Before hiring someone, Zuckerberg used to take them on a hike:

Several people who were hired this way say the strolls usually meandered along the trail — with Mr. Zuckerberg asking questions of the new recruit along the way — and ended atop a lookout. There, Mr. Zuckerberg would explain the terrain in front of them and his vision for the future.

“He pointed out Apple’s headquarters, then Hewlett-Packard and a number of other big tech companies,” one person who was recruited by Mr. Zuckerberg told The New York Times last year. “Then he pointed to Facebook and said that it would eventually be bigger than all of the companies he had just mentioned, and that if I joined the company, I could be a part of it all.”

Not only is that a fantastic way to hire someone, but it shows Zuckerberg’s ambitions for Facebook, too. That isn’t a sales speech—I’ve no doubt it’s his intent to grow Facebook into the most important and influential technology company we’ve seen.

Creative director Kash Sree:

I haven’t done anything I like yet. I say this with students. Look at your work, and imagine your enemy is showing you this ad. “Oh, you think that’s good? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it.” I tend to treat my work like it was my enemy, so I can be hard on it, and sometimes I’m too hard on it, but it helps me keep some perspective.

James Montgomerie:

I think this highlights two things that many other organisations would do well to learn. First, what you have is what it is, it’s not the effort that was put into it. If it’s not worth keeping, it’s not worth keeping. Second, if you want the best results, you need to give good people the room to start over without feeling like they are failing.

Building lasting organizations that can repeatedly build great products—and the right products—is difficult for reasons like this. You have to learn how to build this into your organization.

(Via Buzz Andersen.)

Steve Yelvington on how newspaper should be thinking about their future:

You want profit margins? Look for scarcity.

“News” is everywhere, and it’s free. Entertainment is plentiful and cheap. Context, meaning, convenience, and good stories aren’t.

Alexis Madrigal:

The question is, as it has always been: now what?

Decades ago, the answer was, “Build the Internet.” Fifteen years ago, it was, “Build the Web.” Five years ago, the answers were probably, “Build the social network” or “Build the mobile web.” And it was in around that time in 2007 that Facebook emerged as the social networking leader, Twitter got known at SXSW, and we saw the release of the first Kindle and the first iPhone. There are a lot of new phones that look like the iPhone, plenty of e-readers that look like the Kindle, and countless social networks that look like Facebook and Twitter. In other words, we can cross that task off the list. It happened.

We now have the tools to do incredible things, but what precisely that is isn’t as obvious as it use to be. Before, the harder question was how. Now the questions we should be spending more time on are what and why.

Answering those questions is now going to provide much, much more leverage than answering the how.

Peter Thiel, in his CS183 class at Stanford:

It may upset people to hear that competition may not be unqualifiedly good. We should be clear what we mean here. Some sense of competition seems appropriate. Competition can make for better learning and education. Sometimes credentials do reflect significant degrees of accomplishment. But the worry is that people make a habit of chasing them. Too often, we seem to forget that it’s genuine accomplishment we’re after, and we just train people to compete forever. But that does everyone a great disservice if what’s theoretically optimal is to manage to stop competing, i.e. to become a monopoly and enjoy success.

More classes like this, please.

Planetary Resources, a new venture supported by Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and James Cameron, plans on mining asteroids for rare-earth metals.

It’s a long-term, ambitious plan that is more likely to fail than it is to succeed. Granted. But they’re trying to expand space exploration beyond low-earth orbit, and that’s awesome. I want to see manned exploration of our solar system in my lifetime, and this is a step toward it. I hope it succeeds.

Brent Schlender’s piece on his recently found audio tapes of interviews he did over the years with Steve Jobs:

There was one other big lesson he learned from his Hollywood adventure: People remember stories more than products. “The technology we’ve been laboring on over the past 20 years becomes part of the sedimentary layer,” he told me once. “But when Snow White was re-released [on DVD, in 2001], we were one of the 28 million families that went out and bought a copy of it. This was a film that is 60 years old, and my son was watching it and loving it. I don’t think anybody’s going to be beating on a Macintosh 60 years from now.”

How do you make it so products are more meaningful to people in the same way? Or if not the product, the company itself?

Tim Ricchuiti:

To all those who tout “make a compelling app, charge for it” as the be-all and end-all in “sustainable” business models, read that again. In its current iteration, the App Store really doesn’t allow for a “sustainable” business model any more than giving something away for free does for one very simply reason: developers can’t charge for upgrades.

I think that’s a point that’s been lost in this furor over Instagram’s and, now, Pocket’s business model: the App Store’s “sell once, give free upgrades for life” model isn’t very good, either. Low average prices for applications (99¢ to ¢2.99 or so) mean that developers have to sell a lot of copies consistently just to stay in business, let alone make a substantial profit. While it’s true that taking advantage both of the platform’s tremendous number of users and its blistering growth rate can make this model workable, that depends on creating a rather sizable hit of an application. For the growth to continue, the application has to be well-known. That means a relatively small group of people will realize that kind of success, and it creates two very distinct groups: a small group who are seeing long-term, sustainable success with their application(s), and the rest—a much, much larger group that isn’t.

This dynamic also concentrates development in more popular categories like productivity, because larger categories have a greater chance for that success. As a result, more niche applications are less likely to be created and sustained over long periods of time. The end result is we have an App Store focused on big hits with much less diversity.

