Not a bad view (at Lookout Mobile Security HQ)
MessageMe
Early (!) this morning, MessageMe put up a new post on their blog describing their user growth in the first couple of months of release, and their new $10M financing round that we led, with participation from their other existing investors from the seed round, including True Ventures, First Round Capital, Google Ventures, Resolute.vc and others.
We were fortunate to participate in that seed round through our Discovery Fund, so have gotten to know Arjun & Justin & the team over a longer period of time than usual, and have been blown away by how committed they are to building great products & a great company.
Their goal is to help revolutionize the way we communicate in our world of always on, always present, always connected devices. You know, NBD.
I love the team, and I love the product (go get it!) — as you use the product, the first realization you’ll have is that it’s fast. Really fast. Just try it.
The next thing you’ll start to realize — or the next thing I realized — is that it’s just incredibly useful, and thoughtful in the way it’s built. My wife & I use instant location sharing all the time — a couple of taps, and we know where each other is.
But the really enduring thing for me so far is how much fun it is. Taking a few seconds to think about a song or an image to send can often communicate way better than many sentences could.
We’re living in an incredible time of change technologically & socially. The ways in which we communicate are all changing, too. What I love about the way that MessageMe has started, right out of the gate, is how natural and fluid what they’ve built is, and how it feels like an extension of the in person, pen & pencil, or digital communications we’ve had for years, but moved into this ubiquitous realm of mobile.
And as they wrote in their post, others seem to be liking it a lot, too. A million users in their first 10 days; 5 million in the first 75. Processing 1,500 notifications/second now. It’s an amazing start.
But it’s just a start, and that’s clear from everything the team has done and has plans to do — lots to come! We’re very happy to be involved and working with the company on building something groundbreaking.
In the meantime, try out the app & see what you think!
Tumblr & Human-scale Design
Lots of the chatter this morning is on the $1.1B headline, or the story of Marissa’s Yahoo, or Tumblr’s massive growth & relevance to youth, or New York’s continuing emergence on the world’s tech stage.
But I want to talk about something else that I find remarkable about Tumblr, even today, after about 2 years of working with the team there. What I find remarkable about the company is that it continues to design and build products that are human scale.
I’ll describe what I mean with an architecture analogy — most of the houses that we all live in are human scale. They’re built to fit the way we live. As you build bigger & bigger buildings, sometimes houses, sometimes public structures, they tend to focus more on “being architecture” or accommodating very large groups of people, or showing off. It’s the rare big public space that can relate to normal humans — they just outgrow us at some point.
That’s why we love the buildings that can relate — one of which, appropriately enough, is Grand Central Station in New York.
With digital interfaces, as you get big — and Tumblr, with it’s 105 million blogs and 300 million visitors each month is, decidedly, massive — you tend to lose your human scale, too. Interfaces get cluttered with new features & competing priorities — they tend to let the organization of the builders show through as opposed to the primacy of the user. Or they can become super precious, designed for hanging in a museum instead of daily use.
What I’ve loved about working with Tumblr is that they’ve kept this human scale in every aspect of the product. You can see it in the dashboard UI, you can see it in the creation tools, you can see it in the way they communicate with users, and most of all you can see it in their lineup of mobile products. It’s all just fundamentally more human in aspect than anything I’ve ever seen at this scale.
Here’s an example (of something they shipped today!) in their mobile interface:
The wonderful thing about that very small interaction (creating a new post) is that it matches the way your thumb moves across the screen, from bottom right to top left. It’s a tiny nuance that just fits right. There are hundreds of touches like this across everything that Tumblr makes.
It’s a testament not only to David, who’s a wonderfully smart & thoughtful designer & builder, but the whole team there, including folks I’ve been lucky to work with like Derek, Ari, Peter, Bryan, John & others. And also to Bijan Sabet from Spark Capital, who first convinced David to really go for it, and really grokked the product very early (like he’s done many times at this point!) — thanks for the introduction to the team, Bijan!
The picture above sort of sums it up for me — I took that picture in Tumblr’s elevator lobby when I was there for December’s board meeting. It was just so perfect, so understated, so elegant — so human.
