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RAGS MARTIN-JONES AND THE PR-NCE OF W-LES

With each update that , the search algorithm becomes more and more sophisticated. It’s easy to forget that the fact a computer can understand what you type into that search bar and serve up a relevant piece of content is pretty impressive. Google rolls out Modern search engines are able to work today because of the pioneering work of Karen Spärck Jones. Without her, I wouldn’t be able to search for “pizza open now” and get an exhaustive list of takeaway restaurants in less than one second. Search engines need to know what a webpage is about Lots of factors affect how Google judges the quality of a piece of content and where it positions your site on the results page. But to begin with, the search engine needs to be able to understand That way, it can file it under the right terms and later match it to a search query. what your content is about. Think of it like a library. You have to know more or less what a book is about to put it in the right section so people can find it easily. Human readers can skim a text and get the main gist of what it’s about. But it’s not that simple for a computer. Rare words (usually) = meaningful words Search engines figure out the main topic of a text by looking at how often it uses words in comparison to the average text. The logic behind this system is that By looking at the rarest words a text uses, the search engine can identify the most important words in a text and thus understand what the text is about. the more common a word is, the less important it is. Let’s look at an example. Say I was writing a post about my most recent obsession, Cuban salsa. I’ll probably use some common words like “a” and “the” a lot. I'll also use some more specific, rarer terms like “dancing,” “salsa,” and “Cuban salsa.” The search engine will rank the words in my text in order of importance based on the rule that the rarer a word is, the more important it is. “a,” “the,” “and” – common, not important “Dancing,” “salsa” – fairly rare, pretty important “Cuban salsa” – even rarer, most important Karen Spärck Jones’ term frequency model But isn’t the only thing that makes a word important to the meaning of a text. (how often it’s used) also matters. rarity Frequency Karen Spärck Jones was the programmer who created the scientific method search engines use to figure out which words are important. Her model calculates and combines the rarity of a term with how often it appears in a text. It's got a pretty catchy name: “ ” – or for short. Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency tf-idf ‘Inverse document frequency' looks at how often a term appears on all other pages. You get an idf score by dividing the total number of documents in a set (in this case, that set is all the webpages on the internet) by the number of documents with the term you're investigating. Rare words get higher scores. The ‘Term frequency’ part identifies how often a term shows up in a piece of text. If a word is used a lot in a text, it’s probably important to the topic of that text. For instance, my article might mention “Havana” once or twice. While ‘Havana’ is a rare (therefore important) term, it’s not used anywhere near as much as ‘Cuban salsa’, so we know ‘Havana’ isn’t the main topic of the text. Based on Karen Spärck Jones’ formulas, search engines combine the tf and idf scores for a text to find the most important terms. Because ‘Cuban salsa’ is a term with a really high idf score and a pretty high tf in my article, my post will get a high tf-idf score for that term. The search engine will understand that the topic of my text is ‘Cuban salsa.’ The tf-idf scores allow Google to file my article in the right place in the Google index (the where Google stores The. Entire. Internet). Later, when someone searches for ‘Cuban salsa,’ it’ll retrieve my piece and compare it against all the other relevant articles. If Google considers my piece to be the ‘ ’ article for a specific searcher, I’ll rank top. massive database most helpful A pioneer of Natural Language Processing But Spärck Jones’ work didn’t start with her term frequency model. Her earlier research, in the 1960s, focused on the problem of how to program computers to understand human language. Given the fact that so many words have multiple meanings depending on the context, overcoming this problem was no easy feat. Spärck Jones suggested that a way to get computers to understand natural language is to group related words together. For instance, the word ‘pass’ can have several meanings. But if it’s surrounded by terms like ‘exam,’ ‘mark,’ and ‘grade,’ it means ‘succeed.’ Whereas if it’s in a paragraph with ‘players,’ ‘ball,’ and ‘goal,’ it means to change possession. Her work formed a lot of the foundation for (NLP) technology that we use today. It’s the technology that tools like , , and need to function. natural language processing Grammarly Google Translate Siri So, Spärck Jones didn't just enable our 1 am pizza orders. We should also thank the Yorkshire-born programmer for the fact that we can effortlessly fix spelling, order a coffee in another language, and get voice-activated weather updates. Also published . here

Why We Should Thank Karen Spärck Jones for Search Engines

