By: Henry Blodget

Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004.  Five years later, it has 300 million users and $500 million in revenue, and it’s worth something north of $6 billion.

Now 25, Mark still runs the place. 

He was kind enough to sit down with me recently to talk about how the heck he did it.

“Move fast and break things” is Mark’s prime directive to his developers and team. “Unless you are breaking stuff,” he says, “you are not moving fast enough.”

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By: Tim Ferris

Putting All the Chips on the Table?

Growing up as I did, with an early interest in business, it was almost impossible not to envy people like Gates, and even measure myself against them. Gates had placed all his chips on the table at one time and walked away richer than Croesus. And me? Well, I’d never even sat down at the table. The way I saw it, I couldn’t. I graduated from a state university with a stack of loans to repay. No sooner had I begun to dig my way out of personal debt than I met my wife (who failed to bring her own shovel). I remember her father joking with me soon after we got engaged. “Son,” he said, “I want to let you know about Lori’s dowry—you get her student loans and her bad teeth!” He laughed from deep in his chest. I moaned from the same spot. Add to that three children born within five years, and I felt like I was slogging through quicksand. If only I was in a different position, I used to think. If only I had the courage to take on more risk, like Bill Gates, like lots of others I used to list to myself. And then finally, years later, I realized that that’s not how it happened at all. William Henry Gates III was born October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, to a family with a rich history in business, politics, and community service. His great-grandfather had been a state legislator and mayor, his grandfather was the vice president of a national bank, and his father was a prominent and very wealthy lawyer. Because young Bill excelled from his earliest school days, especially in science and math, his parents saw that he was enrolled in prestigious Lakeside Prep, known for its intense academic environment. This was in the late 1960s, when the world of computing was just beginning to peek over the horizon and carried a golden price tag. But no problem. To assure Lakeside’s students wouldn’t be left behind, the school held a fund-raiser and, with the proceeds, rented what it thought would be a year’s worth of time on a computer owned by General Electric. Bill Gates, his close friend Paul Allen, and a few others torpedoed that plan in a big hurry. They started hanging out in the computer room day and night, learning everything they could, even to the detriment of their other academic obligations. Within a matter of weeks, the expected year’s worth of allotted computer time was gone, but that was no problem either. The school simply struck a new deal, this one with Seattle-based Computer Center Corporation, to get additional computer time at good rates. That might have worked if young Gates and his friends hadn’t immediately started (a) hacking into CCC’s security system so they could reset the meter that tracked computer use and (b) crashing the system just for fun. They were caught, and the company banned Gates and his cohorts from its computers for several weeks. (The thought of Gates and Allen as the godfathers of a hacking subculture that has cost Microsoft and the world overall hundreds of billions of dollars does indeed boggle the mind.) But again, the exile was only temporary. CCC’s business was beginning to suffer from the system’s weak security and the frequency with which it crashed—many of the same flaws Gates and his friends had been exploiting—so the company offered the gang a deal: find the bugs and pinpoint the weaknesses in the system, and they could have unlimited use of the computer. In 1970, Computer Center Corporation ran into financial trouble that would eventually put it out of business, but by then, Gates and Allen had found a new computer home at the University of Washington, where Allen’s father worked. Lakeside also pitched in: during Gates’s junior year at the prep school, the administration offered him a job computerizing the scheduling system. Over the summer, Gates and Allen wrote the program, which coincidentally assured that Gates was assigned to classes with mostly girls—a sequence straight out of a nerd’s revenge movie. In the fall of 1973, Gates left Seattle to begin his freshman year at Harvard, part of his preprogrammed life plan. Allen, who almost certainly could have been admitted to Harvard along with his pal, chose a different route. He wanted hands-on experience, but the two remained in close contact, often discussing the potential of one day starting a company, and at the end of Gates’s first year at Harvard, Allen moved closer to Boston so they could continue to pursue the still-vague possibilities. Then, in December of Gates’s sophomore year, the vague future began to take on a more exact face. On a visit to Harvard, Allen stopped at a convenience store and noticed the current issue of Popular Electronics magazine. On the cover, under the title “World’s First Microcomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models,” was