If you ever meet someone who has started their own business, please
remember what I'm about to tell you.

Starting a business is hard.
Creating something significant from nothing is one of the hardest
things a individual will ever do. A entrepreneur is like a novelist.
Even after the book is published the author never feels its 100%
perfect. In every single page of her novel is a piece of the authors
soul and mind. A business created by a human is as much a part of that
person as a novel is to its author and it requires overcoming a lot of
self doubt and frustration to create a significant business. A
dedicated entrepreneur will take any criticism of their business
seriously, regardless of how they respond on the outside. So if you
have feedback, give it to a entrepreneur like you would give it to a
artist.

Entrepreneurs care about more than money.
A business has to make money to survive, it has to earn a profit to
live. This is fundamental and a business that does not do these things
isn't really a business. But too often people think that entrepreneurs
only care about making money and that is the furthest thing from
reality. Think of it this way, people need food to live, the more
successful you become the better the food gets. That's a great bonus
to success. But people need more than food to be satisfied. After all,
what would life be like if it was all about food? Implying to a
entrepreneur that he only cares about money is a sign of ignorance on
your part. If you really want to win them over, ask them what about
their business are they most proud of.

Entrepreneurs have dramatically different life experiences than you.
Despite growing up in a rough neighborhood I've never really been to a
war zone, I don't know what it's like to have someone trying to kill
me on a daily basis. And despite loving war movies, I would never want
to be in a real one and I have no idea how it would feel to have been
in one.

But I've had partners try to kill me in business. I've had one
particular partner offer my employees large salaries and successfully
recruit them away. I've had a employee sabotage operations. I've had
people close to me start competing businesses, I once lived in a
basement with a single window that the neighborhood dog pissed on
daily when being walked, just to save money to fund my company. The
pissing dog part isn't really about entrepreneurship, but it is about
sacrifice and a lot of suffering. Unless these things have also
happened to you, you don't really know how it feels to build a business.

The semi-entrepreneur
I've met people who call themselves entrepreneurs who are really
project managers. They make little projects that are cute and fun but
they don't actually sacrifice anything. They never fully commit. To me
this is like calling yourself a war vet simply because you own a gun.
If you want to be a entrepreneur, remember you don't know shit until
you have survived a near death experience. If you have the luck of
working with a successful entrepreneur like I did when I worked with
Martin Varsavsky, its important to remember that behind that exterior
of professionalism are the scars of war. Ask a successful entrepreneur
about their war scars, they are always great stories after the fact. A
semi-entrepreneur doesn't have any, but if they stick with it long
enough, they will.

Of course, don't take my word for it. Listen to this story from the founders of SliceHost http://37signals.com/founderstories/slicehost

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Occurred in 1990 when EPMD filmed a video in the park where I played
little league baseball. I'm only in the video for a second at 2:57 but
I was dancing real hard and earned every millisecond of that airtime!
Actually, I think this was my only music video appearance. I should
have had a agent.

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It's like buying new clothes for the first day of school only to have
school cancelled due to a snow storm.

It's like wearing braces forever.

It's like waiting in line for a popular club...forever.

It's like never asking the girl/guy you love out on a date.

It's like never finishing any book that you read.

It's like doing Karate, Judo, Kung Fu, Tae Kwon Do, Jiu Jitsu and
never going beyond a white belt.

Launching is the start, without putting your product in front of
people you never progress to the points that actually matter.
Launching is the most important feature. Do it.

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本日は私イジョビ・ヌウェアが7月末より連載を開始致しましたウィークリー・コラムを皆様にご紹介致します。このコラムは、「ITビジネス最前線」と題し、アメリカのテクノロジービジネスの動向やセキュリティーについて論じるもので、フジサンケイビジネスアイ紙上及びサンケイビズのウェブサイト上に毎週月曜日に掲載されています。
これまでのトピックを簡単にご紹介いたします。

第1回(7月25日) http://www.sankeibiz.jp/business/news/110725/bsk1107250502000-n1.htm
「クオラ」は「グーグル」に勝てる？：実名制Q&Aサイトのクオラには、開設当初からテクノロジー界の著名人が集い、ユーザーも投資も流れ込んでいた。しかし、クオラに彼らを繋ぎとめておく魅力と収入源はあるのだろうか、分析する。

