cdixon.org

So far Hunch users have added 3,690 decision topics (what some people call decision trees). Here are some of my recent favorites:

What should I do with my old laptop? - make thousands more decisions on Hunch.com

Which website should I use to purchase artwork? - make thousands more decisions on Hunch.com

What game can I play with only a pen and paper? - make thousands more decisions on Hunch.com

I ordered an iPhone 3GS last week on apple.com.

Today I received this email from Apple:

To Our Valued Apple Customer:

Our records indicate that we were unable to obtain approval from AT&T
to complete your recent iPhone purchase. As a result, we have
canceled your iPhone order.

Thank you for shopping at the Apple Online Store.

Sincerely,
Apple Online Store Team

Answers to many Apple Online Store questions can be found at
Online Help:

I am an AT&T customer in good standing… lord is AT&T an awful company.

BTW - I was paying *full price* for the phone… no AT&T discount.

A Harvard Business School study out today:

Found that VC firms based in San Francisco, Boston and New York generally return more money on investments outside of their local geographies than on investments close to home.

The academics offer an explanation for this:

The paper suggests that this differential could be caused by VC firms using higher hurdle rates for long-distance deals. Such portfolio companies may require a higher level of managerial/monitoring effort, so more thought is given before offering up a term sheet.

Another explanation that many entrepreneurs would give: when you are far away, it’s harder to meddle with the company, telling them to outsource to india, create a facebook app, or whatever the trend du jour is.

when you type “what” into Ask.com, the #2 suggestion is “what happened to jeeves”

We opened up Hunch to the public today.  There was some good initial press:  MIT Tech Review, BusinessWeek, LA Times, and one of my personal favorite blogs, Search Engine Land.  One of the most important things about making Hunch public is people can now embed Hunch topics where ever they want.  Here’s an example.

Which console video game is right for me? - make thousands more decisions on Hunch.com

Go Hunch!

Here are ten facts:

1. You’re reading my blog post

2. Now you’re saying/thinking that’s a stupid fact.

4. You didn’t notice that i skipped 3.

5. You’re checking it now.

6. You’re smiling.

7. You’re still reading my blog post.

8. You know all you have read is true.

10. You didn’t notice that i skipped 9.

11. You’re checking it now.

12. You didn’t notice there are only 10 facts

I’ve been involved in the development of a number startups over the years, including three I co-founded.   I have also observed the idea development process from the outside many times.  In the 10 years or so I’ve been involved with startups, I have never seen a “Eureka” moment where someone suddenly comes up with a great idea.  Instead, I have always found idea development to be a wrenching and often meandering process that is guided mostly by instinct.

I think the first step to developing an idea is picking a general “space” that you think has interesting things going on (picking the right space and the right co-founders are in my view the only really important things you do at the beginning of a startup).  Maybe you have experience in the space or maybe you just sense something interesting is going on there.  

Here’s my experience developing the idea for SiteAdvisor.  At the time, I had never worked in computer security but had always found it interesting.  When I worked at Bessemer, I spent as much time as I could talking to David Cowan and other security experts.  One thing that was apparent was that, on average, every few years a new type of security threat would come along and usually with each wave of threats some interesting startups were built (e.g. viruses->mcafee & symantec, spam->brightmail & postini, spyware->webroot).  So in 2003 when phishing began to emerge, a friend and I created an anti-phishing toolbar.  It wasn’t a particularly special piece of software - there were a couple of other anti-phishing toolbars around at the time that had similar functionality.  We just figured something interesting was going on so let’s throw our hat in the ring and maybe something good will emerge.  

Think back to 2003, before Firefox.  It was a pretty bad time on the web.  Venturing off the major websites, you’d get bombarded with popups and spyware and ActiveX warnings.  It occurred to us:   if we are warning users about phishing sites, why don’t we warn them about sites that do other bad things?  In other words, we realized that phishing was just a special case of a more general problem - the web needed a reputation system for websites.  Two years later, by the time we actually released SiteAdvisor, phishing was just an afterthought (in fact the first version of SiteAdvisor didn’t even include anti-phishing since we were focused on “Safe Search” and phishing sites don’t show up in search results for various technical reasons).   

