The defining event of the 2000s was 9/11.  I still remember being in geometry class my sophomore year when someone told me “planes had hit the Twin Towers in New York.”  We were scheduled to take a test that day and our teacher was one of the only in the school who didn’t want to get off track.  Instead of allowing us to watch the news, she told us “it was only a small private plane, like a Cessna, don’t worry, it’s not a big deal, let’s take the test.”  We took the test and by the end of class, we rushed out to the library as the first tower crumbled.  I remember watching as the 2nd tower fell and not really believing it was happening.  It looked like something out of a movie.  After school, it became real as I went to get a splint for my recently and unrelated broken wrist.  I remember the real fear the next time I heard a plane fly overhead a few days later.

So much changed after 9/11.  America went to war, we had to take our shoes off to fly on airplanes, cable news stations adopted scrolling bars along the bottom of the screen permanently and the media began its full descent into the all out 24 hour news cycle.  Americans had to think about terrorism and our role in the world.

The Internet matured and became a part of everyone’s daily lives.  After the tech bubble of the late 90s, Americas really started using the internet for everyday tasks.  Now, 95% of Americans use email at least once per week.  Throughout the decade, Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Last.fm and tons of other online services changed the way we live, learn, work and play.

More personally, I got to travel all over the United States and the world.  Between 8th grade and my freshman year of high school, I took at trip with my Aunt and camped on the beach along the pacific in Olympic National Park.  The next summer, I went to Rocky Mountain National Park and camped for a few days.  I got my first taste of Europe just before I turned 16, when my Aunt and I walked across Northern Spain and went to Paris.  I got to see the running of the bulls in Pamplona and walked from Pamplona to Santiago de Compostela.  I loved it and I knew I had been bitten by the travel bug.  I knew I would go back to Europe and see the world.

Back in the states, I learned how to drive and got my license.  I played a ton of soccer and still have friends and great memories from my soccer teams from the 2000s.  I also continued reffing soccer, a job that I had started when I was 12 in 1997 and continue to this day.  I even got to play high school football for a year.  I made some great friends in high school and had a ton of fun, learning along the way how to get things done.  I think my biggest lesson learned in high school is that authority figures do not know everything.  I think that this realization helped me get to where I am today.

I also continued to travel.  Our next door neighbors moved to Belgium to teach in an international school and we visited them twice.  By 2004, I was able to travel to Netherlands, Spain, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany.  I biked around the Netherlands with my Dad, went to the 2003 Confederations Cup in Lyon, France (where the French booed our national anthem) and went to the top of an alpine mountain in Switzerland (and the site of a Bond movie).  I traveled around Spain with my class senior year and stayed with a great family in Segovia, Spain for a week.  I knew that I wanted to travel around the world.

In 2004 I applied to colleges, knowing that I really wanted to go to the University of Wisconsin.  At first, I was waitlisted.  After a few weeks, I finally persuaded admissions that I should be let in and was accepted to Wisconsin.  I remember being utterly shocked when I was waitlisted and even more angry when I lost the lottery for football tickets.  Little did I know that losing the football lottery would be one of the best things that has ever happened to me.

I got to college in 2004 and loved every minute.  I made some amazing friends, learned a ton and attended hundreds (yes hundreds) of Badger football, hockey and basketball games.  I went to the Wisconsin vs. Purdue game where Scott Starks returned a fumble for a touchdown.  I remember the crushing defeat at Mighigan State and then traveling to Iowa to visit a friend and go to the Wisconsin football game.  If the Badgers won, they would go to the Rose Bowl.  Unfortunately, they lost and it was a long drive back to Madison.  I was in Milwaukee with one of my best friends, sitting on the glass, when Wisconsin won its 6th hockey national title.  I rushed the court when Wisconsin won the Big Ten title and was there when Wisconsin had a #1 ranking in basketball.  I loved all of our road trips that my friends and I took as well as the fun times we had doing all sorts of things throughout college.  I entered college being able to cook a few things, but not that well.  I left loving to cook and being able to make a whole bunch of things.

I ended up buying football tickets on ExchangeHut my freshman year.  I was the 1117th registered user.  After freshman year, I ended up buying the site with one of my best friends from high school.  I learned a ton and met some amazing people and realized that I was an entrepreneur and didn’t ever want to have a boss again.  Besides my friends, this realization was the most important part of my college experience.

