I understood basic DOS prompts (I had to having owned the IBM PC Jr. a few years before), could word process with some facility, and could even “fix” friends’ computers, as long as said fix involved restarting the machine and looking unsurprised when everything was fine.

Then, while I still used my MacIntosh desktop (I just love writing ”MacIntosh”), I invested in a PowerBook. This was a “laptop” and it was a brand new game. It was a portable brick that I could carry with me and be productive and all cutting edge. So I did that, carting said PowerBook through all three years of law school.

I never used email in law school. There were 148 people in my law school class. Only in my final year, did I learn that one of them sent an “electronic mail.” Why one would do so eluded me. It was 1995. Clearly, if the era of the Jetsons was coming, I’d rather have the automated food and space cars first.

I first used the Internet in 1995. I bore people with this story all the time and have written about it here before. But since you’re a captive audience, I’ll tell it again.

I was loading a map of my home province of Quebec on my PowerBook. I was told how to do it and how amazing it would be.

It wasn’t. The image of Quebec loaded pixel-by-pixel, thanks in part to the roadrunner-fast connection at the library in Las Vegas, where I was working that day. Noting to self that this would never catch on, I flipped the cassette in my Walkman and continued my day.

Look. I know that there were people coding in 1995. I know that people were using email and I know that people used these machines more effectively and powerfully than I did.

But I was just a guy. I was an athlete-turned-student-turned-teacher-turned-law student. I wasn’t a programmer and didn’t work for the government and wasn’t a scientist on some special project.

Next step in my techvolution was my watch habit. Having received my first watch at 13 for my Bar Mitzvah, I was hooked. I’ve spend my life since then buying, selling, trading watches and looking at all of the pretty pictures that comes along with that. To me, the annual Basel watch fair is better than the Sports Illustrated annual swimsuit edition.

So in the late 90s, I was one of the first members of this thing called eBay. It was a message board – no pictures, no ripoffs, no sharks. Just kind of a classified ads thingy on your computer. And I could buy a watch from someone in Los Angeles even though I lived near Washington, DC.

That was cool.

And then pictures came and I could use this amazing new thing – a ”scanner” – and lay a watch on it and, fairly complicated process later, could try to sell that watch with the buyer having confidence that it wouldn’t arrive in a million pieces and might actually look like that watch I scanned.

And through learning about eBay and building my little but profitable watch trading hobby, I learned a bit about these machines and began gravitating towards tech guys. They were, then, at least in my world, all guys.

So it was 1998 when I’d be as frustrated as hell that I didn’t understand a think that any tech guy would say. But I pushed through it and in 1999, while instill understood little of what was said, my ignorance was a thirst. And that’s still where I am today. It no longer bothers me when something is above my head. If its something I want to know, I figure it out.

In 1999, two amazing tech things happened to me. The first was that I was identified as an educator who not only was bound for leadership, but also had a love and aptitude for technology. That resulted in my first touch with Stanford, which I clearly mark as the entry point to who I am today and the amazing things I get to work on, particularly SVbstance.

The second was that I was asked to update hundreds of computers for the Y2K switchover. Yeah, me. I was trained how to do it, paid really decently, and spent a summer playing with computers. And taking breaks to buy and sell watches. Oh, why did I ever sell that Orfina Porsche Design chronograph?

This millennium hit, all of my machines survived, and I was hooked.

I talk about technology all the time. I wrote about it, think about it, probably dream about it, and am as surprised as all of you when I predict some tech thing to come and it actually happens.

But I’m still just a guy. I’m not a techie, I have no training in technology, and I can still fix any of your computers (as long as the repair process involves turning the machine off then on again – I’m highly skilled at that).

I still don’t get frustrated when I learn about something new in technology that’s over my head. Probably because so much today is. I love technology and while I’m not addicted to it (based on any of the true metrics of addiction) I’m not a fan of being off the grid. Part of who I am as a person and as a worker is to be accessible. I truly believe that sharing who I am an sharing my time, in person and through technology, is part of giving back the gifts I’ve been so fortunate to receive in my life. Yeah, that’s corny, but it’s how I feel. So I continue to struggle with email volume and how to get my technology to work for me and not vice-versa for a change, and I always get lost in thoughts of imaginary worlds where my tech tools are smooth and seamlessly integrated and open doors to a world full of content and leisure time.

