Yup, I’m still a fan.

Sorry for another short post, but I wanted to say congrats to the team at Yelp for raising another $15 million in funding!

I’m with Brian on this one — “it depends.”

BusinessPundit, which my boss got me hooked on, is one of the blogs that I follow regularly. Rob May, the guy behind the blog for the past 5 years, is moving on to do other things — and he wrote a fantastic post titled “The Top 10 Changes in my Business Thinking” summing up his business learnings over the past 5 years.

There’s so much good stuff, that it was hard to not quote the whole thing. Here are his 10 learnings, and my quick thoughts on each of them. I quoted his complete text on the bullet points that really struck a chord in me.

10. Luck Matters

I’m pretty torn on this, but I do agree that luck is a factor in business — mostly in terms of timing. However, that said, I’m a pretty firm believer that everyone controls their own destiny. Hard work and commitment will trump luck anyday — but I won’t rule out the idea that I’ll have a different mindset in 5 years.

9. Touchy Feely vs. Analytical

I think business success requires a bit of both. No matter how much hard data you have, the touchy feely stuff will never be irrelevant.

8. Beware of the Hype

I agree — don’t get caught up in the hype of the media, it’s not all real.

7. It is Always Easy to See What You Want to See

I totally agree with this point. I tell one of my friends quite often that it’s easy to justify anything to yourself, but that doesn’t mean it is the rightly justified. Don’t fall victim to justifying your actions or decisions just because you’ve made them already — keep your mind and your options open.

6. Do Stuff
I used to plan and talk, plan and talk, plan and talk. I’m not criticizing planning or talking… they can be beneficial, but now I prefer to do something instead of talking. Your plans will probably be wrong on anything that is new, so you may as well just start doing. Doing stuff gives you a better “feel” for a business than all the planning in the world. Plus, once you get labeled as a doer, everybody wants to work with you because they have all been burned by planners and talkers. Of course, doing takes a lot more time. It’s also much harder. And once you adopt the doing mentality, you risk doing stuff just for the sake of doing stuff, but action for action’s sake is sometimes the wrong approach.

Actions speak louder than words. I know it’s hard, but strive hard to follow through with the things you say you will do. I’ll admit — I’m guilty of breaking this from time to time, but I’m always improving. Rob’s right that people follow “doers”; it’s a huge reason that I’m at Zillow (the exec team has a vast amount of experience at other successful internet companies).

5. Failure Doesn’t Really Matter
It is embarrassing to fail. We all wish we could string together a bunch of wins. I used to be concerned about looking stupid, or dealing with the criticism that can come with failure, and while I won’t say I like it and embrace it, I will say that it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it used to. One reason for that is many “failures” are only temporary setbacks, and if you don’t let them scare you and demoralize you, they can be turned into wins. The second reason is that failure is almost always a great learning experience, and you can charge valuable consulting fees by finding companies who want to get into a space and selling them the more efficient learning curve they can get by avoiding the mistakes you have already made.

Learning from your failures is crucial.

4. Find Your People
Search is the key process you need to master. I used to think that I needed to be more persuasive. I thought the key to raising money, hiring good people, or selling a lot of whatever it is I was selling was to learn how to convince skeptics. No. Spend your time finding investors who are looking for ideas like yours instead of convincing investors who don’t care that they should listen to you. Spend time finding employees who believe in what you are doing instead of convincing potential hires that they should want to come work for you. Spend time searching for a customer who needs and wants what you have, instead of trying to convince someone who doesn’t that they should want it.

Don’t try to change other people. Try to find the people who are like you in the ways that are most important. Work on meeting and connecting with the people who matter.

This is a huge realization I came to a couple years ago, which I’ll even venture to say has changed my life. I love Rob’s last sentence — “Work on meeting and connecting with people who matter.” I used to spend a lot of my time trying to please everyone, regardless of how much we had in common or liked them. There are some friends who I know won’t be a big part of life in 10 years — and that’s okay. I won’t go so far as to say their relationships don’t matter to me (far from it), but they certainly don’t matter as much as others. I think it’s importance to understand you can’t stay connected to everyone (though Facebook does make it easier) — now, I choose to devote the most time and effort to the relationships with those who I really get along with and have similar passions such as microfinance, web 2.0, and eradicating poverty.

