Pek Pongpaet

Earlier this week, Steve Jobs passed away. I don’t recall the many CEO passings but it was all over the blogosphere and social media on top of being over the regular news channels. Many fans of Apple mourned him including myself. He was many things to many people. To CEOs, he was a visionary leader – able to see trends and industries well before others could. To other business leaders he was an amazing CEO, able to turn around a struggling company. To many he was an inspiration. A baby born out of wedlock, who was adopted, dropped out of college to pursue a dream, built a successful company, got fired from said successful company, start a few more (NeXT and Pixar), and went back to the original company and created wave after wave of hit products. To consumers, he was the guy who they associated with their wonderful Apple products.

What struck me was how many people mourned him. This is a man who runs a company, not a Hollywood celebrity or a rockstar. I doubt many CEOs would have this much impact when their time comes. There are so many products that are much more fundamental to our everyday lives yet we hardly think of them. For example electricity and clean water are essential necessities, but I doubt people care for say Thomas Edison or the CEO of ComEd the way they do Steve Jobs. The other CEO that I can think has this much fame would be Bill Gates who I think mostly people associated with being the richest man in the world at the time. No other person I can think of has been so closely associated with their brand. For example, I know people love their Wii or Xbox, but could they identify the creator? Probably no. People also love their cars and expensive watches, but I also highly doubt those people could identify their makers.

With every product launch Steve Jobs has been at the helm of the presentation giving every keynote until he was no longer able to physically do so. By doing that, he made him and the brand inseparable. When the products and the company became successful because of his absolute focus on quality, design and the whole user experience, he became a pop culture icon. People loved Apple products – Steve’s products, and thus they loved him.

Not only did he represent great products, he symbolized an ideal. His commencement speech at Stanford in 2005 revealed a man who believed in only doing things that mattered because life was short. In his own words, he wanted to make a dent in the universe. He believed in not living someone else’s life. I can’t imagine how this message could not resonate with most people.

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Just played around with Google Plus, Google’s new “Facebook killer” social network. On the surface it looks almost exactly like Facebook. They have a main stream or feed in the middle. It has navigation on the side like Facebook and even let’s me post different types of content, like photos, videos, and links – just link Facebook. I have to say, they are trying to solve the one problem that Facebook has failed to address really well – that is groups. Right now, with around 2000 friends, my Facebook is like my Twitter feed – a lot of noise. I know there is Facebook Groups, but it’s clunky and I don’t like to use it. Google has built a neat UI to segment people into groups like Friends, Family, and Acquaintances. They may well solve the groups problem and I commend them for that. However, if they think this is what is going to take down Facebook, they are wrong.

What’s going to kill Facebook in the end isn’t necessarily a better social network. It’s going to come out of left field and they won’t know what hit them. Here’s an example. If you were a very popular radio station in the 1940s, you were probably very worried about new radio stations popping up and becoming more popular. What they didn’t realize is that another radio station wasn’t going to be the end of their station. Televisions were just recently introduced at the time. At the end of 1946, only 44,000 homes had a TV set; by the end of 1949,there were 4.2 million TV homes. The reason people weren’t listening to your popular station wasn’t because they had found another popular station where all the cool kids were listening to. It was because they were spending their time watching broadcast television. When video games came out, kids spent less time watching television and more time playing games. When the internet came out, more people spent time online than watching TV and playing games (some people anyways). It’s like the guy who sold horses back in the 1900s worried that people are going to buy better and faster horses from another stable when he should really be worried about this little automotive company called Ford. My point is if Google is really serious about taking down Facebook, they should be thinking about fighting them on their turf on their rules.

There are so many new apps and services now other than Facebook that are all legitimately interesting. I myself have been spending less time on Facebook and more time on services like Instagram where all people can do is post interesting photos. I also spend more time playing with iPhone apps that aren’t necessarily even social. I agree with the Gigaom article that the way to beat Facebook is death by a thousand cuts. I’m sure people spend an unhealthy amount of time playing games like CityVille or Farmville – and even though that’s still within the Facebook ecosystem, those people are spending less time on Facebook proper because of it. There are only so many hours in the day and when the next big fun thing comes out – whatever that may be, that is what’s going to take attention away from Facebook, not another social network.

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A couple weeks ago I gave a talk titled ‘Designing for iPad’ at WindyCityGo, a mobile conference in Chicago. It was about my experience designing my iPad app BizTome.

Here’s a video of the talk along with my slides.

Designing for iPad by Pek Pongpaet from ChicagoRuby on Vimeo.

For more presentations from that conference, please go to the WindiCityGo website.

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Just recently ShelfLuv was featured on Crain’s Chicago Business online publication. Reporter Steve Hendershot interviewed me about the genesis of ShelfLuv, where it’s currently at, and where it’s going. Read all about it here.

He even created a very cool video

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In my social circle I know a lot of entrepreneurs, programmers, doers, and executers. Some of these people have more development oriented backgrounds (developers and programmers). These are the people who can build what they dream or at least a working demo/prototype/minimal viable product and get it out the door (myself included). Personally I am of the mindset of launch guns blazing and ask questions later. The problem that we run into is that we launch the product and nobody knows about, nobody uses it and it languishes in startup limbo.

Too often we lament that if we only had a business guy this would be all good. The reason is that we (and I don’t mean to generalize) suck at planning, selling, promoting, marketing, and doing all the other tasks necessary of a business other than designing and building a product. Just like the idea guy who’s in search for his Mark Zuckerberg (see how it ended for Zuckerberg’s original business partner), developer types may also feel the need for a business guy who will sprinkle some magic business sauce on their product and somehow make it successful.

It’s funny to me that some people who want to be entrepreneurs are not really interested at all in building a business but are more interested in just developing a product. That’s equivalent to an idea person who wants to be a software entrepreneur who refuses to learn about software. A business is more than just a product and has multiple moving parts that an entrepreneur has to be aware of. Building a great product is but a piece of it. These are some of the lessons I am slowly learning in my journey as an entrepreneur. Yes having an unhealthy obsession about the product design and user experience is important, but there’s more to a successful business than just that.

The problem of us techie types in finding the business guy is not all too dissimilar from the business guy in search of the techie. If we do not know exactly what the other does and just treat them as a commodity or a means to our end, we will never successfully find our counterpart. That’s because we have no basis on how to judge them. How do we call bullshit? It’s really hard to if you have no clue what the other person does or what their deliverables are and what goes on behind the curtains.

I think the key to this problem is to know enough to ask intelligent questions and establish success metrics and goals. This also means that the techie software guy needs to get their hands and feet wet with “business” and doing all that is required of a successful business in order to learn what exactly he needs help with.

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