Posts
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My Thoughts on LBS… Almost 3 Years Ago
Someone asked about how I got into all of this marketing and PR stuff, and it began with this unauthorized interview with Mashable about the launch of the Whrrl iPhone app in the summer of 2007. So funny… how LBS was the hot topic then, and it is again now with the looming Foursquare acquisition. I’m happy I’m not working this anymore, but it was a lot of fun and still think offering these kinds of features and localized lead gen for business, footstreaming, location awareness, etc. are cool. Long interview, enjoy…
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Birthday Post: I’m 25 Years Old Today!
Time for some navel gazing, because just a couple hours ago marked 25 years since I entered the world at the first daughter of Daniel and Kathryn Clark. People always remark that life is so short, or life is so long, but lately I’ve been feeling like its just right. I know I travel a ton, work like a maniac, am great at planning for the hyper short term (spontaneous) and super long term (procrastinator) but not as great in the middle, etc. I really love being alive, I love the people I’ve chosen to spend my time on Earth with (Kevin, my family, my friends, my professional colleagues, etc.)
At 20, I wasn’t nearly as self-assured or confident in what I was doing, but I did know that I would be an entrepreneur. In fact, I new I would be an entrepreneur when I was 17 working at McDonalds to pay for garage band gear, and when I was 15 working for the family business, and when I was 12 and visited my Dad’s startup in the Maritime building (heated with steam pipes) or when I was 9 and figured out how to get all the Moms on the block to contribute lemonade to our lemonade stand. At each age, that idea of what I might do in the future took on different forms and when people asked, “what do you want to do when you grow up?” I would grasp around for the words to describe it.
Growing up I wasn’t taught that work was something to dread about adulthood, from my viewpoint it was an exciting adventure that I couldn’t wait to be a part of.  A place where applying your mind to problems earned you more than just a good grade, and more than just money, it earned satisfaction and personal fulfillment. I always knew I would do work that I loved, because I never did anything I didn’t love. The second the smell of McDonald’s Egg McMuffins became too disgusting our the dread mounted in my chest about spending another day helping people ship freight, I made the choice to move on. Often I moved on without knowing what I would do next, fully confident that I could figure out how to make money paying the bills (building random websites, training old people how to use their computers, pulling espresso shots at the neighborhood coffee shop, etc).
I have extraordinary parents, who have stayed married in the face of plenty of challenges from rebellious kids (especially me) to financial hardship (multiple failed companies and near bankruptcy). They’ve taught me so much about love and commitment. I criticized them for staying married when I was younger, because I couldn’t see or understand their romance, but now that I’ve been married to Kevin for almost 3 years it makes a lot more sense. Relationships with human beings are fragile, beautiful things to be treasured and appreciated – and my parents loved me even when I was behaving terribly, when I was their heart walking around in the big bad world they couldn’t protect me from, and they watched in fear as I danced with danger from time to time. Fortunately (miraculously?) I kept on being right about decisions they thought were insane, from attending my senior year of high school part time to pursue my band (I was so ahead on credits) to dropping out of college to join the workforce at a Fortune 500 company, to quitting that kick ass job 2 weeks short of my wedding to join a tech startup.
Beyond my parents, I have the kind of marriage I never could have imagined. Kevin proposed to me when I was 21, and we were married when I was 22. The divorce rates for people married our ages aren’t great (37% chance for me, 22% for him) and a lot of people were skeptical when our on-again off-again relationship turned serious after 2 years of dating. Getting married young is probably the riskiest thing I’ve ever done, and the one agreement we came to was that I needed to have the space and freedom to fully discover who I am – outside the marriage. We weren’t going to be a hyper co-dependent couple, and I wasn’t going to have any kids for a long time (right now the plan is to revisit the topic when I’m 30). Instead, we would travel, live abroad, take turns doing startups, and development independent circles of friends. All the things we saw married couples NOT doing, and then complaining about as they filled out the paperwork for divorce. Not a guarantee of happiness, but certainly helpful. Since our marriage, I’ve worked on 3 startups and Kevin left his long-time role at Microsoft after living in China for 6 months. We’ve lived in separate states and/or countries for 50% of the time we’ve been married, made countless friends, founded a company together and travelled a ton. In short, my marriage is my grandest ongoing adventure.
Looking into the future…
I’m more open about my past, and guarded about my future. The future for my company is probably the most clear, and everything else follows from there. I know that when I leave this startup there are 2 things I will do: 1) take a trip to the remaining continents I haven’t been to with my best friend D’Laina 2) catch up on sleep. Then I’ll probably found a company of my own, I’m ready. Will we continue to live in the Bay Area – probably, since the heart of the tech industry is here. Will we ever move back into our blue house in Kingsgate – probaby, when we’re older? I’d love to have kids there, if I have kids at all. Will my life continue to be full of passionate, adventure and people I love – definitely. And being certain of that is enough for me.
