Fernando Pizarro

I’m putting this post on my personal page rather than on the Cinecandy blog because I don’t know how long I’ll keep the Cinecandy blog going.  For which the reason is that I’ve decided to shut Cinecandy down.

For those of you following the story, I worked on Cinecandy from the time I joined the Founder Institute in the winter of 2010 all through 2011.  I thought it would be worth writing about the experience and what I learned.  It’s probably worth noting that most of the lessons may well be internal ones, rather than broadly applicable.  That said, the exercise is probably a good one for me.

One thing that hindsight does is that it creates a coherent story – our memory focuses on selected facts and de-emphasizes others in order to create a narrative that makes sense.  This kind of hindsight exists both in the case of success and in the case of failure.  For successes the tendency is to emphasize the things that one did right.  For failures, the tendency is to emphasize elements that were beyond one’s control.

I already find myself doing this with my Cinecandy narrative – focusing on things like a tight job market for not being able to find a co-founder, for instance.  So I will really try to focus on things that were in my control, good and bad.

Lesson 1:  Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I always thought grokked this lesson.  But I only thought it applied to product – to features, cost/benefit tradeoffs, and time to market.  Not so.

It applied for me big time when it came to the search for a co-founder.  I was too picky in a couple of instances, thinking I could go ahead on my own, and confident that the fact that the product was being built by a contract developer meant I was making progress.  There was one person in particular who would have been a fantastic fit, but they were in Los Angeles.  I didn’t want to commute, I didn’t want a long distance partnership, and I was stupid on both counts.  I should have considered myself lucky to find someone technically gifted and personally compatible and just made it work.  I can’t stress this enough – particularly if you are a business founder, if you are able to sell someone you like and who is capable on your vision – virtually no other criteria justifies not taking them on.  Anyway – I think that I would have gotten a hell of a lot more done and had a far better experience…which might still be continuing, if I had been more flexible about finding a co-founder.  I think this flies in the face of a lot of advice out there around co-founders needing to be soulmates and the search for co-founders being a lot like dating.  I guess I ended up being the 40 year old spinster who finds herself alone after a lifetime of rejecting perfectly good suitors.

Lesson 2:  Misery Needs Company

I need people around me.  This is slightly different from needing a co-founder as an intellectual partner and someone to smooth out the emotional rollercoaster of doing a startup. It’s much more basic – I spent a lot of time working by myself and I realized that I am far happier working on teams.

Lesson 3:  Figure Out ALL Your Runways…

Emotional runway.  I can only deal with about a year’s worth of complete ambiguity.  At a year I realized that not knowing when I would have clarity wouldn’t work for me.  By the same token, if I had been able to see a time down the road when I would be able to prove the concept, or have enough traction to raise money, I think I would have stuck with it.  But, having that moment always be right around the corner was in the end more than I could deal with.

The money thing is insiduous.  We didn’t blow all our savings on Cinecandy, but we spent a lot, and I think the knowledge that it would take more in order to clear then next hurdle made me more tentative than I might have been otherwise.  And being tentative just doesn’t cut it.

Lesson 4:  Walk Before You Fly

I didn’t REALLY prove the concept.  This one is tricky, because Cinecandy ultimately relied on making a beautiful product – a finished, easy to make video.  And in order to do that I had to make the technology that would create such a product.  So the conundrum wasn’t easy – in retrospect I think I should have hired a film editor to do everything manually for a bunch of customers and see if they liked and would pay for the results.  That wouldn’t have been that much cheaper, but I would have gotten the proof I needed earlier.  In fact I never truly got the proof I needed – that people would pay for a video of a special occasion with input from their friends and family.

This is a great example of people telling you what you need to know and still not doing it.  I read Eric Reis, I believe the lean startup mantra.  But I still built way too much before knowing that I could make something that people would pay for.  Live and learn.

