Pearls and Pork Chops

Pickett's Charge

I spent this past weekend in Gettysburg, PA visiting my sister-in-law who attends Gettysburg University. On Sunday, Michelle and I took a couple hours to do a horseback tour of the battlefields. It was a great tour – astounding to get a sense for the scope and weight of what occurred on those fields over 3 days in July 1863. At one point during the tour we found ourselves riding through about 1 mile of open field that separated the Union and Confederate armies on the final day of the battle. The guide gave a detailed description of the Confederate charge on the Union position on July 3^rd, 1863 – today known as Pickett’s Charge. In short, 12,500 Confederate soldiers marched approximately 1 mile across open field, under fire from Union artillery and muskets in an attempt to breach the Union lines. By most accounts, the charge had very little chance of success. The Confederate troops were outnumbered; the Union troops were entrenched in higher ground. The only hope for success was a 2 hour massive cannonade which preceded the charge. Unfortunately for the Confederate soldiers, most of the cannon fire over-shot the Union position. Of the 12,500 soldiers who began the charge, the guide said less than 300 made it to the Union lines. According to the guide, more than half of the 12,500 were killed or wounded. 1500 Union soldiers were wounded or killed as well.

 

I have read a number of accounts of the story of the Battle of Gettysburg and Pickett’s charge, and it’s always horrifying. But there was something about standing on the field where it happened and seeing the distance those men traveled, and trying to imagine the horror they lived (and died) that really made it real.

 

The town of Gettysburg is also an interesting place. It is completely defined by the events that occurred on that battlefield over just 3 days, 140 years ago. I’m glad there are places like that to help remind us of the horror of war, and of the sacrifices made in the name of this country.

 

Spyware Wars Escalating

Looks like the battle against "Spyware" just got escalated a notch.  The path was cleared Wednesday for a class action lawsuit to proceed against alleged spyware purveyor Direct Revenue.  Read more about it here.

What I find particularly interesting about this is how this is likely to be argued.  It sure seems like this will be a question of Direct Revenue's argument that they did nothing wrong according to the letter of the law, vs. the argument that regardless of EULA's etc., there are damages and culpability here.

In so many ways this is reminiscent of what happened in email marketing, where laws were not clearly defined.

I don't know how this will turn out, but rest assured that distributors of adware, spyware and similar applications will be paying close attention to this one.

Balance

“Half the reason I started this blog was to write this post…”

That’s how the draft sitting in my drafts folder starts. The rest of the draft is below, substantively unchanged. But in the last couple weeks I’ve seen two other posts on the topic that make me realize how many others struggle with the same questions. The first was Fred Wilson’s post, which led me to Brad Feld’s post. I don’t know either of these guys, but after reading their posts, I feel like I at least know how they feel, or felt at one point. And so I make my own contribution to the dialogue.

When I founded Right Media, my daughter was almost 2. My son was 4 months old. Looking back the whole thing seems a little crazy. I had a  sketch of a business plan, and a salary that didn’t come close to covering my monthly expenses. I had exactly 4 months of living expenses in my savings account.

At the time, there wasn’t a lot of talk of finding a work-life balance in our house. Well, that’s not quite true, actually. There was talk of it, but it was always something to shoot for down the road. It was never a life and death situation. It just felt like it at times, and so the long hours, the constant preoccupation, the lack of downtime were an accepted part of a choice Michelle and I had made together. The lack of balance was about getting through this period, and achieving a balance once things were stable.

Fast forward 2 ½ years, and the situation is remarkably different, and remarkably the same. What’s different? I now have 3 children. The business model of RM looks nothing like the sketch it was 2 ½ years ago – in fact it’s thriving. Due to a series of fortunate occurrences, not the least of which was finding people who believed in what we’re trying to do, and are making it happen, RM has survived, and prospered. We’ve got a great business, strong venture backing and tremendous momentum. It’s no longer life and death every day. But it still feels that way a lot of the time.

What's the same?  Hours are longer. The problems still big, bigger in fact, which leads to even more pre-occupation. And most important, the human stakes are higher. While there is less day to day risk for me personally, the number of people who rely on RM has increased exponentially. Our employees rely on RM for their living, and have a lot riding on our future success. Our customers rely on RM for our services, which they use to operate their business. Our investor’s success relies on our execution.

Personally, there are constants in my life that haven’t changed. My family’s patience with this is astounding. My children don’t complain about the mornings I’m gone before they’re awake, the nights they’re asleep before I get home, and the absences for business trips. Michelle’s hours with the kids are just as long as mine, or longer.

I wonder, is this how it has to be? No one is telling me that I have to work the hours. No one is suggesting that this sort of imbalance is the only way to succeed. I could point to all of the external factors that feed the imbalance. The emergencies that encroach on scheduled downtime. The late nights that cancel morning workouts. Redeyes. It would be so easy to say that there’s nothing to be done for it. That it is external.

Let’s be real. It’s a choice. I choose the imbalance. I do it consciously on a daily basis. Our customers don’t expect me to work ½ the weekend, they just expect our products and service to be delivered as promised. Our VC’s don’t expect me to be unable to shed my preoccupation with whatever the problem du jour is, they just expect results.  And I'm not the only one here working this way.  Not by a long shot.

I suppose there is a world in which everything that needs to get done can get done in 8 hours per day. Maybe I even live in that world. I just don’t know how to do it. Until I do, I expect balancing “work” and “life” will remain a challenge.

Change

Wow. Change can be excruciating. Too bad it’s so necessary. 

Last summer I had lunch with Jon Kaplan (CEO of PureDigital). We were thinking of raising VC at the time, and Jon’s done it a bunch of times. He gave me some advice on the process. He also said something I didn’t really understand at all at the time. “There’s going to come a point where you’re going to have to decide whether you really want the job you have. It can be the greatest job in the world, but it can also be the loneliest.”