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background. Hi Hackernooners. My name is Franck Jones and I’ve been working in tech since I was a freshman in High School. I started making eCommerce websites in 1998, around the time Google got started. I taught myself to code by reading big fat books, apprenticing, and using IRC chat rooms. What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do? We are Node Chronicles and we make comic books, apps, and games that teach computer science and electrical engineering. Our app allows readers to scan symbols, legends, and elements found in the books so you can unpack and collect cool items and learn more about them as you go. What is the origin story? I tried to teach my kids how to code when they were little and they hated me for it. They wanted to play video games and sports, or hang out with friends. I realized the way I was trying to teach them was boring and annoying, so I worked on a project to make it more fun. Now kids say our products are one of the most fun ways they’ve ever learned, and adults love our products too! Our products share stories about spooky science discoveries, quantum phenomena, and other crazy inventions people like Alan Turing, Nikola Tesla, Linus Torvalds, and Ken Thompson created. We mix fiction with non-fiction and incorporate real-life mysteries, clues, turmoil, and adventure into our plotlines. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem? My partner in crime Christian Colbert is an absolute genius illustrator, colorist, storyteller, and letterer. Mostly, just he and I work on the comic books, apps, and NFTs right now. The way he draws on the tablet, the expressions, the faces, the action - he’s ridiculous. He’s truly one of the best in his field. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing? If I wasn’t building this startup, I’d be working on another startup - possibly an adaptive learning startup, or a new kind of search engine, or some sort of AI workflow tool to improve work efficiency. I’d also probably have a day job, like CTO or UX Director at one of my friend’s startups. At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics? Right now, our success is measured by our learning assessments being collected and analyzed by a top university. Users participating in our study take an assessment before and after using our products and we measure their motivation levels, topics remembered and ability to articulate technology history and problem spaces. We also pay attention to every review, survey, and interview, looking for even the faintest negative opinions. Sometimes, it’s the few and far between negative reviews that tell us the most. What’s most exciting about your traction to date? We had a huge wave of over 1,500 people pre-order our products. Teachers, adults, industry professionals, and comic book lovers all responded in distinct groups, which helped us understand the personas and product-market fit. We did no marketing to get that phase going, it just happened on its own. Now, people are pissed off because they want more, and more, and more. We’re working on our next round of funding at the moment to be able to hire a dozen or more people to become a real studio focused on our dream. Also, we can’t say who, but one of the most popular rap stars in the world might be featured in our next episode, to help get the message across that tech is dope and you don’t need to be a social reject or a nerd to be involved. We hate when people call our beloved programmers and scientists geeks and nerds. We call them G-Neeks because they’re actually quite GANGSTA in our opinion. What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why? I’m excited about systems found in nature becoming a part of technology, like reading and writing data into DNA, atoms or photons, which can exist forever in nature and self propagate. I’m excited about getting rid of wires, certain hardware, corporations, and governments who want to control everything. I’m also worried about the personal privacy of information, especially kids and vulnerable communities, and I’m worried about fake news, confusion, and population collapse, where people have no source of truth. We hope the Ten Branches of Technology featured in Node Chronicles, called AxiomX, can someday be a common ground amongst a highly intelligent population, and that people’s priorities soon align with core truths around the technologies the world needs to prioritize, like climate change, clean energy, pollution, crime, and others. What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform? Hackernoon found us. Great minds think alike. What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself? I wish I could give the 14-year-old version of myself a message: pick one coding language and learn everything you can about it. Start a project and make 1,000 code commits to it before jumping into something else. Become a grandmaster at something relevant by age 18, even if someone else is already doing it. Then start learning other technologies. And stay in school. Go to a university on a mission, with a library of objects and a toolkit that you’ve created, knowing already what you are good at and want to do. What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing? There is an endless sea of possibilities out there, just when you think everything’s been done. Getting good at something takes time. Not 1 year. 3, 5, and 10 years. No matter what industry you choose to disrupt, year 5 and beyond is euphoric. You will never know that feeling if you give up. So pick something that you can envision yourself doing for the rest of your life before you commit. If you don’t know what that is, do some soul searching. Node Chronicles was nominated as , US in HackerNoon’s Startups of the Year. one of the best startups in Grayslake

