Tristan

It is something quite usual for an entrepreneur to lack perspective on their work. I have often seen it (I am not talking about PR release where you sort of have to say that your product is great and game-changer) and I think I have suffered from this.

I think I may have found the explanation in a TedTalk about motivation at work.

Summary of the video:

When you build something, you value it more and it changes your perception of its value for everyone. The best example of the experiments led by Dan Ariely are the origamis.

In this experiment we have two people, the builder of the origami and an observer. The builder also value the origami more than the observer. What I think really interesting is that if you don’t give enough instructions to the builder, it will be harder form him and the origami will be uglier. He will nonetheless value the origami even more and the observer will value it less as it is uglier.

Being an entrepreneur is quite as building an origami without being given the full instructions: it is hard. 

I think entrepreneurs need to have this in mind when they try to value their work and product.

I think that we don’t see the filter because it is really convenient but when we try to move from another point of view, it becomes obvious.

I have recently moved from Paris to London. For 25 years I was interested in news about the UK as a french man living in Paris but not anymore.

I think that before social media, Internet, digital and co, it was like that :

When you moved to another country : You had local TV, local newspapers and you were aware of local news. When you searched form something, you used the local yellow pages, etc… Even your mails did not follow you, it was expensive to receive LeMonde in the UK.

So even if you wanted to stay informed of the news of your home country, you had at the same time to be aware of the local news. You had no choice.

But now :

For the important stuff, I have my apps on my iPad, my my subscriptions on Youtube, Flipboard, my RSS feeds, the newsletters, … all about news in France and they all followed me. For the rest I have the news form people on Twitter and Facebook : “If a piece of news is important, they will talk about it.”

It worked perfectly when I was in Paris. I had always received the news I think were important for me, I hadn’t to look for them but when I moved to London, it did not work anymore.

Some of the news that are important to me did not change (my hobbies) and the filter works fine : running, biking, …I still get the news I want. However it is only a small part of the news I need and it is hard to switch because I get my news from people.

It is easy to unsubscribe to newsletters and subscribe to new ones, it is the same as the old model where you chose the newspaper you wanted to read. But it is the model for news anymore and my Facebook friends are not going to stop talking about French news and I don’t want to hide or unfriend them in order not to see the french news. I know that with time I will have more and more british Facebook friends but it will be a long process until I have the right balance. 

It is worse on Twitter when I was following a lot of people for Ben & Fakto, to be aware of events in Paris, etc…Those people are not my friends but were my relevant fitler for information. I spent a lot of time to build that. My “following” were filtering the news for me and I had to change a lot of it.

But those are the things I can control, it is harder when you do not control it completely. I tried very hard to explain to Google that I moved and I don’t know if it still hasn’t really understand it. I changed the settings of Google, switched it english and changed my location (I have no secret for Google). But because I use Google Chrome, it still switches to google.fr from time to time and I have results that are not relevant.

But it is hard because I still need sometimes to use the two points of view for work : search as I was in France or UK and I don’t want to use “incognito tabs” as I want to remember it…

The filter bubble is a book by Elie Pariser. Here is what you can read about it on Wikipedia :

A filter bubble is a situation in which a website algorithm selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on information about the user (such as location, past click behaviour and search history) and, as a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles. Prime examples are Google’s personalised search results and Facebook’s personalised news stream.

The term was coined by internet activist Eli Pariser in his book by the same name; according to Pariser, users get less exposure to conflicting viewpoints and are isolated intellectually in their own informational bubble. Pariser related an example in which one user searched Google for “BP” and got investment news about British Petroleum while another searcher got information about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and that the two search results pages were “strikingly different.” The bubble effect may have negative implications for civic discourse, according to Pariser, but there are contrasting views suggesting the effect is minimal and addressable.

I had coffee with a guy from my school today. We chat about our jobs, the life in London, etc… And at one point, we talked about our student loan debt. I think that every time I meet with a friend from my school who had to borrow money to pay the school, there is always a discussion where it is mentionned.

Every month I pay 650 euros to my bank to pay back for my student loan and I think that the day I finish paying back the bank will be one of the happiest day in my life.