And every day I’m still amazed at how far we’ve come in fewer years than it takes to properly age an eminently drinkable bottle of whisky.

I learned as a little kid that nothing was free. I assumed that others were learning the same thing but, evidently, I was wrong. So I’m writing a short post today to share how free looks from where I sit.

1. There is no such thing as free: Free exists for a reason. When I was a kid, I saw the birth of massive grocery stores (the direct English translation of the stores that launched when I was a kid were “Hyper Markets”). They aimed (and succeeded) to kill every mom and pop grocery in their catchment area. They brought new foods to the city and had people stationed in each aisle to give you tastes of what they were selling. These were things (enter the fried cheese stick) that we had lived well without. But we tried the samples and liked them and bought what they were purveying for free.

2. Free uses us: What percentage of people who accept a company’s offer for a free trial follow all of the requisite steps to cancel their free trial before the credit card is charged for the first month? It’s lower than we think. And even were a free trial actually free, it’s still not. If we’re not being used for credit card information, we’re being used for personal information. I still get emails from TEC de Monterrey, seven years after I did a one-day consulting job for them. Getting off their mailing list is a human impossibility. I fear that my email information will be in their archives until NBA players again behave like gentlemen on and off the court or the velociraptor reappears at your local zoo, whichever comes first.

3. Free is engineered: Free is a competition killer. Free is a loss leader where one side can absorb said loss with the intent to eliminate competition. You do realize that this is how the Wal-Marts of the world grind the bones of the aforementioned mom and pop shops to bake their bread, yes? They do 2-for-1 deals and roll back prices on certain items to lure you into the store. They lose money every time you accept their offer to purchase one of these deeply discounted items. But they also now have you in their lair, and there’s no way you’re going to leave without buying more things, all of which still undercut the small local competitor (or not – you’ll never know) but because of these uberstores’ massive buying power, still give them a healthy margin per unit times massive volume. They engineer an artificial price reality where they include free things to kill off the competitor who always offered you quality things but at a price point that allowed the people who own that business to make a reasonable living and in turn be able to buy other things from other local merchants.

4. Free is an insidious metric: In 2012, we live in a world where money follows traction and traction is measured in part by the number of eyes on a website. It doesn’t matter one lick how you get people to your site. VCs want to see eyes on your site, and when you can show not only the potential for lots and lots of eyes looking at your site, but can show that they are in fact doing so, you’re in a very, very good place when it comes to funding.

Free scares me the most in education. The EDU space, as I think of it, will always have limited resources (that’s a given in education) and (trust me on this) it is a space just teeming with vultures. I remember working on projects in Ho Chi Minh City, where I spoke with families and government officials about the challenges in a nation where there is only one university place available for every three qualified candidates. There just isn’t enough of anything to go around, and this is a global issue of the utmost importance.

So what do you think we should make of well-funded EDU startups, offering free education? I don’t need to call any of them out – you can do your homework and guess to whom I’m referring. But the idea that some famous educators are going to get together, offer life-changing courses for free, are doing so with millions of dollars of venture (that’s the key word) capital, and expect nothing in return is, in the words of Styx, The Grand Illusion.

Wake up. There is coffee to be smelled.

This wasn’t really news to us. We’d seen the Super Bowl commercials before. This wasn’t the first time that we had witnessed Danica Patrick sell her commercial soul in embarrassingly bad spots for the unctuous peeps at Go Daddy. What was different this time was how the event lived and breathed through the lens of social media. I watch a lot of sports and this was the first event ever where I feel safe saying that the breadth and depth of commentary on social media, especially Twitter, not only eclipsed the event but became the event itself.

Case in point: Madonna’s halftime show.

First, let me say that after what I thought was a kind of bizarre and disturbing opening to her set, the rest of the performance itself was superb, particularly when Cee Lo Green joined her onstage. Were I feeling pun-ish, I’d say that “it got crazy” at that point. But I won’t. Crazy being the reference to the Gnarls – okay, you get it.

