There are varying schools of thought as to what deliverables are required to attract the interest of an investor. Among them, the three most important ingredients are: the product demo, the financial model, and the pitch deck.

At the earliest stages of investing, many view the demo as a key reflection of a team's ability to articulate their vision.  Jason Calacanis famously said that he does not even look at business plans. In the growth or later stages of funding, a company's financial performance is viewed as a leading indicator of both the attractiveness of the underlying market opportunity and the ability of the team in question to execute on that basis.  Product is taken as a given here, and so demos lose relevance.

Having spent time investing at each stage of the venture lifecycle, I am a big believer that a company's pitch deck is the most important means of securing capital (either in working capital for expansion or liquidity for founders or early shareholders).  And while I am absolutely blown away by the quality of the entrepreneurs that I meet with and the products that they build, I continue to be underwhelmed by the quality of the materials used to present their vision.

Pitch decks are sales documents.  Think of them as a kin to the resume.  Anyone that has ever hired anyone (or for that matter interviewed for a job) knows that a CV is tool used to tell a story.  When that tool is not sharp (irrelevant content, poor formatting, lack of attention to the specifications of the job), the tool itself can get in the way of accomplishing the task for which it is used, and job applications wind up in the waste bin before even getting a substantive chance.  A company's (and more specifically a CEO's) ability to sell is one of the most important proxies for its success.  Sales are crucial to hiring (convincing overqualified people to take a career risk and join your venture), strategic partnerships (persuading large companies to take a chance on the little guy), future financings (key to most venture deals), and ultimate liquidity (getting buy-in from either acquirers or the public on an intrinsic strategic premium).

Presentations are a tool used to excite and inform.  Informing is a relatively well understood process in pitch deck creation, but excitement is an absolute rarity. Founders have the unfortunate challenge of dealing with often cynical fund managers who are constantly overwhelmed with the shear volume of opportunities that they see.  While founders live and breathe the thrill of building their dream product or solving a central problem to their lives, it is safe to assume that the people you speak with in the venture community (tuned in as they may or may not be) do not have your company's sense of urgency coursing through their veins.  And it is likely that your prospective customers, partners, and employees don't either.  People of all types require selling.

The great thing about the presentation is that it is a free form document.  In many ways, it even subsumes other parts of the evaluation process such as the financial model and the product demo, as each can be expressed either directly or referentially within a linear page turn.  But, while PowerPoint has to be one of the most important productivity tools of all time, its standard settings have created a near monotony in tones of discourse and vehicles of persuasion.  I would love to see an embrace of a new pitch deck UI.

If you are someone that looks at presentations often, you know a good pitch deck UI when you see it.  Reading them, your heart can literally skip a beat.  One of the original pitch deck UI pioneers of the internet era was a mentor of mine, Josh Koppel.  Josh wrote a book in 2000 called Good Grief that changed my life. While an Internet entrepreneur by trade, Josh introduced his format to the world as an autobiography.  It reads like an adult picture book: few words on each page.  Their interaction with deeply relevant imagery on each page teases the reader between the fascination of looking deeper and the excitement of the page turn.  While Josh's book was physical in form, it translated magically into the digital realm.  The mouse click became his page turn. The content turned professional.  Used to pitch everything from TV pilots to new mobile apps to even his own company when need be, Josh showed me how exciting the story of a product or company can be - even if put together with conventional presentation creation tools (spoiler: Apple Keynote is his layout tool).  While I have learned from a number of others, no one has been more impactful in the development of my own style and appreciation for what is possible.

So when you are preparing your next pitch deck, what some of the things you should consider?  (1) Every design decision, like in your product, is just that, a choice. Use colors, graphs, fonts, and spacing carefully; (2) considering using imagery - pictures really catch people off guard if editorial instincts are strong, and they very much can be worth 1000 words; (3) consider non-linear formats - such as Prezi, if appropriate - although know that most investors would side with the utility of the print-out over the flash & intrigue of an innovative non-linear narrative experience; (4) challenge yourself to keep it short (Fred Wilson suggests six slides - although I'm comfortable with the looser definition of "leaving your audience wanting more"); (5) make sure that you show it to a few low risk people outside the venture community with little relevant experience to ensure the headline themes are clear; and (6) begin your investor conversations also with low risk audiences - either friends or those that are low on your wish list - for real-time debugging of UI.  AB testing works here just as well as in software development.