At the same time I know I don’t have the right to complain. I only borrowed money to pay for the school, my parents were providing me money for my daily life. My life as a student was really easy and if I worked during my last year of school (at eCairn) it was more because I wanted to work earlier, I didn’t really need the money at that time. Life was good and easy.

And life is still easy and good now, I have never know unemployment, I live in London. The months I can’t pay for whatever reason my parents help me and I could have chose a career that pays more (hopefully it will one day pay a lot more ).

But sometimes I am angry at myself for so easily taking that loan. If I knew by then how much it would represent I think I would have thought twice about apprenticeship (where the company you work for pay for the school). I mean I could buy a new MacBook Pro every three months without my student loan debt. I could buy a new iPhone every month, go on week-ends, etc… But if I had chose to be apprentice I would never have done a semester in Canada and it was defintely a great experience.

The loan was especially hard at the time of Ben & Fakto. We had no salary and finding the money was harder. If I look back it was one of the reason we failed (you can read more on Kevin’s blog about that).

I am lucky now as I get paid in pounds, I know that it is harder for those living in Asia with local contracts for example. But still my student loan makes some choices really impossible.

I will be really happy and pride when I am done paying back.

More on this subject :

For those who are really more interested in the topic the discussion on A VC post about the education bubble is quite interesting.

Today I attended for the first time creating morning. 

CreativeMornings is a free, monthly breakfast lecture series for creative types (that is how they defined themselves). It was created by Mailchimp, the newsletters service (and these guys know how to be creative).

He is a futurologist and he did not only describes us what could be the future but encouraged us in building the future that we want.

As expected it was really inspiring and a great way to start your day. I won’t give you a full summary as I think there will be a video of the lecture here but I just want to give the principles that Mark gave us to be optimistic about the future :

- have ashamed optimism of ambition about the future 

- engage in projects that you are bigger than you

- engineer serendipity (meet a lot of people with different ideas, etc….)

- you are what you do, not what you intend to do

- making mistakes is OK, but not trying is irresponsible

- commit to evidence (rational thinking, you need proof, think like an engineer, not a politician)

- lose a lot (in the beginning) : you can’t win the first time, either the second or the third time.

- police your own cynicism : cynicism is like smoking, you think it is cool, but it is bad for you and people around

The Creative mornings website.

A few days back I had the chance to attend a conference with Seth Godin about his new book : the Icarius deception. I was really excited for this conference and I was really not disappointed.

If you do not know Seth Godin, just google his name and you will see what he has done for entrepreneurship and marketing. I was especially sensible of his book “Tribe”. I used it as a reference so many times for what we were doing at eCairn and still use it when I have to explain what the social web looks like.

(source of the picture)

The pitch of his book and his conference was :

The word has changed. We were born in the industrial age with a certain system and we now see that this system does not work anymore (unemployment, pollution,…). It also does not work anymore because the way we can advertise for products changed entirely.

The industrial age was based on the fordist system : standardized products made in big factories that employed a lot of people. This way people were paid more, products were cheaper : workers were able to buy a lot of stuff.

But the world has changed and the fordist compromise (do exactly what you are told, you will have a job and will be able to buy stuff) does not work anymore. Jobs in factories can now be replaced by computers, standardized products can be produced in countries with cheaper workforces, etc…

This is a common statement but Seth Godin offers a vision for the future. According to him you need to do art to overcome this statement.

Seth Godin defines art as : 

Art is the unique work of a human being, work that touches another. Art is the act of a human being doing generous work, creating something for the first time.

Art are not specific actions (it is not painting) but ways to do things. It is a way to make real and meaningful connections with other people, gain their trust and make them see the world through your eyes. It is not following the path that you were supposed to and not doing what you are told. 

I won’t make a complete review of the book, it is the kind of book you have to read yourself. It is more a journey than something you can easily summaryze so I want ot encourage you to read it.

Even I am not a real fan of the form (too much invocation for me, it sometimes looks too much like a motivation speech), I like the substance.

It is actually a question I asked myself a few months ago after we decided to stop Ben & Fakto : “should I try to go work a big corporation and do the things like I have been told ? I won’t be doing something unique but it will be easier.”

I am glad I did not chose this path. 