But that halftime show was also when shit hit the fan on social media outlets. On Twitter, @audreywatters made this superb observation:

“And oh how our culture hates older women’s sexuality. See: twitter stream for proof”

She was, of course, right on. The vitriol that accompanied Madonna’s performance was scary and came from all corners of the world. That an attractive 53-year-old entertainer should be on stage in front of, oh, a billion or so people, and wear outfits that showed that she was indeed attractive and in shape, irked millions.

But that’s really not the issue. What is the issue is that the forum for the dialogue surrounding Madonna is social media. And it’s now an inverted paradigm: where social media used to look to traditional media for content and cues, now everyone from traditional media trolls Twitter and Facebook for content. Last night was arguably the historical (and hysterical) apex of this. Twitter was, in so many ways, the game itself and this was magnified by the fact that, as football games go, three quarters of it was kinda meh.

Two weeks ago, I watched the NFC championship game in one of my favorite sports bars in the world – The Old Pro in Palo Alto. The amazing thing to observe was how many people were interacting with social media on their mobiles or tablets (okay – it’s Silicon Valley, so let’s call it like it is and just say “iPhone and iPads”). I’d venture a guess that 70% of the thousand or so people in that room were as engaged with social media during and about the game than they were with the event itself.

What this means in the business context is that there’s immediate and sometimes brutal feedback on what you put on the air. Last night’s Samsung commercial was a great example. Reaction was immediate and universally negative, with Twitter comments ranging from “Apple didn’t need a Super Bowl ad but Samsung made one for them anyway,” to “Samsung spent ten million dollars to show off a stylus.” The ad struck people as being ill-conceived and downright dumb-headed. In tangible ways, it seemed to take as its proposition that people always go to absurd lengths to get the competitor’s product but ours is readily accessible by a glaring absence of demand.

The problem with a Super Bowl ad is that it’s a massive bet. Good business is about lots of small bets intermingled with a few big bets. But as we last night, we’re living in a land of immediate reactions and big bets that have changed the landscape of how we consume major sports events and the products around them.

Hope you enjoyed the game(s).

In the episode, whenever Jerry loses something, another something of equal value comes to him. The funniest moment is when his girlfriend breaks up with him and he casually responds with a “No problem. It was nice to date you and have a great life,” fully realizing, by this point in the plot, that he’ll meet someone else of equal or better quality right away.

There’s something to this. Jerry was actually identifying life in Flow. When you live in Flow, you’re moving in a positive direction – while it may seem that things come to you, you’re actually attracting them.

When I decided, once and for all, to go off and my own and build a professional life with Lots of different projects and clients, I was afraid that I’d fail and probably starve to death. This Fear lasted minutes, not hours, and was also fortuitously counterbalanced by images in my mind of working for only one client forever. But it was a Fear nonetheless.

And it was something that I embraced because I had no choice but to do so. Anything else would have derailed me. Ignoring my Fear would have placed heavy obstacles in my path as I’d need to deal with them later. Instead, I took everything I had and moved forward.

Part of my moving forward in late 2010 was a cleaning out of things. Some were emotional, some intellectual, and some physical. Changes needed to be made and one of them was simply getting rid of a lot of the shit I’d accumulated over years of living in multiple cities and finding cool things wherever I went.

I parted with 80% of what I owned and realized that I was actually attached to not one thing. There wasn’t one thing that I owned that I needed. Yes, I liked by retro Nike sneaker collection and my watch collecting hobby that I’ve had since I was 13. But to prove that I didn’t need these things, I got rid of the pieces I liked the best and never thought twice about it.

From there, I decided that my life would be Even Steven. Want to buy a shirt? Give away a shirt. Want to add that cool new watch to the collection? Get rid of one first.

And it extended to my professional life when I wasn’t looking. This was really driven home last January, when I was offered the chance to represent a good client in Asia. It would have involved more 16-hour flights than I was willing to take on at this point in my life. More importantly, as I spent time with the client, what I felt inside wasn’t resonance. I saw what they wanted to accomplish strategically and I knew that I could get them to their goals. But, honestly, I really didn’t care. So I passed and opened the door for Fear because I’d passed on a three-year project at a price point that would buy a lot of fun watches and the occasional visit to Dean and Deluca.