a picture of the Altair 8800. Energized as he had never been, Allen showed the magazine to Gates, and within a few days Gates had called the maker of the computer, Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems (MITS), and told them that he had written a BASIC computer program that could be used on the Altair. This was a lie. Gates and Allen were just trying to gauge interest from the company. But MITS was deep in its own deception: the computer shown on the cover had not been developed yet, and even the prototype had been lost in shipping. Still, the magazine article had generated interest far exceeding expectations, so MITS asked Gates and Allen to come in and demonstrate what they were thinking. Only then did the two set out to write the code. Gates focused on programming while Allen worked on simulating how it would work on an Altair 8800, which they didn’t have. At the meeting eight weeks later, the program worked perfectly, and MITS arranged a deal to purchase the rights to Gates’s BASIC. Gates would later say that it was at this moment he knew the software market had been born. Yet, despite his growing certainty of the opportunity in front of him, Bill Gates waited another 12 months, until his junior year, to drop out of school and, with Allen, form Micro-Soft. And even then, the company might have amounted to little more than a footnote in the history of software without Bill Gates’s mother. Long active in community service in the Seattle area, Mary Maxwell Gates became the first female president of the United Way of King County and eventually chair of the executive committee of the national United Way, then one of the most influential nonprofit positions in the world. Serving on the exec committee with her back in the early seventies were, among others, John Akers, who would later become the CEO and chairman of International Business Machines (IBM), and John Opel, who preceded Akers in both positions. Mary Gates mentioned her son’s new business to Opel, who by many accounts then relayed this information to other top IBM executives. There’s no definitive record of what got said when to whom, but only a few weeks after Mary Gates got the ball rolling, IBM took a huge chance by contracting with Bill Gates’s fledgling company to develop an operating system for the company’s first personal computer. The success of both the IBM PC and the Microsoft Disc Operating System (or MS-DOS)—and the sweetheart deal that let Microsoft retain rights to its software—is what ultimately made Bill Gates the richest man on the planet.
Experience, Not Faith
So, did Bill Gates walk away from one of the world’s most coveted degrees toward an uncertain path? Well, he did ultimately make decisions from which there would be no turning back. That part of the myth is dead on. But was Gates a great risk taker? That’s a more complicated story. His family’s money and position provided cover for his youthful computing hijinks and helped assure that he would have the best education available. As for the famous Harvard dropout story, he didn’t really. Rather, he took a formal “leave of absence,” a kind of emotional umbilical cord that kept him tied to Harvard long after he had vacated the campus, just in case things didn’t work out. But by then, he had already turned the odds in his favor. After half a decade of dancing with the opportunity, beginning early in high school, he had already covered most of his downside risks. He knew, for example, that he loved the work, and the early Micro-Soft had projects in the pipeline. What’s more, Gates had validation that both he and Allen were highly competent with this new technology, and he could see that the topside potential was huge. The industry was just emerging, and his mother was in the particularly influential position of head of a United Way executive committee that also included two future CEOs of the world’s dominant computer company. As they say, it’s often not what you know but who your mother knows that can land you billion-dollar contracts. Far from being one of the world’s great risk takers, Bill Gates might more accurately be thought of as one of the world’s greatest risk mitigators. And in that, he is not alone. The simple fact is that everyone is afraid of risk at some level, including everyone I interviewed for this book. That’s a given of human nature. But the further fact is that Door No. 3 is a myth, whether we’re talking about the myth of Bill Gates or the myths that we privately tell ourselves. You don’t have to be fearless to make dramatic changes in your life. Transformative change isn’t propelled by raw courage. It’s “sparked” by a series of events that build exposure and experience, both of which help to create asymmetric risk. Through sparking, the upside opportunity is confirmed while downside risk is mitigated. Ultimately, the leap—when it comes—is not one of faith but of experience, even of comfort, just as it was for Gates. ### Interested in more behind-the-scenes stories?  Check out Leap <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591842565?ie=UTF8&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1591842565> .  It can be read in two quick sittings and will get you off your ass to do whatever it is that you aspire to do