第2回(8月1日) http://www.sankeibiz.jp/macro/news/110801/mcb1108010503009-n1.htm
旅人に空き部屋提供しませんか？：ネット上で部屋やスペースを貸し借りするコミュニティー制のオンライン市場エア・ビーアンドビー(Airbnb)を紹介する。ユニークな新しい旅のあり方を提案し、使い勝手の良さと透明性でアピールするサービスの魅力に迫る。

第3回(8月8日) http://www.sankeibiz.jp/business/news/110808/bsk1108080500000-n1.htm
日本狙うサイバー諜報活動の脅威：世界中でハッキング攻撃が激化しているなか、日本政府及び日本企業の危機意識は十分といえるだろうか。今日本企業が狙われる理由を探る。

第4回(8月22日) http://www.sankeibiz.jp/business/news/110822/bsj1108220503001-n1.htm
見えてきた グルーポンの秘密：IPOを申請したグルーポンに再び注目が集まっている。初期投資家の資金の引き揚げが目立ち、将来性や収益力に疑問が出始めている。その課題をIPO申請書類から読み解く。

第5回(8月29日) http://www.sankeibiz.jp/business/news/110829/bsk1108290500000-n1.htm
機熟すジンガのIPOゲーム戦術：オンラインゲーム会社のジンガが7月にIPOを申請した。その狙いは何なのか。ジンガ・ジャパンの設立、ジンガとフェイスブックとの密接した関係など、急成長を続ける企業の勢いと課題を明らかにする。

第6回(9月5日) http://www.sankeibiz.jp/macro/news/110905/mcb1109050503011-n1.htm
ドロップボックスが変えるクラウド：ドロップボックスの出現により、一般消費者にもクラウドの利用が爆発的に広がる兆しが見えてきた。複数のコンピュータ間のファイル移動・友人とのファイル共有が簡単にできるサービスの魅力とクラウドならではの注意点を紹介する。

第7回(9月19日) http://www.sankeibiz.jp/business/news/110919/bsk1109190502002-n1.htm
アップルの原動力は潤沢な資金：投資家への配当をすべきだとの声もある中、アップルは現金の抱え込みを続けている。彼らの成功戦略と資金の用途を分析し、ジョブズ後のアップルの展開を予想する。

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The reality is, all governments hack. Sometimes they hack companies,
sometimes individuals but more often they hack other governments. Been
happening for a long time. China is in the news, but I guess Russia
and the USA are much more active in this space. What these articles
point out more than anything is the ease in which these targets fell
victim. All of the hacks were performed using "off the shelf" tools
that anyone with a little time and dedication could have done.

Other voices have recently started to speak up that make a much more
important point about the state of global security. What the general
public is starting to understand is something security auditors and
the security industry has known forever. Once an attacker is within
your corporate network, the game is over. Here is a article in
Business Week about how the fundamental concept of security
"protecting the network" is flawed and has miserably failed.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-08-04/hacker-armageddon-forces-symantec...

Expect a shift in the security industry because of the shifting trends
towards computing in the cloud. The start-ups of today, the Groupon's,
the Zynga's and the Twitter's of the world will be the future IBM's in
terms of size and reach and these companies are no longer rely on "the
network" infrastructure to conduct business. Everything is done in the
cloud. When your data is in the cloud, the focus of security becomes
keeping people out of your data as opposed to the network. That should
have been the focus of the security industry anyway.

But its very difficult for a security company to protect data. Often
times data protection requires changing the process of computer usage
that all users have become accustomed too. It becomes a cumbersome
interference into business as usual. The responsibility for ensuring
data protection should have been handled by Microsoft, but they failed
at that. So companies focused on trying to keep hackers away from
their Microsoft products. Its ultimately a losing battle because as
the articles have shown, it is just too easy to gain access to the
network.

And so now that the data is increasingly moving away from Microsoft
products and into cloud based services there should be a new crop of
security companies, companies like Duo Security
http://www.duosecurity.com/ that add additional password protection to
almost any web based service. Or Cloudflare
https://www.cloudflare.com/ that transparently blocks bad guys from
web services. But this is just the start.

Eventually to catch up to this new security reality security companies
like Symantec and McAfee will be forced to acquire these new crop of
cloud based security as a service providers. In the meantime I think
there is a lot of opportunity for innovative security folks to benefit
current gap in perception.