Happy to field questions or provide examples if folks are interested.

There are tons of good reasons for passing (market size; defensibility of IP; absence of operating excellence - to name a few).  But there is one legitimate justification that you will rarely see or hear explicitly from an investor - passing due to a lack of faith in the people behind the given project.  

This predicament is not unique to venture.  In dating, the phenomenon is commonly expressed as "its not you, its me." In hiring, every once in a while, you will hear prospective employers say that things did not work out because there wasn't "a good fit." But, most of the time in venture, you do not even get that much. Why?

Entrepreneurs are one of the most impressive groups of people in the world.  I would not do what I do if it weren't for the fact that I get to interact with so many of them so frequently.  What makes them particularly special is their passion for what they are doing.  Instead of working in traditional settings with benefits, job security, and a tried-and-true career trajectory, entrepreneurs go their own way to solve perceived problems with the way to world works.  They will stop at nothing to see them fixed. Deal or no deal, a part of me always leaves meetings in awe.  

When someone is reaching for their proverbial dreams, it feels almost cruel to tell them that the reason you believe they will not succeed is intrinsic to them.  Instead, one typically hears camouflaged rationales steeped in common pitfalls (back to things like market, IP...).  When businesses have meaningful operating history, sometimes we fall back on a lack of comfort with imperfect business metrics.  At least then, the investor preserves optionality down the road, in the event that the entrepreneur someday matures into a marked success.  

I try to be as transparent with people as possible.  As passing on people will forever be a challenge in my life, I would be curious to know how you (entreprenuer, investor, or otherwise), handle this predicament.  

Just like in dating, a pass from one person is not a reflection of the market.  It is reflection of that person's indeosyncricies, standards, and outcome expectations.  If you are as passionate as most of the entrepreneurs that I meet, you will find funding from someone, sooner or later. 

Small is the experience of ownership and command of relationships in a given geography. Without living and breathing the same air as someone, how proximate can we be?  Over the course of the past year, I moved from New York City to London (my 4th city in the past 7 years) - knowing hardly a soul on the other side of The Pond. In getting myself settled, I have come across a few structural constraints that in my mind limit this geo-shrinkage.

The first is physics.  Our bodies can still only be a one geographic place at one time.  By being in London, I am necessarily not in New York.  While it is possible for me to pick up anecdotes from friends on the ground and in the media, there is a rumble to the sidewalk, a warmth to a hug, and scent of urban jungle that I miss while here.  Although the most recent Apple ads attempt to prove otherwise, moments of technology-enabled sympathy are not a substitute for the empathy made possible by geo-presence.  

The second is the force of community.  No matter who you are, at some point you are likely to want to build or belong to one.  Whether in the digital or physical realm, building takes work and belonging takes acceptance.  Work requires time and energy, both of which are finite.  

Although some aspects of community can be established online (this blog is case in point), still most of what we build has a manifestation in person.  We build to see results.  Because we cannot be in multiple places at once (back to physics), most of us choose to build in a single place, such that the fruits of our labor can be enjoyed.  The consequence is that we are more provincial, and the shrinking of the world hits a limit.  

To belong, a community needs to cement trust among its constituents - which is not doled out easily. Perhaps the most important ingredient to trust is commitment.  If people think that you are a tourist (as recently referenced by Mike Moritz & Paul Kedrosky in reference to transient members of the venture capital community), they will rarely take you as seriously as a prospective member as someone who has long-term historical or prospective roots.   Trust is won through the perception of permanence.  By spreading ourselves geographically thin, we challenge our credibility and belonging becomes unlikely.  If you have built nothing and do not belong to anything, the experience of local ownership is unattainable and we are forced back to living provincial lives.

The physics problem is not one that we are likely to overcome, but technology can do more to facilitate geo-shrinkage.  The key is data portability.  There are a number of reasons for me to have a single local doctor, accountant, dentist, and send my kids to the same school - some personal, some social, and some practical.  But the most important reason is that when my 8 year-old needs his tonsils examined or my teenager requires remediation in pre-calculus, their respective doctors & teachers have their entire respective medical & pedagogical histories.   This anecdote extends to nearly all pockets of life.  We have traditionally been local beings living in provincial worlds because that is where we are known.  But as technology companies (e.g. Knewton in education, Facebook in social, and LinkedIn in professional) develop standards for allowing us to carry our lifetime of data with us, we become more feasibly mobile .  Each of us then requires less of an introduction.  Trust is easier to establish. Communities open up.  And, without permanently physically committing to a geography, we can shrink the world just a little bit further.