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By: D.C. Denison, Globe Staff

Former rapper hails use of social media platforms

There was nothing nostalgic about MC Hammer’s appearance yesterday before 100 entrepreneurs and marketing professionals who gathered at the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge for the Gravity Summit conference on social media marketing.

For many in the audience, Hammer, the energetic dancer and rapper whose music career peaked in the early 1990s, is more about the present than ever. With more than 1.3 million followers on Twitter, the California entertainer has been keeping a large audience up to date with the smallest details of his life, in increments of 140 characters or less.

From the time he landed in Boston Sunday night (“Wheels down!!! Boston . . . Yes!!’’) to the start of the conference, Hammer sent 14 Twitter updates, or “tweets.’’

He sent five tweets during the talks that proceeded his morning keynote address. Hammer’s tweets also appeared on his Facebook page, where his number of “fans’’ recently topped 43,000. Meanwhile, Hammer’s MySpace friends are closing in on 24,000.

There were no requests for “U Can’t Touch This’’ or “Too Legit to Quit’’ from the conference attendees, who sipped coffee in a wood-paneled, chandelier-lit room across the street from Harvard Yard. Instead, the agenda was how to make a social media splash like Hammer has done.

The daylong Gravity Summit was making its East Coast debut after three events in California: at Stanford University and the University of California at Los Angeles and at Irvine.

When he took to the podium, Hammer was short on specifics, but long on enthusiasm. He urged the audience to follow his example and “get involved’’ with services like Twitter and Facebook, even if there’s no obvious way to make money.

“I jumped in with both feet, early,’’ he said, adding that with the number of users who are now online (“250 million on Facebook!’’) there’s got to be a way to “sell those people something!’’

Hammer, who’s real name is Stanley Kirk Burrell, has not been idle since the days when his videos were in heavy rotation on MTV. He has worked as a preacher, a record producer, commercial pitchman, and serial entrepreneur. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife of 24 years and seven children. His most absorbing current project is “Hammertime,’’ a reality show about his family’s domestic life that airs on the A&E cable network.

But yesterday, Hammer made it clear that future projects will all involve social media.

“I’m both an entrepreneur and a brand,’’ he said. “Being in the center of my universe is important to me. That’s what Twitter lets me do. . . . I want to get out in front of the conversation.’’

Asked by an audience member whether all musicians should be active on Twitter, Hammer hesitated.

“I happen to know that a lot of guys who are known for their love songs don’t actually know anything about love,’’ he said, adding that tweets from these singers could backfire by revealing how clueless they are about matters of the heart.

But for a natural showman like MC Hammer, ignoring social media “is not an option’’ he said.

“Social media is all about visibility and awareness,’’ he added. “It’s a great way to add value to my brand.’’

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By: Seth Godin

I was talking with a few executives from one of the biggest technology companies in Europe, and they were explaining how their hands were tied in moving forward on the internet. They were doing the best they could under the circumstances, of course, but there were units in their organization that needed to be protected, prices that needed to be supported, sacred cows that couldn’t be touched. After all, they argued, how could they wipe out their current business just to succeed online?

This conversation happens every single day at organizations large and small. You want to do the new thing, but of course you must do it in a measured, rational way.

Which is great, unless your competition doesn’t agree.

When you have someone who is willing to accomplish A without worrying about B and C, they will almost always defeat you in accomplishing A. Online, of course, this often leads to doom, since there are many organizations that are willing to get big at the expense of revenue, or writers willing to be noticed at the expense of ethics or reputation. But in the short run, the singleminded have a fantastic advantage. And sometimes, their singleminded focus on accomplishing just that one thing (whatever it is) pushes them through the Dip far ahead of you and then yes, they make a ton of money and you’ve lost forever.

Newspapers, magazines, TV stations, hardware companies, real estate brokers, travel agents, bookstores, insurance agents, art galleries and five hundred other industries need to think hard about this before it’s too late.

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By: Seth Godin

If you invent or launch or market (and you’re human) it’s likely that you have the voice of the critic in the back of your head. It’s natural to fear what they’ll say, and if you’re not careful, you’ll end up redesigning your product to please them before you even launch it.

Imagine the restaurant chef who changes the interior of the restaurant to please the Michelin critic (they insist on a certain quality of cutlery in order to award a three star review). It might be your boss who is the critic. Or consider the B2B manufacturer who alters the product specs in order to meet the standards of the GAO so he can sell to the US Government…

Some critics matter. (Your biggest customer, for example). Some are merely loud. Others are just difficult.

Janet Maslin at the New York Times is a cranky hack. She reviews popular fiction and non-fiction, and as best I can tell, she likes neither very much. She’s taken authors to task for questionable copy editing and devoted entire reviews to pointless rants about trivia. Here’s the thing: she doesn’t matter. Janet’s reviews appear to have no impact at all on whether or not a book sells. Her voice is not in my head.

Robert Morris, on the other hand, is a useful guide for people in search of good books. He’s reviewed nearly 2,000 books and received almost 25,000 helpful votes for his reviews on Amazon. If he likes your book, you’re going to sell more copies–not because he liked it, but because his thorough review lets other people decide if they want to buy it or not.

The challenge is in figuring out which kind of critic is worth paying attention to as you create your product or service. In a business to business setting, pleasing the gatekeeper and the bill payer is essential. On the other hand, pleasing an angry blogger might not matter at all.

In our desire to please everyone, it’s very easy to end up being invisible or mediocre. Far better to please the right people.

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By: Douglas MacMillan

After failing to acquire Twitter last fall, Facebook went shopping for what may be the next best thing.

