One resolution I’ve made for 2012 is to take a strong stance on more issues. I’ve always felt some people are too opinionated about things they don’t know enough about, which probably made me overcompensate and not form strong opinions to share. Some friends have pointed out that even when I know a lot about things, I often times don’t take a strong position about them. Instead, I comprehensively recite both sides of an issue, but I don’t pick a side for things like:

•  Is this startup idea good?
•  Which design looks better?
•  Who deserves more from a partnership?

I used to think the easiest think to do is to have a strong opinion while the harder part was having a true understanding of both sides. However, a good friend recently shared the following with me, which completely changed my perspective:

Strong opinions are important because you need to believe in something to guide your decisions in order to accomplish anything. It’s the difference between being an author and a book reviewer. The author has to decide what is important and what should be cut and what the point of the book is. Every word that is in the book is there because the author decided it should be there. The book reviewer can read a book and comment on the decisions that were made by the author, but he will never be able to write a book because he can not make the important decisions, he can only comment on the decisions others have made.

Being well rounded and understanding that both sides of an argument have pros and cons is easy. It’s moving past that and making a decision that is hard. As an entrepreneur by definition you can’t be content to accept both sides of the coin and sit idly by. You have to consider both, and then fully commit to one. Strong opinions lead to vision because only when you have made a decision about what is important and what is right can you start to see how the future should be.

So maybe by having stronger opinions this year, I’ll have a better sense of what’s coming the following years. That seems worth trying for at least.

I wrote an answer to this question on Quora. There are few things more interesting to me than the intersection of behavioral economics and startups.

Reading the biography of Amazon.com’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, I came across this quote on hiring:

“One of [Jeff’s] mottos was that every time we hired someone, he or she would raise the bar for the next hire, so that the overall talent pool was always improving,” said Nicholas Lovejoy, who joined Amazon in 1995 as the fifth employee. Bezos put the philosophy this way: Five years after an employee was hired, he said, that employee should think, “I’m glad that I got hired when I did, because I wouldn’t get hired now.”

I thought this is a terrific approach to hiring. At first, it seemed to conflict with some common advice about hiring only A-players. How could you hire better people in the future if you already were hiring the best?

I realized the way to reconcile these bits of advice is that there are A-players for different stages of the company and also some A-players who can scale across stages. Hiring people who will do a great job at the current scale and have the potential to punch above their weight class can still leave room for “even better” future hires who come from even larger scale organizations where they succeeded. In spite of how far I’ve taken my company, PaperG, from its inception, I am still in awe of outside executives interested in working with us who have far more experience and success to date from their times operating much larger companies. 

PaperG is in the midst of a mini-hiring spree (expanding the team by about 20% in a month) to help us as we scale the business to enable some of the largest media companies go after one of the most exciting markets, local advertising. In some open positions, we just need to compare whether the new hire is much better than someone already in a similar position.

In other open positions, we have to think whether the new hire will be doing a better job than a founder could if he did it full-time. It’s a high bar —  but even founders should want to feel lucky they were the ones to start the company and not be the ones who are applying for the competitive position. 

Recently, I received a nice postcard from a friend who was explicitly trying to prop up her favorite dying US agency — a beautiful, thought though likely futile effort. It made me wonder about the future of businesses that primarily operate offline.

The Internet through the spread of email has permanently disrupted the main business of the US Postal Service, and the uptick in shipping packages to homes from e-tailers hasn’t quite made up for the lost business. That fact surprises me as I consider my recent Black Friday experience seeing many retail spaces remaining empty, big box stores appearing desperate, and online stores doing better than ever. The future of retail feels like it will be largely online with offline delivery for anything that doesn’t have to be consumed or used immediately. Such a future feels a little bleak when you try to imagine all the empty street windows. 

That said, I don’t think that could really come to pass since some equilibrium will be reached. I have started to wonder what would keep retail spaces filled and bustling with business. I’ve come up with five ways this would be possible:

1. Experienced based retailing. I believe either offline retailers are going to have to be like Walmart or be like Apple in the future. They won’t be able to charge a 20-50% markup on a pure commodity shopping experience; instead they must produce an amazing retailing experience or they must simply have cheaper prices than the Internet has to offer. 
2. Pop-up retailing. Internet companies have already begun this season tocreate pop up stores in cheap, empty retail spaces. These pop up stores enable online stores to have a real world face.
3. Online Sales Tax. Federal enactment of such a tax would remove the uneven playing field that sites like Amazon enjoy right now. This would certainly help make offline prices more comparable to online prices.
4. Better Online-to-Offline Advertising. If there was a way to use the Internet to better market and direct customers to offline locations, then bricks and morters would have a chance. Right now, most online advertising focuses on online-to-online conversions (something I’m trying to change through PaperG).
5. Advertising retailing. It’s possible that retail spaces will get so cheap that they become effectively three dimensional advertising spaces. Brands can rent out the space and fill it with their goods supplemented with representatives to answer questions. 

