Disqus - Latest Comments for jonathanhstrauss

Re: We Were Right – Just a Decade Early

Jonathan Strauss — Sun, 23 Oct 2016 12:32:50 -0000

I know it's beside the core point of the post, but the title makes it hard not to think of Howard Marks's fantastic quote:
"Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong."
https://www.goodreads.com/q...

Re: one: Investing: Humans or Machines?

Jonathan Strauss — Tue, 12 Jul 2016 03:14:25 -0000

I wonder how much of the relative success (or not) of machines in down markets has to do with the selection bias in the datasets used to backtest/teach the trading algorithms. There are obviously a lot more up months than down months to be used for training.

Re: How to Get Busy People to Take Action When You Send an Email

Jonathan Strauss — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 18:48:20 -0000

I've learned to treat emails like marketing copy. You should have (relevant) attention-getting headlines, clear calls-to-action, and as little else as possible to distract from them.

Re: How to Know When to Sell vs. When to Market to Customers

Jonathan Strauss — Sun, 14 Jul 2013 13:54:35 -0000

test test test

Re: Elapsed Time: Congrats! The Back Slappy Nature of Social Media

Jonathan Strauss — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:56:21 -0000

Having just read this, I now appreciate your text this morning that much more ;-)

Re: Why Online Video Just Took One More Big Step to Legitimacy

Jonathan Strauss — Thu, 09 May 2013 23:33:29 -0000

Congrats to the whole Maker family!

Re: How to Raise Money When You’re Not in a Major VC Market

Jonathan Strauss — Wed, 08 May 2013 23:18:37 -0000

testing again

Re: Should You Really Sit on Other Boards When You’re a Startup Founder?

Jonathan Strauss — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 10:34:03 -0000

I can confirm that having Ian on our Board has been amazingly valuable to me as the CEO! He has been an incredible mentor to me in a way that would be much more difficult if he didn't have the ongoing exposure to our business that he gets from his Board participation. And he has also been an ally to me in Board discussions helping to represent the company perspective to investors and find common ground on issues that I have approached differently from Mark and Ryan (though those are few and far between ;-) ).

Also, the awe.sm team has grown quite a bit (and gotten new t-shirts) since that photo :-) : http://www.flickr.com/photo...

Re: Our Awe.sm Investment

Jonathan Strauss — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 10:14:50 -0000

Hi Fadi,

awe.sm is primarily designed to be used with Google Analytics, not as a replacement. Google Analytics and other web measurement solutions are great for knowing what happens on your site, but they assume they will be told how the traffic got there (usually by the referring URL of the visit).

Because traffic driven to your site by sharing follows a more complicated path to get there, the normal means of attribution (i.e. referring URL) don't actually tell Google Analytics much useful information about the original share action (e.g. the Tweet or Like or email) that is responsible for the visit. awe.sm's social-native attribution model along with our turnkey Google Analytics integration connects the dots so that you can now accurately see sharing as a source of traffic (and conversions) in Google Analytics.

Re: Is there age bias in VC investing?

Jonathan Strauss — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:27:57 -0000

I just turned 31 and *I* feel old in this business. So I can only imagine how you feel Jud :-P.

You make some great points on the execution and technical sides, and I won't even bother to argue whether or not age plays a factor in having good and relevant ideas. But I believe you're missing the less tangible and arguably equally important, at least from an investor's perspective, factors of motivation and risk tolerance. Not to say that older individuals can't possess significant ambition or vision (R.I.P. Steve Jobs), but there's a reason "young and foolish" is a cliché.

When you're a conventional venture investor looking for a 1,000% return on 1 company to make up for the other 9 goose-eggs in your portfolio, having a founding team that doesn't question your desire for them to swing for the fences is a definite plus. It doesn't mean older people can't fit into that mold, it just means that in general their experience and personal obligations tend to make them more risk averse.

When I was considering starting awe.sm as an unattached 28 year-old, the most definitive piece of advice I got was from @iancr who told me I was at the optimal intersection of experience and risk tolerance to start a company. In other words, the incremental experience I could gain by waiting longer had diminishing marginal returns compared to the likely decrease in my risk tolerance from getting older. And looking back 3 years later, he was entirely right -- I couldn't have done what it took to get to this point if I had more than just myself to worry about.