"It Just Happened On Its Own" Franck Jones, Node Chronicles, On Their Unexpected Preorder Wave

The recent disclosure by Wall Street investor Paul Tudor Jones that his Hedge Fund will start trading bitcoin futures to gain an exposure to bitcoin of approx 2% of their total investment portfolio made the financial headlines the past week. What was little discussed though where the reasons that caused Tudor Jones to take such an important and still contrarian investment step for a highly respected institutional investor on Wall Street. To put things in the right perspective Paul Tudor Jones is not a Millennial. He is a Baby Boomer, a veteran Wall Streeter. Someone who got big in the ´80s at the time when Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky roared Wall Street and inspired the Hollywood fictional characters of Gordon Gekko and Buddy Fox in the movie. Under that light his opening to bitcoin is even more remarkable, simply because digitization and cryptocurrencies — for one of his age (don´t mean to be disrespectful, I am myself close that age group as well) — are not exactly in the DNA. Rather, it requires both an open mind and much critical thinking to consider an asset which has revolutionary characteristics and complexities like bitcoin. Maybe, his MD Lorenzo Giorgianni, has contributed to that. If so — considering that Giorgianni was for over a decade at the IMF — this makes their investment disclosure even more valuable and worth of careful consideration for all other institutional money managers. In my opinion, this decision is so far the most important catalyst to attract institutional money to the crypto sector. Far more important than that of younger Wall Streeters such as Michael Novogratz or Andreessen Horowitz in the past. Wall Street Tudor Jones has summarized his investment decision . I will skip the economical backdrop which causes Tudor Jones to consider bitcoin as an investable asset to fight monetary inflation (I have written 2 months ago ) as well as the decision to trade bitcoin futures rather than physical. in a short paper which I advise you to read to make proper sense of his reasoning about the effects of the incoming monetary tsunami on bitcoin and gold I will simply look at the reasons why bitcoin has become “investable” for someone like Tudor Jones. His analyst team — in what they have called “the inflation race” — has compared the historical performance of ten assets which have traditionally performed well in such a macroeconomic environment including gold, equities, yield curve plays (long 2 year notes vs. short 30 year bonds) etc. Surprisingly bitcoin came out 4th. This sparked their interest even more and they decided to dig deeper. So they proceeded to analysing . Even here bitcoin scores very well — especially as far as liquidity and portability are concerned. Little less so for the two additional features due to its volatility and its short track record, only 10 years compared to over two millennia for gold. how bitcoin scores as a store of value in respect of 4 key features: (i) purchasing power, (ii) trustworthiness, (iii) liquidity and (iv) portability Then Tudor Jones goes on to highlight the additional features which make bitcoin his number one bet, what he calls the “ fastest horse on which to bet to win the race ”: (i) its scarcity by design is a feature which makes it really unique; and (ii) its very low market cap in respect to financial assets and gold. . Indeed, with a market cap of only US$ 176 billion — i.e. 1/1200th of financial assets and 1/60th of gold as Tudor Jones puts it — bitcoin looks underpriced And this is an important valuation coming from an institutional investor. So far other prominent investors like Buffet, Jamie Dimon or economists like Roubini, have repeatedly referred , without ever going into clarifying why it is a “bubble”, what are the criteria to evaluate that and more importantly in respect to what is bitcoin to be considered a “bubble”. The point is that since bitcoin is not an investment and cannot be compared with and valued as any other yielding assets — but it is primarily money and a store of value — how do you evaluate then its fair market price? to bitcoin as a “bubble” . Bitcoin´s value as “money” and as a store of value is derived by a comparison with those instruments which can be either debased more or less discretionally (like fiat currencies) or which prices can be pumped up via monetary inflation (like all other financial assets, real estate, classic cars, arts, etc). The only way to forecast a future price for bitcoin is to assume that a share of the moneys currently invested in traditional financial assets and in gold will slowly migrate to bitcoin Talking about “bubble” territory for bitcoin at US$ 10.000, 20.000 or 100.000 does not make any sense. Bitcoin´s future value will be equal to the amount of moneys that in the future will leave global financial assets, cash, precious metals, arts etc, to migrate to this new asset class. We are