The flow is not just a feed of information - akin to those hosted by Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare or even legacy RSS readers. It is a personalized constellation of news, narrative, gossip, and opinion surrounding the issues that interest us most.  All forms of available media have coefficient in the equation that defines it; email, television, newspapers, magazines, books, phone conversations, dinner table banter and water cooler chats. The momentum of the Flow builds because no matter one's professional, personal, or demographic disposition, there is always a benefit to sitting on the right side of asymmetric information.  Being "in the Flow" is being in the know.  

The Flow is a dynamic concept.  Its pace is determined by the amount of underlying change and corresponding coverage in world events.  Given the historical prohibitive costs of information production, distribution, and consumption - the Flow started off as a drip.  Today, other than by transporting oneself into an episode of Mad Men, it is hard to imagine a time when it was appropriate to digest media by the week - let alone hold our breath for the nightly news.  Staying in the flow used to be a thing of leisure.  But, with 2 billion more information producers (people alone) on the planet than existed just 20 years ago and the advances in technology affording new levels of interconnectedness, the Flow has reached the level of class 5 rapids. Keeping up takes work.

So what is the right balance?  How many people can we actively "follow"; "friends" can we have; subscriptions can we maintain; or channels can we watch?  How many tributaries can we allow to connect to the Flow before it becomes unmanageable?  How much time should we be spending curating, monitoring, and building such information architectures before the very energy required to hold our heads above water is not enough? How do you know when the benefits of information consumption no longer exceed its costs?  

Over time, some of the answer will come from next generation aggregation & curation engines such as the HuffingtonPost and BuzzFeed.  Some of the answer will also come from technology.  We will all go by the way of the Wall Street trader, whose proprietary platforms make trades without the need for human intervention - actively and independently learning from its mistakes.  Put differently, technology will allow us to attain the benefits of the Flow without having to process each piece of data on our own (i.e. bill pay, home energy monitoring, health upkeep, and more).   But, as the optimal level of human information consumption is a deeply personal decision, some elements of equilibrium will for the foreseeable future be determined by the individual.  

I would be keen to understand how you manage your flow.

This post was deliberately focused on the notion of information consumption.  This conversation is complemented & complicated by the introduction of questions as to the appropriate amount of information production for the individual.  These are extremely important interaction variables, which I will attempt to address in a future post.

"Very int. idea at #foocamp: we are in the first ever economy where privacy is dear, publicity is cheap. Large implications. Used to be the reverse." 

This is something of a summary of a broader argument that friend Sam Lessin has been making for a while now (see his post from 01/17/10).  While I cannot be sure that Sam is the ultimate source here, given that they were both at Foocamp and that Sam is a fantastic curator of ideas with "large implications" (go to his Y+30 events to learn more), I think that it is fair to lump their arguments together.  My working definition of publicity is the means by which an entity communicates with the broadest of audiences.

The publicity is cheap argument is based on the shifting microeconomics of content in the digital age.  If Christopher Columbus wanted to broadcast a message to the entire world, it would be a lot cheaper for him to use Twitter than to turn around the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.  This much I agree with.  Once Columbus composes his tweet, the incremental cost of sharing that Tweet to a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th person is low enough, that Twitter does not even charge for pushing content through its pipes.  

Shifting relative marginal costs are one thing, but costs of mass distribution are another. Marginal cost math assumes that the piping is in place for me to push my content out into the world.  Britney Spears (5,226,390 Twitter followers) and Ashton Kutcher (5,192,937 followers) have deeply established brands that have spent millions on personal marketing.  The reason that the marginal cost economics have played out so well at scale for them is because their 'piping' is in place.  But what if they wanted to reach 150MM people (~2.0% of the "entire world" & 1.5x the number of registered Twitter users)? That would be a lot harder, and correspondingly significantly more costly.  

Now think about being an independent recording artist trying to get your latest album into the world.  You might turn to social media to begin to build your fan base, but after you have gotten your friends & family to tweet about it and whatever industry contacts you have are exhausted, then publicity starts to get tough. Publicity economics for any content producer only scale according to the size of their underlying distribution infrastructure.

