Us humans, we’re irrational beasts. Thus not surprising that cultural norms play a large role in influencing behaviors. What will our parents think? What will our peers think? What will potential mates think (yes, that monkey DNA makes breeding a pretty significant driver)?

Tech founders aren’t immune to these forces. In fact, within close knit communities one could even argue the influences are magnified due to groupthink. Whether geographic (Silicon Valley) or virtual (Hacker News), there’s both normalization (behave like others do) and shared role models (be like Person X, Y or Z).

Role models in particular interest me because they ‘teach’ observers what’s right and wrong. When I speak with young founders the two most dominant role models are Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg (with folks like Jack Dorsey and Paul Graham also mentioned).

Their impression of Steve Jobs is one constructed through use of Apple products, Apple product release keynotes, the Stanford graduation speech and sometimes a biographic article/book. Emulation of Jobs justifies their pursuit of ‘simplicity,’ and a lack of willingness to compromise. Excellence, elegance.

Zuck though holds even more sway. He’s of the same generation, he dresses like them (or more specifically, they dress like him) and they all want to respect the Hacker’s Way. This gets turned into mantras like “the best code wins,” and “move fast and break things.” From The Social Network some have learned that you should sometimes play loose with the rules and that you need to navigate around or bull through the stupid folks who seek to slow inevitable disruption, whether they be wealthy twins, Harvard administrators or dead weight co-founders (yes it’s dramatization but these are some of the indelible moments in the film and circle the Facebook founding story for better or worse).

But already a few years old, have we reached “Peak Hoodie?” That is, are we past the halfway point on Zuck as main influence for a generation of technologists. And if so, who will be the next role model and what values will they espouse?

What if the next set of norms include emphasis on trusting people to do good? Or a global citizenship where no matter what our differences, we should be kind to each other? Will the next Hoodie come from someone with a loud social media voice? Will they even be American? Will they be someone we don’t know yet or seeing a familiar face in a new light such as Larry Page?

I don’t know but it does feel like we’re about to enter another transitional phase towards the next set of role models, and it’s likely those people have a bigger impact on the next decade of startups than any technology platform or buzzword.

Three years ago a terrible collection of beasts rose from the sea and threatened the Internet we love so dear. These “content farms” churned out low quality prose in SEO-friendly formats to try and garner traffic from Google and other search engines. This traffic was then converted into dollars via ads, affiliate programs, commerce offers — anything that would yield a profit.

The past six months have seen a rebirth of the “content farm,” although one might call them “content farms for good.” Quora, Svbtle, Medium, and LinkedIn Influencers are four of the most prominent examples of a movement towards “higher quality” content on the web.

Why do I lovingly refer to them as “content farms?”

• “Article” based construction: most readers experience these not as sites but as posts, single page websites. Some of this is in their construction, lots of it is tied to the way they’re discovered via social media. The link at the end of a tweet.
• Silos of Crosspromotion: to various degrees, you come for one article and get effectively crosspromoted to see more from within the network. Often from many different authors.
• Building Tools/Services to Remove Publishing Friction: Whether lightweight CMS, LinkedIn’s Editors or Medium’s increasing staffing of what seems to be a creative services team, these services aren’t just giving you a web authoring tool, they’re removing the obstacles to creation – what should I write about. 

Over at LinkedIn, continuing my series of interviews with early employees at iconic tech companies. Next up, Craig Donato, employee #12 at Excite.

“What most surprises me is the dearth of local content. We always believed that “some day soon” users would easily access all the local content they needed in their daily life – things like the school lunch menu, the little league schedule. And shockingly, it’s still surprisingly hard to get this information.”

Over the weekend asked “What product/services suck but we continue to use them because of inertial, lack of other options, etc”

Here are the answers

“You should have to get a license [to tweet] & i am volunteering to be in charge of the licenses” – Tina Fey

At a recent wedding, I found myself seated next to a R&D executive from one of the largest auto insurance providers. Gave me an opportunity to find out how technology was changing their business. Three interesting takeaways:

eBay exec turned investor Michael Dearing on eBay’s early days:

“When I saw some of the numbers in 1999. The scale was unreal to me and the profitability of the business blew my mind.”

Via GQ magazine, here’s an excerpt from a lawsuit where Lil Wayne was deposed regarding his involvement in a Quincy Jones III documentary.

Lawyer: Did you perform at the Virgin Mobile music fest in 2008 with Kanye West?
Lil Wayne: [looking at fingernails] I don’t know, but I know I did perform at this BADASS bitch’s birthday party recently — she was crazy-stupid thick.

Now with video!!!!

Ok, I usually avoid writing about the day’s news because there are folks who do that for a living but two quick thoughts

1) Tumblr’s 2013 Revenue Goals

Tumblr Founder David Karp graces the cover of Forbes with an article unflatteringly titled “David Karp’s $800m Art Project.” The article itself is pretty balanced – celebrates David’s smarts, Tumblr’s growth while highlighting the business challenges they have ahead. There’s enough insider information and quotes that it’s clear Tumblr’s PR department cooperated with Forbes, giving access to David, other execs/investors and friends. Given this, I was very surprised to read the following sentence:

“The company finished 2012 with $13 million in revenue; the hope in this “leap” year is that it’ll get to $100 million.”

