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The Death of Apple

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My two cents about the death of Steve Jobs is that it will coincide with death of Apple over the next three to five years. The decline will have nothing to do with Steve Jobs’s passing, however, but with the limitations of the Apple business model.
 
Jobs did with Apple what Steve Case did with AOL, only better: he built a magnificent “walled garden”, an extraordinary — but closed — ecosystem.   Eventually, like AOL and like all walled gardens in the information age, Apple will die: no matter how innovative a single company, its innovations cannot keep up with the innumerable innovations outside its walls.  
 
AOL provides a great example of a closed system: it used a proprietary programming language (Rainman) and limited usage to those who paid monthly subscription fees. Business partners had to pay upfront and guaranteed fees for a place on the AOL platform.   AOL was the king of Web 1.0, yet it died a quick death with the ascent of Google's "open" platform; today AOL walks the earth as an harmless corporate zombie.
 
Apple does the same as AOL did: it uses a proprietary programming language and limits usage to paying consumers, i.e., those who purchase its hardware.   As such, Apple walls its garden not with subscription fees but with devices: the iPhone, iPad and Macbook, etc.   (At least with business partners, Apple follows the revenue share paradigm.)
 
Apple has succeeded because, over the last eight years, it has built some of the most elegant, sophisticated devices in the history of mankind.  Consumer have devoured them.  Its best hope for the future lies in continued domination of devices, such that its operating systems become the world’s default operating systems, much like Windows did at one point. That’s unlikely, however, thanks to Android, HTML5 and the multitude of companies innovating and price-cutting in mobile hardware.
 
Right now, the big winners of the next five years appear to be Google and, surprisingly, Amazon.  Google is a beautiful, open platform but AWS has pushed Amazon's platform even deeper than Google's. 
 
Imagine the access to data that Amazon has, imagine the services it can begin to offer through AWS?    Amazon may one day be the most valuable company in the world, due to the openness, and depth, of its AWS platform.
 
As for Apple, over the next five years, its share of the device market will shrink and with it the Apple platform and the company itself.
 
  “Walled gardens” are beautiful but, because they are shut off from the innovation outside their walls, they don’t endure.  Just ask AOL.
November 25, 2011 at 10:37 Comments (10)

Coffee and a Term Sheet in Sao Paulo

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Every startup scene has it cafes: Palo Alto has Coupa Café, San Fran has The Grove and New York has… Starbucks (on every corner). Below I posted my vote for the two most relevant coffee locales in Sao Paulo. I probably have a bias because our offices are nearby but I’ve spent time in other areas of Sampa and I'd still stick with these two.
 
Octavio Café
Av. Brigadeiro Faria Lima, 2996 – Jardim Paulistano
 
Octavio is king of the business breakfast/coffee/lunch. On any given day, the place is packed with businesspeople circled around laptops at the low-slung tables.  Many of them – entrepreneurs, investors, journalists – are connected to the startup scene.
 
The Good:
 
Solid Menu. Octavio has a simple but satisfying menu of breakfast, lunch and dinner. If you want heavier fair, Rubaiyat, one of the best steakhouses in Latin America, sits right next door (ironically, Rubyai is not Brazilian churrascaria but rather a steakhouse with Argentine roots). 
 
The Coffee. Octavio’s building resembles a giant wooden coffee cup. It should. Octavio offers great coffee brewed in every manner ever invented by humans. Previously, I favored the chorreador method, where the waiter pours hot water through a sack at the table. Now, however, Octavio has a Clover machine.  For those who don’t know, that’s a new device that essentially grinds and presses each individual cup of coffee. They are rare – only a few Starbucks in the US have these machines – but for my money they give you the best cup of coffee.
 
The Wifi. Free.
 
The Bad:
 
The Service. The service sucks.  It pains me to write that but it’s true. The staff is friendly and skilled but there are just too few of them. If you have spent time in food establishments in Brazil, you will find that ironic: most places have too much staff, often more than staff than diners. Inexplicably, Octavio has far too few.  It’s maddening.  On good days, you will only get slightly annoyed at the negligence. On bad days, you can wait 45 minutes in between contact with an Octavio employee. Often, you have to stand up and go find one but, alas, there are usually three or four frustrated customers ahead of you doing the same thing.
 
Hours: it opens at 7:45am. That’s late for a coffee house.  5:30am is optimal. 6am is ok. 6:30 is pushing it. 7:45? Even in Sampa, where people party late, that’s excessive.
 
Anyway, Octavio Café is still the best – I love it and will keep taking meetings there until the day it closes. I once spent eight straight hours taking meetings there. It was a great day.
 
Starbucks
Rua Amauri, 286
 
I doubted whether Starbucks would find success in Brazil. Bringing coffee to Brazil is like bringing soccer to Brazil – it’s already here and it’s better. 
 
Yet, Starbucks has thrived. The one on Rua Amauri seems busy all the time. You may wait a bit longer for your coffee but otherwise the experience compares to visiting to any Starbucks anywhere, which is to say, great.
 
I think the crowd skews younger at Starbucks and, if you took a poll, you would find a higher percentage of customers from the startup scene at here than at Octavio.  Many of the customers come from just across the street at the headquarters of IG (one of the Brazil’s largest portals).
 
The Good:
 
It’s Starbucks. Good service, good coffee, good seating.
 
The Bad:
 
Mediocre food options.  Starbucks offers good sweets but there’s not an ounce of protein in the place, unless you count the stale, overpriced nuts at the cash register.
 
Hours: I don’t remember what time it opens but I do remember trying to get there early in the morning (6:15ish?) and it was closed. 
 
