| 作者 |
 Ten Commandments for Entrepreneurs |
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Commandment #5: Create the "Aha" Early -- braveheart - (3760 Byte) 2005-10-04 周二, 00:39 (245 reads) |
braveheart
头衔: 海归上士
加入时间: 2005/02/18
文章: 24
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作者：braveheart 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
Intermission
Halfway home…..and I’ve gotten tons more input from readers than I ever thought. As I round the horn, and start on the last five Commandments, I wanted to reflect a little on the comments that readers have left. I promise a more thoughtful perspective when the entire 10 are finished.
It’s been almost a couple of months since I’ve posted, which several readers have pointed out to me (embarrassingly, but truth be told, also slightly gratifyingly – you mean someone is actually reading it??!!). I’ve been busy at work and home, but aim to pick back up the pace. As partial recompense, I thought I’d offer a snippet of a conversation I had down at the DEMO conference a couple of weeks ago with Walt Mossberg, who writes the Personal Technology column for the WSJ.
Walt and I were having lunch, and, the talk eventually turned to blogs －－ and then to my blog (which Walt hadn’t read). He asked me about it, plus a bunch of other questions about blogging. I told him that I was in trouble because I’d made several rookie blogger mistakes.
They included doing a series of numerically-related posts (the “Ten” Commandments for Entrepreneurs) that hadn’t taken into account the “reverse” chronological order in which one’s posts appear in a blog. What I should’ve done, like David Letterman’s Top 10 Lists, is to have started with Commandment #10 and worked down to Commandment #1. That way, readers new to the blog could read the posts in a more natural way, from Commandment #1 “down” to Commandment #10, instead of seemingly backwards.
But the bigger, MUCH bigger, mistake, I said, had been to promise readers TEN Commandments instead of, say, “Several” Commandments, or “A Few” Commandments – in case (as happened) I got too busy to post, got writer’s block, stepped in front of a bus, etc., etc.
Walt then looked at me with his patented “you’re an idiot” look….Why? Because, he said, experienced journalists never, NEVER, announce a multi-part series (especially one that has an explicit number of installments) before they’ve written all of them. In fact, it turns out that most of the leading newspapers and magazines won’t even print the first of a multi-part article until all installments have been turned in, edited and finalized for printing. They’ve learned from past mistakes, I guess.
Wish I’d thought of that before launching into something called the Ten Commandments.
Anyway, onward and upward.
I’ve received a number of suggestions on my blog, mostly on the Ten Commandments, some of which I’ve listed (and commented on) below.
One of the most interesting, from a pseudonymous VC whom I know of, is that I write a companion series: “Ten Commandments for VC’s”. I will seriously consider this. To help, I invite suggestions from any reader on what they’d include on the list. I’m sure there are lots of entrepreneurs out there with stories they’d like to share back to the VC community.
Another suggestion was to respond to comments to my posts. One regular reader/commentator, Vanilla Chin, takes me to task on this. I assume “Vanilla Chin” is a pseudonym since I can’t find that name (except in connection with other comments on blogs) on Google, in the Internet Archive or at Yahoo People (yes, I know there are other, even free, sites but, at some point, it’s not worth it). In any event, I plead guilty to Mr. or Ms. Chin’s charge, but also plead the extenuating circumstances of being very busy at work and home.
Vanilla Chin has been a very interesting reader: sometimes scolding and sometimes supportive (in the face of attacks by Harry Kiwi (see below)). He’s also one of the more thoughtful respondents to posts, frequently raising concerns about my advice from the entrepreneur’s perspective. I’m tempted to respond to him or her, but I’ve decided to adopt a rule proposed by Dan Gillmor (which I’m not sure he, himself, always follows), which is: don’t respond to comments from anyone using a pseudonym. So, please identify yourself if you want to start a dialogue； otherwise, especially given the time it consumes, I can’t do it.
Throughout the first Five Commandments, I’ve tried to make clear that I’m not defending VC behavior in any way. Most readers who’ve given me any feedback (either in comments to a post or in a direct email to me), seem to have, more or less, gotten that point, although several have accused me of arrogance (some pseudonymously, some using their real names). This has made me realize that, despite a lot of effort, it’s hard to describe (sometimes) arrogant behavior without readers, some at least, thinking the writer is, himself, arrogant.
In this regard, it's important to remember that the game, "Raising Venture Capital", is not played on a level playing field. In some ways that’s not “fair” to the entrepreneur, and I’ve never pretended it is. But it is a fact of life. In writing the Commandments, what I’ve tried to do is give “little”, helpful suggestions to entrepreneurs about how to optimize their chances for winning the game on this unlevel playing field. I sometimes wonder whether – instead of the "Ten Commandments" －－ I should have called them “Several Small Suggestions to Help Entrepreneurs Do Their Best When Interacting With VC’s in the Unfair Game of Raising Money”.
Finally, one reader, whose screen name is Harry Kiwi, really has it in for the VC community, and me as a representative of it (not that there aren’t occasional good reasons). You can read his comments next to the related posts. I have to say that I found his comments to be ad hominem and entirely off the mark, at least relative to my intended message. I’ve also searched for “Harry Kiwi” in Google, Internet Archive and Yahoo People, but, likewise, come up empty-handed. Dan Gillmor also warns of “trolls”, like Harry, and it is amazing how one person, especially one who only comments pseudonymously, can really lessen the whole experience, at least for the blogger.
In any event, Harry’s been the only commentator who’s tested my initial (and still standing) resolve to not block (or ｄｅｌｅｔｅ) posts from anyone unless they’re really over the top. On a couple of occasions, he’s come close, but I consider the “open-ness” of the blog one of its most important attributes, so, for now, I’m hanging in there with the resolve intact.
Anyway, I never expected even to have to think about rules like this for my blog, because I never expected anyone to read it. So, thanks to all of you, except Harry, who have.
作者：braveheart 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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