Getting On The Inside of Outside.in

Steven Johnson, founder and CEO of Outside.in wrote a post last night titled "A Call For Help" in which he talks about the challenges of being an author and a founder at the same time. I knew Steven was going to need some help building Outside.in when we funded the company earlier this year. We talked about how and when to start recruiting a business team and I suggested he do what we've done very successfully - blog about it.

So now that Steven's outlined what he's looking for (a COO, someone to bring in revenue, and someone to bring in deals), I suggest anyone who would like to be on the inside of Outside.in drop Steven a line. His email is on the post I linked to.

I suspect you'll be hearing a bit more about Outside.in on this blog this week. I am at Where 2.0 and location based services are on my mind.

Comments

[Erik Schwartz]

This is a particularly timely post for us as Foneshow has some postions opening up in the next week or so. I spent a good chunk of time over the weekend sketching out job descriptions. I did a short blog post about what kind of people we're looking for.

I was briefly pondering just doing a blog post of the problems we're trying to solve and asking readers if they can help, instead of traditional job listings. After all, to a large extent start up jobs expand to fill the needs or the company. Titles are less important. Ideas are more important than pedigree. Everyone needs to be a generalist at some level.

It would certainly make the interview process more interesting. My only concern is giving away a certain bit more competitive positioning than I'd like.

[Dawn]

Seems to me that Outside.in has a major psychological hurdle. It's scary.

Can you imagine being a "star" blogger in your physical neighborhood? Demands on your time would shoot through the roof and your sense of security would fall through the floor. I sure can't see many women doing this, though it would be a great service for hookers.

Sure, you could attempt to remain anonymous. But then much of the meaning of blogging is taken out for both you and your readers.

Maybe I'm just misunderstanding what Outside.in is, but just being sent to my own neighborhood when I clicked on the link felt ominous to me when I hadn't even given the program any information to go by.

Beyond all that, as an entrepreneur myself, I frankly find Steven's attitude irritating. It's this outlook of "we're well funded so we can treat this as a play ground at worst and R&D at best" that makes getting vc so bloody expensive. Just like responsible producers have to pay more taxes for irresponsible nonproducers, people who launch real businesses with intact revenue models and thoughtful, knowledgeable strategy, have to subsidize the "let's get lots of money and hire employees and throw stuff on the wall and see if anything sticks and then figure out how we can make a business out of it" vc playboys.

[Steven Johnson]

Hey Dawn, I'll hold off on the psychological question you raise -- which is a very interesting one -- since I'm about to give a speech in a few hours. But a quick note to say that I don't think you should interpret my comments as being a late 1990s bubble attitude. We've actually deliberately raised a relatively small amount of money, and kept the operation extremely lean, so that we could experiment and innovate without blowing through a lot of cash. (The last round we did was less than a million dollars.) On the other hand, we've felt all along that there were significant revenue opportunities, and have spent a lot of time thinking about them, but it didn't necessarily make sense to have people thinking about those issues full-time at the outset -- precisely so we could avoid raising a lot of money up front...

sbj

[Safonov]

non

[Safonov]

non

[Dawn]

Hi Steven,

My fault. First, at first look, I didn't realize that you were aggregating content from lots of established sites. I assumed it was something else.

Second, I do understand the need for experimentation. I've been doing that myself for over four years now. But it's always been on my own dime. Maybe I'm just jealous. Ha!

I wish you luck.