I was lucky enough that I got to testify before a Congressional Committee, compete in a business plan competition, travel to Facebook for their platform launch and pitch ideas to angel investors.  By the end of my first senior year, ExchangeHut had been acquired.  I took a second senior year and graduated with a degree in Political Science.  By 2009, I started my blog, a consulting company and another startup.  I started Capital Entrepreneuers and have started to become part of the Madison community.

I also was able to check a few things off the bucket list.  In 2006, I went to the World Cup in Germany and saw the US in action.  After the US was eliminated, my friend and I traveled all over Europe, trying to be in countries when the teams were playing.  I’ll never forget being in Paris when France beat Spain in the Round of 16, being in an Italian bar in Barcelona during the semi-finals and being in Dublin for the final.  It was a great trip and I decided that I would do everything in my power to never miss another World Cup in my lifetime.  I was lucky enough to get to live in downtown Chicago for a few months, attend the Superbowl and go to the Final Four.  This past summer, I was able to visit my friend Beata in London and travel with one of my best friends in Ireland, England and the Netherlands and went to my first two weddings of friends from college.  I also got to do the punt pass and kick competition at halftime of the Wisconsin vs. Michigan game and succeeded.

The 2000s were amazing.  I can honestly say that each year has gotten better than the one before it.  I can only hope that my next 10 years are as much fun as these past 10.  At the end of the next decade, I will 34.  That seems old, but not as old as 24 seemed when I was 14.  I hope to travel to South Africa this summer to see the World Cup and be able to visit Australia, China and the rest of Asia sometime in the next decade.  I would love to go to Brazil for the 2014 World Cup and tour South America.  I know I want to live in a foreign country for at least a year at some point and become fluent in Spanish again.  I want to continue working for myself and continue to create successful startups.  I hope to be reading at least two books per month and continuing to write my blog.  Maybe even write a book.  Who really knows.  I hope that I am healthy, happy and continue to have the good fortune to live like I have in the past ten years.

What are your best memories of the 2000s?  What do you think was the defining event for the world and for you personally?  What are your goals for 2010s?

                          

AT&T has been in a battle with Verizon for mobile phone dominance for the past few years.  Verizon still has more subscribers and a bigger network, although AT&T has closed the gap and even taken the lead in some areas.  AT&T’s launch of the iPhone has been a huge boost for AT&T, but lately Verizon has been hitting back.  They launched a commercial that shows two maps of the US, one showing Verizon’s 3G coverage and the other showing AT&T’s 3G coverage.

ATT&T wrote an open letter trying to explain the situation, but they also created their own commercial to show that they too offer service in most of America.  It sounds like a good idea, but for me, the commercial fails.  It opens with Luke Wilson standing on a map of America saying that he got postcards from people all over the US who are able to use AT&T’s network.  Wilson reads off tons of cities and tosses the postcards where the cities are on the map.  Pretty soon, the entire map is covered in postcards.  It might be a cool idea, but they picked Luke Wilson.  As the viewer, I immediately think, “why couldn’t you get Owen Wilson?”  Is AT&T really the second most famous Wilson brother and Verizon is Owen, the big movie star?  It’s almost too perfect since AT&T is playing second fiddle to Verizon and had enough of an inferiority complex to respond to Verizon’s national 3G coverage map with an open letter to consumers.  At least they didn’t pick Andrew Wilson to be their spokespan.  Then people would think they were US Cellular.

Sears has always had fairly tame advertisements around the holidays an this year isn’t any different.  Their ads are actually fairly good until the end, when they show their 2009 Christmas slogan.  Their slogan is “More Values, More Christmas.”  It hardly seems right to equate buying more things with more Christmas.  Wal-Mart does the same thing with their slogan “Christmas Costs Less at Wal-Mart.”  It seems wrong to me to equate being able to buy more things with “more Christmas.”  I’m not even going at this from religious perspective, simply a materialistic one.  Both stores are equating buying more things with being happier.  It’s a good message for the stores’ bottom line, but not for everyone else.

Finally, the last of the bad.  Kopps Custard, a local institution in the Milwaukee area used to have a billboard on I43 that showed the flavor of the day.  It let you know if you should take a right turn when you got off the highway or continue to your destination.  If it was a good flavor, you got off and got custard.  If it was bad, you continued on.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve stopped because the billboard showed Tiramisu, Chocolate Peanut Butter Chocolate or Grasshopper Fudge.  It was a great ad because it motivated people to change behavior and buy.  You can now follow Kopps on Twitter, but it’s just not the same.