I don’t know if charging for upgrades is the answer, nor whether Apple is even interested in implementing it.¹ But we need to figure out better ways to sustain applications as a business. I think in-app purchase and subscriptions can help. Small up-front prices for applications (or free, even, like Paper) with additional features or content available through in-app purchase could be much more sustainable, because not only does it have the potential to increase total revenue per user, but it also spreads this revenue over a period of time rather than lumping it up-front. By spreading revenue over time, it should make the business much more predictable and consistent for a larger number of businesses.

1. It is something they should be thinking heavily about, though, because a healthy third-party development community is one of the main factors that has made the iPhone and iPad so successful. Maintaining that strength is important for Apple. [↩]

Facebook’s Instagram deal tells us a lot about how Facebook operates:

It was a remarkably speedy three-day path to a deal for Facebook—a young company taking pains to portray itself as blue-chip ahead of its initial public offering of stock in a few weeks that could value it at up to $100 billion. Companies generally prefer to bring in ranks of lawyers and bankers to scrutinize a deal before proceeding, a process that can eat up days or weeks.

Mr. Zuckerberg ditched all that. By the time Facebook’s board was brought in, the deal was all but done. The board, according to one person familiar with the matter, “Was told, not consulted.”

It’s Zuckerberg’s ship.

Federico Viticci:

And now the problem: some people don’t like free on principle. The backgrounds are different, but the core issue is that they are used to one type of business model (the single purchase) and they want every other service to work that way.

How ironic that I’ve read many of these complaints on sites that are, effectively, using a freemium model with ads and premium subscriptions.

Nate Weiner explains why Pocket, the new version of Read It Later, is now free:

By being a paid app, Read It Later was charging like the fast food case, even though the value of our product maps much closer to the second and third graphs. Put simply: From a business perspective, having a user pay $2.99 up-front once and then use the app for 4 years just doesn’t make a lot of sense.

After this realization about our previous revenue strategy we knew we had to change it. We’re moving towards a new model that better fits our business and our users. In the end this will allow us to provide a better service to all of our customers.

He argues their plan is not to get acquired, and going free is a step toward their plan for making money. The argument makes sense, so I’m curious what the plan is.

Pocket looks great, too.

Tony Fadell explains what, in part, made Steve Jobs so good at finding the right solution to a problem:

At the time, Fadell simply said “Steve had a way of scoping the problem bigger. He could just look at a problem and find the solution by thinking larger.”

Sometimes, obstacles we run into while designing something are because we have our eyes so close to the ground, the detail blinds us to a larger truth. It’s useful all of the time, but especially when you can’t seem to figure out a design issue, to consider the greater intent of what you’re designing. What is it meant to do for the user? What is it ultimately doing for them? Answering that question, and thinking through the design problem within that context, often will make the answer immediately obvious.

Last week, Marcelo Somers wrote that when designing a product, you should begin with the experience, not the features it has. You should think primarily about what the product’s purpose is—that is, what is the high-level task in someone’s life that it accomplishes. Marcelo calls this what the product is being hired to do, and I think that’s a great way of thinking about it.

This distinction between designing for a product’s purpose and designing based on its features may seem trivial, so let’s consider an example to illustrate it: the MP3 music player. Here are the music player’s central features:

• Plays back audio files through a 3.5mm headphone jack
• Allows user to put audio files on the device and remove them

Here’s the music player’s purpose:

• Conveniently listen to my music wherever I am

Note how much more the purpose guides your design decisions than the feature list. How should the user physically interact with the device? How should their audio files be organized? What should its physical design be? I don’t know. The feature list just tells you what it should literally do, not what it should accomplish.

But if you start with the music player’s purpose, it begins to answer a lot of these questions. How should the user interact with the device? In a way that’s quick and simple to do, so they can go back to what they were doing as quickly as possible. How should their audio files be organized? Since it’s for playing their music, they should be organized by how we think of music—artist, album, genre, et cetera, and they should be organized in such a way that it’s fast to find exactly the album or song I want, because I’m primarily using it while doing something else. How should it physically be designed? Since it’s for listening wherever the user is, it should be as compact as possible, and it should have a large enough screen for moving through the user’s music.

Focusing on the product’s purpose does even more than begin to answer the very literal design questions, though. What’s truly important is it frames the entire product with a very simple, very easy to understand intent. That intent—in this case, “conveniently listen to my music wherever I am”—is a sort of maxim used to guide and judge the entire project. It’s a lense to look at the project through, and it tells you whether you are succeeding or not. Rather than design each separate part of the product as an autonomous piece separate from the rest, the purpose integrates every part of the product, however small or large, into a cohesive whole.

That frame is what allows customers to immediately understand what a product is for, how it fits into their lives and how it would make their lives better. It does that because every bit of the product was designed to serve that purpose, and when a product’s been designed that way, it’s like a very clear thesis: people see what it’s for from the product itself. They don’t have to figure out what it’s for and what they could use it for, because it’s immediately obvious.

So when considering creating something new, don’t think about it as what it literally does. Think about what it will accomplish for people. Make this your project’s defining thesis, its reason for existing. And once you’ve settled on what that purpose is, design ruthlessly for it. Don’t compromise it. “I can listen to all of my music wherever I am” is much more powerful than “a device which stores and plays audio files.”

Horace Dediu analyzes Charles Arthur’s report that Android has only generate $2.5 billion of revenue since 2008:

My take is that it’s not a bad business. But it’s also not a great one. As long as there is exponential growth in units, Android will improve its position inside Google relative to iOS. But from Google’s perspective, iOS is today a bigger business. And iOS is not standing still. It’s growing not only in terms of units but in revenue per unit.

Dediu figures that Google only makes about $3.50 per Android device sold over its lifetime, and that revenue per device has decreased since 2009. As usual, outstanding work by Horace.