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My Best Friend’s Wedding: The Startup
Update: No, it isn’t TweetToCall – although I love that project (yes, it still works and has a few thousand users now) and do think Twitter is going to become the new phone book. TweetToCall should be a feature of Twitter, and if anyone wants the code etc. I should just open source it.
You know that Julia Roberts movie where she doesn’t realize how much she’s in love with her best friend until he calls to say he’s getting married to someone else, and then falls off that bed? That’s how I feel about my startup idea getting founded and funded by someone else.
To be clear, I’ve probably had thousands of ideas for startups – but I’m a fan of failing fast and most of them have been crappy, or usually technically “cool” but not monetizable. That’s okay. But this idea was actually something I pitched in the few moments I had between leaving Whrrl and joining Twilio. It was something that nabbed me an offer to be an EIR with a reputable VC, which I was honored to receive but ultimately turned down. Most importantly, it was an idea that I am still obsessed with.
Today, I read that someone I know of and respect a great deal received some funding for this business, and is forming a company to execute on it. It haunts me. I know I’ll get over it, and I’ll be watching closely in the next year to observe how it goes as I consider whether or not it is the startup I’ll found someday. I can’t deny part of the pain is over not being first, but that is mainly pride. The rational part of me (or mercifully rationalistic) reminds myself that it may benefit me in the long run not to build a product in a consumer market that will require so much education. Time will tell.
Bottom line: the timing is wrong for me. I love my current company so much, and it is exciting, challenging, fun, growing, amazing — all the things we dream of when we talk about starting companies.
Ideas are a easy to come by, but ideas that you can imagine executing on for YEARS of your life are not. When I learned of Twilio I was immediately intrigued, and when Jeff approached me about joining the company I couldn’t say no. The alignment of market, team, and timing is undeniably awesome. Twilio is an idea I enjoy walking around inside of, thinking about constantly, living and breathing the brand. If I ever found a company as incredible, cohesive, and useful as Twilio I will have succeeded — so for now I’ll have to swallow this momentary pain, and look forward to the exciting future.
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Hitting the Road Again
After a couple weeks at home, except for that quick trip up to Seattle for Valentine’s Day and my going away party, I’ve been free of business travel. I love to travel, but it was good to take some time to be in the office with the team and we got SMS launched. Sometimes its like we run so hard, our feet don’t even touch down. Well, I had my time to touch down briefly. I mean, I did laundry so that means I came home a few nights. My little room is bursting with stuff… clothes and gadgets, but mostly with papers and books and ideas and my anxiousness to become more connected in this new town.
Tomorrow I’m on the road again, headed to Las Vegas for LeadsCon for a couple days, then back home in San Francisco Thursday and then out again to Sunday for a trip to New York where I’ll be doing some speaking and meeting with cool geeks to spread the word about Twilio, host a hackathon, and maybe even find some people we’d like to hire. So I’m back late Thursday night from that trip and home for about a week, then off to South by Southwest. And so it goes.
This song made me think about what its like being on the road. I’m happy, although I do wish I had heeded my Dad’s advice to travel light and hadn’t bough the house back in ’07. Oh well, live and learn I guess. Hopefully I’ll see you in my travels.
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We Launched – Check out Twilio SMS
I love when I can finally talk about something secret that I’ve been working on. Yesterday we launched Twilio SMS, a new API that makes it ridiculously simple (or as someone on Twitter said, “stupidly simple”) to send/receive text messages from Twilio numbers.
Here is the screencast we made to go with it – which I am very proud of 🙂
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Launching a New Blog: ConstraintMarketing.com
While I love my DanielleMorrill.com blog, it is pretty much a smattering of random things I am thinking about and pieces of my personal life. And don’t worry, I won’t stop writing here, but I am looking forward to creating a more structured home for all my ideas about how marketing can be done effectively at startups.
Lately, I’ve been following along more closely with Eric Ries, Steve Blank and others who are talking about Lean Startup. I think it is really cool that “lean” has finally made it down from the ivory tower of Six Sigma to the nerf gun wielding floppy haired startup kids. And with the state of the economy, it couldn’t come at a better time.
How I Came To Love Lean
When I was 15, I started working for my Dad’s newly formed financial consulting company (he’s blogging now, woo!). After two failed startups that had attempted to marry technology and the finance/healthcare benefits industry he was ready to strike out on his own, and I served as his tech-support/office-manager/generalist. It was my sophomore year of high school, and the first year I really got to know my road-warrior of a father. As consult, the business was basically a one-man-show so I began to set up processes that would help things like reporting to scale as we took on more customers. The first business book I ever took down from his shelf was The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox, and it was the seminal work that brought the concept of lean manufacturing to the average businessman when it was published in 1984.I was fascinated by the “Theory of Constraints” – the idea that you have to run your business in a way that is appropriate to your constraints. You have a broken machine, materials shortage, broken supply chain, damaged orders? Figure out how to restructure your processes to serve your end goals and take the reality of your situation into consideration.
