April 2013
7 posts
How the internet influences what we wear
I’m always fascinated with how the internet is impacting other creative industries beyond music.
On Saturday I took my little sister to The Vogue Festival as a birthday present, and we watched 4 of London’s most exciting young designers (JW Anderson, Jonathan Saunders, Mary Katrantzou and Erdem Moralioglu) discuss how they have grown their businesses from the UK.
As designers who...
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Could VC 'value add' be quantified?
Every VC talks about ‘value add’. The unique ways in which they believe they can help you build your business, be a great partner, and increase the chance of your start-up being a success. These include their network, recruitment, strategic advice, operational experience etc.
I have observed that a great angel/VC partner/firm can add enormous value. As a simple example of something...
Zoë Keating: An experiment in crowdfunding a... →
zoekeating:
Dear Londoners,
I am coming to Europe this summer to visit my old school in Italy (I spent my junior year abroad in Florence). While I’m all the way over there on that side of the pond I would like to play a concert or two.
Where should I play? I usually travel to a distant place because a…
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Hip Hop's changing postmodernism
For such a vital and rapidly shifting art form, hip hop has been unusually self-aware of its past [1]. With founding production rooted in samples of funk and soul, the culture respects looking backwards to take things forward. Many of the MCs I grew up listening to had a rich and hyper-aware sense of the giants whose work had influenced them. Quoting verses from years gone by in a new rhyme...
Sea urchin, razor clam ceviche, bouillabaisse
Excellent Billingsgate haul with Dan.
Sea Urchin:
Razor Clam & Blood Orange Ceviche:
Bouillabaisse:
I really do enjoy filleting fish.
February 2013
1 post
1 tag
So we cooked a pig's head
Dan and I had some fun cooking a pig’s head torchon. We were going to do the Dave Chang version, boiling it first then making the torchon. Dan sensibly argued that the Thomas Keller version ‘had more butchery’, so that’s what we made.
Step 1: buy a pigs head. give it a good shave. This was £10! Bargain.
Step 2: use amateur butchery skills & a good knife to remove...
January 2013
3 posts
3 tags
Talking to People You Don't Know
I did kind of a long talk tonight at the London Hacker News Meetup. People seemed to find it helpful so I thought I’d put it up online as well. If you weren’t there you can just skip the italicised bits if you like. I’m not embedding the slides because it stands alone more easily as an essay.
——————————-
I’m really...
The 10 books, films and artists I loved the most...
I’m not normally one for end of year lists but have been inspired to make one after discovering loads of good stuff through them over the xmas break.
Books (most published before 2012):
Infinite Jest
Lolita
The Pale King
Sound and The Fury
To The Lighthouse
Netherland
Gravity’s Rainbow
Retromania
White Noise
Jay-Z: Decoded
Musical artists:
Hit Boy (producer)
Chief Keef
...
December 2012
1 post
There’s a sense of responsibility, shared...
I also wanted to ask you about the tour in Latin America in February—the crowd-sourced tour you guys set up. I was wondering how that idea came to be.
I think they approached us. They were looking to have their inaugural launch of that idea. It’s a cool idea. It’s untested yet, so I don’t know what the cons are yet, but so far it’s all good. What it feels like—I haven’t don’t it yet of...
November 2012
1 post
A co-founder's guide to Biz Dev
I wrote a post a few weeks back about the concept of a 10X Hustler which unexpectedly got over 10k page views. Since then I’ve seen a few other pieces about the nature of BD - I loved this one in particular by another YC alum, Chris Steiner about how Biz Dev is a clever name for dirty work. That makes me think that there’s increasing curiousity about how BD can help early stage...
October 2012
3 posts
The Game Done Changed
Sarah Lacy on Color:
I remember when Max Levchin was launching Slide. At PayPal they’d concocted a clever method of paying users $20 to refer a friend, and the product spread rapidly — and it was cheaper than how other companies were grabbing users back then. With Slide, he was struck by how his pedigree, his experience, his team, his cash — none of this could force adoption. There was no trick...
Detour. I am so excited about this.
