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Why designers make awesome entrepreneurs [video]

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:07:21 +0000

You can tell what drives the folks behind the Designer Fund by simply walking into their office space — it feels like a cross between a hotel lobby and a zen garden (complete with tatami mats), and it was designed that way to make its designer community feel comfortable and inspired. And if you haven’t guessed it by now, the Designer Fund is exactly what you’d expect it to be: an angel fund that supports designer-focused founders and entrepreneurs.

This week the fund, led by co-Directors Enrique Allen and Ben Blumenfeld, announced that it’s opened up its designer-in-residence program — called Bridge — for the next session of designers. The Bridge program connects designers with design-oriented startups in San Francisco, like Path, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest, and Flipboard, and the Designer Fund is now looking for applicants for its Fall program.

For the occasion, we sat down with Allen and Blumenfeld and picked their brains on why they think designer entrepreneurs have unique skills and why they don’t want to fund the next-generation of skinny jeans.

We’ll be focusing on how design is changing the technology industry at our annual RoadMap event in November in San Francisco (tickets will go on sale later this summer and you can learn about RoadMap here).

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Airbnb is 20% to 50% cheaper than a hotel (unless you’re in Vegas or Houston)

Lauren Hockenson — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:06:19 +0000

Airbnb is a poster child for the new sharing economy– the idea that socially driven startups can disrupt entrenched industries like the hotel business, the taxi industry and the education market, with better pricing and availability. So far, Airbnb is off to a fast start. It has rooms listed in 35,000 cities and is forecasting $1 billion in bookings this year.

According to Priceonomics, its rooms and apartments are often significantly cheaper than what hotels charge. In a study compiling the median rental price points of hotel rooms and Airbnb options (both entire apartment rentals and private rooms in occupied apartments), Airbnb consistently beat hotels in cities across the country. On average, Airbnb apartment rentals are 21.2% less expensive than hotel rooms, and a private room in an apartment is on average 49.5% cheaper. Airbnb can undercut hotel rooms in large part because of the lack of overhead.

One interesting note is that in places where there are a lot of Airbnb listings – like San Francisco or Washington, D.C. — there are wider price differentials between apartments and hotels. That makes sense, just like a cluster of hotels in a resort town would likely lead to greater competition and presumably better pricing options for consumers. Also, not surprisingly, the price of an apartment on Airbnb varies greatly by neighborhood.

The pricing trends don’t hold for every city, though. In some places — like Las Vegas and Houston — the median price of the hotel is actually below that of the Airbnb apartments. And in Tucson, Ariz., the hotel is only $9 more than a room in an already-occupied apartment, according to the study. These exceptions are largely a function of the real estate patterns in those markets.

Another important note: Priceonomics is addressing the median prices, not necessarily the lowest in any particular region. Also, regulators in cities like New York are starting to crack down on Airbnb for alleged violations of the so-called illegal hotels law, so it’s unclear whether the market for room and apartment sharing will remain as vibrant in the coming months in some of those cities.

Here’s Airbnb co-founder and Chief Product Officer Joe Gebba speaking at our RoadMap conference last year.

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Design could help transform the web into a hits business, and that’s not a good thing

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 12:00:42 +0000

Emotionally-driven beautiful design has been at the forefront of many of the breakout websites and apps of recent years: Airbnb, Path, Pinterest Instagram, Mailbox; the list goes on and on. Increasingly design is becoming as important (or even more in some cases) as the technology itself, a trend important enough to us to merit an annual event devoted to design called RoadMap.

This transformation is occurring because with the rise of cloud computing and the modularization of the underlying networking technologies, much of the value in web and mobile products has shifted to the interaction with the user. It is no surprise then, that the business model for these digital products could start to look increasingly like the hits-driven business of movies, music or video games.

The bad news is that those are pretty difficult, high-risk businesses that rely on churning out hits and pumping an increasing amount of money into individual products in an attempt to find the summer blockbuster of the season. Replicating hits over and over again is a hard business to sustain over the long run and is something that fundamentally will change the ecosystem of Silicon Valley and the way innovation is created (as Stacey put it in Silicon Valley is Motown and the web is a hit factory).

