As a founding member representing the two year MBA program, I look at my role largely as a connector. In the spirit of wanting to be a good connector, I wanted to break down what the role of a connector is and what real value connectors deliver.

Before I began my career in business school I worked as a marketer, and having read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, I’ve always regarded connectors as influencers. These are the people who stay on top of what’s new, what’s happening and can then disseminate that info to the next wave of adopters. But I wanted to expand on that so I asked the Twitterverse for some input.

Jason Evanish, co-founder of GreenhornConnect, had this to say;

“it’s the glue that holds the community together. Without connectors we are all the dorky guy at the middle school dance.”

My buddy and fellow Babsonite, Ryan Dawidjan, remarked that connectors should…

“Be the center or medium for the exchange of value between individuals/groups. The ‘pivot point’”

Two great answers. Ryan’s response speaks to the role of a connector while Jason spells out the value. Communities need glue. There are a lot of heads-down, hard working startupers who are too focused on shipping and are strapped for time when it comes to hitting the ‘be-seen’ events. In effect, they are the wall flowers at the middle school dance. Sometimes it takes a connector to refer the entrepreneur’s product or service to someone expressing a need. Or perhaps its a recruiting referral when the connector runs into someone with the right skill set. Business partnerships, investor tip, there are a tons of different ways to make a connection and help exchange value.

Ryan also nailed a piece of being a good connector. “Be the center.” Connectors exist in the middle, serving as a conduit to catalyze that value exchange. This made me think of the idea of synergy in that the combined effect of two parties is greater than their individual efforts. How many great companies would Boston be churning out if everyone was working to catalyze more value exchanges?

With that as a framework, I still wanted to think through what it takes to be a good connector. I don’t believe this is a role reserved for certain personality traits who were born networkers. With some effort and conscious action, anyone can do it.  After a little brain storming, here are a few points IMO that seem integral to becoming a good connector

1. Keep on top of what’s going on:
1. Read… a lot. Keep up to date with local journalists, bloggers and Twitter feeds who are plugged into your startup ecosystem.
2. Attend events… as much as you can. Network and talk to people about what they’re working on. Ask about what has captured their interest lately or new companies they’ve heard of
2. Build your network: Related to 1b, the more exchanges you have with people, the more likely you’ll be to successfully create a connection.
3. Make introductions: Even if you’re unsure if there’s a potential exchange, no one will fault you for trying to help. But don’t start introducing a founder to your neighbor’s son because they have similar eye colors. Have a conception of a good fit. After a while when people recognize that you’re a person who makes connections and adds value, you will begin to become a source for folks.
4. Anticipate: This is what establishes Jedi status connection skills. Try to anticipate someone’s inexplicit needs before it becomes explicit and make a connection to help serve that need.
5. Read part 1 again.

What’s in it for me you ask? Good point. Altruism may be good for the next life, but we all have to eat in the here and now. The reality is, if you’re making valuable connections for people and are actively doing 1-5 above, it’s doubtful you’ll ever be left unemployed or unfinanced.

Last week I Tumbl’d about media/tech investment bank LUMA Partners’ depiction of the ad tech landscape. In an effort to further promote this infographic marketing tool, LUMA’s founder, Terrence Kawaja, recorded a webinar titled the Science-ification of Media. It was from the webinar that I pulled this slide which gives a glimpse of what a more sophisticated dialogue between the advertiser and the consumer will look like in the online ecosystem.

Essentially what he says is that the advertiser won’t need me, as the consumer, to utter my caveman needs via search terms (as much) since the medium of display advertising will be driven by much more intelligent targeting. I will navigate to a page and based on more advanced behavioral and contextual data, the advertiser will know I’m in the market for a motorcycle (a 2001 Triumph Bonneville just in case anyone is brainstorming any gift ideas). As an aside, Kawaja makes the point during the webinar that display is experiencing a shift from art to science which this screen shot doesn’t capture, hence the graph’s key including art and science.

Of course, there arises concerns of privacy issues but above and beyond behavioral and contextual data is opt-in data which immediately mitigates privacy concerns from the get go. There is nothing private about what I’ve made transparent. Though I suppose how long data firms or advertisers could keep this data is up for debate. Nevertheless, this approach of targeting based on interest and preference is already taking place. The best illustration of this exists within the Facebook environment. Not too long ago I indicated that I ‘like’ the Triumph motorcycle brand on Facebook and low and behold, Facebook ads from Triumph and other bike brands began to appear. In my view, this is a great evolution of advertising. I’m not just a demographically ideal target buyer for Triumph, but I’ve actively indicated that I am interested in what they have for sale.

