Captain Chelsey Sullenberger, the pilot who managed to calmly and safely land US Air Flight 1549 in the Hudson River, is one cool character. By anyone’s measure, the guy is a hero. A former Air Force fighter pilot with thirty years of flying experience, Sullenberger trained pilots to deal with mid-air emergencies like the one he found himself in.

Clearly, those of us building startups are dealing with issues and outcomes on an entirely different scale… success or failure is very far from life or death. But as I caught clips of interviews with Sullenberger, I couldn’t help but draw a few parallels to our world.

In a recent interview with Katie Couric, Sullenberger was asked what was required to make a successful water landing. He responded:

“I needed to touch down with the wings exactly level. I needed to touch down with the nose slightly up. I needed to touch down at a descent rate that was survivable. And I needed to touch down just above our minimum flying speed but not below it. And I needed to make all these things happen simultaneously.”

The reason that most new ventures fail is that so many things need to simultaneously go right in order to succeed. You’re juggling ten balls, each of which needs to be accounted for, and all of which could derail your momentum if dropped to the floor. There is distraction and noise and yet somehow you need to lock in on those ten balls.

Sullenberger goes on to say…

“I had to solve this problem. I knew I had to find a way out of this box I found myself in… My focus at that point was so intensely on the landing…I thought of nothing else.”

Couric asks if this was difficult, to which Sullenberger coolly responds…

“No. It just took some concentration.”

Most of us will never have half the steely nerves of Sullenberger, but we can certainly learn more intense concentration. Startups rarely seem to fail for lack of good ideas, but often seem to fail for lack of focus. With so many variables in motion, it can be difficult to develop the proper tunnel vision required for perfect execution. By nature, most entrepreneurs that I know are relatively frenetic thinkers and are habitual multi-taskers. That said, the best of them have an ability to take a deep breath and silence the clutter (for minutes, hours, or days) in order to execute against a series of mission critical tasks. Hopefully, we will never need to land a plane on the water, but the more we appreciate Sullenberger, the more we may pilot businesses to success.

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Running a company myself, I clearly have a biased perspective, but I continue to meet -  almost daily – entrepreneurs, many of them first-time entrepreneurs, diving headlong into new ventures.  I’ve come to believe that the driving reason for this continued optimism is that the opportunity cost of starting a new company has never been lower.

The concept of measuring opportunity cost was a favorite pastime of many people that I met back in business school.  Prior to graduate school, they had painstakingly built spreadsheets calculating lost salary while subtracting cost of living and other intangibles to come up with some mystical number that they believed they were losing by attending school.  Frankly, I never cared much about such mystical things, but I know people do, so consider this…

In the job you are working now, you will likely make less than you made last year or not nearly as much as you had anticipated when you took that job.  That is, if you have a job at all – there is a fair chance you may lose it.  Reduced (or no) salary, no bonuses, no job security – it starts to look like your opportunity cost of quitting is pretty damn low.

Not to mention that the world around you is going broke, so the social stigma of going broke has never been lower.  Would you rather go broke sitting in that comfy corporate chair, or at the very least controlling your own destiny as your bank account gets to zero.  As William Wallace would say, “You’ve come to fight as free men… and free men you are. What will you do with that freedom? Will you fight?”

You may not liberate Scotland, but you may create a job for yourself and others, innovatively solve some of the problems that got us into this mess in the first place, and build the foundation for more efficient industries to emerge from the wreckage.  The cost of taking up this challenge has never been lower.  Get out there.  Quit your job, start a company.

The launch got some wonderful media coverage and I’d encourage you to take a look…

PlaceVine in LA Times

PlaceVine in AdWeek

Official Press Release

And so it goes in the startup world, we take a minute for proud reflection and then put our heads back down on building a great company!

Business plans are a great section in the science fiction genre. They are made for the kind of people who like sausages and don’t know how they are made.