He said loneliest. Not hardest, or most stressful or most demanding.

Loneliest.

Candidly, I didn’t know what the hell Jon was talking about. I figure I spend close to 80% of my day talking to people, either on the phone or in meetings. How could this job possibly be lonely? I dismissed it. 

Recently, I have begun to understand what Jon meant, and rapid change at Right Media is what brought it home.

When growth becomes a focus, change is inevitable, and necessary.  Not small change. Big, hairy, painful change.  Communication lines break down. People come to feel out of the loop, marginalized, and often left behind.

You know it’s going to happen. You talk about how it’s going to happen. Good people – people you want to keep - will leave because their role in the organization doesn’t fit like it used to. You know it’s going to happen, but you slam on the accelerator anyway, because growth and change are necessary.

Then you sit across the table from a colleague you respect, and you listen to them talk about how they believe in the company, but don’t fit anymore. And that’s when you realize why the job is lonely. Because, if you’re being honest, you knew this was the most likely outcome of both growth and change, and you drove on anyway.

Intermediation in Interactive Advertising

I've been hearing a new battle cry recently in online ad circles.  The call for dis-intermediation, and the efficiency it will produce.  The online ad network market provides great examples of intermediation as a flawed, but necessary part of the market ecology. 

I have to confess, I used to think that dis-intermediation was the only way to achieve true efficiency in the online ad marketplace.  I'm revising that stance.  It's not that we need to dis-intermediate so much as we need to make the intermediaries more efficient and accountable.

I recently posted the thoughts below in a forum where a discussion was happening on how competing ad networks buy and sell inventory from each other, and the impact on publishers.  I figured I'd post it here. 

The primary questions were:

1.  Why would networks share distribution with direct competitors?
2.  What should end publishers do about this?

Ad networks have been trading inventory with each other pretty much since the beginning. Consider an example. At any given time, Network A may have more advertiser demand than supply, while Network B may have supply than demand. Both problems can be solved by Network A buying from Network B. Network A gets more revenue b/c they deliver on campaigns they can't deliver on their own inventory. Network B gets more revenue because they are able to sell space that would have been sold for less, or gone unsold.

From the network perspective it makes a lot of sense.

It's a little trickier from the Publisher perspective.

Network B will argue that their publishers make more revenue than they would have if they hadn't sold space to network A. This is true... BUT, the publisher might argue that they would make more money still if they had a relationship directly with Network A, and got the buy directly from the seller. This is also true...and that's the quandary.

Networks generally do their best to create efficient markets, but even the largest networks do not get on every ad-buy. Sales force, relationships, market perception all drive buyers to different sellers.

Market theory tells us that the broader the market is, the more efficient the market will be. Networks share distribution as a means to broaden the market, and to find the efficiencies in the non-overlapping ad buys. However, the way this has historically been done is quite inefficient for the end publisher.

Back to the example.

If I'm a publisher who has a relationship with Network B, I'm likely to notice ads from Network A serving on my site. My logic would likely be - if Network A has enough demand to be buying from Network B, then I should consider moving my inventory to Network A. This makes a ton of sense. Assuming that Network A is taking a 30-40% cut of the ad-buy it is brokering to Network B, that means diluted earnings to me, the end publisher. Logically, I'm going to try to move my relationship to Network A.

But here's the rub. What happens when market dynamics shift and Network B has more demand than supply and Network A has more supply than demand. Roles are reversed, and after going through the effort of shifting my inventory from Network B to Network A, I'm now faced with shifting it back. It's a lot like trying to momentum trade stocks. You run the risk of sub-optimizing by missing the supply and demand shifts that occur often, and very quickly.

It's a tricky problem.

What a publisher really needs is the ability to have a relationship with both network A and network B (and networks C, D and E as well) and to have access to their combined advertiser reach. In an ideal market, inventory will flow seamlessly based on the real-time demand economics of both partners and the ad-impression will be sold to the highest bidder on each ad-call.

In order for this to happen, our market is going to have to start behaving a lot more like the financial markets. What I'm talking about is single platform efficiency - the ability to see all the bidders for each impression at the time of the ad-call, and determine for each unique ad call who should receive the ad.  At it's most basic, the concept is to allow the seller to see the broadest possible market which will likely be spread across multiple intermediaries.  It's too easy to say that intermediation is inefficient. In fact, intermediation is necessary in almost any market (when was the last time you bought a stock directly from another seller?).

We don't need to eliminate the intermediary to acheive an efficient market - we just have to change how the intermediary operates.

3

Three.  That's how many times this page has been viewed the last 5 days (not including my own views).  It's a pathetic amount of traffic, but for one thing...  I can't imagine how anyone at all would have found the page.  I've yet to share it with anyone I know, it's not publicized.  Maybe it's robot traffic?  Search engines?

I can only imagine what folks who start to generate real traffic on their blogs must feel like looking at those stats - given the jolt I got just seeing any visits at all.

I suppose to get some readers one actually has to write something other than swill about what a novice one is at this.  Perhaps tomorrow.

What's in a name?

The title of this blog is a literary reference.  That's all I'll say for now.  Those who know it will realize there are a number of ways it could be interpreted.  At some point down the line I may write more about this. 

The quality of the content here will end up defining how the title should be interpreted.

First Post

I feel like I should start with some lofty expectations of what I hope to achieve with this blog.

Right....

The truth is, my expectations are pretty low:

I hope to learn something.

I hope to get better with experience.

I'd imagine there will be unintended consequences.  There always seem to be.  Should be fun.