The Summer Blockbuster

If you think the hits business sounds awesome to you — filled with Will Smith alien movies and Rihanna singles — look no further than Zynga for the uglier side. The company announced this week that it’s cutting 520 people, or 18 percent of its staff, closing some offices in the U.S. It saw its stock fall below $3 per share. As Kevin Kelleher put it on PandoDaily:

Stocks of gaming companies have always been notoriously volatile because their income depends on capturing lightning in a bottle. Zynga tried to get around this by designing data-driven games, but it’s losing its edge. . . Meanwhile, hits remain unpredictable enough that the lightning is showing up in other bottles – like King, the maker of Candy Crush Saga . . .

The movie industry has long suffered from this hits syndrome as well. Back in the early days of film, the movie industry actually tried to use technology as a differentiator, adding sound, color, CG, 3D, and even some technologies that never took off (Smell-O-Vision was a real thing). But nowadays movies are a commodity, and the movie makers turn to content tools to attempt to minimize the risk and maximize the chance of a hit. Some of these things include: formulaic scripts, known star power (Ryan Gosling is in it!), sequels, and the old mainstay of turning a comic book into a movie.

How scary is this Men In Black wax figures scene?

This business model is why a lot of new movies are not worth the price of the popcorn. Is this the future of mobile apps and consumer web products?

The Gigli of the web

Well, there are some key factors that make it a little different. Namely, on the technology cost curve, mobile apps and web products are at some of their cheapest points in history to build. Entire sectors have been built off of cheap computing, broadband and web hosting. So at this point, they’re a far cry from a movie studio spending a hundred million making a movie.

But on the other hand, as mobile apps and consumer web sites become ever more commoditized, the expense to build ones that stand out above the noise — and become hits — could grow considerably. And good design isn’t cheap.

Mobile app startup Sunrise announced it has raised $2.2 million to continue to build out its design-centric calender app that is supposed to rival the free calender app you already get on your phone. The designers behind the app say they looked at the calender as “a design problem, not an engineering problem.” The hot startup behind Mailbox, which redesigned the mail app for the iPhone, was recently sold for a reported $100 million to Dropbox, which wants to expand beyond online storage & syncing and act as your online presence and center for your apps.

But these apps are just the ones that have actually hit some success milestones. As Stacey wrote “the internet has become a wasteland of lame-duck startups and acqui-hires that couldn’t make it to the next level in popularity.”

As this hits-driven mentality emerges, it will continue to transform the more traditional Silicon Valley ecosystem. Inc Magazine put it recently as “venture funds now bet on hackers the way record labels bet on rising pop stars, hoping that someday soon, they will make something wild, new, and insanely lucrative.”

Some of the new mobile app shops are increasingly feeling the necessity of churning out hits more than anyone. The New York investor group Betaworks is already in the business of cranking out mobile apps at a breakneck pace and seems to be doing a decent job at it so far; mobile game Dots is everywhere. But not all the mobile app labs are going to succeed — as a designer I met with last week said to me, how many gorgeous mobile weather apps do we really need?

Mobile app development has really only started, so we’re a long ways off from the crush of the hits-driven industry that now plagues Hollywood. But I think down the road, the pressure of the hits business will increasingly weigh on the internet industry as smart phones and web usage move into utter mainstream usage.

And while this trend is inevitable, it’s not wholly positive, as it will deliver an even greater shift to “the cool,” “the trendy,” and “the celebrity.” Let’s face it: real innovation is often not cool, trendy or made by a celebrity.

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No SQL or DynamoDB: Airbnb goes with Memcached for Neighborhoods feature

Jordan Novet — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 19:44:32 +0000

One of Airbnb’s neat features, Neighborhoods, shows people elegant pages on neighborhoods within big cities that can help them choose exactly where to stay. Actual homes where visitors can stay the night are directly tied to the neighborhood pages. The idea sounds obvious, but it took some engineering tinkering to figure out how to make it all work accurately and quickly.