Today every major security company has a “safe search product.”  It seems kind of obvious now.  But in retrospect, I don’t see how we would ever have developed the idea without having already “thrown our hat in the ring.”  Even if we had thought of the idea, we probably would have dismissed it as too obvious.  When you aren’t actively engaged in an space you can’t see the gaps.

I think a lot of people who are interested in starting companies think they shouldn’t do it until they have a Eureka moment.  I’d say that instead they should focus on finding an area that “feels interesting” and then get ready to bob and weave.

Joining a startup is far less risky than most people seem to think.  In fact, I don’t know if anyone has ever studied this systematically, but I would bet that people who join startups have greater job security than people who join large companies, and certainly have better risk-adjusted returns.

Here’s why:

- Big companies aren’t as stable as you think:  I graduated business school 6 years ago.  Very few people in my class created or joined startups, instead opting for “safe” companies like… Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Ford, hedge funds that no longer exist, etc.  Meanwhile, everyone I know who went the startup route has had job security and been successful - in some cases spectacularly so.

- Big companies aren’t loyal to employees:  When there are cuts at big companies, they tend to just use a hacksaw and not consider how loyal you’ve been or how hard you worked.  The people who survive are often the ones who happen to be in certain favored divisions or are good at playing politics.

On the flip side:

- Startups that have financing pay pretty well:  If the startup you found or join is VC backed, you usually make market or near-market wages (in addition to the potential upside you get with equity).   Even if things go south you will probably have broken even financially and learned valuable skills.

- Startups tend to be much more loyal to employees:  For example, in the recent downturn I know of a number of startups where management took pay cuts (in some cases took their pay to zero) before laying anyone off.  Experienced startup managers know how devastating layoffs can be to morale and to their own reputation and tend to avoid them at all costs.  Moreover, even when there are layoffs they tend to be based on merit and loyalty.

- When you join a startup, you are also joining a network -  You aren’t just joining a company - you are joining a network of employees and investors who - regardless of the fate of the startup you join - will inevitably go on to do interesting and successful ventures.  If you impress them, they will bring you along.  I know of many cases where startups failed but employees went on to flourish at the founders’ next startup or another company their VCs invested in.

In short, just because startups tend to fail more than big companies doesn’t mean joining a startup is riskier than joining a big company.

Back when we were building SiteAdvisor, one of the things we wanted to warn users about were websites that sold or traded your email address leading to spam (you can see some of the bad stuff we caught in our old blog posts). In order to do this we created bots that crawled the web and signed up for every form they could find.  Tens of millions of forms.*

Some of these forms required a physical address, so we rented a post office box and gave that address.  A few weeks after we started, we got a call from the post office saying “Um, you guys better come down here and get your mail.”  What we found were crates and crates of junk mail.

As a result, visitors to our office were delighted to find a great magazine selection:

Eventually we had to build a magazine avoider algorithm into our bots because we started getting billed for all the signed ups!

This crazy little operation still goes on today.  The guys currently at SiteAdvisor (now McAfee) told me they recently received a lamb carcass in the mail (from a hunting advocacy organization).

*Yes, everything is recycled, and the ultimate goal is to reduce spam/junk mail, so we think net it’s a positive service.

As I’ve said before, security questions, password hints etc are a really bad idea.

Today, I was on gap.com and forgot my password.  When you put in an email on their login page and click “I forgot my password” they show you your password hint.  You can put in any email address and find out their password hint this way.  This is a great way for hackers to figure out your password.  (How many people just use the password itself as their hint?  I bet a lot).

When I saw my own hint I put in a long time ago, I had to chuckle at my obnoxious former self :