Greg's Right FIT #406

Quick notes to help you grow your business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week. 

In this issue: 

- Thoughts on a Momentum Lens
- Being Human
- Random Stuff

Thoughts on a Momentum Lens

• Project success is not only rooted in your desire for the result but also its likelihood of succeeding. Mix in other people and it gets more complicated. Consider how it interacts with other projects, and it’s a wonder we get anything done at all. 
• What makes a person worth hiring for $150K for a 45-minute speech? It’s not just content. Bono and that other guy could be saying the same thing, but only one of the two has a shot of filling an arena. If my job is filling the seats, I get Bono.
• Talk of "worth" reminds me: nothing beats sitting down face to face with customers. It's worth a lot. 
• What would really happen if you took the afternoon to yourself every day next week? It's worth testing. 

Being Human - The data grab

"The value of a solution comes from the problem being solved."

A new TV came into the family. I helped install it. When the user agreement came up I took a peek at the privacy section. It's a bit aggressive. Essentially, the TV vacuums up all data from your interaction with it, including screenshots. This data will be shared with partners, a.k.a. "sold." Who wants this data? The agreement suggests someone thinks some part of this data may one day be as valuable as oil.  Someone's told them the value of data depends on the problem being solved, right? 

I have been working on a lead generation campaign. In the testing phase we picked a goal, measured where we are today, and imagined where improvements would show up. A classic "today, tomorrow, and value of the difference" exercise. The key piece in determining the value of the project depends on a piece of data no one has. If it existed, we'd buy it. For a lot of money. The data element doesn't exist. This isn't a problem. We work around the missing info and a few months later guess what we have? A lot of the data we couldn't buy in the marketplace.

The problem with massive data gathering is the value of this data is going to come from the market of problems it solves. By grabbing everything and selling it to the data brokers who don't know if anyone wants to buy it, you're getting pennies per user at best. It has to be a fraction of what you make by selling the TV to begin with, so why bother? 

I'm guessing someone somewhere in the organization said "it's free money, go get it." I wonder if that same person knows their TV brand is a top result under "privacy nightmare" in Google searches? I also wonder if it matters to anyone but me. . . 

Anyway, as you can imagine, the TV is great. Turns out once you've made a hole in the wall and mounted the screen, a corporate data collection policy doesn't matter so much.

(something the finance person must have already known)

Random Stuff

"You know what's weird to think about? Saturday. Saturday everything was normal." –SBF, the Friday after FTX melted down

Do you own bitcoin or a cryptocurrency? Years ago I helped a bitcoin business by acting as their mentor for a lean startup group. To demonstrate how it worked, the startup used his fancy bitcoin ATM to set up a wallet for me. He put in a few dollars worth of bitcoin, and we went to a café so he could demonstrate how useful this new currency is. The transaction was rough. Only one person in the café knew how to use it, but after about 10 minutes the transaction wouldn’t complete. We ended up using old-fashioned US dollars for our doughnuts.

I thought about this experience when bitcoin went up to $65K during the pandemic. He had given me $5 worth when the price of bitcoin was around $250. At one point my $5 of bitcoin was worth maybe $700. If I only knew where I put it. I probably used the paper receipt it was printed on as a bookmark. Maybe. No matter, I simply put the experience in the great big pile of losses I’ve accumulated over the years. 

I thought about my bitcoin wallet again last weekend. I read Michael Lewis new book, "Going Infinite." He had been pitched crypto stories for years, and recounted an eerily similar experience trying to use it as currency. (we have so much in common, Michael Lewis and I)

His new book chronicles his time with Sam Bankman-Fried. It covers SBF's meteoric rise, ending with what looks to be his epic fall. He went from making $1 million a year to being worth an estimated $49,000 million in a couple of years in the crypto world. Now he might go to jail. Crazy.

It's a great read. All Lewis books are. And it illustrates that once again, I missed my chance to make a gazillion dollars.

(kidding–no one wanted me at math camp or MIT)