He captured the sentiment that I had tried to deliver in a talk last month to incoming MBAs interested in Entrepreneurship at The Wharton School.  Returning as a three month old alum, I tried to deliver three very simple points:

(1) Normalcy: Being an entrepreneur is totally and completely normal (this sounds intuitive to most reading this blog, but is not at all obvious in an environment created to funnel new graduates into high paying corporate jobs)

(2) Commitment: The most important thing one can do to start a business is to whole-heartedly commit (no hedging and no back-up plans) to starting a business.  Smart people with their backs against the wall figure out how to make things work.

(3) Execution: Truly original ideas are few and far between… startups succeed based on execution.  I lamented that the Entrepreneurial Management curriculums of most top business schools are long on business plans (long plans, shorts plans, plans of plans!), yet short on execution.  I’ll be impressed when a school abandons their “Business Plan Competition” for a “Business Competition” that tests who can build the best operational (rough beta form) business in 6 months.  As Yossi would argue, let’s stop talking about the sausage and start grinding it into form!

On a related note, my Co-Presenter Seth Berger, the Founder of And 1 apparel and a truly hilarious guy, made an excellent point during our Q&A session about startup compensation.  He posited that MBA graduates were all overly interested in raising venture money for startups because few would stomach making less than six figures.  Peter Thiel, speaking at the aforementioned TechCrunch 50 event, hammered this point home by saying, “the lower the CEO salary, the more likely it is to succeed.”  As Stewart Brand entoned and Steve Jobs echoed,  “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.”

Ps.  For anyone interested in watching this full presentation, it is over here on the Wharton Entrepreneurial Program website.  I’ll warn you that there is no fast forward and I don’t come until 30 minutes in, so this is very much a friends and family link!

It used to be that I ran into a lot of people here in town who had some kind of film project going on. It is an old cliche that every waiter and waitress was either working on a project, had a script, or otherwise looking to make it into Hollywood here. Interestingly enough, it seems in recent months I’ve bumped into lots of folks who seem to have some kind of “web project” going on the side–be that a web video series, content-oriented web site, or even consumer Internet startup. It’s never a company, it’s always some “side project.”

Much as blogs have become digital resumes and calling cards for those of us in the business of technology, “web projects” seem to have taken on similar meaning for those in entertainment.

Over the past decade, declaring the death of “content as king” has become quite fashionable. Andrew Odlyzko seems to have started the trend in earnest with his January 2001 First Monday article entitled, “Content is Not King”. This week Lehman Brothers analyst Anthony DiClemente jumped on the bandwagon. In discussing structural changes in the film and TV content businesses, DiClemente went back to the well and prophisized that “content may no longer be king in the entertainment business“.

In my opinion, these declarations are sensationalist and off the mark.

Will the tectonic changes in distribution set in motion by digital infrastructure change the economics and structure of the content business? Certainly.

Will quality content (great stories performed by great talent) still be the defining asset of the winners in this shake-out? Absolutely.

DiClemente states that “distribution giants Apple and Google seem to prove time and time again” that content is dying. Yet 48 hours later the Wall Street Journal was reporting on the significant challenges that Google is having monetizing content on YouTube. With reports that YouTube is only able to sell advertising against 4% of its entire universe of content, and Google sales head Tim Armstrong attempting to fix the “105 problems with YouTube’s ad sales”, all does not seem so rosy in the land of DiClemente’s heir apparents.

Our old king, Content, seems to get another boost from an upcoming study by The Diffusion Group. As reported by NewTeeVee…

“User-generated video will account for 42 percent of streams this year, but only 4 percent of online video revenue… Conversely, professional online video will account for 58 percent of streams and 96 percent of revenue.”

Advertisers and media buyers, who in many ways hold the keys to the kingdom via ad support, seem, at least for the foreseeable future, content (no pun intended) with the current monarch. That said, there will be no lavish feasts in the castle. To borrow another old adage, it may no longer be “good to be king”.

The economics of the content kingdom will shrink and will be marginally more distributed. The recent writer’s strike and current SAG negotiations are just one piece of evidence that there is strife amidst the royal family. The ability to produce great content with lower production costs means that more great talent may able to finance and monetize content independently. New technology means that great content may be developed in a multitude of forms and with new degrees of interactivity.