Now, onto the good.  This year, Best Buy sent out their Black Friday circular in newspapers around the country, just like they did in other years.  The only difference was that in heavily Muslim areas, they included a bubble at the top that said “Happy Eid Al Ahda.” Eid Al Ahda is a holiday celebrated by Muslims that runs from Friday until Sunday.  Predictably, Best Buy’s decision has drawn criticism from some right wing Christians, including some who want to boycott the store.  I think this is yet another manufactured issue and commend Best Buy for using some innovative marketing to try to tap into an underrepresented market.  As an aside, I also laugh at companies that refuse to mention Christmas in their holiday ads.

Happy Thanksgiving and if you are shopping today, good luck finding those deals.  Remember, door busters don’t mean that you should literally bust the door down.

                          

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense?

Reading it now, the first part seems like it has to be an Onion article.  While most are laughable now, I don’t want to focus on what he got wrong.  Here’s a quick taste of some of Clifford Stoll‘s predictions from 1995:

• “The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper”
• “No computer network will change the way government works”
• “You can’t tote that laptop to the beach”
• “We’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.”
• We won’t be able to find the information we want
• The Internet won’t be useful in government
• Computers in schools? “Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training.”
• “We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.”

He was clearly wrong about pretty much everything in the first section of the article, but I think he gets the second part partially correct:

What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

I think he was right that ultimately, online connections are indeed “limp substitutes” for the real thing, but he missed that the Internet could help people make connections with people they never would have had the chance to meet in their non-Internet lives.  I’ve made connections with people though my blog, facebook, twitter and other networks like Brazen Careerist, who I never would have run across if I weren’t online.

This article brings up another interesting issue.  People love this article now because Stoll was so wrong about so many things.  How will people in my generation look 15 years from now?  We have created huge amounts of content on blogs and social networks, much more than previous generations.  Much of this content contains strong options.

Surely many of us will be as wrong as Stoll was in his Newsweek article.  In 1995, Stoll’s article was fairly reasonable.  He was well informed, involved in the industry and took a strong stand on an issue he believe in.  Unfortunately, today it looks ridiculous.  There is no way Stoll could run for office and win.  His opponent would have more fun than Republicans who make fun of Al Gore for “inventing the internet.”

If an informed stakeholder can get something so wrong, isn’t it likely that most of us will probably write something that will be completely wrong 15 years down the road?  Will articles like these preclude us from running for office?  How about getting a job?  Should we be worried about how history will view our blog posts?

Like unflattering pictures posted online, I hope that blog posts that history proves to be wrong are forgiven.   As long as the posts were well written, logical and thought out, posts where we are wrong should not count against us.  Knee-jerk reactions or Glenn Beckesque rants SHOULD be held against the writer.  If not, we will have some boring future leaders who weren’t even willing to take a stand when they were young!

                          

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance – Steven Levitt and Steven Dubner.  SuperFreakonomics is a great follow up to the Stevens’ first effort, Freakonomics.  If you enjoyed Freakonomics, you will love SuperFreakonomics.  They tackle all sorts of problems with data, which you hardly ever see in most other walks of life.  Ever since I read Freakonomics, I’ve been fascinated with the way they look at problems and issues and I’ve been reading the Freakonomics blog in the New York Times daily.  In SuperFreakonomics, Levitt and Dubner tackle emergency room safety, the efficacy of child car seats, prostitution and most controversially, global warming.  They also present some amazing history about this history of vaccines, car seats and health care in their trademarked, data driven, but still humorous style.

I won’t ruin any more of the book for you, but there has been a huge outcry from the global warming establishment about SuperFreakonomics’ take on global warming.  Dubner and Levitt say that global warming has become a “new relgion complete with dogma and good and evil.”  They have been proven right because they were immediately criticized by the global warming establishment when the book was released.  I liked the way they tried to bring reason and science back to the global warming debate and move it away from political, religious debates that it has become, but was suprised that they advocated so hard for geo-engineering.

Levitt and Dubner (and I) love to point out that most of our problems come from unintended consequences of well meaning policy decision.  Many times, these unintended consequences could have been predicted ahead of time, but weren’t looked at for a variety of reasons.  They advocate geo-engineering the planet, but don’t take any time to talk about the potential unintended consequences.  There may not be many (but I doubt it), but I was expecting them to address the issue at least a little bit.  That said, SuperFreakonomics is entertaining, informative and well worth reading.

