How to Persuade People – 21 Golden Rules –

This month’s Startups Uncensored will be on “How to Persuade People”.  It will be an open and frank town-hall conversation talking about the skills and techniques leaders use to influence others .

This month the session will be run by Jason Nazar, in a presentation format.  The  “How to Persuade People” presentation will be geared towards startups and entrepreneurs to learn and review the skills that will help them raise money, hire great talent, and land partnerships.

The event is free and is followed by a reception and mixer at the Docstoc Offices in Santa Monica by the 3rd Street Promenade. The venue holds about 140 folks, ALL PREVIOUS EVENTS WERE FULL WITH STANDING ROOM ONLY. If you are not one of the first 140 to RSVP and confirm, we will have a waiting list.

Thursday, March 18th 6:30pm – 8:00pm (Townhall)…. 8:00pm on, Reception
Cost: FREE
This event is capped at 140 attendees.
Confirmation will be required or your spot will be given up for our waiting list.

Santa Monica Public Library (Auditorium) 601 Santa Monica Blvd.
Santa Monica, CA 90401

TO SIGN UP FOR THIS EVENT, CLICK HERE

I wouldn’t bet against MySpace. They attract over 70 million people a month (just in the US), and by most accounts are still one of the 10 most popular sites in the world. They also have a new management team, that’s headed up in part by Michael Jones (COO), the most all around talented internet executive I know.

But they’re clearly headed in the wrong direction, and have been for the last two years. Having grown up in LA, and having started Docstoc down here, there’s a bit of a shared connection.  I know many of their founders and early employees, and one of the co-founders of Intermix (the parent company of MySpace) is an investor.  MySpace has lost the battle as the “place for friends”.  If the powers that be can accept this and move forward with breakneck speed, they will have an incredibly huge opportunity to build something we will all be talking about again.

The following are my 7 Ways on How to Save MySpace

1.) MySpace = Yahoo 2.0: Turn MySpace into the Next-Generation Portal

MySpace should not require a login to get into the site, and I DON’T want to see my profile when I do log in. It should be the next generation content/ entertainment portal that leverages millions of user profiles to more accurately provide data to advertisers on what is appealing to specific demographics.

• Management will have to be willing to forgo millions in revenue in the short term by giving up the coveted advertising on the login page, to rebuild a compelling user experience
• Take away the primary focus on the logged in home page, on my profile and other users profiles – MySpace is no longer the popular online destination for connecting with friends, but it still is a traffic behemoth
• Get users immediately into valuable content that engages them in the site: featured video, music, news; video, popular trending items in my network

2.) A Micropayment Ecosystem for ALL Digital Goods

MySpace Music was an ambitious project, but it was executed moronically. They should have leveraged their relationships with the labels to recreate an ITunes that allows users to listen to songs in full and pay less than $1 a track. MySpace should also have the ability to save my credit card information and with a click of a buy button, enable every user to seamlessly purchase any digital good.

• Music – enable a dead simple player on band and profile pages that allows creators to upload their songs and have users purchase them for any price they set
• Movies – no website has more Hollywood DNA. Work with the studios to have premium Hulu-ish content prominently branded and for sale
• Artwork/Content – let users upload and share virtually any digital content including artwork and documents that they can promote and sell

3.) Local News Online & More Valuable User Generated Content

The user generated content on MySpace includes user profiles, updates, blogs and pictures.  MySpace should leverage their users to create millions of topics pages indexed in search engines.  This could also be done by leveraging a partnership (or buyout) of a site like Mahalo.

• Local newspapers are dying all across the country. Rupert Murdoch is quite the fan of newspapers.  MySpace should create thousands of online local newspapers that can be managed by a small team of experienced virtual editors and powered by a community of millions of citizen journalists.
• MySpace should be leveraging editors and their community to create millions of topic pages that can be indexed by search engines and drive traffic. Think eHOW or About.

4.) Court Star Power

Who are the evangelists pimping MySpace? Where is their Ashton Kutcher & CNN?  MySpace HAS followers, what it doesn’t have are people excited to promote themselves on their platform.  If MySpace can amass millions of users following celebrities, thought leaders and evangelists, these self promotion hounds will bring everyone else back and keep them engaged.

