So I decided to pursue a Master’s degree in Public Policy

Today I found out that I was accepted into Northwestern University’s Master’s program in Public Policy and I will be starting classes within a month. Many have wondered just why I would absorb the cost of another degree, and what were my plans with adding another degree to my war chest. I’ve always found an interest in policy decisions, the effects, and how it relates to business and economics. Working on several political campaigns, talking with many politicians, and serving on several exploratory committees, I have had many opportunities to add value and position myself as a resource within these discussions. Without a sound understanding of the policy implications, I felt I was leaving quite a bit of opportunities on the table.

I have also noticed a strong connection between community service organizations, public and private sector, and civic organizations. These institutions are all interconnected and I feel that it’s tough to be highly successful without understanding all sides of the interests of all parties. You learn in your basic negotiation course that understanding the other side is the key to any deal, and one aspect of business that I do not feel comfortable with is how potential policy decisions can impact my business. I also feel that the entrepreneurial spirit is needed in the public sector as well, with tremendous opportunities to take advantage of, even on a part-time basis.

Ultimately, I am doing this because I want to make a difference. I think it’s also advantageous to become part of the political process and serve as my own lobbyist, by being aware and involved.  I think that many people in positions of power do not have a holistic understanding of the issues that affect our communities. There our issues that I encounter on a regular basis as an entrepreneur, that I wish were better represented in the law/policy making process, especially with the current state of things.

With this pursuit of a degree,  I am not slowing down anything with regards to my professional pursuits. I am just managing a portfolio of opportunities, all with different life cycles and growth trajectories. I’ve recently learned the importance of listening and trusting myself, and that slow and steady wins the race, in regards to entrepreneurship. Everyone dreams of YouTube-like growth, but it’s a slow growth process to transform something from a working prototype, to a fully-fledged opportunity. I believe in the value of these endeavors and will continue to work diligently on a daily basis to move these things forward.

It’s just another thing to budget into the day, and I am thankful that I have the flexibility to be able to do this. Lately, I have received a tremendous amount of help and support on a daily basis from my family, as well as Kristen Nicole, Joseph Curalli, Jason Camp, David Burns, Jonathan Cambry, Gavin Tuckett, and Chip Dorsey, who I work with on a daily basis from a professional standpoint to make these opportunities happen. Without them, this would be too daunting of a task. I’m excited and I know I will emerge from this as a more prepared entrepreneur.

In the next couple of weeks, I have another set of cool professional updates, which will complement this announcement.

Update 3-21-09: I decided that I wanted to publish my personal statement for wanting to receive a Master’s degree in Public Policy.

Statement of Purpose

 

 

The economics of health care have always fascinated me, as the model has no parallel. The issues of equitable access to health care and the policies impacting various populations are of interest. The mission is more than utilitarian: demanding the most service, of the highest quality, at the least cost, for the largest population. The evolution of population based medicine has been a natural component of health care’s economic evolution. Policy plays a key role in the ability of organizations to manage their capital structure, within mandated constraints, in such a way as to be able to fulfill the mission of providing service to the greatest extent possible, with steadily shrinking resources. We are at a critical juncture in the history of the United States, and we need innovative, evidence-based strategies and intervention to facilitate the policy-making process, especially in health care.

 

I have a unique background that has enabled me to have a fairly holistic view of many of the issues, but lack the theoretical policy framework. I have participated in community service organizations that aim to address the health care crisis. I have worked in investment banking, in charge of many health care related corporations. My father is an Emergency Room physician and my mother is a Registered Nurse, which gives me insight into issues that impact one’s access to health care. I founded a company, SavvyDoc, which aims to eliminate many of the costs incurred in the health care operational model through technology. Completion of my MBA coursework at Kellogg School of Management, has given me invaluable insight into the business of health care. Personal inquiry and a sense of urgency about gaining understanding about fundamental policy issues, why they were created, and how it effects the institutions involved are the impetus for application to the graduate program in Public Policy.

Further confirmation Internet innovation will slow to a snail’s pace?

Today, Techcrunch announced their Techrunch 2008 Year in Review, a seemingly massive report on 2008 web technology with data from their highly successful brand extension, Crunchbase, a wikipedia for tech companies. In the executive summary posted on Techcrunch, they posted three charts that all point towards the downward trend in startups founded, venture capital raised, and M&A activity.

The one chart that really stood out in my mind is the number of startups founded. From the chart, you can see that in January 2008, there were 170 new companies founded, and in December of 2008, the number was all the way down to approximately 20. From August, it appears that the decline in new companies founded escalated. In August, there were 100 new companies founded, and in an almost straight-line fashion, every month brought about 20 fewer startups that were founded.