Low relative marginal cost publicity economics are also inversely proportional to the amount of noise that is being simultaneously being pushed through the global system.  The more Britneys and Ashtons there are in the world, the harder it will be for even other highly public figures like Oprah (3,726,172 followers) to get their messages across - let along budding musician "Joe Stummer."  And, the amount of noise in the public domain only appears to be getting worse - think Vuvuzela. It feels like everyone has a message, and while attention spans are nimble, they are unlikely to be able to keep up.

Publicity is certainly relatively cheap compared to the days of Christopher Columbus - or even simply the pre-internet era.  My feeling, however, is that instead of thinking about the marginal costs to publicity asymptotically approaching zero, they will soon cease to fall further and may even increase over time. 

What we saw with the emergence of Twitter and Facebook was the complete breakdown of traditional one-to-one & one-to-many communication paradigms.  They were not the creation of a better emailing services or the launch of new cable news channels.  As such, there was a complete land-grab for would-be costly distribution rights at a time when very few people understood the mediums.  This was genius insight of brands like CNN and individuals like Ashton (even if implicit).  Until a new paradigm shifting/land-grab inducing media platform is launched - publicity is only going get more expensive.

My desire, however, is not to impose my own set of values on others.  For those language lovers out there, please continue to pursue your passions.  My proposal is specifically to give parents & students the option to count courses taken in computer science for a foreign language credit.  Students should be enabled and to some degree encouraged to pursue coursework that renders them relevant to the challenges and opportunities of the world that they will grow up to face.  They should not have to cram web design into an after-school activity or take an inappropriately large course load.  They should not only get curricular credit, but were should make it easier for them to do so.  My gut tells me that this is the type of progressive experiment that Dewey would have been in favor of. With all due respect to each of my adored French teachers, if I could turn back the hands of time, I would have pursued computer science given the option - they might even have too.

I will be contacting the Lab School about this issue.  If you agree, ping your alma mater.  I would be curious to hear what kind of experiences people have in challenging the status quo.

A network technology (or a technology that scales via a "network effect") is one in which the value of the product to each incremental user grows exponentially in proportion to the number of users who have already adopted the technology. Networks are always predicated on some level of user communication or interaction.

One of my most vivid memories of such a technology transition dates back to 1995, when my grandmother saw something exciting in Hammacher Schlemmer. It was one of the first home video chatting technologies. This was pre-consumer web. A lunchbox-sized video camera was mounted on top of a small television. The audio for the calls was routed through our landline phone. The video was routed through our TV cable. To coordinate a chat, you called each other to schedule, set the TV to channel 3, and with a prayer, a live feed was up and running. That holiday season, she bought a set-up for our family, my mom's bother's family, and herself. The gift was intended to help us stay in touch. But, at the end of the day, it was just too hard to communicate. The universe of people we could chat with was extremely limited. Even if a connection was made, if you moved while on camera, the system would almost surely crash. We used it thrice.

Now take an example of a successful launch. Remember the early days on Facebook? It was not all that fun, was it? You had no photos from friends to look at. No articles posted by classmates to read. No goofy videos of roommates doing stupid things. Nothing juicy. As your friends started to join and the system opened up beyond local colleges & universities, however, things got more interesting. You were able to catch up with long lost friends from sleep-away camp; meet & learn about people that would become future colleagues, and let your grandparents keep up with your misadventures. While the sociological dynamics with each technology are different, similar user acquisition & interaction dynamics exist with the telegraph, telephone, fax machine, email, instant messaging, Twitter, Foursqaure, and even Chatroulette: the more incremental users on the platform, the more benefit I stand to gain from the service. And, they have to be easy to use.

One June 24th, a lucky few hundred thousand people will buy iPhone 4's and be some of the first in the Western world to join Apple's new implicit mobile video social network. Given the level of precision that Jobs & Co. employ in every area of product messaging, it feels safe to assume that every part of the product role out was a conscious decision and scrutinize them accordingly. I will focus on four.