• MySpace’s attempt to copy twitter with “Status and Mood” was lame and sophomoric in comparison to Facebook’s play.
• Make the Status updates an exclusive benefit that ONLY celebrities and famous people get, and move millions of users to follow those select groups of evangelists.
• Kill the “friends” concept. I’m not friends with most of the people that are connected to me on social networks. There are people mutually connected, people I follow, and people who follow me.

5.) Fuel Micro Jobs

The world is flat, but it’s also poor. There are millions of people all over the world and in the US who need supplemental income. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is an amazing service that that enables the exchange of micro payments for any variety of activity. MySpace should be the conduit for the exchange of billions of dollars, connecting people who need work done with people who need work.

• Leverage a worldwide community to enable a perfect market for outsourcing activities like online research, writing and content review.
• MySpace’s active users on average have less discretionary income than Facebook’s active users. Empower working mothers and folks out of work across the US with the opportunity to make an additional $20 – $500 a month doing various online service based projects.

6.) New Product Releases Every Month & A Rock Star Product Evangelist

MySpace has come out with a thousand new features since I started using the site, but most seem to be buried in the navigation structure. The MySpace product management and dev team need to bite of fsmaller projects, get them out more quickly, and make sure they are exposed to everyone visiting the site.

• Have a set date every month where the public knows MySpace is coming out with a new key feature and build excitement and buzz around these releases. Their development process need to be more open and transparent to get the community excited about being part of reviving the MySpace user experience.
• In the early days of MySpace, Tom used to post messages all the time talking about new updates, fixes and features in the site, and even personal notes. MySpace needs Tom to be Tom again – the evangelist always communicating and involving the users. MySpace lost its personal touch, they need it back.

7.) Hustle & Chutzpa

I recently finished “Stealing MySpace” by Julia Angwin. The book is an incredible accounting of the history of MySpace.  Anyone who reads it should be amazed at a how a group of founders and dealmakers that were perpetually underfunded built one of the best known internet sites and had the largest financial exit of its time.

They did this because they had Hustle and Chutzpa, and it’s the same DNA th at Rupert Murdoch has. But somewhere in-between it got muddled.

MySpace surpassed Friendster in large part because they were quicker to iterate, they took more risks, and they turned their mistakes into opportunities. They built a fundamentally revolutionary user experience enabling friends to connect online.

But that risk-taking mentality seems long gone. I hope that MySpace is a place I want to start visiting again every day instead of once a month out of morbid curiosity.  I want Facebook to legitimately have competition, so we all benefit as consumers.  Most of all I want MySpace to take their 1000 plus employees & 100 million plus users and take big risks.

MySpace is a giant, and giants don’t quietly fade into ambiguity. They should be killed in glorious battle making a mosterous roar as they fall to a more worthy opponent; or they take their place as an endangered warrior that albeit bloodied and wounded, outlasted all their counterparts and will remain immortalized for generations to come.

There is only one way I can imagine running a startup, obsessively giving it everything you’ve got. In my opinion its what separates the winners from everyone else, and it’s the only way I’d ever be able to look back on this experience without regret. But that kind of dedication comes with a price. And anyone who has chosen a path of starting a business can tell you the unintended consequences of startups.

For the past 2 years I’ve neglected my health, family, and friends. For most of my adult life, I was about 165 pounds. I’m almost 210 pounds these days, and trust me when I say my body’s not meant to carry this much weight. 2 years ago I was running 6 miles a day 3 times a week, and playing competitive basketball and tennis.

After we raised our first round of capital I regularly started staying in the office until 2am. I found myself so physically and mentally spent by the weekend that I typically slept most the day on Saturday, before I went back to work on Sundays. I was so inactive, I’m convinced now my muscles started to atrophy and I tore the ligament in my right foot, trying to finally exercise one day. Compensating for that injury I tore my left calf, and it’s been 5 months since I’ve been able to run or jog.