Several months ago, one of my close business friends told me something I won’t forget — you’ll always be able to count your close friends, those who will be there through thick and thin, on two hands. Those are the people that REALLY matter.

3. Revenge is a Waste of Time and Energy

There is absolutely NO point to getting revenge.

2. Help Others Reach Their Goals
Five years ago, I would have said you should monopolize talent, force people to do what you wanted, not what they wanted, lock people in, and in general do whatever it takes to keep everything tilted in your favor (maybe that is why I favored the trimmings of a happy workplace mentioned above… because I didn’t believe work itself could be happy). Now I believe that everyone has dreams and if you can help them reach those dreams, most of them will go to the ends of the earth to help you out down the road. When skilled employees are ready to move on, don’t be mad, be happy for them. When customers have outgrown you and need a different type of provider, help them find what they need, don’t be angry at them. Don’t be one of those people who only takes and takes in a relationship. Be a giver, even if other people call you a sucker. In the long run, you will be better off.

Again, I 100% agree. If you help others, you will be in their debt forever and they will gladly return the favor down the road — what comes around goes around. But that’s not the primary reason to help others; it’s rewarding. I’m lucky enough to have close friends with high aspirations, and I certainly do whatever I can to help them succeed — and expect the same in return down the road.

1. Relationships, relationships, relationships
The single biggest thing that I have learned is that relationships matter. People like to work with people they trust. Five years ago, I thought I would be a successful entrepreneur some day because I would hole up in my house and read all kinds of technology and business books and play with lots of software and then have some breakthrough insight that would shake up the world on its own. Now I think if I am ever highly successful, it will be because a bunch of people helped me get there. My biggest regret at this point in my life is that I wasted my MBA years by not networking. I skipped almost every networking event we ever had because I thought it was a waste of time and I was better off studying or reading. I should have spent that time networking and getting to know my classmates.

In December, we decided to give up our search for funding and turn to services work to bring in revenue and keep our product development hopes alive. We went from $0 in revenue in November to an expected $40K in March, and we have enough potential business in the pipeline that if we close just part of it we will be over $100K in revenue a month by the fall. Almost all of that business came from relationships. Some of the relationships are relatively new, but still, my point is that no one contacted us through a web site and we haven’t done any advertising. We just started talking to friends about the stuff we are doing and our network of relationships started sending us business. It saved us from having to shut down our own hopes and dreams. If we end up successful, it will be because of other people. It will be because of the relationships we have.

Business is all about relationships. You’re going to have a hard time succeeding by yourself in anything you do, so it’s imperative to build and nuture relationships with friends, partners, and foes. The importance of building a network can’t be downplayed if you aim to be successful in a business career.

Esperanza is opening a new office in Santiago, DR -

On Monday, February 11, 2008 Esperanza International inaugurated its ninth office in the Dominican Republic, and tenth office branch overall. This new branch is located in Santiago de los Caballeros, a city of roughly 2 million people—the second largest city behind the capital of Santo Domingo.

Congrats!!

And yes, for the record, one of my best friends wrote the article I linked to (she’s working down in the DR right now).

Here’s a great video that shows what is possible via social entrepreneurship. The project is by Playpumps International.

This begs the question — why aren’t we seeing more projects like this getting some attention?

[via Guy Kawasaki]

I’m traveling to Southeast Asia next month for a couple weeks, and my buddy and I are starting to figure out which places we want to visit in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Hong Kong while we’re there — Halong Bay in Vietnam is one of the early finds.

Picture via Village Voices

Photo by Kristupa Saragih (found here)

If you have any suggestions about specific places to visit, please leave a comment or e-mail me.

Here’s a great commercial I just saw on ABC from Jordan Brand that made me think. Jordan didn’t get to where he is in life by relying on sheer luck, so any life advice he gives should be listened to.