All in all, this is why it’s a great time to start a web company if you can weather the storm. As I said in my previous post,

• When money is tight, it forces you to establish a solid business model
• Would be competitors, especially those who need a great salary, benefits, and stability are going to take a wait-and-see approach, probably not leaving their corporate jobs
• Your potential competitors aren’t getting funded, especially copycat ideas
• The pace of development and innovation is slowed, enabling you to incrementally iterate, without worrying that too much money is flowing into your space, possibly crushing you or diluting your impact on the space
• Real estate prices will go down, as well as labor input costs
• Only those truly passionate about what they are doing and the value they are creating are going to stay in the game. Others, who may only be monetairly motivated, will drop out and do something “safer”

Right now it’s the beginning of the gut check of those that wanted to be or are entrepreneurs. It would be interesting to see how 2008 compared to 2007 with number of new companies founded, and it will be interesting to watch in 2009, as the US system continues to take body blows.

Mark Cuban said it best in his blog post,

“The nature of our country’s business infrastructure is that it is destined to be boom and bust. Booms are when the smart people sell. Busts are when rich people started on their path to wealth.”

The one aspect to see moving forward is the number of companies that consider themselves strictly iPhone and Blackberry application companies, rather than traditional web-based companies, since presumably, it would take less cash to start generating revenue since you have the ulitmate distribution platform. Maybe innovation could improve since platforms such as the iPhone enable developers to care less about the infrastructure and scaling, and moreso on the value add. If I were a betting man, I’d say that Internet innovation has come to a screeching halt, not to be picked back up until 2011.

Surgeon Live Tweets Surgery?

The biggest surprise of the day comes from a video on CNN.com showcasing a surgeon and his team tweeting (using Twitter) while performing a risky surgical procedure. In real-time, the surgeon is  chronicling the procedure and unexpected challenges, pushing it out to all of Tweet-ville.  In the video, it appears that they are using the recently funded Tweetdeck.

I was rather surprised that this story didn’t get picked up on the major blogs for several reasons:

• Doctors are using Twitter! Physicians have been stereotyped as hesitant to adopt bleeding edge technologies, especially in the web space. Health care in general is one of the slowest, least innovative, muli-billion dollar industries out there. We still have tons and tons of paperwork which has amounted to a tremendous amount of waste, preventing millions of people to be able to afford health care coverage. Primary care physicians rarely use e-mail or other web-based technologies because of the exposure to lawsuits  and paper trail. Robotic surgery is the perfect use for something like Twitter, because the doctor doesn’t need to be sterile.

• Twitter can be used for instruction! The major benefit of open, web-based technology is the ability for everyone to collaborate on a real-time basis. The power of Twitter lies in the fact that you can use the real-time feed of Twitter with a self-selected follower base, who is interested in learning more. Imagine the power if tens of thousands of physicians gaining more and more knowledge of special techniques and provide feedback to other physicians on innovative procedures or even bedside manner. This open knowledge transfer and the subsequent discussions could be extremely interesting to watch moving forward.

• Privacy issues? Although the patient’s name was not released, some part of me feels a little uneasy about procedures being publicly disclosed. My uneasiness is probably informed because of all the legislation, HIPAA, and outcries of people concerned with any disclosure of their medical history.  Many people do not want their electronic medical record (EMR) to be online, yet it is acceptable to have any and all financial information online. I wish the program covered whether the patient approved of the public tweeting of the operation.

I think today’s story on CNN was fascinating because it shows real application of light-weight web-based tools, where as I said in my blog post yesterday, people are the killer application. This is extremely important for those looking to try and grasp what is Twitter and how it’s different than Facebook Status Update.

If you want to find out more information about Twitter, be sure to purchase the Twitter Survival Guide on multisocialmedia.com

USAService.org: As US President, you have no chicken and egg problem when launching a web app

Today, while watching the NBA All-Star game, at halftime, President Obama announced the launch of USAService.org, a site where Americans can get together to plan and join campaigns for public service. It’s kind of like Meetup meets Causes meets ThePoint. Several minutes ago, I saw a commercial featuring Obama, requesting people to join the site, join the movement, sign up and get involved. I haven’t been old enough to witness many United States presidents, but this is unprecedented in my mind. One of the interesting things, and whether you are a Democrat or Republican, you see that Obama is taking a very personal approach to attempt to engage and empathize with the American people. Whether it’s working, remains to be seen, but this is another extension of his plan to ensure that he maintains his grassroots appeal and continue to push the Obama movement.

There are several effective areas of the site that are quite interesting:

1) When you first sign up to the site, they prompt you to enter in your contact information. You have an opportunity to skip entering in your contact info, but it is slightly hidden in the user interface. This is consistent with all of his online properties. The Obama campaign’s major strength were their ability to create a massive database of people, and the ability to reach out to those individuals, when actions were necessary. They are a highly organized, well-oiled online machine. Being opt-in, I’d imagine that they have lower than normal “unsubscribed” rates, and with this self-selection, many people can’t get enough Obama information, so they read much of the information being disseminated.

2) Minimalistic: Simple and easy to use. They request the minimal amount of information possible to get involved.

3) The ability to search. Works quite well, and filtered the right way.

4) There seems to be a good amount of activity on the site, which is important for first-time visitors.

Despite all of the good things here, there are a couple things lacking:

1) Facebook Connect: Would be a perfect opportunity to leverage the Facebook powerhouse. It would be great if I knew if my Facebook friends would be participating

2) Twitter mashup to aggregate all of the Twitter posts of the people within the group, or using a Twitter-like format to highlight the successes of the event, for future events to learn from.

