to be found outside the company — rather than inside the company — to help with most any challenge. And change always needed to be made fast. And the new guy would catch up to the team & figure it out.

Speed’s a temptation for every CEO & BoD working in “hyper-growth time”. Set course, push, evaluate & make changes at Mach-1 speed.

Most times, that instinct for speed is key to survival & success in markets that change weekly. But as it applies to people decisions, speed can be especially twin-edged.

Move fast — & move people in or up.

Other times, it creates more issues.  Move fast — & move people out.

Putting the right folks in the right jobs is the single most important responsibility that founders, CEOs & BoDs have. And one mistake evaluating the wrong manager can cause missed opportunity.

Speed can kill.  It can also set a team back months — or years.

Bad manager. Doesn’t suffer fools. Doesn’t move fast enough. Losing the team. Can’t hire well. Can’t scale. Not a good fit.

Sit in a start-up’s BoD meeting discussing an exec with disappointing performance and all of that can come up. And unfortunately, it can sometimes come up as fast as 6 months after a “rock star” is brought into the company.

Or worse yet, after an individual contributor star was elevated from within into a management role.

Pretty soon, the discussion turns to whether the star needs to leave. A real shame if that person was brought in from the outside without enough thought. And an incredible shame if that person played a key role the company’s success before s/he was given more responsibility.

Many of us have experienced attempts to keep a failed exec in a “special role” after wings have been clipped. Not fair & not effective for the person, for the team, for the company.

And bringing on another new manager while a former incumbent is on board can usually be a recipe for long-term chronic pain, if not short-term acute drama.

So, back to baseball fundamentals . How does a mess like this begin? What can prevent it?

• There are few truly-complete ballplayers.  How does it start? Hire an exec or manager for a job different than what made her/him a star in the first place. “Projecting athleticism” is tough business.  When it works, it’s beautiful.  When it doesn’t  it’s a disaster.  Doing real diligence on an individual is critical — whether they are a new hire — or already on the team.  Deeply understand what makes him/her “tick” & how they manage & lead others. Think though areas of weakness/needed development and aim to compensate for these with team balance. It takes time but it’s all well-spent.
• Don’t take too big a lead.  How else can it begin? A poor bet that a great individual contributor can lead a team.  Skills of a great architect, for example, may not port to leading a small team of architects. Two completely different skill sets. Although it seems counter-intuitive, great founders & CEOs consider what they’d do in the future should a move NOT work — before the hire or promotion is made.
• Be careful of the home run swing.  Another way it starts? A misguided bet that “big name” success can immediately translate to a start-up culture. Cultural fit is the keystone of most small dev teams, for example.  Though nothing’s impossible, hiring a manager into a start-up without directly-relevant start-up success (or directly-relevant failure, for that matter) is a low percentage undertaking.
• Everybody needs a coach.  And still another way it begins? Place “stars” into their first management role, without them ever having worked FOR a great manager. Everyone benefits from having a mentor – at least from closely-observing a pattern of success.  A great founder or CEO knows enough about each key team member to know who their mentors are — or have been.

Like all things involved in leading a hyper-growth start-up — hard thought as well as hard work around people decision-making — is huge.

Year-end Top 10: Early Stage Funding

Always lots of ideas from entrepreneurs, angels, vcs about how best to raise Seed & Early Stage capital.

‘Tis the season for end-of-year lists.  So, if good enough for “Top 10 NFL GameDay Hits” — surely a list is good enough to help the cause of Building Founder Value.

Having spoken to a ton of folks who raised capital during 2011 (as point of scale, @dogpatchlabs had almost 2,000 folks apply for community residency over the last year) — here’s my real-time two cents on what can repeatably work well:

1. Articulate a Killer Opportunity & a Great Company in the Making.   Kind of obvious, but lots of teams don’t spend the time to prepare a discussion about how to take a solid shot at being really great.  Not just really interesting — really great.
2. Be Relevant.  Why the team is a dead-on fit for what you are doing.  And what the next several team members to-be are all about.  And where you’ll get them from.
3. Have a Crisp Plan. Even the earliest of great technology Seeds should have a tight set of choices to develop about how money will be made & scale achieved.  And what the milestones are heading into Series A.  And “What Success Looks Like” beyond that.   
4. Keep it Simple. Current & go-forward user growth, unit economics, revenue plans should be Comfortably-Grokked.
5. Always Be Talking. Informally getting to know potential investors when not in raise mode can only help. Be careful to not be “too cute”.  It’s about getting to know folks over coffee & exploring common ground.
6. Create a Sense of Urgency.  Investor competition is obviously helpful to the cause.  But more important (& more sustainable in any market condition) is the value of articulating a legitimate opportunity window that needs exploitation – now.
7. Be Prepared. Think of questions that you’d have if someone talked to you about being an angel investor in their deal.  And go from there.
8. What, Me Worry? Talk through how you will learn, adjust & iterate.  Product, model & team.
9. Talk to Investors Like You’d Be Partners. There’s a time for selling.  And a time for Straight Talk.  The end of the meeting — on both sides of the table — should be about Straight Talk.
10. Do Your Work.  This is the opportunity to really check into Investors Who Would be Partners. Ask around about what value they’ve helped to create already — with those entrepreneurs with whom they’ve already partnered. How they work. How they behave (when there are bumps in the road or worse). Bill Belichick says “Do Your Job”.  The best thing you can do before weighing a Term Sheet (or multiple Term Sheets) is to Do Your Work on whom you’ll be working with for years to come.