It took me a while to admit that I was stressed out, and even longer to realize I would turn to food to compensate for that stress. Over the past year, I’ve become a more solitary person with my thoughts and emotions than I’ve ever been, while increasingly becoming a public figure who’s known as an outgoing social networker and showman. It’s a strange dichotomy.

My family has been both incredibly supportive but also upset that I’ve seemingly disappeared. I have three (quite) older siblings, and we’re undeniably close. But while they’re all proud of me, they disapprove of my unbalanced lifestyle. My brother and I share opposing sides of duplex, he’s literally a wall away from me. But I can often go 2 weeks without seeing or talking to him. My sisters are busy raising their kids, so they can relate a bit more. But like so many others, our conversation often come back to them asking me “why don’t you ever want to talk about what’s going on in your life”.

My father who I love dearly, isn’t only from another generation/country, he might as well be from another planet. He struggles the most to be supportive; I know he’s at least a little disappointed I didn’t practice law and take over the family real estate business. A lot of what I do is to make him proud and prove to him that all his hard work for his children was not in vain. If it were up to my father, we’d spend everyday together going to lunch and “working” side by side. I get to see him about once a week. He’s almost 80 and every time I see him I try and cherish the interactions, because I don’t know how many will be left.

When it comes to my family though, my lack of time affects me most in relation to my mom. My mother has been severely ill for the last 6 years. Due to mental illness that set in later in life, and a very early onset of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, she can’t hold a conversation, stand, eat, or function at all without full time caregivers. She is the person that has done more for me than anyone else, and was always my biggest cheerleader. She lives about 5 minutes away from my home. She doesn’t always remember my name, but every time I see her she lights up, and when I say “I love you”, she always says it back. I could leave the office every night at 8:00pm and give her a hug and kiss, spend a half hour with her, but I don’t. Our first office was across the street from her (not accidentally), and I’d walk over during the day to check on her. Since we moved further away, I typically go by to see her once every two weeks. It’s a choice I’m not very proud of.

Friends are a little bit easier to handle, I’ve have the same ones since I was 5, and you build up a little bit of “friendship equity” after 20+ years. But for a long time they did stop calling me, knowing I always turned down plans for work. It was a little disconcerting to see my closest friends just write me off for the time being as someone who was never free to hang out. But there were also cases of severe strains with some of my close friends. I pulled back from engaging and interacting with them, and felt that if someone wasn’t at that startup with me on a daily basis, that it took too much effort to try and explain the intricacies and emotions of the experience.

Dating has been a totally surreal experience. I went from being a hopeless romantic “when harry met sally” type, to literally not even thinking about relationships in the least bit. The extent of my effort with girls for a long time consisted of texting them on a Friday/Saturday night at 11pm to meet up when I had finished my work.

I think I’ve reached my breaking point, at least for now, and mostly in regards to my health. Somehow I know my relationships will work out, but I often find myself feeling like I’m working at 40% of my capacity and energy, and I think its due in large part to poor physical habits. So I’m going to drop 30lbs in the next 60 days, and will take a bet against anybody that thinks I can’t do it. As you can see even that I have to do obsessively.

In the last year I’ve probably met close to a thousand entrepreneurs. And the ones I’ve consistently bonded with the most, were those folks willing to do whatever it took, and make any sacrifices to be successful. Starting and running a company is the joy of my life right now, and gives me a greater sense of purpose than anything I’ve done before. Its come with a price though, and I know a lot of other folks like me are thinking through and struggling with issues of balance and the unintended consequences of pouring yourself into that which you love and defines you.

Is there a difference between tech startups in Silicon Valley vs. Los Angeles? Most emphatically, Yes!

I’ve spent the last year running a tech company based in Santa Monica, CA and I’ve spent countless weeks in the Bay meeting with hundreds of tech founders. As unreliable as stereotypes may be, these are my generalizations.

Bay area founders are amazing technologists. They build obsessively user focused products, do a fantastic job at virally driving a ton of traffic, but usually have their head up their ass when it comes to making money.

Los Angles founders are hustlers and deal makers. They are more focused on the bottom line and care more about their P&L than their products, which tend to be messy.