And everything worked out and did so pretty quickly. New clients, whose mission I really loved, found me. And I became busier than I ever imagined being and still am. It was Flow. Trusting that you’re in the currents of something that’s larger than you are and letting yourself fall into it.

It’s about embracing Jerry’s Even Steven and realizing that what comes next is full of promise if you just let yourself go.

Leadership is the most overused term in business. Few know what it looks like.

Imagine explaining a leadership concept to your grandfather. If you see him looking sceptical, so should you.

Reading books about leadership is an infinitely less valuable exercise than reading books about lives well-lived.

If a leadership concept doesn’t fit the world, it won’t fit your home either.

A true leader rarely thinks about the term “leadership.”

Leadership is always about empathy, never about tolerance.

Leaders walk the walk and guide others in doing so. Leadership without teaching is hollow.

Leadership is thought plus action, never thought alone.

Look for leadership outside of your comfort zone. Understanding leadership in different contexts is key.

There are no negative leadership lessons. Seeing how not to lead is a remarkable gift.

There is no leadership without reflection and meditation. A leader knows how to find their center.

Leadership needs to be communicated virally.

Leadership can be learned by and from people of all ages. We are never too young or old.

False praise is to leadership what arsenic is to a soup recipe.

Leadership is not a contest.

Leadership is iteration plus awareness.

Ego is leadership kryptonite.

Leadership is never a final document. It is an ongoing series of rough drafts.

I’ve traveled two MILLION miles with carry-ons. It’s not as difficult as you think, though I did kind of bend the rules a bit in the old days.

When I used to need to “dress up” (thankfully, with my work now, I wear whatever I want, whenever I want) I had several home bases around the world. So I’d store clothes there. When I arrived in Beijing, for example, my hotel room closet would magically have my freshly-pressed suits and clean shirts, dress shoes shiny as a pretty penny.

That was pretty cool.

And on those trips, I’d really have only my brief bag and dopp kit. That’s it.

But I also did a 70 day business trip carry-on only. Lessons from that trip resonate today:

- You can replenish things (including, say, socks) when you’re on the road.

- Not everything that left with you needs to come home.

- Quick-dry clothes (Nike’s dri-fit totally rules) save the day.

- Your carry-on needs to be the perfect balance of light and indestructible. Err on the side of indestructible.

- While wheeled luggage is great, hard-sided cases are not the way to go. You need soft ballistic nylon (I use a no-longer made Timbuk2) that accommodates jamming in extra stuff.

Here’s the issue: Assuming that you’re staying places where laundry isn’t an issue, how much do you REALLY need to bring?

I can go a couple of months on the road with:

- 3 pair of pants. Quick drying is best, but I don’t follow that rule. I like jeans and khakis as soft as puppy fur.

- A variety of 5 shirts.

- Quick drying personal garments. Tilley Endurables make stuff that dries in minutes.

- Layers for warmth. Again, I swear by Nike Dri-fit. Their full- and half-zip tops take no room, cut the cold and wind and can dry in an hour.

- Workout gear. I’m partial to Ralph Lauren’s quick-drying RLX line. Great gym shorts.

If you DO need a business jacket, the aforementioned Tilley Endurables make a great travel blazer. I had one and beat the crap out of it. You can roll it into a ball, use it as a pillow on your flight, hang it in your bathroom, turn on the hot water and, voila, no wrinkles. Amazing. And it looks like a real blazer – it has structure and style.

Sometimes it’s best to wash your own stuff rather than send it to the laundry, especially when what they charge to wash your pants is more than the pants cost. Here’s my how-to:

You take what needs to be washed into the shower with you. After you’re clean, You pulverize the clothes with liquid soap and very hot water. Don’t be shy. Ring it all out well. Place on the floor in a thick towel. Roll up with towel with a piece of clothing in it. Walk all over said towel (jumping is cool too, as is doing the Mambo), thereby extracting water from the garment. Hang or lay the garment. You’re soon good to go, friend.

Never put damp clothes in your bag. Even after a short flight, the stench is amazing. It will ruin your bag (R.I.P. lovely old Tumi).

As for shoes, I’m a sneakerhound, as you know. And I work out a lot. So, I wear one pair and pack another.

And that’s all. It’s totally do-able and you can have a variety of clothes. Just remember that very thin is always better than thick. Always err on the side of bringing a bit too little. You can always pick up something you need when you’re there.