talking about well over US$ 300 trillion of global assets. . A long way up from what Buffet and Roubini defined long ago already “bubble” territory. To assume that only 1% of that will be, sooner or later, attracted to bitcoin is not unthinkable. With a market cap of just US$ 3 trillion and a money supply of 19 million coins (considering that at least 2 million have already been lost) one bitcoin could well be worth over US$ 150.000 Though, there´s a lot more than that to the “value” of bitcoin and the whole crypto sector. Kyle Samani´s , which I have discussed in the article “ ”, makes the crypto investment case compulsory for every institutional investor. And bitcoin — as a digital gold/store of value — is only one of such investment cases. The Crypto Mega Theses Oops! Ray Dalio missed the biggest of all paradigm shifts: Crypto Decentralized finance, Web3 networks and the Covid-19 generated catalyst for a global digitization, are the others. But the seminal work for any institutional investor is — in my opinion — John Pfeffer´s 2017 paper “ ”. An (Institutional) Investor´s take on cryptoassets I will finish off quoting Pfeffer: “ . …the potential for a cryptoasset to emerge as a dominant, non-sovereign monetary store of value, which could be worth many trillions of dollars . While also risky, this potential value and the probability that it might develop for the current leading candidate for this use case (Bitcoin) would appear to be sufficiently high to make it rational for many investors to allocate a small portion of their assets to Bitcoin with a long-term investment horizon ” . Here you go, a rational bet and asymmetric returns make it possible to allocate just 1–2% of your wealth to crypto and one day this might well become the largest portion of your wealth © — 2020 www.bianconiandrea.com #bianconiandrea #thinkblocktank #blockchain #bitcoin #cryptocurrencies #cryptoassets #paultudorjones #storeofvalue ************************************************************* : The website and the information contained herein is for general guidance only and it does not constitute legal advice. As such, it should not be used as a substitute for consultation with lawyers on specific issues. All information in this paper is provided “as is”, with no guarantee of completeness, accuracy, timeliness or warranty of any kind, express or implied. Legal Disclaimer : The website and the information contained herein is not intended to be a source of advice or credit analysis with respect to the material presented, and the information and/or documents contained in this website do not constitute investment advice. Investment Disclaimer

What Tudor Jones' Bitcoin Investment Means for Other Institutional Investors and Bitcoin

MVP — MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT https://deepwater.systems/mvp.html https://www.facebook.com/DeepWaterSystem/ Robots and AI instead of intuition and luck. I’m talking about searching for underwater treasures and the proposal of the Ecuadorian businessmen. They have come up with the idea to create a drone fleet that will be able to find sunken ships. The underwater machine army will be working autonomously scanning the sea floor meter by meter, where countless riches are hidden. UNESCO estimates that there are traces of 3,000,000 shipwrecks lying in the ocean. Hundreds of thousands of these ships could be loaded with treasure chests which are rumored to cost trillions of dollars. The most expensive cargo — the treasures of the Spanish king — was discovered a couple of years ago. Gold and emeralds from the Caribbean were worth $15 billion. The drone fleet could be sold at a profit. Authors of the start-up promise to create a ship map as a result of their research and auction their coordinates. The data could be bought only with cryptocurrency. A question arises: Why share such valuable data when they could use it themselves? The drones are equipped with the traditional hardware . Their length is about 2 meters and the maximum depth is about 600. Their sonar hydrolocators are also pretty standard. However, some aspects are rather odd. It’s been listed that they can work autonomously for half a year. Compare that to an American analog: according to its technical dossier, its operating period is only 70 hours. Both Ecuadorian and American prototypes have electric motors and large lithium-ion batteries. What makes them so different then? By the way, thanks to the American drones the shipwreck site of the Spanish galleon San José was discovered that had been carrying gold along the shores of Colombia. It sunk in the Caribbean. The sea and the Mexican Gulf were prioritized by the authors of the project. However, the Ecuadorian treasure hunters plan to scan the bottom of the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans along the historic trade routes between the Old and the New Worlds. Another question arises: How will other countries treat the mini-submarines at their shores? The project isn’t purely Ecuadorian. It becomes clear when you see the list of the authors. It was founded by Alejandro Gavrilyuk. 15-year IT experience and the fact that he founded a special company. It appears that Gavrilyuk’s Ecuadorian team is not going to share information with treasure hunters. They preserve the right to examine the most promising locations and plan to surface one or two ships per year.