At parties in the Bay people talk about Twitter, Friend Feed, what’s being written on Valleywag and Techcrunch, and kickball games between VC’s and entrepreneurs.

At parties in Los Angeles people talk about a media deal they’re “closing”, what TV star is at the party, and some “gray hat” spam-like technique that made them an extra 100K last month.

Folks in the Bay are generally way more obsessive about their products, work harder/longer, can be a bit snobby about their accomplishments and tend to be clique-ish.

Folks in Los Angeles are shrewder business people, have better interpersonal skills, but are more full of shit and two faced, and struggle to build products that get virally adopted.

Some of the Entrepreneurs in the Bay I’ve learned the most from are:
Greg Tseng – smartest person I’ve ever met about user viral marketing and A/B testing
Michael Arrington – undeniably the hardest worker, obsessive about his product and content
Mark Zuckerberg & Reid Hoffman – hands down built the two best consumer internet applications on the web
Raj Kapoor – a hawk about understanding the metrics that drive the growth of online communities

Some of the Entrepreneurs in Los Angeles I’ve learned the most from are:
Kamran Pourzanjani – best deal maker and negotiator in the web space I’ve met
Matt Coffin – guru at scalable revenue models and identifying and exploiting profit centers
Peter Pham – best networker / connector in web 2.0
Jason Calacanis – master promoter of online buzz / controversy
Michael Jones – most intuitively curious and overall talented web entrepreneur in LA

Other than just trying to piss a bunch of people off for hyper-generalizing, there is an important take-away.

The next few years will be an economic apocalypse the likes of which most of us have never lived through before. Many are going to get washed away in the storm, while others will show their true colors and rise to the cream of the crop.

In order to succeed in the future, web entrepreneurs will have to learn how to incorporate the DNA of both Silicon Valley and Los Angeles.

The goal is to be monetization masters who are focused on consumers and build viral, capital efficient products, and to leave behind the full of shit, spam artists who are snobby about not making money.

What should the core values for our company be? Being a HUGE comic buff, I took this as the opportunity to frame our mission and values within the metaphor of an epic adventure. So here is the list of our core values, based on 10 Lessons Startups Can Learn From Superheros. (substitute “Superheros” for “Your StartUp Company”)

Superheroes Never Give Up

Like Batman, you have to keep pressing on to the very last breath. Challenges are overcome by wholeheartedly committing to unrelenting persistence.

Superheroes Always Get the Job Done

There are no excuses if you don’t save the girl from the burning house. There are just results, not reasons, you either save the day or you don’t. Gray area is for Kafka not comic heros.

Superheroes Are the Best at What They Do

Flash is the fastest and we all know it. . If you’re the back end developer, you are the best developer in the world, and everyone on your team knows it. Let great talent excel in areas where their superpowers are most needed.

Superheroes Are Crystal Clear of their Purpose

Captain Marvel may be a cheeseball, but he knows what he stands for. Startups die when they are not clear on their mission.

Superheroes Are NOT Flawless

Superheros have flaws, every member of your team will also. The goal is not perfection, it’s the pursuit of perfection.

Superheroes Do Not Seek Glory…But They Get it Anyway

Don’t do it because you want the attention.
If you do it right, you’ll get it anyway

Superheroes Help Others

Superheroes help people by solving problems. Startups should be obsessed NOT with themselves, but with how they are going to help other people and solve their issues.

Superheroes Can Do it By Themselves But Are More Powerful in Teams

You always have to have each other’s back. Its you vs. the world and brining together your own team of superheroes, and the mutual respect, loyalty, and camaraderie of that team is vital.

Superheroes’ True Strength Comes From Their Character

No matter how super you think you are, you’re strength comes from your character not your talent. Be courageous, be respectful, be honorable, be selfless.

Superheroes Accomplish Huge Feats

The same effort it takes to start a lemonade stand or college club, is the same raw effort it takes to change the world. Your goal is not to build a product or get traffic… Your goal is to accomplish the most amazing feat imaginable. Make the Product, Save the World.

And here is a presentation I gave on the topic with the presentation:

Part 1

Part 2

Ten Lessons Startups Can Learn From Superheroes –