And enjoy your trip

It’s simple: just learn to deal with the fear of starting from zero. And, to help you out, I have the perfect training tool:

Snakes and Ladders

Yes. THAT Snakes and Ladders.

You remember the game. You roll the dice, move your piece and head up the levels of the game board. If you land on a ladder, you move up to where the ladder ends. If you hit a snake, you slide down to where it takes you.

Basically, like working with any startup in the world.

The beauty of the game is that it sucks you in. Things appear to be going so smoothly. You’re 10, 15, 20 places ahead of the competition. Then…ssssssssssssliiiiiide (insert snake sound here, please). You’re 18 behind. And then they hit a snake and all of a sudden you’re even again.

But part of the fun of the game isn’t that you’re once again tied, it’s that you thought the game was about to end and, instead, you’re both only on number 22 instead of 71.

It’s frustrating. But it’s good practice for starting anything from scratch.

I really like to cook. And my favorite thing is to take a pot, fill it with some water, and create some kind of Asian fusion soup. What I love most about the process is just that – staring at a pot with water heating up in it and thinking about what I’m going to pull out of the fridge and cupboard over the next few minutes to make it not only consumable, but, ideally, something I’m proud of.

So I’ll take a little miso paste from the fridge, some rice noodles, peanut sauce, seaweed, some kale, spring onion, maybe some lemongrass, even add a little green tea if I’ve brewed some. Maybe some sliced fish cake, a little of the salmon roe I always keep in the freezer, maybe some Malaysian curry paste and then I let it simmer.

Sometimes, for a variety of reasons, what I end up with isn’t great. And sometimes it’s stunningly good and while I’m tempted to record on paper what I just did, I never do. It’s about the art of the invention. Next time I want to make something even more delicious and I want to do it by really testing the elasticity of my ingredients. I want to try a new mix of parts to make an even more innovative whole. I’m no longer afraid of how the pot looks when it only has water in it.

I spent most of yesterday moving from a blank Keynote on my iPad to, about 14 hours and four NFL and NHL games later, a really decent deck for something brand new. The feedback this morning on what I created was strong. I feel good about what I did and how I did it. I want to do it again because the feeling of getting in front of the idea that you’ll never again create anything of value is amazing. And the way for you to experience that is to, again and again, stand in front of that empty pot, that blank screen, and make it happen. That’s how to build anything from scratch. Be prepared for the snakes and ladders and the days you forget how salty salt actually is and ruin the broth. You can always start again but you can’t start again unless you start the first time.

As always, rock on, my friends.

I don’t want you to make any New Year’s Resolutions aside from this one: “I will allow myself to BE.” By allowing yourself to be, you will allow yourself to become.

That’s it. Its beauty is in its simplicity. When you stop being the one who not only builds but actually (and kind of insanely, when you think about it) guards the roadblocks in your life, you’ll be opening the avenues to a new world.

I know. I don’t usually write about things like this. I am avowedly not in the mold of the self-help gurus you can see at 2am on a bad cable channel. But this is immensely important stuff and I implore you to consider this today, before your airwaves fill with Resolutionmania.

I had a conversation the other night about gyms. You know when gyms are the most full? Right after New Year’s. Know when they empty out? A month later. The reason is simple: when someone sets a personal policy such as “I will go to work out at the gym every day,” and the starting point was a fully sedentary life, it’s a prescription for failure. It’s simply not a resolution that’s going to be met, for a variety of reasons.

What I’m advocating here is permission to just be. If you want to be more healthy, allow yourself to be. These are affirmative choices. It’s not about schedule or routine or the insanity that comes with padlocking pantries and painful deprivation. Just open a door every day on the path to your goal.

So maybe the first thing is to develop a taste for an Americano instead of your usual latte. You think “Wow – I love the coffee flavor and it’s a different thing without the milkiness.” And since you drink two small lattes a day now, you end up saving 500 calories a day which will, just given the math, result in a one-pound weight loss a week. By doing nothing but exploring a new taste. It’s about discovery, not deprivation.