This can go too far the other way IMHO when you have a kid straight out of college who believes that living off pizza and ramen is a good trade-off for not having to get a "real" job for as long as this gig lasts. And there are plenty of people over 30 who are willing to put in whatever it takes to make their vision a success (e.g. Gnip ;-) ). So in the end I think motivation (e.g. to change the world, to get rich, to have a steady paycheck, to avoid getting a "real" job) is a key factor that investors need to suss out one way or another and age is, for better or worse, a superficial indicator for motivation.

Re: Paid, Owned, Earned (Media)

Jonathan Strauss — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 10:48:25 -0000

Glad to see this framework getting some love as I'm often surprised how few people understand these terms, especially in social media marketing.

FWIW, I believe the term 'earned media' has been in use in electoral politics for quite a while. My first exposure to that term came while being trained as a campaign operative back in 2003 (primarily referring to press coverage at the time).

Re: Understanding How The Innovator’s Dilemma Affects You

Jonathan Strauss — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 12:49:28 -0000

I knew there's a reason we get on so well :-)

As to the question of what disrupted incumbents can/should do, I tried to answer that as applied to the film studios in a blog post last year. From http://jonathanhstrauss.com...

"If I were the head of a studio, I would stop trying to figure out how to grow the buggy whip business by keeping down the automobile. I would also recognize that transforming my profitable if shrinking buggy whip business into a money-losing automobile business making it up in volume is probably not in the best economic interest of my shareholders. So instead of throwing good money after bad trying to keep the overall buggy whip market from shrinking, I would focus on getting as much share as possible while all my competitors spent their time futilely worrying about the cars. I would ruthlessly cut costs to maintain profitability in the face of shrinking demand. And, I would put all those profits into a dividend so my shareholders would stop pressuring me for growth that isn’t there. Finally, when it’s time to close my buggy whip factory’s doors, I would take all that dividend money I earned and put it into the best automobile company I could find (and then I would be sure to sell that ~80 years later ;-) )."

Re: Do Twitter’s New Application Naming Rules Spell Bad News For TweetDeck?

Jonathan Strauss — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 22:02:35 -0000

Note the footer of CoTweet.com has for the last several months included the following language:
"CoTweet is a trademark of Twitter Inc, and is used under license."

Re: Using bit.ly with Twitter’s Tweet Button

Jonathan Strauss — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 12:16:40 -0000

We (the friendly folks over at awe.sm) have whipped up a WordPress plugin that supports bit.ly as well as awe.sm, su.pr, and tinyurl - http://wordpress.org/extend...

Re: Boston-Bound: Leaving USV and Next Steps

Jonathan Strauss — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 14:22:15 -0000

Congrats and best of luck in Bean-town!

Re: SXSW, Power laws, Twitter, and Clay Shirky

Jonathan Strauss — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:06:02 -0000

I think you just accidentally explained why Robert Scoble is anybody today ;-)

Re: Top 25 Albums of 2009 (and a few other things I liked)

Jonathan Strauss — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:21:07 -0000

If you liked the Neko Case album cover art, I'm happy to let you stand on the hood of my car while Laura takes a photo ;-)

Re: Facebook Launches Share Buttons for Publishers

Jonathan Strauss — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:56:19 -0000

Hey Silencio,

Facebook gave us early access to the stats API, so the latest version of the fbShare button incorporates both their stats and the ones from awe.sm. Our primary goal with the fbShare button was to offer more sharing tools to awe.sm customers, making it a useful standalone product was just a nice bonus. So while we do think there are still some advantages to the fbShare button as a standalone (i.e. without an awe.sm account) over the official FB button (like Google Analytics integration, more standard dimensions, and a handy WordPress plugin), we're going to continue to focus on it primarily as a tool for awe.sm customers.

Here's the full story on our blog:
http://blog.thesnowballfact...

Re: Facebook "ReTweet" (Share) Button

Jonathan Strauss — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:01:10 -0000

The issue with extracting info about the post was actually on the Facebook side. They had problems with the bots they use to crawl pages for preview information in the sharer pop-ups. This now appears to be fixed on their side and your button is working as expected.

Re: The Market is Confused, But Main Street is NOT

Jonathan Strauss — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:51:28 -0000

I had to buy supplies for a bbq this weekend, and I was struck by how much the physical retail landscape had changed in the last 10 years at my local mall in LA: the electronics store was gone (replaced by Amazon), the music/movie store was gone (replaced by iTunes), the market was gone (consolidated into a larger supermarket in the area), and all that was left was consumables (coffee shops, fast food, restaurants), clothing, and cell phone stores. With online shopping and destination big box retailers eliminating/consolidating a number of retail tenant segments, there is only so much coffee shop, boutique, cell phone store backfill that is sustainable long-term. Doubly so in this economic environment.

