Is Execution More Important than Vision?

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In case you didn’t read him quoted in some 1,700 newspapers last week, NBC’s Press:Here has an interview with Chris Kelly, Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer this week. The show, which focuses on technology, airs in the Bay Area on Sunday mornings after Meet the Press, and the young show has already been beating Meet the Press in the ratings. You can also watch a clip on the jump or the entire episode online here right now. (I was one of the guest reporters on the show this week.)Kelly said in no uncertain terms that Facebook does not own your data and content, never did and never will. What’s more: Any reproduction of your data has to be subject to the privacy settings you choose as a Facebook user. You can sense his frustration amid a scandal that was essentially cooked up by Consumerist on the Sunday night of a holiday weekend without even calling Facebook to check if their assumptions on the Terms of Use changes were right.But this isn’t the first or last time users will be in an uproar over Facebook, despite all of Facebook’s best efforts. Why? There’s never been a Web site—or media property for that matter—that people trusted with so much personal, emotional and intimate information, whether it’s your cell phone number or a video of your child taking his first steps. And with Facebook’s business model still uncertain, that trust makes us legitimately nervous. You think all the search data Google has been collecting on us for all these years is scary? Things you do and upload to Facebook are far, far more personal. For the conspiracy theorists out there, Facebook is going to be the gift that keeps on giving.I asked Kelly—on this, the third major user uproar the company has faced on privacy that caught it completely by surprise—if the issue was a blind spot for the company or if Facebook was doing something so new in organizing the data of human relationships that it was bound to take all the arrows as these issues of privacy continually emerge. Kelly essentially said its the l
Feb
2009

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A few years ago, Max Levchin—of PayPal and Slide fame— told me there were two kinds of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley: Those who work tirelessly and are great at execution, and those who are visionary and truly create new ideas—and sometimes new markets. Levchin put himself in the former category. Indeed, a lot of Slide’s success has just been the result of doing a better job ripping off ideas from competitors like RockYou. He put Evan Williams of Blogger and Twitter in the latter. At the time, Twitter was only a techy phenomenon, but Max noted that unlike a lot of other Web 2.0 companies, Twitter was one of the only ones doing something untested and new. With all the hyperbole about Twitter today, if I asked you whether the executor or the visionary would wind up being more successful, nearly everyone would say the visionary. But—as Levchin no doubt knew when he made this point—the visionary is usually the one that gets the shaft in Silicon Valley. Napster changed the music world, but it was iTunes that profited off of it. Google was one of the last companies in the Internet bubble to try their hand at building a search engine—and was laughed out of some VCs’ offices as a result. Palm pioneered the smart phone, not Blackberry. And Friendster was the social network pioneer before Mark Zuckerberg even entered college. What about Apple? Well it was visionary when it came to the computer, but what turned the company around was the iPod and the iPhone—both just way better versions of MP3 player and smart phones. You can extrapolate it to enterprise software too: Is it i2, PeopleSoft or Siebel that ended up reaping top dog rewards for creating the software that now runs every single large company? Nope. It’s SAP—a company great at applications but horrible at underlying technology—and Oracle—a company great at technology but horrible at applications. Of course, you can’t talk about this issue without bringing up TiVo: The company that rev
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