On the Airbnb Nerd Blog on Thursday, engineers Andy Kramolisch and Ben Hughes, who worked on Neighborhoods and previously founded NabeWise, a neighborhood guide for American cities, explained the back-end process of aligning locations with neighborhoods.

Behind the scenes, Kramolisch said, a cartographer carves out the borders of neighborhoods. Then it’s time to match up hosts’ homes with the neighborhoods listed on Airbnb. On the site’s back end, Kramolisch said, the latitude and longitude of available homes are regularly associated with the various neighborhoods in a given city, if those neighborhoods are represented on Airbnb, through an internal system called Glop, short for Genome Location Pipeline. “For example, say you list your place, which is located at (12.333568650219718, 45.43647998034738). The next time Glop runs, it will correctly identify your listing as being in San Marco,” he said.

It’s not as if Neighborhoods works with “insane amounts of data,” Kramolisch said. Still, up-to-date data on places to stay in neighborhoods needs to be served up quickly, so users aren’t kept waiting in front of their screens. Data changes fast, and an SQL database wouldn’t work because of “mass updates,” Kramolisch said. So an internal NoSQL database in cooperation with Amazon Web Services’ managed DynamoDB NoSQL database service was considered. But DynamoDB couldn’t handle Airbnb’s storage needs. So the engineers turned to the Memcached key-value store for quickly serving up data by keeping it in memory.

In going with Memcached, Airbnb is making the same choice as Facebook, Etsy and other companies that operate at webscale. Location is the top criterion for Airbnb travelers, Kramolisch says, and the fast service Memcached enables — 35 milliseconds on average, to be precise — is the kind of solution that could help Airbnb focus on giving customers more of what they want from the site, when they want it.

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What Airbnb learned from Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 21:00:37 +0000

Airbnb cofounder and Chief Product Officer Joe Gebbia is one of a new crop of designer founders who have successfully morphed their design careers into building and running breakout startups. And these new designers have been looking to some very non-traditional creators for inspiration. Gebbia told a group of designers at an event, which was a collaboration between AIGA and Parisoma, in San Francisco on Wednesday night that the movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi represents what they fundamentally believe at Airbnb.

In case you haven’t seen the documentary, which came out in 2011, Jiro is an octogenarian sushi master who has perfected the art of making sushi at his Michelin three-star restaurant in the Ginza subway in Tokyo. He’s spent decades perfecting simple tasks like selecting, cutting, and preparing the best fish. “Jiro embodies craftsmanship and detail,” said Gebbia, explaining:

One of the responsibilities of designers is to seek out and find the details. If we don’t who else will?

Gebbia, who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, says he took his entire product team to Jiro Dreams of Sushi. “At Airbnb we’re trying to build a culture that supports details, celebrates them, and gives our teams creative license to pursue them,” said Gebbia. I’m not interested in the debate about what comes first engineering or design, said Gebbia, “the important thing is designing the farm,” or the environment for these things to thrive.

For example, Gebbia cited a small detail that Airbnb built into its host messaging system. When a host is replying to a guest, the email can be repopulated with a message that the host sent to a former guest, but with the name changed for the current guest. The idea is that a host will commonly be emailing the same things to multiple guests, and the auto population can save them significant time. One host was so happy with the time-saver that they sent a gushing email to the team.

Airbnb might be a $2.5 billion-plus valued company now, but of course it wasn’t always so. Gebbia — who says his first entrepreneurial venture was selling drawings of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to classmates in grade school — remembers the times of rejection quite clearly. Around 2008 we were “staring in the face of rejection,” after attempting to raise funding from venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. “We got 20 email intros to investors, 10 emailed us back, 5 took coffee meetings with us, and zero invested in us,” recalls Gebbia.

Some of the best advice Gebbia says he got in 2009 from Paul Graham, the head of Y Combinator, who accepted the Airbnb founders into his accelerator. Graham gave the company permission to solve problems that wouldn’t scale, said Gebbia, explaining that Graham told his team to “go out and meet your customers.”