Starting to talk about Detour…
http://www.songkick.com/blog/2012/09/28/500-true-fans-how-tychos-fans-crowdfunded-his-first-european-show/
http://www.songkick.com/blog/2012/10/10/hot-chip-detour-goes-viral/
Yeats, Yeats, Yeats
The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark. When all that story’s finished, what’s the news? In luck or out the toil has left its mark: That old perplexity an empty purse, Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.
William Butler Yeats
September 2012
3 posts
Piracy and Live Music
The connection between pirating of music and live music revenues for an artist was the subject of an interesting academic paper a couple years back.
Interesting to see a major artist (Ed Sheeran) now presenting the conclusions of this thesis as a viable business model. From what I understand Sheeran is on Atlantic & therefore very likely to have a 360 deal (label takes a share of all...
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Gravity's Rainbow: Proverbs for Paranoids
I finally finished Gravity’s Rainbow. Has to be one of the longest, hardest books I’ve read. If you’re looking for a 1000 page meditation on paranoia, death and conspiracy, this is your number (00000)! For anyone who embarks on it, the final part after Slothrop’s mind starts to fragment is particularly hard work, but rewarding in the end. Thanks again to Dan for the...
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White Label = be anyone's bitch
I like that quote from Fred Wilson about the dangers of being overly dependent on one platform:
When Schonfeld asked him about the Twitter ecosystem, and the company’s recent moves to discourage app developers from building Twitter clients, he replied with this one liner, “Don’t be a Google Bitch, don’t be a Facebook Bitch, and Don’t be a Twitter Bitch. Be your own Bitch.”
For me going white...
August 2012
7 posts
5 tags
The 10X Hustler
I first heard about Paul Graham through his essays. Prior to YC’s brand becoming the international juggernaut it is today, the essays were what lead Michelle, Pete and me to apply to YC. One of Paul’s essays that really stood out for me was How to Make Wealth, and in particular the concept that if you were a great hacker, you could be 10-100X more productive than the average developer...
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The Lost Years of Internet Start-ups
I was standing on a railway station platform near my parents’ house the other day, and saw a small coffee shack at one end of the platform. As I was waiting for my coffee, I saw the words “Est. 1997” printed on the wooden mantel. You see those words in restaurants, in bars, in local shops, in publishing houses. Usually it’s a point of pride and an indication of authenticity. It got me...
Why we're there at the 9am onsale: no God mode
Songkick has a policy of not taking up offers to be put on the guestlist for shows. We didn’t actually realise this was something that unusual until Ben Sisario mentioned it in his NYT piece. Relatively quickly if you run a site for music (e.g. a medium sized music blog) you can get free tickets to most shows. We deliberately don’t do that so that everyone in our team still waits by...
5 tags
A peer-to-peer escrow
Dan and I spotted an interesting innovation while in Jakarta. The most popular online marketplace in Indonesia is Kaskus. It evolved from a Counter-Strike forum and now facilitates a Craigslist-esque service for buying and selling all types of goods.
One challenge online businesses in Indonesia face is the high level of fraud to contend with. Fraudulent sellers & buyers appear to be...
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Erotica and social media
I don’t know a lot about the history of erotica online, but I find what has been occurring on Tumblr (and to a lesser extent Pinterest) very intriguing. From my experience, erotica has not intersected much with social networks. Sites like Literotica enable user submitted erotic stories, but due to the real world identity-centric focus of Facebook & its predecessors, combined with the nature of...
July 2012
3 posts
Follow up: Facebook loses 5m users in Indonesia in...
Following up on my post on how Indonesian social media usage might forecast a broader Facebook decline, the Indonesian based tech site, DailySocial has some stats today on FB losing 5m active users in Indonesia over the past 3 months. A 15% drop.
Would be very interesting to see this compared to Twitter & Path growth over the same period.
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Does social media use in Indonesia predict...
I just spent a week in Jakarta exploring opportunities for Songkick, and was really surprised at the consumption patterns around social media there. Firstly it’s huge. Similar to Brazil, URLs are often left off advertising hoardings, and there are only FB/Twitter handles to activate. Everyone I spoke with was an active and passionate user of social media and fluent in the landscape of...