Re: URL-shorteners go Amazon (Scripting News)

Jonathan Strauss — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:59:46 -0000

Thanks for the shout-out Niv!

Re: URL-shorteners go Amazon (Scripting News)

Jonathan Strauss — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:59:01 -0000

FWIW, we've been offering URL shortening on your own domain since May. And we offer the ability via our APIs for you to take all your data (and URL mappings) with you if you ever decide to point your domain elsewhere. :-)

Re: Music, Technology, Art, Economy

Jonathan Strauss — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:56:41 -0000

I believe the point he was trying to make is "I'm a social media docuhebag." :-)

Re: Deep Market Thoughts…From Fear to Fear!

Jonathan Strauss — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 03:20:14 -0000

Per usual, your advice is right on -- you can't win if you don't play, and no one has all the answers.

I actually spent most of this afternoon mulling over these same questions myself. I don't by any means claim this analysis can predict where the market is going next month, let alone next week. But it does give me some personal confidence in the 7,000-7,500 level as a long-term foundation for recovery. That is of course barring anymore unpleasant surprises from the financial sector, which I think we all agree is still a real possibility.

Ultimately, you've got to place your bets and live with them. And anyone who tells you they aren't bets is selling you some bullshit. You can use analysis to break down some of the complexity and make the choices a little clearer. But no one is going to make the choice for you.

Re: Bit.ly Spelled backwards is ‘DEVIL’

Jonathan Strauss — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 12:47:35 -0000

Being part of a company (http://thesnowballfactory.com) that is involved in this space (http://awe.sm), I wouldn't want to miss the chance to draft on such a high-brow discussion ;-)

I think the main issue here is that Howard and Dave are talking about two very different customer segments for URL shorteners. Howard is looking at things from a consumer's perspective, while Dave is voicing what I would call the publisher's point of view. And I think you are both right.

I believe Howard is correct that the average consumer doesn't understand, let alone care about, the underlying technology issue of URL shorteners introducing a single point of failure and subverting the elegantly distributed redundancy of DNS. I would also argue that the majority of consumers also don't care about the more tangible issue of long-term ownership of and/or support for a shortened URL. The numbers show that the half-life of a tweeted link is measured in minutes not years. And so a consumer like Howard just cares that it's going to work this week, not in perpetuity.

I agree with Joshua that URL shorteners are somewhat of a necessary evil in certain circumstances and I think that his point was more they shouldn't be used blindly especially in situations where their limitations could have more serious consequences than me not being able to click through on Howard's latest rant against the SEC. And I think Dave is right that there is more URL shorteners can do to mitigate the risks to publishers who have a different set of concerns than a consumer.

Publisher's generally view shared links as calls to action for outbound marketing (e.g. when I tweet a link to my new blog post), and as such view issues like long-term ownership and support as business critical -- *any* lost click, no matter when, is lost traffic is lost revenue. <shameless plug="">That's why as a publisher focused sharing analytics product, we are already offering our customers several of the features Dave suggests to mitigate the inherent risks of third-party redirects. In fact, the first publisher in our private beta will be launching shortly on a domain they own with the ability to pull the destination URLs for all their shortened URLs in a given period (i.e. once a week) from our API.</shameless>

The main reason I think Howard and Dave are talking past each other is that bit.ly has somewhat blurred the lines between publishers and consumers as URL shortener customers. If all a consumer cared about was making a long URL shorter, there is little reason for them to switch from TinyURL unless even that is too long, in which case they should go for something like is.gd. And to reinforce Howard's point, TechCrunch recently posted that TinyURL still has ~75% market share of shortened URLs on Twitter compared to bit.ly's 13% (even Danny Sullivan's more influencer-oriented survey has TinyURL still ahead of bit.ly). Bit.ly was able to grab a lot of market-share early on with pro-sumers and publishers by being one of the first URL shorteners to offer analytics, and they still have a great offering for pro-sumers (high-end consumers/low-end publishers). But today most professional publishers I know have moved on to cli.gs or tr.im which arguably offer superior analytics.

The good news about the low-barriers to entry in the URL shortening space is that there will continue to be new players who step in to fill the unmet needs of any meaningful customer segment. Howard is right that start-ups need to focus and Dave is right that successful companies need to listen to their customers. I would combine those two to say that successful startups need to listen to the customers on whom they're focused.

So Dave, while it sounds like you may not be a customer on whom bit.ly wants to focus, we're all ears and would be happy to give you an awe.sm invite :-)