“Do you know where we are?” asked Milo.

“Certainly,” he replied, “we’re right here on this very spot. Besides, being lost is never a matter of not knowing where you are; it's a matter of not knowing where you aren't – and I don’t care at all about where I’m not."

Act II: Enterpoid

I’ve officially joined the Enterproid team this week, and I could not be more excited. I’ve worked closely with the founders over the past year since our investment, and have just been blown away. The technology is impressive, and the guys are among the brightest I’ve ever worked with. (Comcast, Qualcomm, & Google Ventures agree.)

While I’m moving back to the light side, I will remain a partner of BOLDstart Ventures (so please keep sending opportunities my way!), continuing to work with Eliot and Ed, who have both been awesome mentors for the past few years. I’m totally committed to continuing to actively support our entrepreneurs – I am, as always, still happy to hop on a call or meet up at any time to help out. Several of the projects I will be working on for Enterproid will be highly relevant to other mobile startups (more on this soon), and should enable me to provide a lot more of that elusive venture capital ‘value-add’ to the companies we work with.

Those who know me well know that I love to build, and that since putting my last startup project on hold to join the venture world I’ve been eager to get my hands dirty again. I strongly believe that to be a great venture capitalist you need to deeply understand what it’s like to work at and start a venture yourself. I’m hoping that Enterproid will be the first of several opportunities to make myself a better investor, and a better entrepreneur.

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Areas of Interest (v2)

Just under a year into my existence in the world of startups and venture capital I wrote a post on my areas of interest. Almost a year later, my perspective has just about completely changed. First, lessons learned:

  1. There’s a ton I don’t know, and learning it is hard (if you don’t care). Gaining experience is a gradual process, and it’s best to start with what you know, then to jump to the tangential unknown. And focusing on what you genuinely care about is super important - it makes it so much easier and worthwhile.
  2. You’re most useful to startups if you stick to what you know. I could write essays on this, but basically: the more you know > the more value you can add > the more involved you can be > the more you will learn > repeat.

Currently my kaleidoscope of interest in the startup space looks pretty much like the above. Underlying everything are three interconnected macro trends: mobile-first, the social layer, and data availability. These three trends are pretty obvious at this point: 

  1. With mobile phone ubiquity (5 billion worldwide) and unlimited extensibility (thanks to iOS and Android), developers are often building new applications for mobile use first.
  2. Thanks in large part to open APIs and people’s desire to stalk each other, everything now either has or is capable of having a ‘social layer’ built in.
  3. More data is created every 2 days than in the entire history of the world up to 2003, and that data is now more accessible than ever.

These three macro trends have created a really cool set of positive externalities everywhere. Three that I care about are:

  • Education / Knowledge. New ways to teach, learn, and share ideas are now possible, including mobile education games (that are actually fun), deep linked interactive books, and an ability to use data to analyze what works and what doesn’t.
  • Developing Countries. M-Pesa, a mobile payment company, has roughly 10 million subscribers in Kenya - 40% of the adult population. These trends, combined with startups like FrontlineSMS, are creating huge opportunities for innovation.
  • Filtration / Curation. In short, with all this new data availability, there are tons of opportunities to better track, analyze, and use all sorts of new datasets to improve our lives.

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2 Months Without a Mobile Phone

Due to a combination of UK bureaucracy, Apple’s servitude to AT&T, and my stubbornness – I refuse to carry two phones or give up my iPhone apps –, I spent my first two months abroad, phoneless. There was at least one positive result from the ordeal though: I was forced to experience what it’s like to not have ubiquitous mobile connectivity.  Below are a few take-aways from the experience.

1. Mobile phones are unnecessary

To clarify, by mobile phones I mean the technology that allows people to place mobile calls. My job involves frequent communication, and yet there was not one time in the past two months where a situation was drastically effected by my need to return to a computer to make a call. As mobile computing eclipses mobile calling, phone technology is starting to become more of a feature than a product.  And rightly so: carrying around a device that can receive calls is surprisingly unnecessary. For social situations, I do regret not having text messaging capability, but again, voice was completely unwarranted.

2. Unplanned calls are highly invasive & disruptive

When the telephone was invented, people were initially taken aback by this blatant invasion of privacy: suddenly anyone could ‘enter’ your home at any hour of the night, unannounced. Today we might choose to ignore (or forgot) this, but it is incredible that we see it as completely normal for someone to force you to participate in a conversation just to ascertain a message’s importance and subject. Beyond encouraging poor communication etiquette, unplanned calls interrupt precious thought and focus. While email and text messaging can be equally distracting, at least there are efficient ways of quickly determining importance and postponing response.

