BrainCrack

another fad

This time it’s the “mobile ambient awareness apps”,  like highlight, Sonar and a few more.

SXSW is famous for launching new startups into stardom - like twitter and Foursquare - so every year people speculate who will win SXSW, and this year everyone’s talking about the new class of mobile ambient awareness apps.

What’s that? Those apps basically keep track of your location in the background and pings you whenever a friend is nearby or interesting new people. Think of it as a way to connect people in close proximity.

I’m sorry (not really) to burst everyone’s bubble, but this is a fad.

Why?… Because people are not social machines!

We don’t go around every day just hoping that we’ll bump into friends or meet exciting new people. Most of us are way too busy to even meet our close friends, let alone waste time with acquaintances and new people.

Sure, it might be useful during events to locate friends and people you want to meet, but I don’t see it being used anywhere else.

You all agree with me here, right? 

how business plans really work

You come up with numbers out of your ass and then spend the rest of your time rationalizing those numbers and convincing others that they’re are realistic and carefully constructed.

the future of social networks

Hidden inside Pete Cashmore’s post on Pinterest is one of the best insights on the future of social networks and why Pinterest got so big:

As tech entrepreneur Elad Gil insightfully explained in an article on his blog last month, sharing on the Web has been following three parallel trends.

The first is that sharing involves less effort over time.

The second is that social sites are becoming more visual over time.

And the third is that “people-centric” recommendations are being augmented by “topic-centric” networks — which is to say that while Facebook lets you explore the Web through information shared by friends, newer social networks organize content by topics of interest. Some in the technology industry call this the “interest graph.”

where’s the money in social?

It’s nowhere to be found…

Photo by 401k.

Brands spend and spend to grow their fans, get more followers and have more impressions but what’s beyond that?

Are those numbers resulting in more sales, actual customers, more retail footfall, etc.? 

I bet not. Or at least nowhere near the amounts of money being spent.

Here’s a quote from a recent piece on Facebook and why they might not be able to keep growing their Ad sales:

They all told me the same thing—they don’t have the tools to measure whether social ads are driving sales, and they don’t care, because these ads currently constitute a miniscule portion of their advertising budgets. To continue its rapid growth, though, Facebook is going to have to convince such firms to devote more of their money to social ads.

One day someone will wake up and ask “where’s the money?” and there will be silence in the room…

Zuckerberg’s “The Hacker Way”

Buried within Facebook’s SEC filing is one of the most profound pieces ever written about Facebook.

It briefly describes the DNA of Facebook, that is responsible for making it the way it is now.

If you’re looking for the secret sauce to build a great company for the future, the below should be your bible:

I’ve bolded some key parts that you shouldn’t miss.

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

what they don’t tell you about entrepreneurship

It’s fucking hard! 

Harder than anything you’ve done before.

Not only it will test you physically, mentally and emotionally every day, it will push you to your extreme limits, beyond what normal people go through in their worst days… and then some more.

You give it everything you have and yet you have higher chances of failing than making it, statistically speaking of course. But I know what you tell yourself: you’re better than others.

Just stop for a moment and realize that everyone thinks that (they really do), which means there are no others.

So before you start dreaming about all the money, fame and women, ask yourself this: are you ready to pay the price? and the price is a lot more than you expect.

I’ll be honest here; If I knew all of that before starting my own business, I wouldn’t have done it.

Maybe I’m a pussy. You’re surely not.

why I’m being a jerk to local startups

In his Wamda piece about Cairo StartupWeekend, Omar has referred to me as “notoriously hard to please”, so it got me thinking about this reputation of mine and how it came to be in the first place.

So, why am I such an asshole to local startups?

Because I refuse to treat them like children.

How do I know that? It’s because this is what they tell me, in confidence of course.

Those industry leaders, investors, CEOs, StartupWeekend judges and mentors secretly think this about you and your work, but end up saying ego-soothing comments and words of support.

I dunno about you, but this sounds insulting to me! I surely don’t want to be treated as such, and I believe that we need to be held up to the highest standards, that startups in places like Silicon Valley are held up to.

How can we ever learn to create great products if we’re constantly told that our shitty pathetic creations are good enough?

The teams behind world-leading products like Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare and Path are certainly no better than anyone of us here in the region, only difference is they have very high standards which the industry expects of them, and they work their ass off to meet that. 

In closing, I ask you again: do you still want to be treated like children?

what entrepreneurship is really about

3 things:

1- making a shitload of money

2- saying fuck you to your boss, and never working for someone else again

3- having the freedom to do whatever the hell you want to

Everyone is going around trying to glorify it by saying things like: entrepreneurship is about solving “real” problems, changing the world or building great products, and so and so… you know, the usual bullshit…

Truth is, you can do all of these things if you work for others, and sometimes more effectively! You can’t argue that the average employee inside Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon are changing the world, building great products and solving problems more than 80% of the entrepreneurs out there.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for people starting their own business, just don’t go around and over-glorifying what you do and make a prophet out of yourself… let’s be real.

no one gives a fuck about your Klout score!

Seriously… do you think people check out your Klout score before they talk to you or reply to your tweets? get a life…

Try to realize how ridiculous it is that your social self-worth is being tied to some guys writing stupid algorithms and playing with them like kids!

You’re better off seeking some Penis enlargement treatments… at least someone will really care about the difference!

Having fun with Siri