The early team started staying in the Airbnb rooms in New York and realized the hosts needed much better photography to show off their housing assets. After spending a weekend renting a camera, photographing host accommodations and publishing them on the site, bookings started growing immediately. The team returned to the Bay Area and reported their findings back to Graham. Graham’s immediate response was: “what are you doing here? Get back to New York.”

Sushi master Jiro is just one newer influence on the design of Airbnb. Gebbia, who studied industrial design at RISD, says his early influences also include Charles and Ray Eames, the furniture and product designer team who are widely cited as helping democratize design. In terms of company culture, the early Airbnb team visited Zappos a few years ago to learn about how to create and maintain a fun company.

Gebbia spoke at our soldout RoadMap 2012 event, which focused on design in the age of connectivity. RoadMap 2013 will take place this coming November and tickets will go on sale shortly. To be the first to know when tickets will go on sale, sign up here.

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Sift Science says it can sniff out cyber fraud — before it gets expensive

Barb Darrow — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 10:30:34 +0000

Sift Science, the startup forged by a gaggle of former Googlers, is ready for its close up. As of Tuesday, the company is opening up the testing of its fraud-detection service for e-commerce and other sites to the public and has $5.5 million in funding from some heavy-hitter investors to back its play.

The San Francisco company, which we covered in October, claims it can scope out more fraudsters before they do harm because it is not constrained by the finite number of rules that most vendors use to flag suspicious activity. “Many anti-fraud technologies follow a set number, maybe 175 to 225 rules, against which to measure user behavior — the problem is fraudsters don’t follow the rules and change all the time,” Sift Science co-founder Brandon Ballinger said in a recent interview.

Customers can flag users as fraudsters in order to train Sift Science’s algorithm to spot patterns unique to their site.

“We take a machine learning approach to learn from patterns early as they form to predict whether a new user is fraudulent,” he said. Sift Science’s machine learning algorithm has automatically learned one million patterns that predict fraud, and as more sites join the network, it will learn more patterns to help everybody fight fraud more accurately, he said.

Speeding up fraud defense

“You might expect the worst type of users to sign onto a site and make an immediate purchase [with a stolen credit card] but in reality if they wait an hour or so they’re more likely to be a fraudster than a fast buyer,” Ballinger said. “Or, if you’re an auction site and a seller posts an item where the text is all in caps, the user is four times more likely to be a fraudster — they’re not posting real items, it’s usually some sort of money laundering scheme, they’ll have 100 stolen credit cares and create a seller account and a bunch of buyer accounts then they post fake items and buy them.”

But the bad guys are always going to change things up to avoid detection. An example, in the past, the most popular time to conduct online fraud was at 3 a.m. local time but now it’s midnight to 1 a.m., Ballinger said. And, while a large percentage of traffic coming out of Nigeria remains fraudulent, a whopping 81 percent of fraud comes from U.S.-based IP addresses. “That means either they’re in the U.S. or are smart enough to use a proxy,” Ballinger said.

Applying webscale data and analytics to fraud detection

That fluidity and flexibility is important as is the company’s Google DNA. Ballinger said 8 of the company’s 9 employees are engineers and 5 are ex-Google engineers. “We’re taking the Google approach of large-scale machine learning,” he said. Except Sift Science is running on Hadoop, Hbase and MapReduce on Amazon’s public cloud.

Network funneling is one of many fraud patterns identified by Sift Science, which uses symmetry to detect when a fraudster is funneling money through a large network of accounts.

It is thus able to use Amazon Web Services huge scale –and the network effect of all the companies on it — to build its knowledge base. “If someone attacks AirBNB and Affirm we can apply that knowledge and use it elsewhere,” Ballinger said.

Sift Science, which relies on what Ballinger calls a dead-simple REST API, will face off against in the fraud detection space including Silver Tail Systems, which EMC bought last year and which watches and tracks user navigation trends; and Threatmetrix which watches device IDs.

Early customers include payment processors, online retailers, and some name brands including Airbnb and Affirm, Max Levchin’s latest startup.