Absurdistan – Gary Shteyngart.  Not many books can make me laugh out loud.  I was on a flight to NYC, reading Absurdistan and trying not to laugh out loud and failed fairly miserably.  Absurdistan is the fictional story about a young, Jewish, fat, son of an oligarch, Russian immigrant to New York City and his trials and tribulations going between Russia, the US and Absurdistan, a fictional country located near Iran.  I read it on the advice of of someone who likes many of the same books I’ve read and wasn’t disappointed.

Shtyngart’s writing is really fun.  He mixes in hip hop references with geopolitical feelings musings that would only occur to a Russian who moved to the US.  One of my favorite parts is about how people in the 3rd world applaud whenever a pilot safely lands a plan “as if it were some kind of miracle”, whereas in the West, people complain about being late and rush to get off.  The section on a Holocaust Museum in Absurdistan is brilliant writing and worth reading on its own.  The books is a scathing critique of just about everything from Russian politics, American foreign policy, fat people and corporations.  While a little slow in places, each chapter has at least a gem worth finding.  I recommend reading this book if you like history, politics, different cultures and good writing.  As a bonus, after reading Absurdistan, Oscar Wao and The White Tiger, I now know how to say a certain part of the male anatomy in Russia, The Dominican Republic and India.

                          

I’m in the unusual position of being able to test the essays I write about startups. I hope the ones on other topics are right, but I have no way to test them. The ones on startups get tested by about 70 people every 6 months.

So I sent all the founders an email asking what surprised them about starting a startup. This amounts to asking what I got wrong, because if I’d explained things well enough, nothing should have surprised them.

He took the most interesting responses and wrote an essay reacting to it.  If you run a startup, are interesting in starting one or are just interested in what entrepreneurs go through to start a company, this article is a must read.  Pretty much everything he says rings true to my experiences and would be advice I would give, so I will just let it stand on its own.

                          

My advice was “don’t be afraid of competiton.”  I learned this lesson when I was running ExchangeHut and talked about it at last year’s Entrepreneurial Deli event in Madison.  While we were running ExchangeHut’s trading platform for college students, our biggest fear was that Facebook would launch a marketplace that would crush our competitive advantage.  When we heard that Facebook was launching its marketplace, we changed big parts of our strategy to react to the new competition that had yet to launch.

Big mistake.  When marketplace first launched, it was fairly useless and was not a competitor to our business.  We had changed some of our bigger plans because we were afraid of competition and did not expand as quickly as we had planned because of it.  Our competition did not hurt us.  My point is that you never know if your competition will actually be successful.  If you have a great idea, don’t immediately change your plans if you hear about competition.  Execute on your ideas and let the chips fall where they may.  If your idea is good and you execute well, you will be successful.

Another point on competition:  Don’t be afraid to get in contact with your competition.  This isn’t t say that you should tell your competitors (or the world) every last detail of your plans to conquer the world, but you should be on good terms with the other people and companies in your space.  We found that it paid off to get to know the other startups that were in our market.  We talked to just about everyone in our market.

We even ended up being able to work out some great deals with competition because we were on good terms with them and they knew we existed.  There really is no downside to being on good terms with the others in your market.  You never know when a great opportunity will present itself to you or one of your competitors that will be beneficial to both of you.  Plus, if you plan to start another company, these contacts will be valuable later.  If we had been afraid of competition and not talked to them, we would have missed out.  Moral of the story: don’t be afraid of competition, get to know them, but don’t tell them everything!

                          

There are all kinds of entrepreneurs.  They come in all shapes and sizes and start all sorts of industries.  I think everyone agrees that high flying Silicon Valley tech startups and cutting edge biotech companies are clearly founded by entrepreneurs, but there are so many more examples of entrepreneurship that many people overlook.  Founders of small businesses like gas stations or restaurants are entrepreneurs.  So are people who start non-profits, people who start bands, artists who sell their paintings and people who create custom designed t-shirts.  Self-employed consultants, programmers and graphic designers are entrepreneurs.  So are people who sell parking on football Saturdays and Sundays around the country.  The examples are endless.