• Penis Envy (or "I've Got Something You Don't Have"): Facetime will begin as an exclusively iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 technology. For a network technology, some might see this as a surprising limitation. They will begin by capping the number of people benefiting from their powerful feature set. One has to imagine that technology was not the limitation to letting users make video calls to other video camera-enabled devices (even if only to Apple's very own iChat, which works on both laptop and desktop devices). This would have been a tremendous benefit to users in the feature's early days, helping them avoid the techno-isolation I experienced via Hammacher Schlemmer. Given how good Apple is at releasing products of any kind, Jobs has to be betting that enough people will be purchasing the device to begin with that whatever limitations this places on their network's traction will be more than made up for by the creation of the public perception that the only way one can participate in such an experience is by purchasing an iPhone 4. In a somewhat similar way, RIM has done the same things with their internal BBM service on Blackberry devices - a huge marketing success for them in the teenage demographic, where kids can send messages to one another all day long without it showing up on their parent's cell phone bill.


• Reliability. Facetime will begin as an exclusively WiFi-based experience. While the real "Jetsons Experience," as Jobs calls it, is the ability to truly video conference on the go, the company has learned from its experience with AT&T. As in the case of the Hammer Schlemmer device, if the service quickly earns a reputation for poor video call quality, consumers will dismiss the technology as a novelty feature. Jobs has also learned from the failure of AppleTV. After a weak inital product launch into a new category, it is tough to get a second chance with consumers. 3G conferencing will come in a matter of time.


• Bundling. Facetime is one of "100" new features on the new iPhone and the last of 9 specifically called out at the lastest Apple marketing event. This is an important hedge for Jobs & Co. They know that each feature will not resonate with each consumer. Some will buy the device only for the retina display. Some will think of it as a camcorder and a substitute for a device like a Flip. Some will buy it for Facetime. No matter the purchasing intent, Apple's goal is to get the iPhone 4 in as many hands as possible. Buy selling these and each of the many other features, they are implicitly telling all of us that no matter who we are, the iPhone 4 has something that we will love. From the network's perspective this is hugely helpful. Anyone who has an iPhone 4 will be another node, and each node increases the value of the network to that next user manyfold.


• Openness. In the coming months, Facetime will open source its underlying architectural protocols to the developer community. While the details of this decisions still need to be fleshed out over time, it is clear that Apple would like to allow its mobile video-enabled devices to communicate with as many other devices as possible (mobile, laptop, desktop, and otherwise). Contrary to my Hammacher Schlemmer experience, this is intended to give each user as many instant benefits from purchasing their product as possible. If I am a child in a family of other iPhone 4s, openness might not matter. As soon as I fire up my device for the first time, Facetime will work. But for heterogenous environments, which the broader world is, this will become key. The more instant satisfaction that my network delivers, the more I am likely to use it. The more I use it, the more benefit I will be delivering to each of the other nodes in the network by extension.

While Jobs is a prosthelytizer of simplicity, he did explicitly leave something out that I believe will be important over time: a video conferencing buddy list. Leaving out this functionality at launch makes sense. If you opened your buddy list on June 25th or even December 25th, you might not see many people on it. Like a guest list to a party without no one on it, Facetime chatting might not be worth considering. Over time, however, as the feature's adoption crosses some critical mass, a simple buddy list, even something as small as a video icon next to corresponding names on a contact list, would go a long way. Seeing a rich "attendance" list will compel widespread attendance.

The goal of a product developer in the launch of a new network technology needs to be to both get as many useful connections on the system as fast as possible and to lower the barriers to interaction as much as possible. Apple appears to have something magical here. Very much looking forward to seing how things unfold.

UPDATE: Very interesting to see that Apple has already begun to struggle with the infancy of its Facetime network.  They launched 1-888-FACETIME to give people without a critical mass of iPhone 4 contacts the ability to chat with an Apple representative instead (8:00 AM - 8:00 PM CDT).  I wonder how long it will take them to make the service interoperable with other video chatting clients. 

I am proud to have led and been a part of organizations that have spearheaded investments in the sector over the past few years.  For each of the businesses that I have backed, there are hundreds of others that I have looked at - some of which I wish that I had.  The most important transformation that I have witnessed is the migration of pedagogy from a teacher- to a learner-centric model.  Just as the transition of the album- to track-based economies of the music industry allowed consumers to purchase more of only what the want and web services like Twitter, Instapaper, and Boxee give their users the ability to set their own table of contents to the stories that they want to follow, students now have more power than ever before.  