The $5.5 million in funding comes from some big names including Union Square Ventures; Max Levchin of PayPal, Slide and Affirm fame; Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com; Kevin Scott of AdMob, Google and LinkedIn; Alexis Ohanian (Reddit and YCombinator); and Rich Barton (Zillow and.)

Prospective customers can sign up on Sift Science’s site for the service, which is free of charge for their first 5,000 users, the service is free; after that it’s 10 cents per user.

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How the mega data center is changing the hardware and data center markets

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 18:24:07 +0000

Mega data centers’ innovations in serviceability, automatically detecting and recovering from failures, procurement practices, and so forth will become standard practice in all modern data centers.

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Homeless in San Francisco, AirBnB founder eats his dog food

GigaOM — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 06:43:13 +0000

I am still homeless (most of the time), and living on @Airbnb. Permanent residences are for families.

AirBnB CEO & co-founder Brian Chesky via Twitter

A video conversation with Brian Chesky from our archives:

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Startups are great, but we can learn a lot from “end-ups,” too

John Maeda, Guest Contributor — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 18:30:07 +0000

At last week’s DLD Conference in Munich, I had the opportunity to sit onstage with the co-founder and CPO of Airbnb, Joe Gebbia. We started by discussing the unique creative culture at Rhode Island School of Design, where Joe went to college, and where I currently serve as president. Joe shared some of his secrets of being a successful designer-founder, and then turned the tables and asked me what it’s like to run a 136-year-old institution like RISD.

As often happens these days, the Twitter summary of my answer was perhaps more articulate than my answer itself:

@johnmaeda: “Today end-ups — old companies and institutions — want to be become more like start-ups. Yet they are classic and important.” via @AnnePascual

@johnmaeda: “Start-ups want to end up successful. Both want to be great.” via @Sloane

I sit on the board of a couple of start-ups (like Sonos and Quirky), but I spend my days running RISD – what I call an “end-up” in contrast with a start-up. I also used to be at the academic equivalent of a start-up, the MIT Media Lab, which was founded in the 1980s (30 years is young in academic terms). Now, the term end-up may sound pejorative, but in fact I mean the opposite: If you think about it, the end goal for most start-ups is to eventually become an end-up, which is to say successful and long lasting.

At the same time, you increasingly hear that large corporations and institutions now wish to act more like start-ups, in order to innovate and become more agile. My friend Jocelyn Glei, editor-in-chief of 99U, remarked recently how “start-up culture” is so much more coveted and in the zeitgeist than it was 10 years ago; prior presidents simply didn’t talk about start-ups like Obama does.

(As an interesting side note, this analogy works for countries as well. European nations like France are the great end-ups of civilization. The U.S. was a start-up that is now coping with becoming an end-up. And China is an end-up that feels like a start-up again.)

Here are some of the crucial differences between start-ups and end-ups:

Start-ups	End-ups
Want to be something	Already are something
Agile	Stable
Culture is forming	Culture has formed
Have little	Have lots
Have little to lose	Have lots to lose
Try something for the first time	Tried everything and know what works
Unproven	Proven
Do what needs to get done	Clear roles and responsibilities
Flat structure with empowerment	Hierarchical structure with rules
May come and go	Stand the test of time
Heterarchy	Hierarchy

Start-ups have little, but also little to lose

By definition, customers aren’t drawn to start-ups because of a trusted legacy or brand. So they must prove their worth to each and every new customer and get their name out without a well-resourced marketing machine behind them.

End-ups with strong brands that draw customers in, however, can become hesitant to act for fear of tarnishing or altering that brand. Start-ups have no choice but to act, and act fully – it’s the only way they’ll survive.

Change comes naturally to a start-up

A start-up is like a baby growing up: It needs to change and grow to become itself. Start-ups often dream of having the strong internal cultures, passed-down stories, and shared history that you commonly find in end-ups and that guide their decisions.

But change is awkward to an end-up, much like it can be for a grown adult trying to reimagine him/herself. It’s often necessary for end-ups, but it’s never easy.