Robot Indiana Jones! Ecuadorians Launch Plan to Create Underwater Treasure-Searching Drone Fleet

The Only Rule of Startup Success You Really Need to Follow At Play Labs @ MIT, one of the central messages that I try to impart on our startup teams is that while there are many books that can inspire and inform us about the startup journey, at its heart, the startup journey is like an adventure — an unpredictable one! I like to explain further that the best metaphor for the startup adventure may be an Indiana Jones film (the best ones being, of course, and ). Raiders of the Lost Ark Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade As an entrepreneur, you will find yourself going through the stages of the hero’s journey, following the clues to unexpected places, recruiting fellow adventurers, all the while dodging unsavory characters, overcoming obstacles and if you are successful, finally finding the treasure! Shouldn’t I be spending more time teaching entrepreneurs how to create marketing plans, interview customers to find product/market fit, reviewing term sheets, teaching lean methodology, sales training, etc., rather than spending all my time talking about “adventures” and “treasure hunting”? It turns out that information about “specific techniques” to use at every stage of the startup process is not that hard to find in today’s connected world. But in my 20+ years of founding and investing in startups, I find that usually the success of a startup happens when it from one stage to the next. transitions How does this transition happen? Often it comes from an insight or connection — a “clue”. These “clues” usually come from an unexpected meeting with an investor, customer, prospect, advisor, or from a synthesis of market information that you are taking in. Just as surely as clues guide Indy towards the treasure in his films, these insights are the “clues” on our startup Treasure Hunt: they guide us to the next big feature or customer or product or investor or partner. Here are the top 5 reasons why “following the clues” may just be the most important technique in growing your startup: 1) The Map is Revealed Over Time; Rarely All at Once! In an Indiana Jones film, wouldn’t it be nice for Indy if the clues were laid out all at once on a map at the beginning of the film? All he would have to do is to go to the final “X” and pick up the treasure (the “Ark of the Covenant”)! Of course it never works this way — for one thing it wouldn’t make for a very interesting story! Usually there is one clue that, if followed … leads to… another clue! This second clue, then, leads to another clue, which (eventually!) leads to the treasure. Some clues need to be figure out or interpreted, while some are leading us down a wrong path, while others are obvious. Many startups I’ve seen start off with one idea, but then end up pivoting to another product or service, related to the first one, and it’s this second concept which leads to the eventual success of the company. This was true in many startups in popular startup lore, like Microsoft or Slack, and I found it was just as true in the startups that I have invested in. But where does the insight come from to go in this second direction? Let’s look at the example of Discord, which started off as a game company. After their initial game didn’t take off as expected, Jason Citron, the founder, had the insight that the communication/chat system they had created for the game would be popular for hardcore gamers and others. Why this particular pivot and not, say, building another game? There is no formula which will guarantee a successful pivot — you have to rely on the hunches of the founders and their understanding of the market — which is why a “startup clue” is subjective and requires both an external event and internal insight. Jason put the new app (called Discord) out there and it started to pick up steam with hardcore gamers, gaining tremendous month-over-month organic growth. I actually had lunch with Jason when the organic growth was just starting to validate the new direction; I remember wondering why he chose this particular pivot — it was of course based on the experience and insight of the team as hard core gamers to recognize that what they’d built would work without the game. The best clues are personalized — i don’t know if another entrepreneur in the same spot would have gone in the same direction. This is why “clues” are subjective. 2) Savory and Unsavory characters. In the films, while some characters are clearly trying to Indy, and some (like the Nazis) are clearly trying to him, there are always some whose motivations are far more complex. They might seem like they are there to help Indy on his quest at first, but it turns out they have their own agenda and are often working against him to pursue it. help hinder In your startup journey, you will come across an interesting cadre of people, each of whom will present themselves as indispensable for your startup journey. While we all need mentors, it’s a complex process to sift through the array of consultants, advisors, angels, VC’s who all say they have interests at heart. your In truth, all of them are also busy trying to advance their interests. Some may impress you with the name of a super successful company they were with. However, just because they worked at or were associated with successful company X is no guarantee that they can really work in your particular situation. Were they the architects of the company’s success or just hangers-on on a successful journey? own An early stage startup is a special kind of beast, and you should have some idea of why someone is an advisor and what you hope to get out of them (and vice-versa): will it be investor intros? Will it be prospects or sales calls? Is their name there simply to beef up your investor deck? Are they experts in a field where you will need to call on their expertise? There are so many bullshitters out there that you need to spend time with people to see how much value they provide.The best thing to do is to get to know them over time and see how they make decisions before committing to them in the long term. really 3) The biggest