The Wifi.  Not free.
 
 
Anyway, if you are in Sao Paulo and want to run into a VC or entrepreneur or, maybe, just work on your laptop in a place that has the startup vibe, Octavio Café and Starbucks Amauri are good bets. They may soon become the Sampa equivalent of Coupa, Grove or, well, Starbucks.
 
 
November 9, 2011 at 06:05 Comments (6)

Three Simple Time-Management Techniques

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I have always struggled with managing my time efficiently.  More than most people, I believe.

As such, I've sought help from a wide-variety time management techniques, most of which I've subsequently abandoned.  After compiling a library of half-read books, downloading twenty once-used apps and trying to emulate the systems of organized colleagues, I've selected a few simple techniques that work for me.

First, I divide my tasks into Stephen Covey's Four Quadrants.  This keeps me focused on the most important activities each day, while ensuring that I maintain sight of my long-term goals. 

Tasks in the "Important but not urgent" quadrant are the most elusive — we tend to ignore these tasks despite the fact that they have the largest impact on our effectiveness. 

The second technique is a simple age-old wisdom: plan your day the night before.  Specifically, spend the last 10-15 minutes of each work day prioritizing and scheduling your tasks for the next day.  It's amazing how much more efficient it is to start the day with a to-do list from the night before — it eliminates distractions and provides continuity from one day to another. 

The third technique comes from Tony Schwartz at Harvard: execute the most important task in the first 90 minutes of the workday.  The first 90 minutes are when people operate most productively.  I try to put items from the "important and non-urgent" quadrant in the first 90 minutes of each day.

That's it: Four Quadrants, Plan the Next Day, First 90 Minutes.

A few suggestions: first, keep your system simple.  Elaborate systems with multiple actions often work but they rarely last.  Personally, I can't sustain more than three techniques for time management (see above).  Find a system that you can sustain.

A second, related suggestion: don't expect perfection.  "Nothing's perfect" and perfectionists never stick with anything.  My system has gaps and I work my system inconsistently but it's effective and I don't abandon it. 

Third, expect to make minor tweaks to your system regularly.  I used to search for some unifying theory of time management which, once implemented, would make the universe fall blissfully and permanently into place.  Nope. 

Maintaining balance, maintaining anything, requires frequent recalibration.  Frequent minor adjustments are part of sustaining any system.

September 20, 2011 at 09:18 Comments (0)

Weekly News August 20, 2011

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Brazil:

·       Aiming to stimulate digital entrepreneurship in Brazil, Grupo RBS has launched the first RBS Prize for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. The initiative will offer prizes of R$50,000, R$25,000 and R$10,000 to the top 3.

o   http://bit.ly/n1BtRF

·       Latin America’s largest group buying site, Peixe Urbano announces that they are going to sponsor a segment of the Startup Farm accelerator program for a startup intending to create solutions using the Peixe Urbano API.

o   http://bit.ly/qu6JYI

·       Led by founder, Rafael Dahis, Brazilian based social networking user review service for University students, CarrascoMamata, launches, offering students  advice on class material, professor evaluations,  notes on class style, etc.

o   http://bit.ly/nLgGZz

·       Recently launched Brazilian startup, Drimio helps brands and consumers to integrate ideas, opinions and content.

o   http://bit.ly/qG4ye

United States:

·       According to TechCrunch, Facebook is in the process of rolling out its new “mini” news feed to far more users. The miniature real-time News Feed on the right side of the page will be labeled “Ticker.”

o   http://tcrn.ch/qVi0kH

·       Foursquare announces that users can now officially ‘check in’ to events using the location based service. Foursquare has hooked up with ESPN for sports events, MovieTicket.com for movie tickets and Songkick for concerts to populate its database with official events.

o   http://tcrn.ch/oB3Ut8

·       Bing launches new Windows app “We’re In.” When you use the app to create an event and invite people to it, the invitation goes out via text message. In addition, the app allows participants to leave in-group status updates.

o   http://tcrn.ch/ow4nrv

·       Textbook rental leader Chegg announces that it is going digital and will be steadily rolling e-textbooks on its platform. In preparation for it’s digitial debut, Chegg has partnered with many leading textbook publishers.  

o   http://tcrn.ch/rsxYmK

·       Evernote CEO Phil Libin announces that the company has acquired Skitch, a best selling app in the Apple app store. Also announced was the availability of Skitch for Android.

o   http://tcrn.ch/qQ14B1

·       Google announces that the company will be adding a new weather layer to its popular mapping service, Google Maps. Courtesy of weather.com, the weather layer will display conditions with various icons for sun, rain, clouds, etc.

o   http://tcrn.ch/oCyxpv

·       In the hours leading up to their Q3 conference call, HP confirmed that the company will be discontinuing operations surrounding the TouchPad and all webOS phones. The company claims that it “will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.”

o   http://tcrn.ch/prwo3Z

VC/Industry:

·       Chinese video sharing site, Tudou, which is similar to YouTube, raises $174 million this week in its U.S. IPO. Tudou’s shares were priced at a 58 percent discount compared to rival Youku, valuing the company at $822 million.

o   http://bit.ly/pBZcoA

·       According to a recent study from Nielsen, the 10 most popular Android apps capture 43 percent of all the time spent by Android consumers on mobile apps.

o   http://bit.ly/raAbTR

·       Research in Motion, the company behind Blackberry announces the development of their own streaming music service that would run specifically on its smartphones and tablets.

o   http://bit.ly/rtr8aN

August 20, 2011 at 12:23 Comments (0)

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