Cogblog

True factoid, based on Cogdata, your sales people are not working as hard as they usually do.

Due to the business cycle nature of Cogmap traffic, there has always been a dip in Cogtraffic as the holidays approach, as our data shows.  If you point to one day that I look at and say, “Ah, a slightly unusual decline starts here”, it is the second Tuesday in December.  Each year, traffic started to decline there in an unusual way.  Isn’t that neat?

So your sales people started slacking there, in case you wondered.

This is also born out if you look at LinkedIn.com Traffic:

Or jigsaw:

So there you go, people shut it down on the second Tuesday of December.

“COGMAP is AWESOME!!!

I’ve been looking for something like this for, God knows, how long?!? And here it is, you’re here, here to stay!

Just thought of letting you know, because with the type of work that my organization and I do, this is the magical pill.”

I read recently that Millenial Media and Admob both see around 6-7b impressions per month.

Pretty good.  Obviously, a reasonable next question is what does that business look like?

First, we need to speculate on what kind of CPMs they achieve.  We have absolutely no idea, so let’s make up a number.  A reasonable starting point might be “regular ad network CPMs”.  So here is Pubmatics numbers:

OK, so $0.27 is a real network value.  But that is the publisher payout.  So if we inflate that 40%, to get the network revenue:  ~$0.50.  In the interests of being conservative, let’s make the mobile network CPMs $0.25.  That also makes our math easy.

So a 6.0b impression/month network yields a $1.5m/month business with ~$600k gross margins.  That means they could probably support 30 employees with that business.  From this, one could imply that Admob, with ~150 employees was losing a lot of money and Millenial Media, with ~50 employees (and ~1b more impressions, yielding an extra ~$100k in gross margins), actually close to breakeven.

Are these margins realistic?  I have no idea.  Maybe they have to rev share with the carriers.  Maybe a lot of these are international impressions and hence worthless.  (Although the Millenial team, at the least, is smart enough not to buy those impressions.)

Seems like a great business.  Obviously, Millenial is sending a message with their raise, as did Google with their acquisition, that the market is a lot bigger than these two companies current implied run rate implies (implications imply!), but these numbers actually seem to make a lot of random anecdotal sense to me.  I had heard that Admob was doing around $10m in revenue annually , so this kind of lines up, given their ramp.

The obvious question is “was my imaginary CPM correct?”  Anecdotal information is that CPM prices are high and CPC prices are low in the industry.  When I try to unwind all of the math from the blog post, it sounds like $0.25 is about right.

I would be shocked if this back of the envelope calculation was too far off.

Woo, boy.  You are a presenting machine now.  It will not be long before someone asks you to present at a conference.

Let me preface this with the fact that I am assuming you are not being asked to explain how you cured cancer to one hundred cancer scientists.  Or “black-hat secrets of SEO” for the top one hundred SEO geeks on earth.  I assume those presentations will consist largely of dense gibberish on a page.  I am assuming instead that you have been asked to give a broader discussion to a more generalized audience.    Even in the above situations, one should seriously consider using the approach I describe below.

I don’t know how many of my readers have read Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm”.  If you haven’t, go read it!  It is considered one of the seminal books on how to start companies and has core ideas there that will be critical to your thinking in the future.  One thing he talks about is how, as a company goes through various stages of its lifecycle, the way you manage the business changes.

The same is true of presentations.  When you are called on to do a conference presentation, it is a completely different kind of animal from all the rest of your presentations.  In fact, a good conference presentation requires you break the rules.  Here, people want a memorable story.  People want twists and turns.  People want the UNEXPECTED.  If you bite the head off a bat on stage, they will pay more attention to you than they have paid to any other speaker all day.  Think about it.

Your average conference presentation bores to tears.  To have a great presentation, the most important thing, in my opinion, is to entertain.  If you entertain, you have the chance to educate.  If you bore, you cannot possibly educate.  With that in mind, here are the new rules:

• Slides should not have more than 6 words on them.
• Slides should be dominated by an image that explains the point.

Here is a presentation I did for Ignite Baltimore.  Remember the Ignite rules, these slides are auto-advancing every 15 seconds.

No lie, many people thought it was the best presentation of the evening.

Flickr is a great place to find graphics for these kinds of presentations.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/terretta/189767445/

Yesterday I talked about how I develop Deliverables in Powerpoint.  Today we will talk about how I develop Sales Presentations.  These are slides for a smaller audience (20 or less people) where I am trying to persuade and educate them.

The key thing I think about when I am building these presentations is that the real person I am trying to sell is probably not in the room.  I am trying to give concepts to people that they can take back to their boss or talk about with their teams.