Jean-Baptiste Say, a French economist and the person who coined the word entrepreneur, defined an entrepreneur as someone who “undertakes an enterprise, acting as intermediary between capital and labour.”  I like his definition, but will add that an entrepreneur has to accept full responsibility for the endeavor’s success or failure.  All of these endeavors fit this definition.

Whenever I talk about entrepreneurship, I’m referring to all of these different ways to be an entrepreneur.  I think its critical for people who are thinking about starting something on their own to realize that they can be an entrepreneur and live the entrepreneurial lifestyle without raising hundreds of thousands of dollars, hiring huge amounts of employees and inventing something that will change the world.  These other types of entrepreneurship are just as important, if not more important, than many of the big high tech, high visibility startups that you hear about in most newspapers.  I think this distinction is really important and try to break it down whenever I talk with potential entrepreneurs.

                          

I trust Google with my life….almost. I have my email, calendar, documents, contacts, advertising campaign, photos and website analytics all in Google’s hands. I use Google maps to find out where I am going (google maps), view business reviews (search), and upload and view videos (youtube). I get my news in part from Google News. I used to use blogger, another Google service, to host my blog, but have since moved to hosting my own site on a wordpress platform. Google is so much more than a search engine and millions of people around the world trust google to protect and store their important data. Google Creep, as I like to call it, is Google’s amazing ability to become useful, if not necessary, to our daily lives.

I’ve never been one to put all of my eggs in one basket, but I realized I pretty much have with google. In the unlikely event of Google’s bankruptcy, failure due to hacking or natural disaster, I would be pretty much screwed. I bet millions of others would be in my shoes, too. Its amazing that we have not only allowed a company to permeate our entire lives as much as Google has, but we have embraced it, always asking for Google to do more.

Google is now pushing into electronic medical records, mobile phones and even renewable energy. It will be interesting to see if there is any backlash in the coming years about how much we depend on Google. As people move from hard drives toward storage on the internet, more and more people will become dependent on Google.

After I got my internet connection back up, I backed up all of my contacts and google docs onto my hard drive, which is backed up by Mozy. This is not an anti-google post and I doubt anything bad will happen to Google, but it was shocking to find how dependent I had become on Google and its services. I probably won’t change anything, but its pretty amazing. I can’t think of any other company that took over like Google has in the history of America.

What do you think? Are you as dependent on Google as I am? Do you have any strategies to combat Google creep as it takes over even more facets of our online lives? Do you think it is a bad thing?

                          

Mozy is an online data backup company that stores and protects files on your hard drive.  Here’s how it works.  You sign up for an unlimited storage plan for $4.95 per month and install the Mozy client onto your computer.  You tell Mozy what you want to back up and then the application does the rest.  The client runs in the background when you start up and shut down your computer, saving any files that have been modified in the interim.  If you computer dies, is stolen or somehow gets damaged, you can load the Mozy client onto your new machine and have your data back in as little as three hours.

There are a myriad of online backup companies, but I think Mozy has the best branding and advertising (I use Mozy to backup my computer).  Check out their homepage and see if you agree.  

I wanted to focus on an email they sent to their customers last week.  Its simply brilliant.  Here is the email:

Paul Jorgensen had just come from a meeting at Goldman Sachs when he boarded US Airways Flight 1549. He sat down in seat 1A next to the window, pulled out his notebook to capture of few thoughts, then put it away and prepared for takeoff.

Seated one row behind Jorgensen was Bill Wiley, also traveling for business with a computer onboard the plane. In fact, he brought a couple of notebooks with him. But he, like Jorgensen and all passengers, abandoned his personal belongings and focused on saving his life when the plane crash-landed into the Hudson River.

Both men had been backing up regularly. The difference is Jorgenson backed up online with Mozy, and Wiley backed up his two computers to thumb drives. Jorgensen retrieved his data back from Mozy, but Wiley lost 250 GB of his employer’s information. The stories were detailed in USA Today and ComputerWorld.

In moments of disaster, those who use Mozy are able to focus on other things than backup without the fear of losing their data. At Mozy, we’re grateful that all passengers on Flight 1549 were in the hands of such an skillful crew and were able to return to their loved ones without any loss of life or significant injury. 

Be safe,
Devin Knighton
Mozy.com

This story is the perfect example of a sticky message.  Most Americans know about the crash landing in the Hudson.  Everyone can picture what they would do if they were in a similar situation and everyone can picture what they would feel like if they did not have Mozy to protect their data.  This email is another piece of brilliant marketing from Mozy.