3) Forward this event to a friend. Especially if this was integrated with Facebook Connect, this could be powerful.

4) Recommendations based on events that you RSVP to. It would be great if I could subscribe to a feed of events similar to the one I signed up for

All in all, this is a great implementation and it will be interesting to see how this goes moving forward. The great thing about this is that I am sure that Obama will continue the commercials in support of the site, and media coverage will get this site to become  mainstream in a short amount of time. This is the wonderful thing about web apps.

The problem with most entrepreneurs, myself included, is that it’s tough to get people to use your site. I’ve heard several times that getting the first 100,000 users is the hardest thing about getting something off the ground. The dreaded chicken and egg problem. The site is only as valuable as the number of users using it. There are tons of great ideas and companies trying to get off the ground, and trying to market to both sides is deadly for a startup because you effectively have two completely different customers and resources to reach only one, if you’re lucky.

With Obama’s platform, he only has one side of the equation to figure out, and with this initial launch, it looks like we’ll see the power of what open collaboration can do. This will be powerful. Hopefully other organizations and causes can use this platform to advertise their initiatives, galvanizing more support for their initiatives. I think this will grow the market for many tech entrepreneurs, because everyone will see that people are the killer application, not the webtools themselves. Therefore, if you’re a large company, you have the resources to provide one side of the equation. Leverage the tech start-ups, and some interesting projects like USAService can happen.

Facebook status API updates won’t kill Twitter, but it will stunt their growth

Much has been made of Facebook’s announcement of the release of the Status API, which will enable web developers to create web applications using the increasingly popular Facebook Status Update. I am sure that web developers are chomping at the bits, hoping to develop the next Twirl or TweetDeck of Facebook.  Nick O’Neil of AllFacebook says that Twitter is all but on it’s way to a painful death, and Fred Wilson, VC investor in Twitter, believes that this new update will enlarge the market and opportunities for Twitter.

It’s the weekend, so I’ll keep this post shorter than usual, but Twitter has yet to go mainstream. Yes, it’s had several mainstream use cases such as Rick Sanchez on CNN asking for feedback during his daily show, or Shaquille O’Neal and Brittney Spears using it intermittently, but very few of my non-early adopter friends have yet to see the value in Twitter, and how it’s better than Facebook Status Update. To me, Facebook and Twitter have two different demographics.

Everyone uses Facebook. My mother, my mother’s family friends, my 8th grade teacher, and my friends from high school, college, and grad school. Because of the development platform and monetization opportunities for web developers, they have spawned an exorbitant amount of continued support from the early adopters, especially the technology development community. Twitter has also benefited significantly from the early adopter crowd and techies. It’s easy to use, all the techies are on there, and there are conversations that take place outside of a blog. We all read the same blogs, comment on the same news, and attend the same events. Twitter opened up their platform, enabled people to build their own applications, monetize their applications, and even gain investment from the venture community for Twitter applications. Even Summize, a Twitter search engine, had funding from Betaworks, and was acquired by Twitter.

Up until the past couple of days, Facebook didn’t have this open type of format, which I believe made Twitter more appealing for the early adopter. I use Twitter because it filtered the tech people I enjoy reading and listening to, and it was a major news source. I rarely get breaking news from my Facebook Status Updates. I follow the typical RSS feeds, but information discovery is a huge element of why I use Twitter. I don’t really care about whether someone is grabbing a cup of coffee, getting on the plane, or working at their desk. I do care about someone pushing an undiscovered blog post or breaking news. I’d argue that the mainstream user isn’t as interested in this. They want to know what their friends are up to, and Facebook Status does the job just fine. They aren’t interested in promoting themselves, their product and service, or conversing with people they do not know. Of the almost 200 people that I am following on Twitter, only a handful are Facebook friends of mine as well.

Some people cite the simplicity with Twitter that is a reason why it will go mainstream. For my mother, going to one site is simpler than going to two.

Marc Canter states that Twitter is worth half as much as it was, virtually overnight. The innovation that can come about, leveraging the significant social graph of Facebook, will make it that much harder for someone to adopt Twitter. Facebook can leverage their massive strength, their user base and data, and couple that with an open platform, it is going to force Twitter to immediately  innovate and get a solid business model. It would be interesting to study the people who use both Facebook and Twitter, but in any business, where you reduce the amount of use cases because of the 300-pound gorilla doing something like what you’re doing, I think that you’ll see declined growth patterns for Twitter from here on out. The amount of times someone asks me “What is Twitter and why should I use it?” has just lost a couple significant reasons why I’d recommend it. If I were a developer, would I rather create an innovative platform for hundreds of millions of users, or for something much smaller than that? I think you can expect Facebook developers to innovate much more rapidly because they can tie in so many other things that Facebook has to offer, once again, making it that much harder for someone to want to get a Twitter account.

If you want to find out more information about Twitter, be sure to purchase the Twitter Survival Guide on multisocialmedia.com