Why “Constraint Marketing” for Startups?
Marketing in the technology world is more than just brand awareness, it’s a core distribution channel for consumer and enterprise products that are sold on the internet. The new product supply chain isn’t interested in planes, trains, trucks, and boats. Instead it is interested in channels like display advertising, social media, webinars, and ultimately a call-to-action that leads to conversion.
So what if we applied the rules of lean manufacturing and supply chain to startup marketing? What would happen, what can we learn, and would be more effective marketers? I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve heard marketers derided for not being cost conscious enough, or efficient enough – and in that way I think I have a lot in common with a plant manager at a factory.
I think my experiences working in logistics (Expeditors International) as well as on-site for highly productive lean manufacturing factory concerns such as a Genie Industries and distributors like Zumiez were some of the most fascinating and formative experiences of my life. In the same way I am marrying the old and the new in telecommunications with Twilio, let me marry the old and new wisdom of product distribution for online products. We’ll see where this goes… I’m looking forward to feedback.
Stay tuned, http://www.constraintmarketing.com will be live soon
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Why I Won’t Touch LBS with a Ten Foot Pole
Pitch any VC and you’ll find certain markets, uses cases, and other oddities that have left a bad taste in their month. No matter how interesting your product, or how much traction you have, they’re just not going to go there. This can be frustrating and make you feel like they are being ignorant or bull headed. I even though so, until I recently realized that I get annoyed by every single location based services idea I hear – mostly as a result of having worked on Whrrl. People will tell me “the opportunity is huge” and all I can do is smile slightly, thinking that I know better but there is a no way they will understand, when I ask, “Really, why?”
And why is the location based services opportunity huge, exactly? Is it really an untapped need people have to get information about the world around them on the go. While this might seem cool to a very small niche of geeks, is this anywhere near making it to the mainstream world? I used to think so, and to believe that it was simple a problem people didn’t realize they had. At a time, it was my job to evangelize a product that would help people to capture their experiences and share their location with friend. Fundamentally, doing this is all about collecting “footstreaming” data on the company’s end so that they can slice and dice users in a different way, and sell advertisers on segments like “visits urban bar 2+ nights per week” or “goes to McDonald’s more than 3 times per month”, etc… you get the idea.
People Will Balk When Location Data is Used for Advertisements
Right now people are having fun using location data to share their location with friends on Foursquare, but the minute I begin to receive advertisements on Foursquare (or Twitter/Facebook where I am publishing my location) I am going to feel like my privacy has been invaded, and I am going to stop sharing. Nevermind that the information is already public and that I’m already explicitly putting it out there for the world to read – right now only humans are answering back (if at all). Getting advertisements related to my checkins would be the equivalent of interaction with bot Twitter users – lame!
Possible Location Based Network of Choice: Facebook
As I wrote in early November, Facebook seems like the best option for a successful location based network because it already has the critical mass of friends who I actually know and trust in real life AND the granular privacy settings that LBS users on every product have been clamoring for from day one. A few weeks after my post, Jason Kincaid echoed my sentiment in his post “Watch Out Foursquare, Facebook is Poised to Dominate Geo”.
Facebook Privacy Management Isn’t Great
I have to wonder if anyone even remembers the debacle with Beacon? It seems to me they’ve been aware of and actively working on LBS capabilities for the social network, along with advertising, for some time now and have probably been waiting for that mess to blow over (P.S. Looks like Facebook settled the Beacon thing for a cool $9.5 Million dollars). To read more on this visit: http://www.beaconclasssettlement.com/
What About Whrrl, Loopt, Brightkite and the Rest?
MG Siegler, who has been covering LBS for a long time and even wrote about the launch of the Whrrl iPhone app (thanks MG!), posted “Location’s Social Paradox” today on TechCrunch, and opened with the statement:
“There’s an absolute eruption of activity around location-based services right now.”
It’s funny, it seems like each year is going to finally be the reckoning for social uses of devices with GPS. With each year comes a new crop of products, applications, companies, and avid users looking to take their products mainstream. Last year it was Brightkite, a year before that you might saw it was Loopt or Whrrl. Before that we had Dodgeball, Jaiku, and a slew of others.
For various reasons, these products have had less penetration into the early adopter market than Foursquare. Of course, there is a bit of an echo chamber when it comes to faddish apps in the Bay Area – but if crossing the chasm is the name of the game for LBS then making a fad and turning it into a trend might just be what Foursquare can accomplish that the others have not.