On Aug. 10, Facebook said it had acquired FriendFeed, the Mountain View (Calif.) social aggregation service founded by Google (GOOG) alumni Bret Taylor and Jim Norris in 2008. The deal, which The Wall Street Journal reported to be valued at nearly $50 million in cash and stock, gives Facebook top talent and advanced technology in an area many see as the next great frontier on the Web: real-time search.

The deal was seen by many as an assault on Twitter, a site that, like FriendFeed, lets users discover what people on the Web are saying about a certain topic at any given time. (Twitter turned down a $500 million offer from Facebook last November.) But experts say the pickup may be geared just as much toward a showdown with the king of Web search and the former employer of Taylor and Norris: Google. “In one fell swoop, Facebook gets to buy up Google’s best-known superstars,” says technology blogger Robert Scoble.

Pulling in Real-Time Data

FriendFeed’s founders and staff of mostly ex-Googlers earned their stripes building Google Talk, Google Maps, Gmail, and other free Web services. When they launched FriendFeed to the public in February 2008, they designed the service to help users organize their online social lives—everything from Twitter updates to pictures posted on Facebook to Netflix rentals—in one place. To help members scour through all this information, the company developed an advanced search engine that pulls in real-time data from many different sites around the Web. It lets users search keywords that only certain friends have mentioned, or only for posts that have been “liked” by a certain number of people on the site.

This search engine may be a big part of what Facebook is after. Currently the social network has a limited search engine, which only retrieves data from certain types of pages within its own site. “They could plug the [FriendFeed] search engine into Facebook and have a huge win,” Scoble says. If the site succeeds in building compelling search, more Web users may turn to Facebook for everyday searches, rather than general search engines like Google.

More effective search of current conversations and popular topics could lead to more profits for Facebook, which has taken criticism for focusing more on growth in the number of its users than in generating revenue. “Being able to get a taste of what consumers are doing on 50 different sites can be very powerful,” says David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client strategy for digital marketing agency 360i, of FriendFeed’s search. By contrast, he says Facebook’s search tools have not been as effective for marketers.

Beefing Up Search Tools

Buying FriendFeed opens the possibility of more refined search, though Facebook has not commented on what aspects of the site will be integrated into its own. “We haven’t had the opportunity to have an in-depth, thoughtful dialogue on what to do over the long term,” says Facebook spokesman Larry Yu.

Another reminder that Facebook wants to beef up its search tools came the same day the FriendFeed deal was announced. A new tool will let users search the last 30 days of information posted by their friends. It will also let users search postings even by nonfriends, assuming those people have opted to make their material public.

In recent months, Facebook has introduced a number of features aimed at getting users to share more publicly, and the FriendFeed acquisition shows the company is committed to that goal, says Forrester Research (FORR) analyst Jeremiah Owyang. “FriendFeed is public and Facebook is not. We should expect Facebook to continue this trend to make users public,” he says. More public sharing would mean more data that’s searchable, which marketers would also appreciate.

While a battle with Google looms, Facebook’s acquisition has created a more immediate concern for the company: keeping existing users of FriendFeed from defecting to other sites. No plans to shut down the site have been announced, but many users are nervous. “If Facebook does take FriendFeed down, chances are I’ll migrate with many of the other social media and programming pundits to a similar service,” says programmer Christopher Charabaruk. “Or if there isn’t one, I’ll probably help start one.”

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By: Merritt Colaizzi

After Stephanie Miller’s recent guest post about optimizing the deliverability of e-mail marketing messages, we received several requests for more information about e-mail marketing best practices. With 10 years of e-mail marketing experience under our belt, we’ve learned a few things. Now it’s time for us to share with you.

The golden rule: Do unto others …

My No. 1 tip for e-mail marketing success is actually what not to do: Do not send too many e-mails to your list. The value of your list decreases the more you send e-mails that recipients don’t want/need. Instead, treat your e-mail lists the way you want your own e-mail address to be treated. Be ruthlessly critical of what you send and consolidate messages when possible.

At SmartBrief, we’re careful to practice what we preach, reaching out to the members of our trade association partners no more than twice a year.  As a result, we avoid fatiguing the list and give ourselves the best opportunity for success.

Along the same lines, we encourage our association partners to consolidate their marketing messages within our daily SmartBrief newsletters, allocating them a section of our daily e-mail to promote their events, member benefits, white papers, books and so on. Consolidation allows you to focus on creating more value in one e-mail.

Optimize your subject line

Once you’ve got a list of exceptional quality, how do you get the maximum number of people to open it?