The story being sold today is that a new form of "Persistent Attacks"
by nation states is making the world insecure. See Jeff Carr;
http://jeffreycarr.blogspot.com/2011/08/with-shady-rat-mcafee-indicts-itself-...
But the truth is a little more like "It's really hard to keep hackers
off your network if they really want to get in. Microsoft and nearly
all products built on Microsoft are super easy to hack, so you are
screwed once a hacker is on your network." And another thing people
should be talking about is "We haven't really figured out how to
secure services that run in the cloud, so you are on your own for
protecting that stuff too."

Too bad China is taking the brunt of the blame for what is really a
structural problem with how companies approach security. It has the
danger of blinding people to the real problem.

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"Even with this tragic event, the spirit of the Japanese really makes me want to return and live here."

Tatum only has 3 weeks scheduled to be with his wife while on leave from work "but this is an experience I will never forget, buy I'm hopeful things will work out when the airport opens again"

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"as frustrating as it is, I hope not many people were hurt. I'm really impressed with the friendliness and professionalism of everyone in japan" said Hersey while searching for a Internet connection to update his family.

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> > > > >

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It seems to integrate sharing into all the Google network. What I found
interesting (alarming?) was the sharing functionality around news
content given in this example here

To what extent will Google intergrate social sharing around content? It
will be interesting to see how this develops. Ultimately Facebook and
Google will want to become your portal to the web similar to Yahoo!
Where does that leave the news portals?

How will this dance play out?

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I held three national kickboxing titles and one local boxing title, so technically speaking I can say that I was an elite athlete. Reading the article I found my thought process as a fighter the same as a elite runners. The same applies to successful entrepreneurs and business people. It's a article worth reading.

Becoming a champion fighter is easy. There is only one major ingredient. Work. You need to put in the hours. Working on technique and stamina often enough puts you in the top ten in your weight class. Working harder than the average competitor puts you in the top five and working harder than anyone else makes you number one.

Building a successful business is easy also. There is only one major ingredient. Work. Working often enough puts you in the top ten of your product category. Working harder than the average competitor puts you in the top five of your product class and working harder than any other company is willing to, makes you number one.

Working hard is hard to do.

It's hard because you must force yourself to endure the pain of learning and pushing your physical or mental abilities beyond its previous limits, constantly. In both instances you will suffer injuries and losses on the road to success. You have to really want to win to endure all the pain. Paul Graham says it best:

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I'm excited to announce our new e-learning partnership with Sankei
Shimbun one of Japan's five national newspapers. This partnership
brings together amazing content from The Japan Times (our strategic
partner) with the marketing leverage of one of Japan's leading
Internet news portals.

One of the reasons I'm really excited about working with Sankei is
that even though it's a very traditional Japanese media company,
Sankei Digital really has some progressive ideas on the future of
online media. This is obvious from Sankei's partnership with MSN Japan
in 2007 that has been very successful.

Everyone on my team has worked very hard on this and the deal could
not have been done without all of them. Thanks!

While I've been mostly offline preparing for the launch, a friend
joked that he knew something big was coming up since I pretty much
stopped tweeting!

I'm proud to have another partner who really understands the
importance of digital business in the future of media and look forward
to announcing more partnerships in the near future.

You can check out the first portal we launched together last week
focused on business learners at http://sankei.learning-network.jp

Special thanks to Kondo-san, the President of Sankei Digital pictured
above for making this deal happen (that's the actual contract in my
hand).

日本の５大新聞の一つ、サンケイ新聞と弊社との新しいパートナーシップについて皆さんに喜んで発表したいと思います。

このパートナーシップは弊社の戦略的パートナーであるジャパンタイムズの素晴らしいコンテンツと日本のトップ・インターネットポータルのマーケティングパワーを結びつけるものです。

私がサンケイとの提携に大変エキサイトしているのは、サンケイは伝統的な日本のメディア会社であるにもかかわらずオンラインメディアの将来に対して進歩的な考えを持っているからです。これは2007年に彼らがMSNジャパンとパートナーシップを組み、成功していることからも明らかです。今回の提携には私たちのチーム一人一人のハードワークがあり、彼らなしには達成できませんでした。ありがとう！