clue may be the little voice Sometimes listening to the “little voice” is the best way to navigate and follow the clues in the startup journey. Steven Spielberg has said that he tells his kids to follow the dreams that “come in whispers”, while the world is yelling at us and we have to learn to tune it out in order to hear this “little voice”. This can be difficult in a place like Silicon Valley, where all the latest buzz is around X (you name X — mobile games, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, machine learning, block chain/ICO/cryptocurrency), etc.) We are subjected to a constant barrage of articles of company XYZ raising $10 million for X, wile we might be struggling to raise even $1 million for Y. this can be disheartening. There is also the the common “wisdom” in the Valley of . Should you give up your idea to pursue what’s hot at the moment? fail fast, pivot quickly . But it’s also good to follow your instincts, your hunches and remember the reason you departed on this adventure in the first place. If the little voice is telling you to pivot, then great. However, If the “loud voice” (i.e. everyone else) is saying “pivot” and the little voice is telling you to stay true to what you started, that’s when you need to listen to the little voice. Maybe As an example, in 2012–2013 there was a run-up in bitcoin (prior to the current run-up!) from $100 to $1200 and suddenly everyone wanted to jump into crypto. Then, as bitcoin crashed from $1000 back to $300, suddenly the crypto market funding dried up for all but the most dedicated. Those who really believed in crypto-currency kept going, despite what the market was saying, and those that weren’t that dedicated to the space shifted (to VR/AI or other startups). Then, suddenly, as crypto became popular again this year (as bitcoin rose to $5000+ per bitcoin), suddenly wanted to jump in again. While I personally am a big believer in cryptocurrency, there will undoubtedly be another crash at some point, which will shake out the current crop of block chain pretenders. Your “little voice” can be the clue that you follow when there is deafening noise on the marketplace. It takes a certain kind of courage to follow it. everyone 4) Some “clues” come with unexpected feelings and synchronicity — pay attention! Now I’m going to delve into areas that science doesn’t fully understand. Sometimes we meet or hear about a company or person, and we get a funny feeling inside. We can’t explain it logically, but our intuition tells us there is “something” there. Carl Jung defined a synchronicity as a “meaningful coincidence” or as an “a-causal connecting principle” — where two things seem related in our mind in a meaningful way, but there is no “obvious, logical, causal” way for the connection to exist. A simple form of synchronicity might be that you think of a friend that you haven’t thought about in a while but then they call you that day or the next day wanting to talk to you. I call these little events as special types of “clues” — or “glitches in the quantum matrix”. They are glitches where we get an insight into some possible future event that may be important to us. This happened to me again and again before I started to look into quantum physics and realized that there was a consistency to what they were saying and what some of the mystics are saying about time and the past and the future. In one interpretation of quantum physics, there are many possible futures with different probabilities, sending you back information in a probability wave. As we move froward from the present into the future, paying attention to these possible futures is what moves you in one direction. Fred Alan Wolf, a quantum physicist, in his book , tells us that “our minds are time machines, able to sense the flow of possibility waves from the past and the future.” consciously Parallel Worlds How does this work in the startup world? I often tell the story of how I had “funny feelings” about a particularly company the first time I’d heard of them, and then over time, they ended up being super-important to my startup. True clues based on synchronicity and funny feelings aren’t wishful thinking like, “oh Facebook is huge and they will buy us”– that’s just Silicon Valley cliché and not real intuition and not “messages from the quantum foam” that is the future.In genuine cases of intuition, for it to be a “clue”, the funny feeling usually accompanies a person or company that you . have never heard of before For example, when we were looking to find a name for our document company, I happened to be in Ann Arbor, Michigan visiting my parents and drove by a building that had the name of a company on it, “Arbortext”. I had a funny feeling about it; it was odd that I had driven by the building many times but never noticed it before. I used it as a “clue” — here was a company doing XML that named their company after their college town, so I followed the clue and we named our company after our college town, CambridgeDocs (short for Cambridge Documents). Following the thread left by this clue, I contacted them, and then over a period of time, they became our largest customer and got us into into some of the largest enterprises in the world (and ended up making an offer to acquire us to boot!). 