3. Voice is not the technology of the (near) future

Given the increasing efficiency and functionality of mobile messaging, I do not believe that ‘voice,’ at least in its current form, will be a central technology of the near future. Reading comprehension for the average person tops out at about 400 words per minute (600 per minute for 70% comprehension), whereas auctioneers speak at around 250 words per minute. On the creation side, speech to text would be highly beneficial given that we speak faster than we write, but as demonstrated by Google Voice, machine transcription technology has a long way to go.

Given these observations, and rising concern over holding a radiocative device next to our heads, I’m going to try to refrain from mobile calling and answering unplanned calls as much as possible. So if you need to reach me, send me an email or text first!

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Life, Liberty, & Ownership of Data

Lately I’ve been frustrated that my data - created and stored in different applications across my iPhone, iPad, and Mac - still often resides within those applications alone. Despite the fact that we’re in a mobile, “internet everywhere” age (I was told yesterday of a town without running water that had wifi), I can still only get at certain data in certain places. Evernote has excelled at meeting this challenge, as has Amazon with WhisperSync, but what about my ToDo items? Or messages and @replies marked read in Twitter? Or the fact that of the myriad of mind mapping applications for iOS, only one does multi-device sync!

I don’t mention Apple among the successful syncers in protest of their “charge for sync,” Mobile Me model. Owning your data should be an inherent human right, and companies that force you to keep it in their walled garden, or charge you for access to it, should be boycotted. Unfortunately I’m of a weak will when it comes to Apple products, and will be sitting out of that battle for moment….

Developers: the value of my data is the data itself, not the application! Give me a way to get at that data anywhere and I will be a very happy customer - even if you’re not the one providing the vehicle to access it. I’m a big proponent of beautiful UI/UX work, but I would definitely sacrifice that to make sure I can access my stuff.

This was actually another one of those posts that has been sitting, written, in my file for a while now - only seeing the light of day because a friend mentioned that he was planning to make an investment in this space. Thank god. No developer should be releasing something they want people to use heavily if the underlying data created in use is not entirely transferable. Yet of course there are always exceptions, and it will be interesting to see where companies like Facebook end up in this regard.

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In the Stream

A few weekends ago (it always seems to take a few weeks to publish these posts for some reason), I went to a brunch organized by a well known entrepreneur-turned-investor to bring entrepreneurs together to share ideas. (The idea being that in New York the concentration of consumers and industry has enabled some amazing startups, but for some reason not as close of a community as the valley. I agree). Anyway, in conversing with the friend that invited me to the brunch, I commented that I really liked his new startup, specifically because the service didn’t pull me out of the stream of my normal workflow.

A lot of services have popped up recently that allow people to connect, socialize, and generally interact in more efficient ways - and in ways never before possible - because of the increasing number of phones that support location-aware, robust internet functionality.  One of the more popular examples is Foursquare.  The problem I have with Foursquare, and the reason I don’t use it at the moment, is because I have to actively think about notifying my friends of my location, and open up the app to do so. Many people have turned this action into habit, and it’s really not that big of a deal, but for some reason I just can’t remember to do it, and the app has therefore gone unused. (That said, I do see significant value in the notion of “checking in” and controlling your location data as opposed to general location-publishing apps).     

We looked at an investment with a similar issue recently on the enterprise side, and try as I might to bring myself to use it - because it is a great tool - it just takes an extra degree of thought (and memory) to open up, and I end up not using it. Perhaps this is not a real issue for the early adopters and gadget lovers, but certainly when a company attempts to reach a larger audience this issue becomes much more significant.  Will it prevent the company from being successful? Probably not.  But it’s certainly one more obstacle to overcome.

Some apps, like Foursquare, have done a great job integrating with other services (offering “publish to…” links and the like), making it much easier to include in a person’s daily stream. But for me, it’s just not there yet.

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Juventas Fugit  is designed and written by Justin Wohlstadter, who, when not writing in the third person, can be found in a coffee shop talking about startups, thinking about the future of education, and generally procrastinating something important.

  • Passions: startups that positively affect the world, education innovation, good design, learning, and meeting those with an equally insatiable curiosity.
  • Play: director of product design at Enterproid and partner at BOLDstart Ventures.
  • Previously: built the early-stage venture arm of Penny Black. And many other crazy, less successful ventures involving fire extinguishers, measuring philanthropic impact, and creative spaces.
  • Pedantry: most of the important stuff I taught myself or learned from friends, but I’m fortunate to have (barely received) degrees from Harvard and Oxford. At Oxford I wrote my dissertation on how internet innovation will disrupt access to higher education.
  • Procrastination: can be found on Twitter, Linkedin, AngelList and other web spaces, and be reached via email at my first name at this domain.
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