The same title logic I discussed with Deliverables, I typically carry through to here, but there are a few extra nuances that I apply:

• Larry Weinbach, the former CEO of Anderson Consulting and Unisys, once told me, “in a sales presentation, the potential customer can only remember about three things, so what are yours?”  A great comment that stuck with me.  Before you start writing your deck, you should figure out what the three things you actually want them to remember are.  Then, as you build your deck, remember that those are the only things they will actually remember.  You will find that this actually has a lot of impact on the deck construction.
• Pictures are really important.

Let’s talk about pictures.  Pictures of smiling, multi-cultural people shaking hands and looking at laptops and being productive are probably good.  Someone smarter than I can comment on that, because I have not tested it, but what I really think about is a picture describing what I am talking about.  Typically the three things I pick when I am focusing my presentation are complex, so I need to have a simple way to describe each one, otherwise, my first thing will end up being 10 different things they have to remember.  That is a fail.  If you are looking for a simple way to describe something complex, it can be helpful to remember that a picture is worth a thousand words.  So a good picture does wonders.

My approach when trying to define the picture is that it has to be articulated in such a way that if someone in the room wants to sketch it later for their boss or team, they can do it justice.  It can’t be some crazy network stack or some insanely complex diagram.  It has to be something simple, like a triangle, or a few interlocking bubbles, or something like that.  A great way to start is to draw it by hand – because that is what they will be doing.  You can have a designer add some sex appeal to your graphic later, but remember, the utility of the graphic is that it is so simple and easy for someone to capture in their mind that after you show them the graphic and explain it, they can run back to their bosses office and draw the exact same thing on his/her whiteboard and explain it the exact same way.  This ability to explain one of your key points is a core concept I try to accomplish in a sales presentation.

While the Deliverable presentation was incredibly verbose, this presentation is less wordy.  It is still complete sentences and at least two bullets everywhere, but you don’t have to put it all in there because this is not designed to be documentation.  Deliverables are reference material.  This is persuasive.  The voice track that walks someone through the pictures is critical.  If you can explain it well on the slides, so much the better, because different people learn differently, but the key focus is on your few critical pictures that drive your three points home.

Tomorrow we will do Part 3 – Presentations for Conferences.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yandle/3857109447/

I am the kind of presenter that people either love or hate.  I have a lot of manic energy when I talk and that either rubs people the right way, because they love my enthusiasm, or the wrong way because they think I am a nut.

Regardless, I have now done hundreds of presentations in my life using Powerpoint and I have developed some strong feelings about the way that these presentations should be done.  I am no expert on presentations, and there are some books out there by real experts that are better and more relevant, but there you go.

I have broken down my presentations into three types:

1)      Deliverables – These presentations may be requirements documents, strategy documents, or other kinds of content where format “is not important”.  Not surprisingly, I have a very strict format that I feel is the right way to do it when format it not important.

2)      Sales Presentations – This kind of presentation explains a product or organization to a relatively small (20 or less) group of people.  This is both persuasive and informative.

3)      Conference Presentations – This is meant to entertain and educate potentially hundreds of people at a time.

Deliverables

I worked at Booz Allen Hamilton for a year and while there, I got to see a lot of systematic thinking about how presentations should be put together.  Unfortunately, I felt like the only situation where the thinking they had done could be applied was this particular kind of presentation.  A lot of this thinking was based on their best practices.

First, let’s talk about deck logic at a high level.  You could build a story incrementally, slowly working the audience up to your big conclusion: “These are the features, these are the costs, these are the risks, this is the conclusion!” or you could tell people the conclusion up-front: “This is the conclusion, now we will break down why.”

Generally, the up-front approach is the way to go.  There is a reason people flip through decks to get to the end while you are talking.  This is what they want to know!  Tell them early and you will have more control over the presentation.  The only situations where you may want to go incrementally are:

• The conclusion is controversial
• The audience does not agree among themselves
• The process that led to the conclusion is just as important as the result

People love the incremental approach because it is more “story-like”, but remember, when you start telling stories, audiences start waiting for the plot twists and surprise endings – and no one wants a surprise in these kinds of presentations.  Up-front approaches minimize surprise, making for a dull presentation but a happier audience.

Another best practice I took away is titling slides.  Booz Allen had a standard: No longer than two lines, a complete sentence (without a period at the end), and should summarize the page.  One thing every partner would do to check a presentation in development was to flip through it reading only the titles.  If the presentation made sense, it was a good presentation.  If it didn’t, then you knew where to work.  If a title was only one line, then it could probably have more information added to it to make it more impactful.  Let me give you a quick example:

Poor:

• Widget X is better than its competitors in three ways

Better:

• Widget X is smaller, faster, and less expensive than its competitors

Best:

• Widget X is 25% smaller, 100% faster and 50% of the price of its nearest competitor.

That is a great slide title!  Does that make the bullets on the page a little more boring?  Yep.  The goal is to reduce surprise.

A final note from a mistake I see frequently that makes me cringe: There should always be at least two bullets.  If there is less, it should be combined with the top level.

