This short presentation, delivered in Berlin at the NEXT Conference, covers the four key principles of the #1 New York Times bestseller, The 4-Hour Body. It also includes an interview with the fantastic David Rowan, editor of Wired Magazine in the UK.
The Q&A covers smart drugs, Ambien, measurement of “thoughts” (prefrontal cortex activity), and more.
All speaker videos from NEXT can be found here, and include some gems, like the inimitable CTO of Amazon, Dr. Werner Vogels.
May 18th, 2011
(Photo credit: Graphistolage)
The following interview is a slightly modified version of an interview that just appeared on BoingBoing.
It explores philosophical systems as personal operating systems (for better decision-making), the value of college and MBAs, and the bridge between business and military strategy, among other things.
Avi first reached out to discuss my practical obsession with the philosopher Lucius Seneca, so that’s where we start… Read More
May 15th, 2011
Random Episode 15 from Glenn McElhose on Vimeo.
In this long-overdue episode of Random, Kevin Rose and I discuss everything from start-ups and photography to naming products, iPhone apps, and survivalist training. Fueled by bourbon and pizza — cheat day, of course — we had a blast.
Hope you enjoy! The mentioned links, assorted goodies, and show notes are below.
Last but not least, The Random Show is now on iTunes! If you simply want audio-only, or if you’d like to watch the episodes on your iPhone or iPad, here you go:
VIDEO: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-random-show-podcast/id417595309
AUDIO: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-random-show-podcast-audio/id417635513
Milk, Inc.
http://milkinc.com/
Daniel Burka
http://www.deltatangobravo.com/
Path
http://www.path.com/
Business Insider – 15 Greatest Tech Pivots
Bessemer’s “anti-portfolio” (mistakenly referred to as Accel’s anti-portfolio)
http://www.bvp.com/Portfolio/AntiPortfolio.aspx
Control 4 Home Automation
http://www.control4.com/
Panasonic LUMIX G 20mm f/1.7 Aspherical Pancake Lens
Christopher Michel – Photography
http://www.christophermichel.com/
Matt Mullenweg
http://ma.tt/
Power: Why Some People Have It And Others Don’t, by Jeffrey Pfeffer
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, by Walter Isaacson
Sedo
http://sedo.com
Domain names – hash tag for kevin on Twitter: #krdomain
IPA (phonetic alphabet) flash cards
http://ipaflashcards.com/
Evernote
http://www.evernote.com/
PDF pen – app
http://www.smilesoftware.com/PDFpen/
America: The Story Of US
http://www.history.com/shows/america-the-story-of-us
###
All previous episodes of The Random Show can be found here.
May 9th, 2011
(Photo: Josh Liba)
Once again, I have been BLOWN AWAY by you all.
Please find below the semi-finalists for the scholarship spot to the $10,000 Opening The Kimono event.
There are 26, listed in no particular order, as we could not narrow it down further. The case studies range from parents to students, from snowboarding to software, from Berlin to British Columbia. Here’s the next step:
1) Each video is a combination of three video submissions. After watching each video, vote for your favorite of the three applicants. Voting ends this Thursday, May 12th, at 12 midnight PST.
2) Once tallied, this round of voting will decide the 8-10 finalists for the next round.
Much like the Cold Remedy video case studies, these videos remind me of how much I owe you all. This kind of feedback is the reason that I continue to write, despite how hard it is for me, and why I love this community so much.
Thank you.
I hope you love these as much as I did. If you need a little inspiration, these are exactly what the doctor ordered.
Enjoy!
###
Odds and Ends: Tim in Germany
I’m leaving from SFO for Germany as I type this, where I’ll be for 1-2 weeks, mostly in Berlin.
Anyone want to throw a big party? Know any club owners so we can blow it out? Other recommendations for fun in Berlin? Can’t wait to rediscover it, as I haven’t been since 2004.
Danke!
April 29th, 2011
It doesn’t take a lot of time, money, or sacrifice to do an incredible amount of good. Hence the name of this post (and potential series): Five Minutes on Friday. Even if it’s not Friday, this post might interest you…
Can you — and can I — take just five minutes each Friday (or Saturday, Sunday, etc.) to fix big problems and feel awesome in the process? Sure. It need not suck or feel like work. In fact, it can be like getting a Christmas present. Or perhaps like slaying bad guys as The Punisher.