Here’s another simple one: many people tend to shy away from walking during their workday for a simple reason: the shoes they wear to work are very uncomfortable to walk in. We’ve all had new shoes and ended up creating a makeshift band-aid triage unit just so we could walk from the train to our offices.

Well it’s 2012 in a few days. There are tons of great walking shoes disguised as dress shoes, for women as well as men. I can tell you that I used to walk tens of thousands of miles around the world in Ecco Danish dress shoes. They’re not expensive, they look as good as any conservative dress shoe, and it’s like walking in a pair of sneakers. Cole-Haan, in fact, makes an entire line of dress shoes for men and women with Nike Air technology. They’re so comfortable, you’ll find yourself slipping into them on weekends.

The point being, of course, that if you’re comfortable walking, you’re inclined to walk more. It becomes something that you can just do more of rather than a painful chore.

Back to my gym example for a sec – know a major reason why so many people new to a gym quit? It’s the bikes. Seriously. They’re not used to riding, then they sit on stationary bikes (assuming that they’re easier than any of the other cardio machines) and within days they’re in constant pain because of how uncomfortable the seats are. That dull throbbing when they walk turns them off the gym altogether.

“Okay, so we’re feeling somewhat warm and fuzzy now. Aren’t you going to talk about innovation, as you almost always do?”

Yep. Here comes:

Let this attitude carry over to your relationship with ideas.

By far, our biggest obstacle in the realm of innovation is ourselves. I see this every day in my work. We’re afraid to give our ideas the oxygen they need to survive.  We’re scared of failure and, If we’re being open and honest, we’re more scared of success. Too many ideas die well before iteration. We kill them out of fear.

So, following this model, find ways to discover your ideas. Buy a nice notebook or (I prefer these) big artist’s pad and start to write and draw out what you’re thinking. Collaborate. Share your idea with people who can help. Get on my radar if you think that might make sense – I’m happy to talk with you and point you in the right direction. Tell your fear that having a few sets of eyes and ears on your idea is just a way to stretch your creative muscles a bit. It’s not about an endgame, it’s about learning.

Don’t forbid yourself what you used to see as a luxury of time. Your ideas are a part of you and they deserve your attention. No matter how you need to do it, gift yourself that time and focus to play with your ideas. Test their elasticity. See how they fly and, more importantly, in what direction they bounce when they hit a wall.

Play with this idea of letting yourself BE as a resolution substitute. Resolve not to resolve and let 2012 be the best year you’ve ever had.

Fifteen years ago, few people used the Internet. Not many used email and even if you actually did, you couldn’t assume that even a small fraction of the people you knew did. So it had little currency.

Today we live in a state of daily information overload. But, I would argue, the fundamental problem remains, that of finding meaning and relevance.

When I was a kid, I was taught how to search for information. It was a slow process, involving travel to a library, index cards, often asking a person for help. And the information available to me was just the information available to me. If it wasn’t physically where I was, then I couldn’t have it.

I could ask others for help, and in so doing, I’d have access to the information to which they has access. So my reach was now wider. And they might consult with someone on my behalf, for another plus one.

Surely this was slow and as certainly this was labor-intensive. But I’m going to argue that in some ways it was superior than what we often do today.

When we did first-hand research then broaden our search by consulting others, there was a legitimacy to the process. I remember doing a research project as a kid on zoos. Aside from some primary library research, we had to talk to people who worked at zoos. We gathered first-hand accounts and perspectives. While the volume of information we collected paled in comparison to what we get today, it was deep and
robust.

Now we have instant access. From almost anywhere in the world, we can immediately find information on devices that, in 1995, made only phone calls and that very few people had. As the devices that are the conduits of information became ubiquitous, the volume quickly ramped up. Just the other day I read that the amount of information an elementary school student can access in a day eclipses that to which a
fine scholar would have had access in a lifetime less than a century ago. Phrased in this way, I envision a toddler holding a gun that can down elephants.

So if 2011 was the year of information, I think that 2012 will be the year of transparency. The true currency of information is trust. In my research example from when I was a kid, I trusted the librarians, the encyclopedia, and the people I spoke to who worked at the zoo. After all, if you want to know what it’s like to work at a zoo, isn’t it a
better idea to ask someone who does rather than enter a “query” into a “search engine?”