5) . Connecting the dots to find the larger pattern Sometimes, these clues are like dots in a pattern that only reveals itself over longer periods of time. Like in Indy’s Treasure Hunts, the overall picture is only revealed following the clues. after In another example, when I was part of the early team at Tapjoy, I recall seeing an email about a Japanese company that I had never heard of, DeNA, which had a mobile product called Mobage-town. This was before DeNA or GREE were well-known names in Silicon Valley. For some reason, that name “Mobage-town” stuck in my head, in that funny way that clues do. A few years later, when I was running Gameview studios and we were looking for an acquirer or investor, I remembered that funny feeling. Despite already being in advanced discussions with US-based acquirers and investors, I decided to follow that clue and contacted them, even though “logically” I was told Japanese companies take too long to make decisions, and we were too far along with the other companies to start a discussion with them, so I would be wasting my time. To make a long story short, our other options fell through, but DeNA ended up being the one that acquired us! The larger pattern that emerges from following our intuition is about “connecting the dots” over our entire careers. The best startups are those whose founders lives and careers contribute to the startup and vice versa. In the case of Indy, his father (played by Sean Connery) had been following the clues to find the “Holy Grail” in his “grail diary” for his entire life; and thus Indy’s quest was intertwined with his father’s. Sometimes there are clues which seem unrelated, but if you follow the thread of each one you might find a larger pattern emerging years, or even decades later. In a vivid example of this, there was a young man who was attending a college in Oregon when he decided to drop a few classes. As he walked along the edge of campus, a flyer caught his eye. He went up to look more closely at it, and it was for a Calligraphy class. He decided to take that class and learned all about fonts, serifs, spacing and fell in love with the artistry of calligraphy. Now it might seem that this was an “aside” to his career, but years later, when that young man, Steve Jobs, was creating the Macintosh computer, he insisted that multiple fonts be included in the first version of Mac, partly because of his experience with the Calligraphy class. If it wasn’t for a young Steve following the clues to that class, I might be typing this and you might be reading on courier on a green screen! Conclusion The “clues” are really forms of intuition — and they are an essential part of most successful business person’s decision making. Whether we call it gut feelings, hunches, or pattern matching, it’s important to learn to trust ourselves, and the way to do that is by noticing and following the “clues”. Sometimes things that seem unrelated to our careers actually influence us in mysterious ways into the complex tapestry of our career. As Steve Jobs said, “you can’t connect the dots looking forward — you have to connect them looking backwards.” This aspect of entrepreneurship and VC investing is rarely talked about but more important than you would think. In fact, as everyone tries to create models and step-by-step procedures to follow for successfully “teaching entrepreneurship”, keep in mind that all of these models are usually invented to justify why someone was successful. after the fact If it was as easy as following steps 1,2,3 to startup success then everyone would have a successful startup! (Here’s a hint: most startups aren’t successful!) Don’t forget that Indy, a veteran treasure hunter, in trying to “teach the methodology of archaeology” to his students, says: “we don’t follow maps to buried treasure, and X never, ever marks the spot!”. That’s what Indy the teacher says. But, on that same day, Indy the adventurer is drawn into an adventure to follow the clues to find the Holy Grail. While Indy is fictional, the number of entrepreneurs who succeeded by following their hunches and intuition isn’t. So if you are looking for the “secret rule” of entrepreneurship, it is this: To find the treasure … follow the clues! Zen Entrepreneurship About the Author: Riz Virk is a successful entrepreneur, investor, film producer and video game pioneer. Startups he has co-founded or invested in include Tapjoy, Gameview, Telltale, Discord, Sliver.tv, CambridgeDocs, and Funzio. His video games, including Tap Fish and Penny Dreadful: Demimonde have been downloaded tens of millions of times. He is also the bestselling author of and just released his new book, Treasure Hunt: Follow Your Inner Clues to Find True Success . He is a graduate of MIT and Stanford, and currently runs Play Labs @ MIT, a startup accelerator. Learn more at his website, www.zenentrepreneur.com

Why Every Startup is Like an Indiana Jones film!

By Micah Rosenbloom , Managing Partner We’ve written a number of stories about the , , and that , but implementing this idea of “efficient entrepreneurship” can be difficult. Early stage startups are frantically trying to figure out how to get traction while established startups feel locked into a burn rate and a course of action. dangers of raising too much venture capital demonstrating that raising more money doesn’t make startups more successful $100M exits are worth celebrating It might be a useful exercise for founders to think of themselves as auteurs rather than entrepreneurs. Filmmakers and founders are both creative professionals, but directors have to contend with a world where capital is a fixed sum, not a seemingly endless stream. Directors must have a vision for their product, a rough understanding of what it would cost to realize that vision, and then execute within those constraints. Contrast that to startup founders who always have the possibility of raising another round of funding. Strict limitations for filmmakers have led to slew of indie projects, made on shoe-string budgets by unknown creators, that go on to rival star-studded Hollywood blockbusters. For instance: This list is far from exhaustive and doesn’t include movies like Slumdog Millionaire and The Kings Speech which had $15M+ budgets and mid-nine-figure grosses, due in part to better known stars and directors. These are career making projects that put stars, and catchphrases, on the map. All were made — at most — with a series A level of funding. What makes these low-budget films so successful? There seem to be a few common themes: Target underserved niches Schlocky horror movies don’t win Academy Awards, but they are consistently profitable and represent half the movies in this sampe. In the startup world, raised $4M to focus on a SaaS tools for a relatively small group of life science companies and have been rewarded with a $5B market cap. Veeva Embraced Constraints The creators of didn’t have many resources. Still, the movie’s high concept made up for the lack of star power. Compare that to entrepreneur, Jon Oringer was a software engineer by trade