Are you scared of what you won’t become? Or are you scared of what you could become?

And I’m excited to hear the news they have a new look to their recent readers widget.

[via Agent Genius]

A Yahoo!-Newscorp deal would certainly be interesting, wouldn’t it? Spinning off Myspace and all their other net properties and merging them with Yahoo! would certainly give them a massive user base to cross promote content (page views) to. And combining their ad sales teams and inventory couldn’t hurt either. Though with myspace’s search deal with Google, it’s pretty far-fetched. Personally, I hope Yahoo! stays independent, but I’m guessing it’s not going to happen due to their legal requirement to maximize profits for their shareholders.

It’s really no secret I’m an Obama fan. I was certainly happy to check cnn tonight when I got home and see that Obama beat Hillary in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. In my opinion, it’s going to be extremely difficult for Hillary to overtake him now — his momentum is only increasing…

I’d encourage everyone interested in social media and marketing to read Brian Solis’ post — Transforming Customers into Evangelists: The Art of Listening and Engagement. I live and breathe this social media stuff every day at Zillow, so it really resonated with me. There’s many good take-aways, but here’s one that I particularly agree with -

Most importantly, make sure that you integrate customer success stories into your PR and marketing initiatives. Feature them on your blog. Invite them to events. Partner with them to be proactive voices to help rally other customers. After all, customers are the very thing that keep you in business. Show them that you know this by reaching out to them, not just waiting for them to come to you.

I think we do a fairly good job of following this advice, but it’s a great reminder — we can always do better.

Though the actual article is making a case against blogging, I couldn’t help but link to it as a result of the gem of a comment left by Jay Thompson -

I can blog in my underwear while I drink beer and watch football.

Check out this article Brian Solis wrote a couple days ago at PR 2.0 (one of my favorite blogs that I follow) about the new site Alltop, which aggregates influential voices across the web. Brian lists the voices included, which are likely household names if you’re familiar with the tech blogosphere.

Fake Steve Jobs, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Jeremiah Owyang, Teresa Valdez Klein, Jason Calacanis, Michael Arrington, Charlene Li, Tara Hunt, Doc Searls, Fred Wilson, Chris Brogan, Tim O’Reilly, Jason Kottke, John Gruber, Ze Frank, Chris Anderson, Marc Andreessen, Chris Messina, James Hong, Shel Israel, Jonathan Schwartz, Mark Cuban, Tom Peters, Marc Canter, Brian Oberkirch, Paul Kedrosky, Evan Williams, David Armano, Walt Mossberg, David Weinberger, and Nick Denton.

But, if you check out the Alltop acknowledgments, you’ll notice one of our own from the RE.net is included.

Deirdre Breakenridge, David Curlee, Pete Dawson, Kristen Forbriger, Bill Green, Francine Hardaway, Cone Johnson, Tom Kirkendall, Andrew Korf, Lani Anglin-Rosales, Tiara S., Nick Taylor, Andy Valadez.

So, without further adieu, I have to extend a huge congrats to Lani (who writes at ReRevealed and Agent Genius) for making the list!!

There’s a great book review over at NextBillion.net for the book The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World. I’ve got a long list of books to read (currently reading a long way gone by Ishmael Beah), but I’m definitely going to add this to my short list.

Mashable just reported that Facebook is now available in Spanish. That’s awesome news, both for Facebook expansion and for me. I took two years of Spanish in high school, but 2 years of language classes almost 10 years ago isn’t sufficient to be fluent — far from it. Where am I going with this? I traveled to Spain (and 12 other countries) 2 years ago and, more recently, to the Dominican Republic in November.  Both of those experiences made me want to re-learn the language so that I can at least have conversational dialogue with locals when visiting spanish-speaking countries in the future. Hopefully, the fact that FB is now available in spanish helps me improve my currently crappy Spanish skills. Now, the challenge of getting the motivation to switch to the spanish version and understand very little (or maybe nothing) on my profile…

Brilliant.