Jay-Z connecting the dots between Russell Simmons...
“People in the record business had always made a lot of money. Not the artists, who kept dying broke, but the execs. Still, regular fans had no idea who they were. Russell changed that. His brand as an executive mattered not just within the industry, but among people in the street. And with Def Jam he created one of the most powerful brands in the history of American entertainment.
Russell...
June 2012
1 post
Introducing the World Series: #1 Yancey Strickler
I love spending time with people who are creating something unusual.
Those people are hard to track down in person. They often skip the conference circuit to spend more time working on their product or art. But if you travel to see them, over dinner and drinks you can learn so much about the process of creating something enduring.
I’ve been lucky to meet a ton of people like that over...
May 2012
2 posts
Scaling the Manhattan Project
A couple of months ago someone I love was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Alongside with the very personal aspects of this, it’s got me thinking about the rate of progress being made at solving the hardest problems humanity faces, and what could be done to accelerate that.
I hope the work we are doing at Songkick is going to really matter. A lot of our vision for the future of live music is...
Designing for Emergence
I’ve become increasingly curious about whether you can explicitly design systems to exhibit emergent phenomena. Not trying to be all meta and shit, but the good folks at Wikipedia have come up with a definition of emergence as:
“the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems” - Goldstein...
April 2012
3 posts
Towards a unified theory of starting up
Wired asked me to write something for the last issue about start-ups, aka that ol’ heartache.
Here’s my attempt at a unified theory for starting up:
1. Find the people you believe you could build something amazing with. These are your cofounders.
2. Find something you love deeply that could be so much better. This is your market.
3. If you spent your lifetime on that thing, what...
Do I trust these founders with this market?
Alfred Lin, once mentioned to me how important founder-market fit is to a start-up’s success. His point (if I’m remembering correctly) was that the depth of passion a founder feels for their market is a powerful predictor of whether they’ll make it through the hard times, and build something enduring.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot since and I’ve realised that the products that I get most...
February 2012
7 posts
TL; DR as a service?
Part of the reason I’ve started this blog is to find more resonant moments.
Part of it is to explore thoughts that I can’t let go of.
But part of it is to try to get better at writing. I think the web has given greater and greater leverage to people who can express their ideas via keystrokes. Hackers and writers. Every day I read whatever keystrokes people like Fred Wilson, or danah...
Sometimes you have to go to the ropes. What...
Most of the people I really admire are trying to do something amazing in the face of great adversity. The artists trying to express the heart of something. The start-up teams trying to do the impossible. The critics holding everyone to the highest standards. Anyone fighting the odds to do something great.
The first phase of building Songkick hasn’t been easy, and if we’re going to...
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One exciting thing about having two internets:...
One of my favourite things about learning a new language, is discovering words that only exist in it. That old cliché about Sami having 100 ways to describe snow. Schadenfreude, litost, torschlusspanik, saudade, ya’aburnee. Feels to me that you can learn a lot about a culture, by understanding its Relative Compliment.
I’ve been learning Mandarin since I was 18 and there are many examples of...
Same time, online. On building Synchronous Social...
One of the people who has inspired me to try to write more is John Borthwick, who we are lucky to have as an investor in Songkick. He and Andy have written heavily on and invested in the theme of the ‘now’ or ‘real time’ web. There’s a subset of that ‘now’ meme that I’m particularly excited about, and that is synchronous social services.
I love live...
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Swag Rap. A new movement in rap?
I’m fascinated with being there as a musical movement emerges.
For me, that’s the period when shows are the rawest and the community around the music is the most intimate. I’ve had a few moments close to that, from driving up to Milton Keanes for early drum and bass raves to seeing Mos Def and Outkast during their most exciting periods. I’m jealous of anyone who was there at Dizzee’s early...
Why I'm writing this.
I love those moments when you’re sitting with someone, and you hit some kind of resonant frequency. An idea will have been building in me, a new fascination, or one that’s been brewing for years, that hasn’t found a way out. Something in the room triggers one of us to try, and then it builds and expands till it’s out and shared between us. I love those moments and the friendships they’ve lead...
