Victor Wong

Autodidacticism for Entrepreneurs - Starting

An autodidact is a mostly self-taught person.  As Wikipedia says:

“A person may become an autodidact at nearly any point in his or her life. While some may have been educated in a conventional manner in a particular field, they may choose to educate themselves in other, often unrelated areas.”

I hadn’t considered myself one until I came across the word recently.  Since taking a leave of absence from Yale over two years ago, I’ve been learning so much in new ways and in new settings.  Not to say the classroom doesn’t hold some value in teaching you about some things, but I do believe now that it falls short in teaching you about certain subjects not rooted in traditional academics.

Beyond finding mentors and advisors who share their own experiences, I have learned how to start and run a company in a field I had no prior experience in by reading books and blogs. 

One of the greatest thing I had growing up was my parents’ firm belief in supporting my education — specifically, they would always pay for anything to further my education including buying any book.  My dad, whose family went through the communist take over of China and subsequent seizure of private property, would say “there is one thing they can never take away from you and that is your education.”  His belief allowed me to explore new areas on my own, armed with only an Amazon.com prime account.  I would certainly do the same for my future kids as I think it encourages them to learn more. 

I have read a lot of books in the last few years (maybe 2 per month?), but I will attempt to breakdown my entrepreneurial education for others who have asked where to start.

Books 

 Reality Check

  Getting to Plan B

 Founders at Work

Blogs

Fred Wilson’s Blog

Seth Godin’s Blog

Marc Andreessen’s Blog (Backed Up)

These select works have been the most helpful when first starting a company or thinking about starting something.  This is as close to a academic curriculum on the subject but of course it falls short of learning from experience.  I will continue this series with follow up posts about topics people want but probably starting with marketing and leadership. 

Seeding New Local Content

This post originally appeared on 2/5/10 in PaidContent as a guest article titled “Some New Ways To Make Money on Local”

Most companies working on solving “local” have so far focused on ways to provide more and better-targeted local news. But by defining “news” in such a narrow and traditional way, they all face two big problems: the high cost of content production and the lack of contextually relevant advertisers.

There are great opportunities for entrepreneurs to mine a slew of non-“news” content, in areas ranging from local job opportunities to neighborhood safety, that has potentially huge appeal for both local readers and advertisers. It’s not that no one is trying to do this already. A recent report by the American Society of News Editors, for example, looks at some of the efforts by local newspapers to branch out into new areas of coverage using data that is locally available but that has been all-but ignored until now.

But there are still plenty of content areas where lots more could be done. So how to find them?

The most obvious places to start would be monitoring Google search trends for a local area, the local blogs via Outside.in, and tweets filtered by location (e.g. Twitter’s local trending service). While these locally focused resources can provide leads to what a particular community cares about in the moment, they fall short in offering a steady stream of content ideas.

A more promising, but untapped, source for locally relevant content is now available thanks to the rise of data aggregators for specific verticals. You can easily imagine coupling, say, content about local real-estate trends with relevant advertisers like real-estate agents and even local political campaigns. Here are some possible scenarios that demonstrate how companies could generate new local content cost-effectively by simply monitoring and curating data that is already readily obtainable.

1) Safety: Companies like SeeClickFix are creating data around issues in the community like potholes and poor lighting. Journalists and others can use this data to spot and comment on trends like growing pockets of criminal activity or neighborhoods neglected by the city. Until now, this information has not been easy to gather, analyze and report.

2) Jobs: With unemployment at the top of the nation’s worry list, there is surprisingly little local effort to examine employment trends. Simple analysis across existing employment sites could yield interesting and surprising figures about which industries are doing well locally and where the jobs are. Month-to-month analysis of job-listing volume could produce a simple employment index to show whether hiring is going up or down. It could also include business-license application monitoring through a service like EveryBlock.

3) Autos: You could track the volume of listings across auto sites and provide some basic data breakdown. How useful would it be to know when local used-car dealerships have a large increase in inventory (and thus are probably more willing to sell at a lower price)? Other data like new-car listings could show what the local population is buying by examining what is posted and taken down by the dealers. Publishers can even create new content by encouraging users to input data about what sorts of deals and treatment they got, which would be useful for other local buyers and could be turned into a local car-buying guide.

4) Real Estate: Many real-estate portals make their residential data available through APIs.  It’s surprising that more content isn’t produced around neighborhood trends, or even how well specific residential real-estate agents are performing. Right now, print publications showcase a handful of recent transactions, whereas online, every recent sale could be captured and analyzed to reveal important trends that would have real value for readers.

New-apartment developments rarely get spotlighted or scrutinized –wouldn’t it be interesting to see occupancy rates and overall rent trends?  This data could be gathered over the phone or even through user responses. Some enterprising web developer may already have created an app that captures this info. Curbed, in New York, already produces content like this and has been very successful.

These are just some ideas of how the thousands of local publishers – traditional and new – can make use of data that’s there for the taking, waiting to be collected, reported and monetized. Local isn’t just about breaking news; it’s also about what’s trending over time. Local content is always there just waiting to be produced.

New Frontier: mashing up public domain and new content

As a throwback to my childhood, I watched Justice League: New Frontier on Netflix Streaming the other night.  Something about super hero epics is so appealing — could be the simple good versus evil and clear solutions that exist in the comic world which don’t necessarily reveal themselves in the real world so easily.

However, what really struck me was the very end where the creators took excerpts from JFK’s Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech.  It has to be one of the most creative mashups of public domain creatives with new original content production.  They selectively excerpted parts of the speech and recombined elements to make something applicable to the video.  It also happens to be inspiring:

The pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their own lives to build a new world here in the West.  They were determined to make that new world strong and free, an example to the world.  Some would say that those struggles are all over – that all the horizons have been explored – that all the battles have been won – that there is no longer an American frontier.  We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier,  the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils.  Beyond that frontier are the uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice.

I am asking each of you to be pioneers towards that New Frontier. My call is to the young in heart, regardless of age.

Can we carry through in an age where we will witness not only new breakthroughs in weapons of destruction, but also a race for mastery of the sky and the rain, the ocean and the tides, the far side of space and the inside of men’s minds?

All mankind waits upon our decision. A whole world looks to see what we will do. We cannot fail their trust, we cannot fail to try.