Education for hundreds of years was a market that functioned under local monopolies.  If I wanted to go to college in the pre-plane/train era as a Chicago-an, only the most wealthy of families could afford to send me somewhere beyond Ann Arbor, MI or Champagne, IL.  Now international learners represent a non-trivial proportion of many domestic student bodies.  When combined with the amazing economics of software & the internet, working parents can take supplementary MBA classes late at night or early in the morning from the University of Phoenix, and a child can take chinese lessons from Rosetta Stone if their school does not offer it.   These newer models challenge local monopolies by empowering individuals with tools to achieve a better temporal & geographic fit for their needs.  This is where we stand today.  A working student growing up in the Bronx might just as easily encounter their next door neighbor in an early morning GMAT test prep course as a Indian accountant burning the midnight oil.

The learners of today, however, demand more.  In an era where the music streams of Pandora adapt to each listeners love of lyrics and temperament toward tempo, educational technology must find ways of teaching the same routine concepts math, science, language arts, and social science in ways that cater to the specific learning needs & preferences of the individual.  Some students learn geometry better through equations.  Others grasp it better through graphs.  Some students learn language better via video visualizations.  Others keep up better when forced to spend time conversing in groups.  The only way that the educational system can scalably be more finely tuned to optimize pedagogical concepts at the learner level is through technology - an exciting opportunity for the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

This is fundamentally a data problem, one I call the Atomic Challenge in Next Generation Education.  The only way to "optimize" is to know by student what techniques and content are working and what aren't.  The only way to do that is to tag each and every question posed by difficulty, format (graph-based, video, algorithmic...), time of delivery, and really any other variable that could possibly effect an individual's performance.  Next, a level of machine learning is needed to build a customized content feed according to the formats that maximize that individual's chances of success.  

Atomic data-based learning is going to be the way of the world because the failures of the system - at least in the US - demand it.  With the staggering cost of healthcare and impending bankruptcy of the Social Security Trust, their economy must grow fast enough over the long-run to afford to pay both principal & interest to reduce the national debt.  Super-charged & sustainable growth requires heightened levels of productivity.  Since the 1980s, however, the US has experienced half the productivity increase as in the previous two decades.   The principle way in which we boost productivity is by fixing our falling educational system.  In order to improve, we need to understand what is working.  And, in order to understand what is working, we need data.  The Duncan / Obama $4.35B "Race to the Top" program embraces "Standards & Assessments"-based initiatives as a key area of focus.  Only by accepting that reality will projects be eligible for state financing.  When teachers fail to improve the performance of their students and cannot get our young to basic levels of literacy, we need to know.  

Along with the district & state bureaucracy that supports them, institutions of instruction have shifted to an Age of Compliance.  Accountability will soon pervade schools the way it governs our hospitals and courts.

If we take for a given that today's relatively data-lite schools will some day be guided by 1s and 0s, what sorts of technologies exist to enable transition?  How can we think about building educational content in the absence of a common set of pedagogical formatting standards?  Is it worth it, or should we wait?  These are questions that keep me up at night.  If you have ideas, drop me a line.

It is out of my absolute respect for women in business that that I wholeheartedly disagree.  I do not debate the demographic fact that technology has historically been an industry lopsided heavily towards the Y chromosome.  I am also no proponent of active discrimination or misogynism - as has been reported in the past.  Women, as well any any other relative minority in the tech world and beyond, should be judged by their qualifications and given an equal shot at opportunity.  

What I take issue with is the notion that just because discriminatory experiences have occurred against a minority group, that somehow society should expect and desire a world in which women and men are equally or even more proportionately represented in the tech arena.  Imposing some normative view on demographic equilibria is wrong.  Telling women that there should be more of them running their own companies, raising capital for their own businesses, and engineering interesting products is just as bad as telling them that they should be in the garden planting flowers or picking the kids up from school.  Women should be encouraged to do what they want to do.  Some women choose to start companies.  Some choose to treat patients.  Some choose to teach algebra.  Social structures are changing, and despite the snail-like pace, to the extent that they are underrepresented relative to their own volition, the numbers are sure to swing back toward female participation/leadership in technology in the coming years.  

The question then becomes how we enable those women who may someday want to play a role in the technology & business worlds to fulfill their dreams.  I believe that this question can even be expanded more broadly to apply to young aspiring mind of both genders.  So what are our options?