So, Why Not Touch LBS?
Other than crappy past experience, I’m just not sure the market is as big as I originally believed it was. I think sharing location is useful with a very small number of people who actually care about where I am, and even then it might be more efficient for me to ask for or tell them location explicitly on a case-by-case basis (over chat, IM, phone, etc.) than to passively send the information out to followers on a network. And that’s just an issue of finding a use case for sharing location. Monetizing it as a business is an entirely different issue, because while I might share my location with friends as a feature of a product I am loathe to consider sharing it with a company looking to leverage my information for advertising dollars.
This begs a deeper question, which is ‘what is the future of advertising’? At one time, contextual information such as location was considered useful for providing more deeply relevant ads, but is this still realistic or meaningful today. While a curiousity, it is still to be seen if these more timely and location-relevant ads would actually create more *action* against offers, like visiting a restaurant or cashing in on a special (coupon). For now, I think this remains a feature – not a product, and it is why Facebook is still best positioned to experiment. Maybe they will acquire a product with a network and significant traction (such as Foursquare) to nudge things along.
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Video From LeWeb 2009 Party
Here is the video from last night, all the footage I snagged edited down. You might see yourself on there if you were at VIP on Rue Rivoli anytime after 11:30pm.
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5 Books for the Flight to LeWeb
Tomorrow I’m head to Paris on a very last minute trip with Kevin that combines business and pleasure, which for those of you who know me means it is 100% fun. I had requested a press pass from LeWeb back in October in hopes that I’d be able to cover the event for Seattle 2.0. When I didn’t get one, I shrugged it off – but then last week on a whim I searched for LeWeb and an email popped up in my spam inbox with my press pass! I’m so fortunate to have my wonderful team at Twilio, who gave me the okay to go and represent our company as well as Seattle 2.0
Kevin’s plane ticket was paid for with Amex points I had been stockpiling for just such an occaison, and we’re staying with a friend who Kevin worked at on the Sharepoint team who just moved back to Paris today (can you say serendipity?!) and we will be staying with him at his parent’s house – which is near the center of the city. Altogether I can’t believe how easily it worked out, and I’m even more excited about this trip than I was for Beijing! I’ve never been to Europe, and neither has Kevin.
What I’ll Be Reading on the Flight
We’ve got a two leg trip, because I hate direct flights longer than 8 hours. First leg is Seattle to Toronto, then Toronto to Charles De Gaulle airport. We leave Monday at 8am PST and arrive on Tuesday at 9:40 am local time (12:40am in Seattle). I’ll be working hard for inbox zero and some serious email processing, but I’ve also got a handful of books I’ve read but have been meaning to revisit.
Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh BernoffHighly relevant to what I’m doing day-to-day, building a branding using social technologies. I’m looking forward to reading the examples most of all, and I’m sure this will get new ideas churning with a second read through.
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agrreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher and William Ury
Super useful book for business, and also for life. This one is more for my personal development of rhetoric, defending philosophical and political ideas, etc. but I am sure it will have applications to all parts of my life.
Rules for Revolutionaries by Guy KawasakiI’ve never read his through, only skimmed because it is Kevin’s. Anything that says “Capitalist Manifestor” gets my attention, I like to think Guy Kawasaki and I have something in common: we’re both mercenaries. And “Create Like a God, Command Like a King, Work Like a Slave” – yeah, that appeals to me, too. I’m doing the 3rd thing at least, need to work on the other two.
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore
The classic book on bringing a disruptive product to market through the niche beachhead strategy.  Fun to read as we broaden the marketing efforts around Twilio to reach out to more developers in 2010.
The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking by Barbara MintoMy previous boss implored me to read this book in order to improve my communication skills, and that is definitely an area of expertise that I want to keep very sharp. Minto focuses on the order in which we present concepts and build upon ideas to ultimately communicate complex ideas. There are a lot of exercises in this book that I can do while on the plane.
Honorable Mentions – Didn’t Make the Suitcase This Trip
- Getting Things Done
- Made to Stick by Dan Heath and Chip Heath
- Blue Ocean Strategy
- Guns, Germs, and Steel
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Test Post from New Blog Home
Moved to a new server, testing 1, 2, 3…
Phew well it looks like that worked. As you may have noticed, DanielleMorrill.com has been down A LOT lately so I’ve moved it over to a new server and cleaned some things up in my WordPress install. Hope you like the updated navigation and layout – more coming soon!
Update: Crap, okay something is broken here and I need to figure out what. It looks like you can view my posts from the index of my site, but the individual post URLs are broken. Working on it now.
Update 2: All fixed, thanks everyone for your help and suggestions things are working again