and a hobbyist photographer. He didn’t have easy access to venture capital but he combined his hobby and academic training to build Shutterstock, a $2B company without raising any outside funding. Paranormal Activity Prove Creative Marketing Wins took advantage of a nascent online population to sow doubt about it’s reality. , currently valued at $5.5B, was founded by a pair of broke college students. They couldn’t buy ads, so instead they placed TVs in doctor’s offices and sold ads on them. The Blair Witch Project Outcome Health The most important takeaway from these movies is a reminder that capital is not determinative of success. In 2003, the same year generated a 100X ROI, the Ben Affleck/Jennifer Lopez vehicle made its debut. The latter had two of the biggest stars on the planet at the time (remember “ ”?), a $54M budget, and still only managed to make . This year’s , made with a $4M budget and a little-known cast will earn more profit than the recent big budget, celebrity-filled spectaculars , , and — combined. Open Water Gigli Bennifer $7.3M world wide Get Out Baywatch Ghost in the Shell Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The auteur model can be an amazing deal for entrepreneurs. Filmmakers get one shot to build their product, but startup founders can iterate endlessly once they reach profitability. Moreover, movie studios often take the bulk of a successful film’s profits from the creator, especially neophytes. Successful founders who embrace an “art house” budget can earn outsized financial rewards when they produce something that resonates. The VC model still works best with blockbusters, but it’s not clear that a much larger budget will lead to better returns in films or finance. How might one run their startup if they knew that only could raise $5M dollars to build a company before an IPO? VCs Could Learn a Lesson from Indiana Jones Hollywood also has lessons for VCs. Before VCs started trying to corral unicorns, movie moguls chased blockbusters. Huge amounts of money were spent trying to prop up franchises only to see them flop on opening night. Michael Eisner, the former CEO of Disney, was famous for being budget-focused in a world that celebrates excess. At one point, he greenlit the first movie, which had a larger than normal budget and became a hit — the Unicorn of its day. He didn’t want people at his studio to think that this one movie’s success marked a change in his strategy. He wrote what became a legendary memo explaining how to think about investing in films while serving as President of Paramount Studios, which was excerpted in the book : Indiana Jones DisneyWar Eisner prided himself on keeping costs modest; some thought it bordered on obsession. For Eisner, the quality of the story was all-important, not high-priced directors and stars. He looked for stories with compelling characters, clear conflict and resolutions, three easily identifiable “acts,” and universal themes that could be summarized — that is, marketed — in a sentence or two. This approach, dubbed “high concept” in the parlance of Hollywood, spawned many imitators, but few were as successful as Eisner and Diller. Despite his frugality, Eisner was on occasion willing to take financial risks. After two other studios balked at the high projected costs, and even Diller opposed the project on financial grounds, Eisner signed Star Wars writer George Lucas, director Steven Spielberg, and actor Harrison Ford to make Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. With $240 million in U.S. box-office receipts, it became a “franchise,” a huge hit that spawned a series of highly profitable sequels. Nevertheless, Eisner was fanatical at keeping costs low to earn a profit, a curiously iconoclastic view in Hollywood, which had a long and deeply entrenched tradition of rewarding talent, agents, managers, and studio executives before anyone gave much thought to shareholders. After the huge success of Raiders, Eisner recorded his philosophy in a twenty-one-page manifesto distributed to Paramount executives. In it, he noted that nearly all of the studio’s profits from 1981 had come from Raiders, an expensive anomaly in the Eisner canon, and he didn’t want anyone at Paramount to get the idea that he was veering from his time-tested strategy that combined high concepts and low budgets. “Often the big win comes with a single smash movie,” he wrote. “The intoxication of a blockbuster hit can lead to an easy sense the luck will keep striking. Over the past five years, Paramount has either been number one or two in the motion picture business. Success tends to make you forget what made you successful, and just when you least suspect it, the big error shifts the game. Will success lull us into the fatal bad play?” “The intoxication of a blockbuster hit can lead to an easy sense the luck will keep striking.” Eisner proceeded to make his own priorities clear. “We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make a statement. But to make money, it is often important to make history, to make art, or to make some significant statement…In order to make money, we must always make entertaining movies, and if we make entertaining movies, at times we will reliably make history, art, a statement, or all three. We may even win awards…We cannot expect numerous hits, but if every film has an original and imaginative concept, then we can be confident that something will break through.” “We cannot expect numerous hits, but if every film has an original and imaginative concept, then we can be confident that something will break through.” Replace the word “film” with “startups” and swap “Unicorn” for “Blockbuster” and Eisner’s advice actually maps pretty well onto the world of startups. He’s basically advocating for a portfolio approach to filmmaking, and it paid off brilliantly (for a while.) This idea of frugality is borne out in the startup data as well. If more entrepreneurs and VCs followed Eisner’s advice, perhaps we’d have fewer startup horror stories and more happy endings. Six of the 20 best startups of the last half decade raised <$50M. One raised nothing.

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