Starting a business is very hard and to be successful I think you need to have a certain set of characteristics, one of which I’ll call the “insane maniac” trait.

I by no means think you need to be certifiably crazy to start and run a business, but I do think you need to be able to handle the stresses of entrepreneurial life and to do so requires a mentality that, in some cases, you can just flat-out call crazy.

Things like:

Paying people with money you don’t have
Working 24+ hours straight
Flying across the world and back for one meeting
Buying assets with money you don’t have
Living with no income, but lots of expenses
Distributing flyers room by room, in hundreds of rooms for hours on end
Obsessing over a problem or idea during all hours of the day
Walking around for weeks with inventory in your backpack in … Read More »

Now that the dust has settled a bit and the acquisition is done, I wanted to talk a little bit about Dogpatch Labs NYC and the role they played in Spinback.

1. Collaboration

For the past few months the Spinback team has been working out of a union square loft in NYC hosted by Polaris Ventures. We have been working alongside 15 – 20 other impressive and humbling startups all of which are building truly unique businesses. Every day, we had the opportunity to walk around to other startups and engage in conversation on a variety of topics that affected our business. We were able to get real time feedback on specific topics from unique perspectives. For example, a custom commerce startup gave us feedback on our EasyShare design and sharing process. A real-time group messaging platform gave us insights to different marketing … Read More »

As the news says, today my partners and I over at Spinback are pleased to announce that we’ve been acquired by Buddy Media, the Facebook management system of choice for eight out of the ten top global advertisers.

When we started Spinback the goal was to build the most cutting edge technology that would facilitate conversations and sharing of products. More importantly, we wanted this technology to also track how word of mouth marketing affects new sales and new customer acquisition.

Now as a part of Buddy Media, we will have  all the tools and infrastructure necessary to accelerate our collective mission which is ultimately about leveraging this new social web in new and interesting ways for leading companies around the world.

We are really excited to begin the next chapter and I’ll leave the rest of the details to Buddy Media.

“On to the … Read More »

There is a lot of debate going on in Washington DC and among the Ad Tech community around data and privacy. Technology has enabled every single one of us with the ability to communicate freely and broadly with ease and there are companies that make this possible, most notably through advertising revenue.

The loose claim being made is that our privacy is not safe and that as consumers, we are being exploited. However, I offer the following points to think about in order to add different abstraction to the conversation:

As a celebrity, you have the ability to communicate to the masses.
As a celebrity, you are subject to continual public criticism and scrutiny.
As a celebrity, you are subject to unwanted or unwarranted photography and videography.
As a celebrity, your likeness is often times used to make money (e.g. tabloids).

The current communication tools available make us all, … Read More »

Osama Bin Laden is dead and today I recall the feelings I had on that fateful day in 2001. Although I am admittedly filled with thoughts of joy about how this evil is wiped off the face of the earth, I still cannot seem to shake the sadness that continues to live on with those who lost loved ones over the past 10 years. And although the Seal team executed this operation with surgical movie-like precision, there have been other Seal teams that did not have the same fortune during this extended war against terror.

And it is with this in mind that today I recall the story of Marcus Luttrell, a Navy Seal who was awarded the Navy Cross for his actions against the Taliban during Operation Redwing. During Operation Redwing, Marcus lost his closest friends and was quite literally a Lone Survivor in … Read More »