Knowing going in that you are going to follow this standard prevents you from agonizing about how you are going to do it.  A perfect example of methodology freeing us to focus on where we really need to be creative.

These presentations tend to be very verbose.  Ideally, you should not even need to present them.  They should stand by themselves.  They are designed to act as a presentable replacement for Microsoft Word.  To that extent, they probably require a table of contents slide and then a slide at each section break introducing the next chapter.  This slide should be a version of the table of contents slide with the next section highlighted in some way.  Yes, this means that the slide after the table of contents slide is a table of contents slide highlighted with the next section.  The table of contents slide is to discuss the table of contents, the next slide is to introduce the first section.  Standard is good!

Tomorrow I will talk about Sales Presentations and how they should be structured.

It has been a little while since we had a nice Cogmap blog post, so without further ado:

Cogmap new charts since inception:

You can see the traditional initial PR burst and then how adoption has grown over time.  In May, 2007, we added a lot of maps internally, so that is an artificial spike.  March 2008 saw the introduction of private maps.   Adoption has fairly consistently grown since then.

What does it all mean?  Comment away.

Not to belabor the obvious, but newspapers appear to be hopelessly doomed.  Here is their revenue:

Here is my theory for what is going on:

Now there are all of these meta-newspapers such as Drudge, HuffPo, Delicious, Yahoo Home Page, Google Finance, etc.  They do not generally product a lot of their own content, but they point to content.  If a newspaper writes a good article, back in the day you would buy that paper and subsidize all the other content.  Furthermore, it made every advertiser in the newspaper happy, not just the advertisers adjacent to that one good article.  Now, people hop in and hop out, using their meta-newspaper to find good content on many sites, ignore the bad content, and deal with information overload.  What is sad is that not every article resonates with large audiences – and it is hard to know in advance if there is something there.  So generating content is a risky business.  Much like Hollywood, you have to weigh the odds that the investment pays off every time you invest upfront in value creation.  Journalism as a hits business.  Will this individual article generate enough revenue to cover its costs?  That is a lot harder.

It goes without saying that people read meta-newspapers now and not real news web sites.  HuffPo just blew past the Washington Post:

So now that no one reads real newspaper web sites, using meta-sites to get pointed to moments of goodness by real reporters, what happens?

Watergate began June 17, 1972 with the break-in.  Watergate ended August 24, 1974 with Richard Nixon’s resignation.  In between are two years of steady investigation by Woodward and Bernstein that resulted in a resignation by a sitting President.  If you were the editor of an online magazine, would you have told your two best reporters to go off into a hole for months and months and months working on a story that may or may not have a positive outcome?  Maybe they will find out they were barking up the wrong tree.  Maybe they will find out that there isn’t much there.  Maybe it turns out that the President isn’t involved in this break-in and it is an interesting, albeit not too interesting story.  This is a really, really risky story.  Would you write a $100k check to maybe get a great story?  $200k?  $500k?

What will become of real investigative journalism?  Who will keep politicians honest if, in a world of TMZ and Perez Hilton, doing real investigative work does not pay the bills.

I fear for the safety of our global community in a world where investigative journalism does not have a viable economic model.  Who will keep politicians honest?  Remember, the direct result of Watergate was not just Nixon’s resignation: It was FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act.  It was the Ethics in Government Act.  Politicians didn’t publish their tax returns before.    All of this new visibility is because journalists proved it was necessary to keep us safe from our politician caretakers.  What does the future hold?

They are coming!

In sports, people take performance enhancing drugs for one reason:  Professional sports are extremely competitive.  The difference between a superstar and an average professional athlete is a razor thin margin.  The push to be your absolute best is intense, no less so when the compensation differences between superstars and average players (all of whom were huge superstars in college and high school) is orders of magnitude.

This is an area where people are under intense scrutiny to not use performance enhancing drugs.  In many respects, being caught taking them is comparable to a death sentence, yet the incentive to perform better is so enormous, people take that chance.

In the workplace, without such oversight, if there were drugs you could take that make you a superstar, what would you do?

I suspect people will dope like crazy!

I have been reading many articles lately about the Adderall trend.  I now believe the following facts to be true:

• There are drugs that you could take today that would improve your performance in the workplace.
• These drugs are frequently taken by college students today and have been taken for years by a younger generation, illustrating that the long term side effects of such drug use are relatively low.
• The generation entering the workplace today is taking these drugs and performing better as a result.

Given the evidence we have seen of how professional poker players and college students have reaped the benefits of Adderall use, I suspect that today many Wall Street employees probably take Adderall.  It is a competitive industry and compensation is tightly linked to performance.