There is no doubts Seth Godin and his team are really good in marketing, you should see how they used a mobile web app to promote the book for the attendees of the conference. You can see it here.

PS : As I now live in London, I will try to write mostly in english here as I hope to interact with people from the UK. I apologize in advance : switching from french to english will (without any doubts) increase the number of grammar and orthpgraphs mistakes, bad wordings, etc….

Je commence ?? ??crire ??a dans le m??tro, il est 7h20. Je me l??ve t??t pour pouvoir faire une heure de sport avant le bureau. Mon objectif est le marathon de Berlin dans un an, je suis au niveau z??ro de forme physique, un an ne sera pas trop pour me pr??parer et faire un meilleur temps qu’au marathon de Paris il y a 5 mois.

Je me pose une question depuis longtemps : comment font ceux qui s’entra??nent s??rieusement et qui maintiennent une vie ?? c??t?? ? Un travail ? Une vie sociale qui demande ?? se coucher tard ? Et pour ceux ont une famille ?

Je lisais que Marc Simoncini roule ??norm??ment ?? v??lo chaque semaine. Comment s’organise-t-il ? (Marc si un jour vous lisez ??a, votre r??ponse sera grandement appr??ci??e).

Une des choses que j’essaye est de toujours me coucher t??t, entre 22h30 et minuit. Mon probl??me est que j’ai besoin de dormir 7h30-8h, et que je ne suis pas au top si je dors moins trop de jours cons??cutifs.

(Pause vestiaire, je reprends l’??criture sur le v??lo)

La solution serait d’am??nager mon temps de travail en allongeant la pause dej mais ce n’est pas toujours envisageable et pr??visible, je ne travaille pas seul.

Je lisais dans le Monde magazine un portrait d’Obama ce week-end et il r??ussit ?? faire une heure de sport par jour. S’il arrive ?? en faire une, je peux bien en faire 3.

Bref, je suis curieux de savoir comment les coureurs organisent leur entra??nement.

Je travaille maintenant dans une entreprise dont c’est en grande partie le m??tier (la beaut?? est le m??tier g??n??ral). Je m’y int??resse donc et cherche ?? comprendre certains comportements. Bref, ?? la recherche d’insights.

Je suis ?? la salle de sport, il est 8h50 du matin.

La femme ?? c??t?? de moi est maquill??e, fortement et bien (enfin, en tant que gar??on, je trouve ??a joli).

Mais je me dis qu’en partant de chez elle, elle a d?? y passer au moins 10 minutes, que si elle fait vraiment du sport et transpire un peu, ??a ne va pas ??tre beau et que dans 20 min, elle ira prendre sa douche et tout recommencer.

Si bien que si je trouve ??a joli, je trouve surtout ??a ridicule.

A l’inverse, j’accepte d’arriver ?? ma salle de sport le matin en mauvais ??tat, je ferai le minimum n??cessaire ?? la sortie de la douche avant de rejoindre le bureau.

Bien s??r, la salle de sport est aussi un lieux de sociabilit??. Elle connait d’ailleurs des gens ici, un mec (tr??s bel homme) est d’ailleurs venu la saluer.

Mais tout de m??me, je m’interroge ou plut??t, je comprends des diff??rences (qu’on me sorte pas homme/femme, car je vous expliquerai que ??a n’a rien d’inn??…).

En effet, ce phénomène provoque à la fois une diminution de l’offre locative privée traditionnelle et une hausse du coût des logements, tant à la location qu’à l’achat.

Dans le cadre des réflexions menées sur le logement, il souhaite connaître son point de vue sur plusieurs points :

Juridiquement, transformer un logement en location touristique nécessite une autorisation préalable de changement d’usage avec compensation. Dans les faits, cette obligation n’est pas respectée. Quels mécanismes et moyens prévoit le Gouvernement pour faire appliquer la loi ?

Pour lui, il est essentiel d’informer en amont les propriétaires, rarement au courant de cette obligation, et d’encadrer l’activité de ces sites internet qui, s’ils perçoivent une commission sur chaque transaction, s’exonèrent de toute responsabilité vis-à-vis du propriétaire comme du locataire, sans parler des pouvoirs publics.