Polling a few prominent female technologists, Viviek Wadhwa argues that as a population, "parents need to teach their daughters that they can help change the world by becoming engineers and scientists, and successful women need to provide them with encouragement and coaching."  This is a respectable suggestion, but one that is very hard to actively implement formally as family values are often older and more impenetrable than the hills.  My friend Elizabeth Stark suggests that we (both men and women) should focus specifically on creating more of a culture of mentorship, such that feeble minds have the support infrastructure to make mistakes, take chances, and challenge societal norms.  I like this idea because I believe that it is relatively easier to implement.  For women in particular, I have been very pleased to see local events such as Girls in Tech in NYC & DLD Women in Germany bring together such prominent individuals who can serve as role models and coaches for the next generation of hungry minds.  Even Fast Company's Most Influential Women in Technology serves to direct talent toward individuals who might be able to help them get where they want to be.

In my mind, parenting and mentoring initiatives are not scalable enough.  There needs to be a more institutional way of getting people closer to "what they want to be when they grow-up."  I would target schools.  Middle schools and high schools are a possibility down the road, but I would focus today on those most capable of near term change: colleges & universities, who year after year shuttle our young directly into the working world.  Career counseling and on-campus recruiting efforts are abhorrent.  They feed students into white collar jobs through formal recruiting cycles that find a way to woo candidates into jobs that they do not even understand.  As a 20 or 21 year old, most jobs that pay $50K+ sound amazing and as friends throw frisbees and sip cold ones on the main green, it is easy to loose track of what you are even applying for.

Having been through the system a few years back, my experience was that if you are not going to med school or law school, 'campus recruiting' is essentially an on-ramp to consulting, trading, or investment banking.  While the dynamics may have changed as a result of the financial crisis, I always found it sad that many of the best and the brightness technical minds (both male and female) got siphoned off to architect trading systems for Goldman Sachs or sweat under heat lamps while building complex leveraged buyout models for JP Morgan.  Some population of graduating seniors with their heads on their shoulders actually knowing want to go into finance - and they should.  But before anyone is sentenced to a cubicle confined serfdom, they should know the options that they really have.  

Entrepreneurship - and the technology world more broadly - is a vast expanse of opportunity that continues to be under-encouraged by the pedagogical support community.  My recommendation would be to create an "Innovation Track" to supplement Finance, Consulting, Medicine, and Law.  Universities have the ability to leverage their deep networks of alumni that have done interesting things to help breed more success.  While it would certainly be hard work, my hypothesis is that it would pay off in the the long-run from an endowment perspective as happy people fulfilling their dreams are far more likely to support the infrastructure that allowed it to happen.  This is a gender agnostic proposition, but one that I think would very much work out for eager and qualified women everywhere. 

Negative: The Kindle has buttons.  This was not the device's fatal flaw, but it was the paradigm into which the form factor was born.  Unlike the touch-screen multi-purpose devices that would come to being, the Kindle was meant for reading.  As such, every design element must be evaluated against this backdrop.  Every button must exist to make this process easier.  The keyboard was useful for looking up words and making little notes every now and again.  Unlike the buttons on cell phones positioned incestuously close together, the Kindle had a more comfortably spaced nearly full keypad.  Sure the mini-joystick-like navigation interface had a lot to be desired.  But, Amazon's greatest blunder was leaving out the most important button: Store (a.k.a. BUY! BUY! BUY!).  

As the reader, I want to be able to access new books as quickly as possible.  I do not want to do any workflow guessing.  I do not want to toggle through menus.  Like the readily visible AppStore and iTunes store on the iPhone, I want an obvious and frictionless path the purchase.  

So too does Amazon! This is what is so surprising.  For a $55B company with likely scores of people focused on optimizing customer conversion in their ecommerce business, this was an unexpected oversight which revealed how far behind in their thinking Bezos and team really were.

Positive: Taking the aggregation and indexing of massive amounts of digital media as a given feature of any successful e-reader, the most unique feature of Amazon's Kindle product strategy was their embrace of digital media content as a data vs. as a native app.  In purchasing a Kindle version of a book, I am able to access content on any device onto which Amazon has a connection (iPhone, Laptop, Kindle, Blackberry, iPad...).  It gives users ownership of the reading experience, rather than a form factor.  To make content portability work, however, Amazon takes things one step farther.  They sync your place from medium to medium, allowing you to pick-up on your iPhone where you left off on your Kindle - automatically.  

There were a number of other positive & negative features of the device.  If you had overwhelmingly different impressions, I'd love to hear your thoughts.