私が発表に向けて準備している時、友人の一人は何か大きなことでも起こすのだろうと冗談を言ってきました。なぜならツイートをしばらく止めていたからです！

メディアの未来におけるデジタルビジネスの重要さを理解しているパートナーを持つことを私は誇りにしており、将来更なる提携を発表出来ることを楽しみにしています。

弊社が先週発表した最初のポータルはこちらで見ることが出来ます。

http://sankei.learning-network.jp/

今回の提携を実現させて頂いたサンケイデジタルの近藤社長に感謝致します。（私の手の中にあるのが実際の契約書です）

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Sorry I didn't get a close up of the food, I guess I got distracted...

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UPDATE 09/24/2010: Three minutes after posting this to my Facebook profile I received a automated "feedback" request from the Facebook advertising team. In the feedback form I copy-pasted most of what is on this page. One hour after that my first ad was disapproved and within 48 hours I was told that all of my ads were not compliant with Facebook's advertising guidelines. I can fix the issues they pointed out, but the timing of it all seems odd given that I'd been advertising the same product for 3 months or so.

Just something to consider when you are giving Facebook feedback or complaining in a open forum.

1) Ad scheduling is horrible

When you are marketing online you notice a pattern in the peak conversion time of day for your product. For example in Japan its often late night, after dinner. While in the USA most people do their shopping during business hours. Once you have recognized the pattern of your conversions you should time the display of your advertisements to match your peak conversion period. You do this by creating targetted ad groups with timing associated with those groups.

Japan Group: Country, Japan. Timing, 8PM - 12AM

USA Group : Country, USA. Timing, 12PM - 3PM

...for example. The USA has several time zones so you would actually create groups based on region or state unless you are using an intelligent ad platform like Google Adwords.

This isn't possible at all on Facebook. It's a fundamental requirement for effective marketing, so I hope they have this at the top of their priority list. They do have a very basic function that requires you to manually log in to stop and start your advertising display by hand. It's hilarious, but if you are disciplined enough to do it, your advertising cost will decrease because your click through rate will improve.

2) Advertising approval is inconsistent

I start campaigns with 6 or so advertisements that are all very different. Three ads are grouped to target women, and three for men. The three advertisements are actually the same in each group so I want to test which is most effective for men vs women. I start with the image and then after I find the most effective image I work on the copy and headlines. This means I'm making tiny little changes to the advertisements at least once every 24 hours until I find the right combination.

I have no idea by what criteria the Facebook advertising team judges ads by, some ads take 1 hour to approve others take 12 hours. And a lot of it seems to be dependent on the time of day. I find it hard to believe that they don't have a 24 hour approval process, but it sure looks like it. So if you make a slight change to your ad and are not careful, you can end up missing an entire day of impressions. It seems like the only way around this is to duplicate the ads so you end up with 100 ads all with minute changes. And of course you have to manually disable the old ads and enable the slightly modified ads once they are approved. Even writing this makes me laugh at how unnecessarily complicated this is.

Facebook should have intelligence behind the ad approval process. For example if an ad has already been approved, and the only thing that changed in the ad is a single number "2 day trial" becomes "5 day trial" that should be a no brainer and automated.

3) Reporting is based on Pacific Time?

I don't really understand how reporting works, some reports like Responder Profile can only be generated once a week. Others can only be generated once a day (based on Pacific Time).  And you can't specify the time zone the reports cover which makes it difficult to understand for me at first glance because I have to calculate the actual time in Japan. I'm not sure if this is a problem with my profile only but its annoying.

I would like all reports generated by my time zone, and it would be helpful to see the time zone of the person who clicked on the ad. And can I please see the information updated with data newer than the previous 24 hours? Please?

The Good:

The demographic data you can gather from Facebook is golden. For $200 you can identify your target market age, sex, city and peak usage time. You want this data. Before you invest more of your advertising budget, gather data from Facebook and then use that information for your broader campaign and to improve your advertising copy. But you do have to wait a few weeks for Facebook to get around to reporting all of the data for you, but good things are worth waiting for eh?

And of course once Facebook owns the web all of this will be 1000 times more useful.

A additional note: On Facebook not all advertisers are treated equally, so many of the features I wish I had are rumored to be available to big spenders. So the rest of us will just have to wait...

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