Also, I spent big on lawyers and a full-on Delaware C-Corp.  I had a great deal with Wilson Sonsini to defer legal expenses (thanks to the Founder Institute), but they were due at the end of the year and piled on with the rest of the money I had spent into my mental calculus.  I would have been better off building product and proof of concept without having all of the incorporation stuff done – it was a needless distraction at my stage.  C-corps cost money, require attention, and involve lawyers…all fine when you have a product that’s getting some traction, but before then a useless waste of time.  The argument to get that all done early is that it makes it easy for investors.  These days I’d contend that if the product is working and you have traction, you can definitely figure out the legal and entity stuff.

Lesson 5:  Know yourself

Would I do it again?  Of course.  Would I do it the same way?  No way – but I know myself better now, and that counts for a great deal…

The Occupy Wall Street movement is still in its infancy, but the speed of its growth and the passion it has tapped portends large for society.  A lot has been written elsewhere about what and who the movement really represents and what its goals are, so I won’t go into those topics.  Rather, what I am concerned about is that once the dust settles and the who’s and how’s become clear, there will still be a long way to go for the movement to translate its support and vision into political change.  Because let’s face it, at the end of the day we in the United States have already won what many of the other Occupy revolutions have sought – a representative political system sensitive to the will of the people.

Making their will heard is what the 1% have mastered through lobbying.  I think that the response, in addition to camping out in Zuccotti Park, is through collective action via the ballot box.  No matter how many squares we camp out in, at the end of the day the only way to compel real change will be through elections.  And honestly, that makes me feel pretty good, because given the numbers, which the movement clearly has, and the organization made possible by the internet and mobile, real change is posibble.

So here are some ideas:

1)  Anyone who shows the commitment necessary to come to an OWS should be signed up for automated reminders to register to vote.  Everyone coming out should become part of a mailing list.  Mail Chimp, anyone?

2)  A free OWS mobile app could be used to provide several organizational benefits:

– Reminding people to register

– Providing the locations of the nearest polling places

– Allowing people to volunteer for driver service using car sharing services as in (3) below.

– Creating  ”Political Poke” groups in which small groups of 5-10 app owners call each other to encourage voting

– Identifying candidates at all levels who make pledges consistent with the OWS agenda – whenever that agenda gets set

–  Identifying the most sensitive elections at all levels – in which small numbers of votes can make a difference – in order to let people know when their votes will have the greatest impact.

3)  Using car-sharing services to provide rides for voters on election day

– This can be done either through the OWS app itself (no ideal) or through an effort by the car sharing startups in the valley:  Relay Rides, Getaround, etc.

4)  Crowdsourcing political ads

–  If there is one thing OWS probably over indexes for it is creativity.  That creativity should be harnessed to produce political advertisements, and there are several technology companies that could help – Youtube and Vimeo come to mind.

5)  Changing venues

–  I think a Political version of “Let’s Lunch” would be a great way to let politicians get to know the people involved with OWS – and the Tea Party, for that matter, in a context that is less formal and more meaningful than the current mass actions.

I’m sure there’s tons more – I’d love to see suggestions in comments.

I am torn.  I’ve been following the debt ceiling debate and the ongoing division in the US about what sort of a country we would like to be.  The age old debate between pragmatism and idealism.  To be honest I have gone back and forth on the fundamental question – should government be smaller than it is today?  I mean – isn’t there some sort of self-equilibrating size that optimizes for the greatest good among the most people?  And isn’t the answer to this question in fact a summation of millions of individual laws and their effects on millions of citizens’ utility?

I can’t help but think that politics is the one place that technology has not improved our lot.  If government is the marketplace for the pricing of the common good – it sure seems like a a pretty dysfunctional market:  opaque, illiquid, ridden with asymmetry and made worse by the fact that no one believes the playing field is level.

And yet, haven’t other markets with similar issues been improved with the introduction of technology that aggregates information and facilitates trading?  Futures markets, equity markets, debt markets.  The benefits that have accrued when clear pricing, transparency, and oversight were introduced have been huge.  So – what would a Common Good Market (CGM) look like?