Some or all of these will likely to come true. I hope so because I would hate to live in a world of empty windows.

As a bit of a foodie myself (just made Yelp Elite! screw useless Foursquare badges. I can’t eat them), I’ve always been fascinated by entrepreneurship in the food space. I still can’t believe the crap most people eat and that there aren’t better choices available for some people. People are forced to eat unhealthy take out food or junk food because of a lack of fresh, tasty options. Here are some of the coolest ideas I’ve seen to address this problem:

Gobble lets you order meals from neighborhood chefs. It’s basically a marketplace for locally prepared, healthy meals that can be picked up or delivered. Strangely, I came across this Internet startup first in the real world when they set up a kiosk outside a building I was at. The food they prepared was terrific for $9 and I would gladly use their service again if they setup outside my office building. However, after trying to use their service online, I realized there were two shortcomings still: (1) can’t sort meals by neighborhood and  (2) delivery fees are quite high. I realize the first problem may have more to do with the lack of enough chefs still given the early stage the marketplace is at. There aren’t any local options for me that I can easily pick up in North Beach or in the Financial District so I would consider delivery except I wouldn’t pay $10 for delivery for my own meal. Once this startup gets critical mass on the customer and chef sides, it will be quite powerful.

Kitchit tries to democratize fine dining by enabling you to book a top local chef to cook for you and your guests. This service certainly isn’t for everyone as it normally costs $50-$100/person but if you host fancy diner parties, it could be a great solution.

Stockbox Grocers is trying to get rid of “food deserts” — low-income areas that lack access to healthy, affordable food. There are a lot of urban areas where the cornerstore doesn’t stock fresh fruits and veggies, which leads to a lot of health problems. Their solution is unique: convert reclaimed shipping containers into miniature grocery stores which operate out of parking lots. I guess they redefine what it means to think inside the box.

These companies probably are just some of the many tackling the problem. In San Francisco, there’s a whole meetup called “Food Startups” which deals with it. Food is such a basic problem in life and it’s surprising it hasn’t been disrupted by the Internet yet, but it will.

In response to the article on the Entrepreneurial Generation, I’ve been discussing with friends a specific part:

AND that, I think, is the real meaning of the Millennial affect — which is, like the entrepreneurial ideal, essentially everyone’s now. Today’s polite, pleasant personality is, above all, a commercial personality. It is the salesman’s smile and hearty handshake, because the customer is always right and you should always keep the customer happy. If you want to get ahead, said Benjamin Franklin, the original business guru, make yourself pleasing to others.

It has made me wonder whether it makes sense to try not offending people with strong positions and opinions. Do nice guys get ahead by not taking a position?

I’ve often not ventured a strong opinion as it’s rare to find a situation without a lot of nuance and oftentimes in discussions I have nothing to gain by being offensive. It’s far easier to state the sides than take a side. In fact, I’m never forced to take a strong position unless I’m making a decision for business. I’m beginning to rethink this general approach and in fact embrace the idea of taking only strong positions in anything I elect to opine or make a decision on. I’m inspired by something incredibly insightful and powerful that one friend wrote back to me:

Strong opinions are important because you need to believe in something to guide your decisions in order to accomplish anything. It’s the difference between being an author and a book reviewer. The author has to decide what is important and what should be cut and what the point of the book is.  Every word that is in the book is there because the author decided it should be there.  The book reviewer can read a book and comment on the decisions that were made by the author, but he will never be able to write a book because he can not make the important decisions, he can only comment on the decisions others have made.  Being well rounded and understanding that both sides of an argument have pros and cons is easy.  Its moving past that and making a decision that is hard. As an entrepreneur by definition you can’t be content to accept both sides of the coin and sit idly by.  You have to consider both, and then fully commit to one.  Strong opinions lead to vision, because only when you have made a decision about what is important and what is right can you start to see how the future should be.