What’s so strange about it? Well it serves no strategic purpose for the company. And it’s quite a remarkable goal. This level of increase usually comes from one of the following:

• Adding more salespeople to scale a proven direct sales model
• Opening a previously supply-constrained ad program up to all advertisers (ie going from ads on 5% of site to 100%)
• Taking a program which is working domestically and launching in other countries

From everything I’ve read 2012 was a year of monetization firsts for Tumblr – some native ad models for promoted posts, some branded campaigns on topic pages. Even if these were showing promising results it’s very hard to get to $100m booked in 2013. I worked on Google AdSense for three years and have seen YouTube monetization scale from 2007 to now. You need not just inventory but headcount and infrastructure. You need brand and agency relationships which move from their experimental budgets to endemic spend.

Maybe the number isn’t correct – it could be “$100m runrate” (which essentially means $25m booked in Q413). Or the number could be lower. But if either one was true, why didn’t the company correct it since they’re working so closely with the reporter? Here’s how these things work – maybe reporter got the number from somewhere (or made it up). Tells the company. Company won’t confirm or deny on the record, but on background says “that’s really high. Our goal for the year is closer to X.” And then the reporter uses that figure, or turns it into a range. So I look at this and think, wow, either the business plan is very very aggressive or someone really wants to hold Karp’s feet to the fire. Either way, uncomfortable discussions sure to happen as the year progresses.

Btw, how do I think Tumblr should make money? Here are two I’d investigate in addition to the promoted brand advertising approach.

A) Affiliate Programs like viglink.com. Essentially allows publisher to add their affiliate codes to organic commercial links if Tumblr owner didn’t add their own code already. Would be invisible to readers – no change to current behavior. Maybe a bit off-brand for Tumblr but if authors can toggle on/off at the blog level. In 2011, I estimated Wikipedia could make $16m annually using Viglink on just their US traffic. (Disclosure: I joined Viglink’s advisory board last year)

B) Let Brands Sponsor Users. Increasingly brands needs to create content or lovingly wrap themselves around content. Create marketplace where brands can sponsor users, which means addition of some branding/attribution on the Tumblr. Classy though – in a style that’s consistent with the aesthetics of the Tumblr and style of the author. Tumblr creator can accept/reject and get some % of the $.

2) Andrew Sullivan Leaves Daily Beast, Starts $19.99 Subscription Site

All the world’s information available at your fingertips. That was the promise of the web and the online education boom seems to be bringing us ever closer. Want to study computer science? Physics? Photography? Udacity, Khan Academy, Coursera, CreativeLive are just some of the virtual classrooms where you can find world class instruction. And it’s not only these dedicated pure-plays – visit YouTube and if there’s a skill to be taught via video, there’s one (or 1,000) waiting for you. YouTube has been such a boon that TED Curator Chris Anderson believes we’ve entered a magical period of “crowd accelerated innovation” as the result of online video. In his words:

Online video has given every community global reach. It has allowed talents to be shared digitally that could never be shared before. You can track innovation online by looking at the moment a community was first able to share its talents digitally. For writers and software programmers, it happened as soon as the Internet connected them. Photographers and musicians followed soon after, when even the low-bandwidth web could just about handle GIFs, JPEGs, and MP3s. But the vast majority of communities had to wait for online video. It was the technology that allowed any talent to be shared digitally.

My work at YouTube convinced me that Chris Anderson is correct but still, something about this nirvana gave me pause. It crystalized while reading this statement by my former boss at Second Life.

“Time to expert” is getting much shorter.-@philiplinden #IU12
— David Lidsky (@davidlidsky) November 8, 2012

Aha! That’s it! It’s never been easier to learn a new skill. Never been easier to find and follow someone else’s ‘best practices.’ To mimic the well-worn path of someone who came before you. And that’s the potential trap – breakthroughs come not just from following instructions to minimize the time spent learning, but sometimes from the struggle, from pushing not down the riverbed where water has already flowed, but carving into hard earth.

Is it possible that it’s never been easier to be, well, average? If everyone is learning the same information and studying the same approach, yes the floor rises – we’re all more educated – but what about the ceiling? Who will push outside of the boundaries? Who will remember that in addition to acquiring a skill, education is about learning how to learn. Does expedient, always-available instruction make it too easy?

The best counterargument I can construct is that most adult learning is purpose-driven. You are learning a skill as a component of trying to accomplish a task. Get a better job, build that mobile app, fix the screen door. Skills learned as a necessary stepping stone, not an end goal. Perhaps the gamification of education actually creates false incentives, making badge acquisition the goal instead of solving a real problem?

At the end of the day no one, certainly not me, would argue that pervasive access to content we can mimic is anything but a public good. But continue to challenge yourself. Don’t just become an expert, try to do it differently. Color a bit outside the lines. And you might just find yourself creating the best practices copied by the next wave of learners.