This notion of making my personal interests transparent to advertisers is an exciting one that promises growth and opportunity. This opportunity will be particularly relevant once the information I’ve provided can be utilized across many media destinations. The other component to seizing this opportunity will be gaining wider adoption. I’d gander to say I’m probably an early adopter here and more liberal with the information I share on the web as I understand and believe that more often than not, it makes my web browsing experience a better one. But I have an inkling that just in the way online dating’s stigma has dissipated, so too can the aversion to providing relevant information about oneself indicating their interests. Because in the end, the advertiser really wishes to deliver a more pleasant experience to the consumer anyway. So with that level of mutual understanding, it would seem that ‘conversation’ could evolve from caveman grunts to a sophisticated language with a fluent exchange.

At a high level, it helps to bring national attention to this crucially important component to our economy. Also, its great to see that those working in Obama’s administration are making the distinction between ‘mom & pop’ small businesses and potentially high-impact, scalable small businesses. But what does this mean for the startup community here in Boston?

To add a little context to the question, there is a great piece by Daniel Isenberg in the Harvard Business Review in which he both praises the things that were handled well but also offers some critical suggestions for improving Startup America.  Amongst the suggestions, a key piece in how this all relates to Boston’s community is this quote:

Entrepreneurship is hyper-local in that all “species” of entrepreneurs gather around extremely small “watering holes” to draw from the resources (people, ideas, capital, customers) they need to launch and grow.

The thing is, the watering hole is well stocked here. We see leadership from individuals like David Cancel, Jeremy Allaire, Roy Rodenstein, Dharmesh Shah, Simeon Simeonov, Dave Balter, John Prendergast, Brian Shin (CEO of Visible Measures which is where I work), Jeff Bussgang and many others. We have a culture of innovation that dates back to the fifties with the evolution of the 128 loop. There are tons of success stories such as TripAdvisor, A123 Systems, and EnerNOC as just a few off the top of my head. There are countless venture capital firms in the region and a plethora of angel investors to provide the capital necessary for growing startups. In fact, there was $2.12 billion that was dished out to startups in Boston last year alone which probably doesn’t even account for most of the seed rounds. As for education, well… it’s Boston. I don’t think that needs any further explanation. There is MassChallenge, Tech Stars, Y Combinator, and Dog Patch Labs to name a few of the region’s incubators which is a big component to the Startup America initiative. I’ve seen a great host of events taking place in the past couple years fostering new relationships and entrepreneurial support lead by members of the community like DART Boston and the folks at Microsoft NERD. And I think that focused media coverage from Xconomy Boston, BostInnovation, Scott Kirsner’s Innovation Economy blog on Boston.com and Mass High Tech is another important piece to the ecosystem by documenting the goings on and events that take place so that progress and shifts can be noted.

So I return to the original question of what Startup America means for Boston. From my perspective, I don’t think it will mean a whole lot. Perhaps the most impactful piece will be tax breaks and incentives for entrepreneurs but most of what the program is attempting to do are things that are already established here. There’s always room for improvement in the startup scene, don’t get me wrong but a lot of infrastructure already exists. That’s part of the reason why the MassChallenge was involved in the formation of the White House’s program.

So to expand slightly more on Daniel’s critiques, it would seem that one of the further measures of Startup America’s success will be the ability to truly foster innovation and entrepreneurship in areas of the country that do not have this type of infrastructure already in place.

I do want to end this on a positive note and reiterate that I am very excited and encouraged to see this type of attention from the top levels of our government paid to this sector of industry. And instead of simply patting ourselves on the back for a job already well done here in Boston, I’d love to hear in the comments if there are ways you think we can a) improve things here in Boston further and b) essentially teach, share, or export some of our capabilities or lessons learned to regions that are still fostering their own local innovation economies.

By my way of thinking, it really comes down to a handful of factors. I’ve made a checklist of considerations to mull over before taking the entrepreneurial plunge.