If your peers were suddenly working harder and being more productive than you, would you feel pressure to enhance your performance artificially?  What if the people working for you were suddenly working harder and more productive than you.  Would the person performing poorest be less likely to be promoted?  Would you promote the least productive person on your team?  Who would you promote if everyone else was using Adderall?  The possibility of not just upward mobility halting, but continued employment may be threatened for non-enhancers.

This is you entering the world of professional athletes.  Everyone is doping to get ahead, if you do not, you risk not getting ahead.  Is your company suggesting people don’t?  Nope, they are in a battle to the death with competitors and the enhanced performance of their employees is critical to victory.  Your company wants you to do it, your co-workers are doing it, and not doing it makes you a worse employee.

Is this bad?  I don’t know, but it is certainly seductive.  If I told you that you could take a pill when you got to work that would give you unparalleled ability to focus for the next 12 hours, would you refuse?  Who doesn’t like to flow?  Be in the zone.

The American Psychological Association believes that achieving “Flow”, the state of intense focus, is critical to a person happiness.  Hey, I believe it.  When I am flowing, it is awesome.  Flowing is the most awesome thing around.  Now you can self-medicate to instantly flow.  For me, it typically requires 4-5 hours of uninterrupted time for me to be able to achieve flow for the last 2 hours.  And that only works 25% of the time.

I work with coders.  Coders are the kind of people that would probably benefit disproportionately from the ability to decide to instantly flow for a few hours.  What would you be willing to do to flow on command?

Are you tempted?  Comment.

Yay!  Venturebeat recently announced that they had acquired Tradevibes, a crowd-sourced web site of company information, for an undisclosed sum.  A huge victory for Venturebeat, as the acquisition of crowd-sourced company information is a key strategy for success in the modern economy by any company.  Surely Venturebeat is just one good acquisition away (hint, hint) from dominating the tech news market.

Tradevibes is an interesting company.  Great pedigree: 4 paypal guys raise $900k from Ron Conway and Dave McClure, some of the best angels out there.  They blew past 10,000 companies in the database a year ago and I eyeball that they probably have more than 20,000 companies in their database today.  Is the data good?  I checked out Facebook:

Management

• Mark Zuckerberg, Founder & CEO [x]
• Dustin Moskovitz, Co-founder & VP of Engineering [x]
• Owen Van Natta, Chief Revenue Officer, VP of Operations [x]
• Matt Kohler, VP Strategy & Business Operations [x]
• Chamath Palihapitiya, VP of Marketing & Operations [x]
• Gideon Yu, CFO [x]
• Sheryl Sandberg, COO [x]
• Jonathan Heiliger, VP of Technical Operations [x]
• Elliott Schrage, VP Global Communications & Public Affairs [x]
• David Fischer, VP Online Sales & Operations [x]
• Christopher Kelly, General Counsel [x]
• Ben Ling, SVP Development

A lot of those people are gone.  Dustin is gone, Owen is gone, Chamath is gone, Gideon is gone and Ben is gone.  And those are just the ones I know about, and I know nothing about Facebook.

Obviously, I live in a glass house, so I won’t be throwing stones, but the data is certainly no better than ours and in many cases sparser.  The page was viewed 50,000 times and has 100 edits.  The most recent edit was 9/30/2009, so you have to like that it was edited recently – although many obvious errors were not corrected. 1 in 500 users makes an edit, which seems realistic.

On Cogmap, Facebook has had more than 3,000 views and has 20 edits, so we are getting edits about every 60 views.  A more engaged community?  Hard to say, we have fewer maps: Slightly more than 7,000.  It would be interesting to compare their most popular companies and our most popular maps head-to-head, or global site activity, however we don’t have that data.

Anyway, enough head-to-head battles, let’s talk about the transaction: I bet it went poorly for Tradevibes.  VentureBeat has raised $300k in capital and doesn’t seem like it is awash in cash, so it is unlikely that Tradevibes saw the kind of exit that returns 10x to the investors.  Certainly, VentureBeat probably doesn’t have a plan to use Tradevibes in a way that generates the kind of value that would justify a 10x payout.

Did Ron and Dave get out with their initial investment?  I bet they did not get out at all.  I wonder if they realized Tradevibes was not working out and simply became investors in VentureBeat.  I checked LinkedIn in an effort to discover if the Tradevibes founders had stuck around.  All I was able to find was that Peter Chu, the CTO, left a year ago.  I had heard that Tradevibes was struggling, that is more evidence that the business was going sideways.

One of the funny exercises in small companies selling out to other small companies is that, if it is not an all cash transaction,  it is not simply about valuing Tradevibes – it is about valuing VentureBeat.   Assuming VentureBeat was not going to write a check for more than a million dollars (probably the only scenario where the investors get out whole), they took some cash and some stock – probably more stock.  If they took stock, then the question you wonder is how VentureBeat was valued relative to Tradevibes.

Here at Cogmap, we look forward to working with Matt and the VentureBeat team – or anyone that wants to crush them.  We love business development deals!