1. Get to the point. In our experience, subject lines of less than 30 characters are optimal, less than 40 work well, and less than 60 are still acceptable.  After that, you’re on your own. We have seen some news services string together a series of disparate topics with ellipses to create subject lines greater than 70 characters, but in our experience, shorter and more direct is better.
2. Pack in trigger words. These can be hot-button topics (e.g. social media), the names of companies of interest (e.g. Facebook), or numbers (e.g. Top 5 Leadership goofs). We are constantly amazed how much people love numbered lists — I guess it’s because they’re looking for quick and useful nuggets of information.
3. Consider including a call to action. We sometimes put “Sign Up” in our subject lines when we’re launching a product. That way, readers immediately know that they need to take some sort of action, and they will not just be passively reading.
4. Don’t look spammy. Here’s a handy list of words that might land your email in a spam filter.
5. Be your own harshest critic. Ask yourself, would you open an email with that subject line?

Does subject line really matter? You bet.

In March, SmartBrief ran an A/B test on the final day of a four-day campaign asking readers to opt-in to one of our newsletters. We split the recipient list evenly, and one list received a tried-and-true subject line we had been using for the final send day: “You’re not receiving your [industry] news” (where [industry] changed depending on the promotion). The other half of the list received a new, more personal-sounding message: “We’re sorry to see you go …”

The new subject line generated a 48.8% higher open rate and brought in 62.4% more subscribers than the old subject line.

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By: The New York Times/ Brad Stone

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By: Basheera Khan

Every now and again, you come across a service that promises to disrupt and change the entrepreneurial landscape for good. Buildabrand (@buildabrand) could do just that. The service provides high quality “strategically correct” branding for your startup for about the same price as domain registration, effectively bypassing what is a traditionally expensive and time-consuming process.

Answer a few questions about your business and buildabrand will provide a selection of brand identities: logos, fonts and so on. You can then apply that branding (after customising it, if you choose) to downloadable graphics, stationery, website templates and even – eventually – merchandise like pens and beach towels. You just pay for the items you order or download. The service requires no creative skills from users.

How does it work? Well, once you’ve entered a bit of information about your company at the “create” stage of the process – your “brand values” – buildabrand’s algorithm will exclude all the brands, including logos, in its extensive (and ever-growing) catalogue that aren’t appropriate or relevant and just show you the ones that are right for your business. You can choose from the selection it gives you, tweak the logo a bit – say, if you want it in a different colour – and you’re good to go.

CEO and design director Justin Champney was formerly head of brand innovation for McCann Worldgroup. Justin brings 15 years’ branding experience to the start-up, but he’s going to need every year: buildabrand must get the algorithm right, because it’s the quality of the recommendations that will determine whether buildabrand stands or falls. If Champney pulls it off, buildabrand has the potential to be one of the most disruptive elements in the start-up ecosystem for years.

buildabrand was formed in 2008 and completed a round of angel investment from a sole investor last November.

Update: a blog post from the company founder here explains a bit more about the service in response to some commenters’ questions.

We have 200 beta invitations for buildabrand for TechCrunch readers, available on a first come, first served basis. If you want one, leave a comment below. You’ll be notified when buildabrand’s open beta launches later this year.

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By: Michael Arrington 

The Wall Street Journal has long envied the success of professional social network LinkedIn and its 15 million or so monthly visitors (WSJ.com has just a third of that). In late 2008 they launched WSJ Community, a social network bolted onto the main WSJ site. That community is a ghost town – raise your hand if you’ve even heard of it, let alone visited it. At some point, they’ll likely shut it down as quietly as possible.

But they are still serious about gunning for the LinkedIn crowd and all those monetization opportunities (jobs, ads and a heck of a marketing pool for WSJ subscriptions). They’ve been working on a new social network, to be called WSJ Connect, we’ve confirmed. And instead of building it internally, like they did with WSJ Community, they’ve enlisted the help of another arm of parent company News Corp. – Slingshot Labs. And yes, they call it “LinkedIn Killer” internally.

Slingshot Labs is the R&D arm of News Corp. and works on digital products. Their first product was Daily Fill, which launched earlier this year. They also built the MySpace Events product that we covered in March. They operate fairly independently, have their own funding and 40-50 staff, according to one person familiar with their operations.

WSJ Connect is still in the planning/conceptual stages, says one source, but there is “strong interest” to move the project forward. Importantly, it would leverage the WSJ brand but would be a separate property and unencumbered by the need for a paid subscription to the newspaper.

Conceptual screenshots of the product are apparently floating around Slingshot, the WSJ and MySpace. We’re trying to track them down.

Absolutely no one responded to our requests for comment. Luckily, lots of ex-MySpace employees are happy to talk.

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