1. Distinctive Offering – I’ve heard claims that the distinguishing factor to Google’s success was the simplicity of its interface; the stripped down, bare search bar. But looking at the early designs between Google and the other early search competitors, there’s not that much of a difference. The most distinctive component of Google’s offering was PageRank. PageRank along with an incredibly talented crew of engineers made Google’s search experience the best on the web. There’s a lot more to add here which contributed to Google’s success, but I’m going to leave it at that for now.
2. Capital – If you’ve got more luchini than the next guy,  be prudent but use it to your advantage.
3. Focus – Yahoo! was in the search business since March of ’95 but hadn’t focused on that aspect of their operation with the laser precision in the way Google did. Moreover, if you’re observing a lack of focus in a market, dive in and apply that laser edge.
4. Cost – This one is pretty obvious but determine how much it costs the competition to acquire new customers/deliver their services/manufacture their products and figure out if you can do the same thing for less… sustainably.
5. Timing – If you have an idea in which you’re going to create a micro-blogging platform in which users can shoot off quick bursts of text based information, you’re a little late to the game. You’re probably even late to the social photo-sharing app game already. On the other hand, you might want to hold off if you see competitors jumping in too early like B2B online marketplace Ariba did back in 2000.
6. Blood In The Water – This is a sexier way of saying ‘if you see poor execution, counter, and attack with great execution.’ Friendster is an example that comes to mind here. Myspace sensed blood in the water as Friendster couldn’t deliver a service that loaded profile pages within forty seconds time which is shameful (and to say it was 2003 is no excuse). Needless to say, Myspace out-executed Friendster at the simple task of processing along with a list of another feature add-ons, etc. [For a good, detailed breakdown of events, this is a good read from the Times]. Then, of course we all know the story of how Myspace got Facebooked which hardly needs further analysis. Another example here would be Plurk aka the Twitter clone. Some of you may recall Twitter’s fail whale which represented essentially the same problem that Friendster experienced. Plurk launched right at the point in which many Twitter users were becoming increasingly frustrated with the amount of down time and were open to switching to a new medium. I personally recall experimenting with both. But this story plays out differently in the end (obviously) as Twitter was able to scale their processing requirements. Tech readers back me up here, but I believe they restructured their database architecture to a sharding design?
7. Location – For non-web based companies, location will certainly play a roll in sizing up your market opportunity. But how about for web based businesses? I suppose if your zip code is 94301 you would likely have a better chance at success than starting your me-too company in the Yukon.  I’d love to hear further thoughts on this.

A friend of mine recently described a concept he has for a LBS app which was the real catalyst for this post. I thought it was a really interesting idea, and a unique spin on what already exists in the market. Given LBS is one of the newer (but getting old in internet years) ‘shiny market opportunities,’ the major events have yet to play out. Foursquare, Gowalla, SCVNGR, and now Facebook are all active players in the space making for stiff competition. I should know better than to pose questions to my readership base of three visitors, but I’ll pose the question anyway to see if I can drum up some dialogue here. The question is two fold:

1. Is there anything you would add/remove/refine in the me-too checklist?
2. Based on this checklist, how would you size up the LBS market opportunity right now?

Mission Statement

There are two primary goals I’m looking to accomplish in maintaining this blog. The first is to use this as a way to sharpen my thoughts and views. I believe that blogging will force me to articulate a stance and opinion which will hone my overall thinking. The second goal is to build more personal connections and communicate with others who are intellectually engaged in the topics I chose to write about. And while I’m at it, I’m going to add a third goal which is basically a combination of the prior two. I hope that through the discourse of commenter’s feedback, it will challenge my way of thinking to further hone my views while giving me a new way to look at things.

I aim to post once a week here. When I see other blogs that post less frequently than that, it feels stale. But I’m not going to commit to more than that. If I do end up posting more regularly… bonus. And if I end up falling short, hey, nobody is perfect.

Lastly, I aim to maintain a focus of topics here. There are a bunch of other great blogs out there that cover a lot of ground. In some cases, I feel they try to cover too much ground. I’ve always steered towards blogs that keep to a relatively consistent theme. The tagline I wrote states this blog is “Mostly thoughts on business, startups, and technology.” I intendto stick to that so for those who navigate here, you can know what to expect for the most part.

That is not to say business, startups, and technology are the extent of my interests which is why I’ve also created a page tab for my Tumblog. In launching jamestheiii here on WordPress, I’ve also launched a new Tumblog to coincide.  I’ll post mostly about art, music, fashion, and other cultural related tidbits over there for anyone who cares or is interested.

Further Context

I really am a third. James Francis O’Connor III that is. I hope the URL I selected doesn’t come off as lofty or pompous. Its just that jamesoconnor.com was already taken (and yes, I’m not going to hyperlink that URL out of spite). The same went for my Twitter handle. Plus, I figure it better to keep the consistency. And as for the header image, I grabbed that from a nifty site called weeplaces.com. It provides you with a visualized timeline of all your geo/social checkins. I felt it was a good representation of me in that it depicts my use of social technologies (Foursquare in this case) while illustrating where I live and where I’ve been.

If there’s anything I’ve missed or haven’t covered in this inaugural post, please leave me a comment and I’ll get with the updating.