How many university student would you guess consult online resources when they’re considering entering a profession? I would guess a massive percentage. They go online and learn about, say, different specializations in the Law, what new associates earn at a set of firms they choose to plug into their search. There’s a lot of data online and they do a diligent job in diving into it.

How many do you think arrange in-person meetings with several lawyers? How many ask questions in person like “Are you a happy person?” “If you had to do it again, would you become a lawyer?” It’s not just asking the question (sure, that can be done online), it’s about the intimacy of the research, the reception of indepth emotion and nuance that one can only get in person. It’s about a trust that happens when said experienced lawyer whispers “Honestly, the just isn’t for me. I’m stuck and I’d love to get out. And here’s why…”

2012 will be a year where the value of information finally seeps into the public consciousness. The conversation will become about not only what we know but how we know that what we know is meaningful. We will shift from an orientation of quantity to one of quality. It’s not that we won’t use the Internet, it’s not that Google will disappear – of course not.

I like to think of it as Slow Information.

Just as the Slow Food movement brought a shift in perspective to how we thought about food and eating (and how we gathered food, and where and why), Slow Information (an elegant counterpoint, I would argue, to the hyperfastness of information today) is about meaning and meaning is currency.

A startup is ANY newly-created company or, if you want to get more technical, one with a relatively limited operational history. Yeah, actually, that’s the definition of startup.

People almost never use the term “tech startup” anymore, which is a shame, because the massive number of startups in this space has resulted in tech startups taking ownership over the entire nomenclature. But, and this is entire reason I’m writing this piece, it’s ESSENTIAL to understand that while tech startups are absolutely startups, so are newly-created businesses that aren’t in the tech space. Seems like a no-brainer to me but I’m often standing in the wilderness on this.

See, here’s the thing. I love tech and I love educational technology (“EdTech”) and all of the other forms of tech. But we’ve somehow lost the thread. We’ve become yobongoed.

Hah? “yobongoed?”

So, yesterday I saw a commercial for a tech startup called yobongo, currently in development or perhaps dead (a little difficult to ascertain at the moment). Here’s the video, in case you’re so inclined:

yobongo (click on it, silly)

I’m sorry but this video pushed me right over the edge and it does so for three key reasons:

1. Stop. Just stop using your big, fertile brains to create another messaging service when you could be creating socially useful shit. For the love of God, stop. How many messaging services are enough? I don’t want to know exactly where everyone I know is at all times and I as sure don’t need to be tracked more than I’m sure I already am. Plus, um, hasn’t this been done before. What the hell is Glympse? Yammer does pieces of it. Even INSTAGRAM does if you use it in that way. Seriously.

2. The video itself is just abysmal. Seriously, this is the worst piece of shit I’ve seen in ages, partly because of the next point.

3. Enough hipsters already. Come ON. First, the video was clearly shot in insanely hipstery Dolores Park and the even mas hipsterific Summit SF cafe. The level of inventiveness in this is a flat zero. My brain hurts with the entire concept. I can just smell the soy latte and ironic monotone whining.

Oddly, this wasn’t a tangent. This is the shit people see in their minds when they think “startup.” It’s seared into our consciousness with the hot, red branding iron of mediocrity.

Look, I work in and with a bunch of startups. I love to advise them and the entrepreneurs who fuel their progress. And while tech is a part of most startups today, where tech is in and of itself the beginning and end, my concentration is strained. Throw in terms like “social” and “messaging” and the ubiquitous “the next Facebook” and I’m measuring the potential bodily damaging from flinging myself over whatever is closest.

What I want to see for 2012 is a much broader realization that anyone looking to open a great new business is opening a startup. I want to see incubators for non-tech startups. I want to see more EDUpreneurs use tech as a tool rather than as the entire engine. I want more talent following what I try to do, which is to identify amazing people with great drive and energy and leadership and for us to use our time and talents to support them. I want to see people passionate about making truly exceptional, world-changing shit rather than getting all bouncy over how to monetize something they haven’t a clue how to build out. I really just want to see ALL good startups have a chance to succeed and I want us to call out stupid ideas and copycat shit and put a bullet in the base of the skull of a lot more rip-off, intellectually complacent, fluffy ideas.

And I want world peace, of course.

And onion rings.