Regardless, great content is still what will attract viewers. No amount of wrangling in the kingdom will leave viewers happy to watch poor content just because its broadcast on an IPTV or an iPhone. Content will still be king. It will rule more benevolently and perhaps more frugally, but it will still reign supreme.

I usually leave the photography to my friends with far better cameras and better aesthetic sense, but I thought that this image captured on my camera phone at a recent Barack Obama rally in Philadelphia was worth sharing.  What could more personify “Hope” than children on their parents shoulders straining in the darkness to see the light of the man who will hopefully be the next President of the United States.

I’ll admit that in the past couple of months I have fallen prey at different times to making excuses based on school.  Balancing a full-time graduate program while maintaining momentum on the more than full-time job of propelling a startup forward has been difficult to say the least.  I watched as both undergraduate and graduate peers that I knew left school (or took leaves of absence) to pursue their companies and wondered about the trade-offs that I was making.  I cringed nearly every time I heard myself say “it’s been a challenging semester balancing school and work”.

But after completing my last final last week, I will finally wake up tomorrow in a zone of no excuses.  The leg weights of school will be off and we will be just another startup, running as fast as we can, founded by two guys who were lucky enough to meet each other at school, but whose company will be judged in the real world without a safety net.  Granted, we were both on the management team of startups prior to school and crave the freedom and challenge on being out on a limb, but I won’t deny that playing the student card had occassional merits.

“Had”… past tense.  With only one title in life now, there will be no less work and no more sleep only more focus and no room for excuses.

Part I: The Problem

This morning in New York City, I bounded down to one of my favorite coffeeshops in the world, Snice in the West Village.  Hot coffee and bagel in hand, I opened my laptop only to find that Snice no longer offers Wi-Fi.  I should have seen it coming as the last time I was in there, there was a guy who had literally brought an iMac desktop, complete with full keyboard, and smacked it down on a table (whoever you are, you are an inconsiderate idiot!).  They had instituted a no laptop policy on many of the tables especially on weeekends, so it was only a matter of time.  I finished my coffee, did what I could offline, and walked around the corner to another favorite, Grounded on Jane Street.  I ordered a decaf this time, sat down, opened my laptop and once again, nothing.

I am now at Starbucks, where, thanks to T-Mobile, for $40 a month, I am assured of a connection.  The problem is that I don’t like sitting in Starbucks.  I want to sit in Snice or Grounded, or Tryst (if, god forbid, I’m in DC), or Cafe Hausbrandt (in Philadelphia), or the Panini Garden (in Santa Monica), or the Dolores Park Cafe (in San Francisco).  Last I checked, Tryst, Hausbrandt, and Panini Garden all still offered free wireless connections.  But free is not the issue, I’d be happy to pay.  The creative, office-less class is killing coffeeshop Wi-Fi and we must figure out a way to save it.

Starbucks doesn’t face the same problem.  The vast majority of their sales come from quick serve “to-go” customers.  In fact, Starbucks recently announced that it is moving from T-Mobile to AT&T and will now be offering patrons a free two hours of wireless access per coffee purchased.  The same is not true of neighborhood coffee shops which serve breakfast, lunch, and assorted food along with coffee and make their money on “sit down” customers.  Those of us wanting to co-opt their space for our office reduce turnover and hence revenue opportunities.

Part II: The Solution

The earliest proposed solution to this problem seemed to be aggregators like Boingo who were piecing together networks and ostensibly offering some royalty back to the access point from which traffic originated.  It now looks like there is an even more direct solution to the problem in the form of Whisher, a new software application which lets any access point owner turn their node into a pay-for-access hotspot.

So there you go.  Snice, Grounded, et al… you have a customer waiting.  Charge me.  I want to pay because I realize my rent should not be completely free and I want to continue working in pleasant spaces.  Please, take my money, but don’t evict from my office!