For those who don’t know the reference, it’s from A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) — Charlie Brown is sent out to get a Christmas tree, and this is what he brings back, despite the fact that the lot was full of bigger, shinier, nicer trees:
But Charlie & Linus took a chance on the smaller, more organic, more human tree. They got a lot of grief from their friends for not picking the shinier ones, naturally. But Linus put his blanket around the tree, and they all started taking care of it, decorating it, coaxing it into life.
And what they got at the end was this:
Clearly superior, in my view, and clearly human.
Congratulations to the whole team at Tumblr for the accomplishment, and for building such a massive global phenomenon, but in a way that’s so fundamentally human scale. That’s something to be awfully proud of. Looking forward to watching you humanize even more of our digital lives.
Sums up the dynamic pretty well, in many ways. :-)
“The great workplace dilemmas of our time…”
Source: marissamayr
It’s about moments in life that are great but don’t last. They don’t go on, but you always have the memory and they have an effect on you. That’s what I was thinking about.
Lost in Translation is really one of my favorite movies of all times. So, so good. So, so true.
—-
Sofia Coppola on Lost In Translation
(via stoweboyd)
(via parislemon)
Dave Duffield, @aneelb & @reidhoffman at HBS company of the year award. Congrats @aneelb!
Sunken Diamond. Best place in the world to catch ballgame. (at Klein Field at Sunken Diamond)
Think globally, hack locally.
Soon enough. :-) (at Escondido Elementary School)
We do not own Collins’s decision. His courage is not ours. He owes us, and our society, nothing more than he already has given us. He made the decision, I hope, knowing one thing quite clearly, and that is that history is not predictable. It does not move in a straight line, let alone in a straight line to glory. History is a river, with currents and eddies and backwashes, and if you just let yourself drift with it, you will not necessarily find your way from the source to the sea. If every river moved straight and true, from bad to good, from historic crime to ultimate redemption, herring would rule the world. It has been said in too many places now already that the best thing about what Jason Collins did this week was to prove how “normal” his announcement was, and how little an impact it seemed to make, and how supportive most of his fellow athletes were. We will see how “normal” the country will allow his life to be going forward. Oh, we shall surely see that.
Wonderful piece in Grantland reacting to Jason Collins’ decision yesterday.
A crucial reminder that nothing about history is inevitable. That history happens because we all make choices to stand for what we believe in. We make history, or it happens to us.
Amazing & inspirational for Jason to do this, but it’s just a step.
Was there ever a more charming letter writer than Vonnegut?
In which Kurt Vonnegut modestly offers his talents to the JFK campaign. Our favorite line? “On occasion, I write pretty well.” http://slate.me/11QNcwA
Source: slatevault
As much as you can, knowing it’s a subjective thing — you’re dealing with human beings — but you always look for a certain talent level, and we like to think about somebody’s work ethic, what they’ve proven as far as what type of teammate they might be,” Popovich said. “In our vernacular we talk about people who’ve gotten over themselves, [who] can cheer for teammates’ success, as well as their own. When you find those kind of people, they’re more interested in the group than they are themselves. That’s a winning formula in most cases.
This is ostensibly an article about the differences between how the Spurs and Lakers approach building & winning, but I find it to be just as relevant to how we build winning organizations.
As some folks know, I moved around a lot growing up, but spent my high school years in San Antonio, right when they went from horrible to not-as-horrible by drafting David Robinson, a role model in many, many ways. And I know that most folks think watching the NBA, let alone the decidedly low drama Spurs, is about as exciting as watching paint dry.
But ever since Popovich got there, and then Tim Duncan, it’s just been an incredible organization to watch. They’re so committed to developing players, so committed to finding them wherever they are in the world, so committed to winning over the long term and in the right way.
It’s easy to focus on the superstars — and just like sports, in a lot of ways the technology world is indeed driven by superstars — but having an amazing team top to bottom, and a mindset that you’re always going to be developing each person, and developing the team overall — in my view this balance is the key to long term, durable success.
This quote just captures so much about what makes the Spurs special, and what makes some of the companies I’m involved with the same.