End-ups have resources; start-ups have commitment

At end-ups, employees have well-defined roles and responsibilities. In the best case, that ensures that things are done efficiently. In the worst case, though, it can inhibit people from taking on new responsibilities with agility. At a start-up, it’s all-hands-on-deck to make sure things get out the door, even if it’s sometimes unclear whose hands are doing what and chaos ensues.

And it’s important to note that it’s the stories and legends of the great end-ups that inspire most great start-ups – think of HP, Apple, IBM. Rather than assume that all end-ups are decaying dinosaurs, we must acknowledge that each is the envy of the other in some respects.

End-ups have learned to manage scale, and have accumulated wisdom over time; start-ups have the benefit of the agile beginner’s mind. The challenge for both is to seek greatness by learning from each other.

John Maeda is a graphic designer and artist, and is president of Rhode Island School of Design. Follow him on Twitter @johnmaeda.

Photo courtesy of Anettphoto/Shutterstock.com.

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Revealed: the finalists for the 2012 Crunchies

Tom Krazit — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 18:00:44 +0000

The finalists for the 2012 Crunchies have been released, and now it’s time to decide who should rewarded for their technology innovation and leadership over the course of 2012.

The list of honorees follows below, and it’s a list packed with newcomers as well as Silicon Valley veterans. Thanks to all for voting in the nomination process, and now that we’ve narrowed it down to five candidates for each award, don’t forget to vote for which person or company you think is most deserving. Voting begins today (the voting page can be found here, and the rules are here) and closes on January 24th.

As a reminder, the Crunchies, a joint production with our friends at Techcrunch and Venturebeat, will take place on Thursday, January 31, 2013, from 7:30pm to 11:30pm at Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco. You can purchase tickets here.

So, without any further delay, the nominees for the 2012 Crunchies are as follows:

Best Technology Achievement
Baumgartner Jump
Google Glass
Mars Curiosity
SpaceX docks with International Space Station
Tesla Supercharger Network

Best Collaborative Consumption Service
Airbnb
Get It Now/Postmates
Lyft
TaskRabbit
Uber

Best E-Commerce Application
Fab
Hotel Tonight
Karma/Facebook Gifts
Warby Parker
Zulily

Best Mobile Application
Evernote
Google Maps
Grindr
Instagram
Square

Fastest Rising Startup
Exec
Lyft
Pinterest
Snapchat
Stripe

Best Content Discovery Application
Flipboard
Instapaper
Pinterest
Prismatic
Tumblr

Best Design
Facebook Timeline
Medium
Paper by FiftyThree
Square
Svbtle

Best Bootstrapped Startup
FreshBooks
Instapaper
Nimbus
Techmeme
Upverter

Sexiest Enterprise Startup
Asana
Box
Cloudera
Plexxi
Zendesk

Best International Startup
Hailo
Rovio
Soundcloud
Spotify
Xiaomi

Best Education Startup
Codecademy
Coursera
Edmodo
Khan Academy
Udacity

Best Hardware Startup
Lit Motors
Lockitron
Makerbot
Nest
Raspberry Pi

Best Time Sink
Angry Birds Star Wars
Buzzfeed
Letterpress
Pinterest
WhatsApp

Biggest Social Impact
Donors Choose
Indiegogo
Kickstarter
Kiva
Reddit

Angel of the Year
Michael Arrington
Chris Dixon
Paul Graham
David Lee
Chris Sacca

VC of the Year
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
Matt Cohler
Jim Goetz
Michael Moritz
Peter Thiel

Founder of the Year
Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia (Airbnb)
Kevin and Julia Hartz (Eventbrite)
Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla)
Kevin Systrom (Instagram)
Nir Zuk (Palo Alto Networks)

CEO of the Year
Dick Costolo (Twitter)
Phil Libin (Evernote)
Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!)
Larry Page (Google)
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Best New Startup of 2012
Coursera
Crowdtilt
Lyft
Snapchat
Waze

Best Overall Startup of 2012
Fab
Github
Instagram
Palantir
Square

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