The currency:  obviously on some level everything is priced in dollars.  But how to standardize the value of the benefits that accrue to groups or individuals so that they can be priced?  I actually think that a start would be to give each citizen, of any age, an official Common Good account.  This account would reflect credits and debits against that citizen’s wellbeing, priced in CG points.  Legal guardians would manage accounts for their charges.  For simplicity’s sake, assume everyone starts with a zero balance at birth and accrues at a fixed rate…though you can complicate the point system with age, wealth, and any number of other factors.

Making laws is like making sausage, and laws at all levels of government add credits and debits to each citizen in differing measure – the problem is it’s not clear who benefits and who loses, and to what extent, when the law is created.

To increase transparency, the key function of legislative drafting (and of legislators) would be to define an arbitrary CG point gain or loss to any proposed  law, along with a definition of the groups of citizens affected by the law.  Affected citizens could then “price” the law up or down by buying it or selling it using the points in their CG accounts.  The point here is that citizens who benefitted disproportionately from a law would spend more of their CG points to support it and those who didn’t would not – providing a much better indication of a law’s benefits.  Passage would be determined based on a net CG effect.  I’ll defer to the folks who manage World of Warcraft on the intricacies of the point system – but you get the thrust of it.

Lawmaking takes effect at multiple levels – federal, state, and local.  Moreover there are overlapping jurisdictions at each level.  Lots of waste, obviously, but also lots of ways for people with good lobbyists to get what they want.  The CGM would incorporate the laws at all three levels – making them all visible, and importantly, equilibrating their effects.  A single nationwide repository, with prices denominated in CG units reflected at all times for each individual law.  It would very quickly become evident who was benefitting disproportionately.

This might all sound very complicated, opening the solution to the charge that it would require too much involvement from citizens.  But the fact is that those who did not participate would be affected by the laws as proposed – much as things stand today.  Those who cared could simply look at their CG account to see how proposed or passed laws were affecting them.  And if they disagreed with the effects, they could always sell the laws that didn’t work for them.

And, really, could introducing clear pricing of the Common Good be that much worse than what we have today?

Technology has made communications so much easier and efficient in recent years, and yet sometimes technology companies have to walk a very fine line between allowing openness and deferring to less open regimes in which they do business.  It seems obvious, but I think the issue is far more important when we’re talking about communications as opposed to, say, strip mining coal.

Of course, most people these days know of the power of social networks in the context of the various upheavals in the Middle East – and rightly consider these tools a great step forward.  I’m reminded, though, of a time when I worked at an internet company in Southeast Asia.  At the time our business was growing by leaps in bounds in certain markets – due more to serendipity than any particular stroke of genius on our part.  In any case, we had large numbers of users in Vietnam, and we believed that the Vietnamese market would be an important one for us going forward.

Ironically, before we could drop our own servers in country (and thereby become legally subject to local jurisdiction), some of the bloggers on our platform wrote things with which the Vietnamese government disagreed.  Now it’s worth noting that this took place right around the time that Google was having a tough time because it was voluntarily censoring its search results in China.  So internet companies were sensitive to these types of issues.  Long story short, the Vietnamese government requested that we had over the personal details of one of the bloggers.  Because we had not yet deployed in country (we later did) we were able to say that we could not divulge.  But it was a very tough decision.  Licenses were in process, approvals were needed, and there was a strong incentive to appear cooperative.

At the time I was managing the BD activity for Vietnam, and I remember how good it made me feel that we were standing up for a right – free speech – in which I strongly believe.  Several of the requests for information had come through me, and I remember thinking that, on some level, it wasn’t our blogging tool that was helping the blogger – though of course it was a great platform – it was the company’s decision not to reveal his or her identity.  The policy, not the technology.

I don’t know what happened with that policy after I left, but it strikes me that corporations wield so much power these days – especially in communications – that they have an almost higher calling.  It’s as if the public square itself is now in the domain of non-government entities.  And it seems that maintaining freedom in that public square will often collide with financial objectives, if the experience in places like Vietnam is one to go on.  I wonder, is the maintenance of open communications platforms a noble calling separate from business in the same way that journalism is?