Pretty sweet on both sides. Here are two quick options for your five minutes this week…
Make a $10 or greater donation to Music for Relief for earthquake and tsunami relief in Japan and receive a kick-ass exclusive compilation of music from incredible musicians. To get people to take action, the offer is only good for a few days. Listen to the music (listed below) and make a donation here: http://japan.downloadtodonate.org/
Current Tracklisting:
Hoobastank — Running Away (acoustic)
Shinedown – Shed Some Light (acoustic live)
Sara Bareilles — Song For A Soldier
Flyleaf — How He Loves (live)
Staind —Right Here (live)
The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus — 21 and Up
Angels & Airwaves — Hallucinations
Taking Back Sunday – Best Places To Be A Mom
Placebo – Bright Lights (live)
Black Cards – Dr. Jekkyl & Mr. Fame
B’z — Home
Surfer Blood – Take it Easy (Live)
Ben Folds – Sleazy
Slash featuring Myles Kennedy – Starlight (live)
Counting Crows – Colorblind (live)
R.E.M. – Man on the Moon (live from Tokyo)
Talib Kweli – GMB
Plain White T’s — Rhythm Of Love (live)
Elliott Yamin — Self Control
Pendulum – Witchcraft
Patrick Stump – Saturday Night Again
Linkin Park — Ishho Ni
Pretty sweet, right? Click here to download the tracks.
More than 100 million sharks are now slaughtered annually to fuel the shark fin soup trade. The soup is non-nutritive, expensive, and doesn’t even taste particularly good (yes, I tried it in China in the 90′s). It is served mostly as a status symbol at Asian weddings, formal functions, and high-end restaurants.
How is this fine soup made?
Shark fins are cut-off the sharks in a process called “finning.” The practice is wasteful, unsustainable and ecologically unsound. Here’s how it works: sharks are caught on long-lines (miles of line floating in the oceans, affixed with hooks and bait), brought to the boat, and have their fins are hacked off. Next, since shark meat isn’t worth as much as shark fins, the mutilated but normally live animals are thrown back in to the water to sink and die.
Sharks cannot reproduce fast enough to keep up with mass-production shark finning. In the Atlantic ocean alone, shark populations in many species have decreased more than 90% percent in the last 15 years alone. It’s fucking disgusting.
I wanted to be a marine biologist for nearly 15 years, and if there is two things to remember about sharks, here they are:
- Most sharks don’t attack humans and have no interest in us whatsoever. I’ve dived with hundreds of sharks without incident.
- If you destroy apex predators (predators at the top of the food chain), the rest of the food chain topples soon thereafter.
If the oceans go to hell, so do we. To stick it to the bad guys and help the good guys, here are two five-minute options:
1. Boycott and Publicly Shame Restaurants That Serve Shark Fin Soup
Below is a list of Canadian and US restaurants that still serve shark fin soup. Boycott them, write to them, and — corporations hate bad PR — publicly shame them for inhumanely slaughtering sharks, using blogs, tweets, Facebook, e-mail, or whatever you have:
United States List of restaurant perpetrators
Canada’s list of restaurant perpetrators
2. Join Future Shark Adventures
The University of Miami offers year-round shark expeditions, including weekly tagging trips in the Florida Keys, Great White Shark expeditions in South Africa, and Diving and Tagging tiger shark adventures in the Bahamas. Click here for more information.
If you have other creative ideas on how to promote ocean conservation, please contact Dr. Neil Hammerschalg at nhammerschlag-at-rsmas.miami.edu. To learn more about shark protection, visit these sites:
http://www.wildaid.org
http://www.sharksavers.org
http://www.rjd.miami.edu
http://www.sharktrust.org
Yes, I really love sharks. Here, I tag my first shark off of Miami as part of Summit Series: a beautiful female tiger shark. Truly gorgeous.
Have a fantastic weekend, all. Take the five minutes if you can. It will make you feel incredible, and it will have an impact.
April 26th, 2011
Once upon a time, two entrepreneurs had an idea: what if we used traditional bookbinding to make iPad cases?
It was a fun idea.
Then it suddenly became very, very profitable. The two entrepreneurs, Patrick Buckley and Craig Dalton, named the idea DODOCase and soon had sold more than 10,000 iPad cases at $60 a pop.
Soon thereafter, they were featured in The New York Times and had a multi-million dollar business on their hands, to the tune to $4-5 million a year.
That could be you.
See, DODOcase was far from alone. They were part of a simple experiment, a business-building competition I launched jointly with an incredible start-up called Shopify.
The results were amazing:
Revenue PER HOUR for the duration of the contest: $696.38
Total number of orders placed: 66,503
Most important — Total businesses created: nearly 1,400
1,400 &^%$ing businesses, created by people just like you.
People who’d become comfortable in a routine. People who’d dreamt of starting their own company… someday. People who just needed a quick slap to get off the tranquilizers of their 9-to-5. But did I say “people just like you”? Scratch that — 1,400 businesses, many of them created by people far less capable than you.
The Shopify Build-a-Business competition is back, bigger and better than ever. There are more than $500,000 in prizes, including:
$100,000 Grand Prize
VIP trip for two to New York City, where Seth Godin will cook you dinner
One-hour power session with Gary Vaynerchuk
VIP trip to San Francisco, where you’ll visit the Googleplex and have dinner (and wine, of course) with yours truly at one of my favorite restaurants in the world… Read More
April 20th, 2011
What did Twitter look like before it was Twitter? Let us begin the story with an image…
Jack Dorsey’s first sketch for what would become Twitter (Photo: Jack Dorsey and d0tc0m)
This photo was first shown to me by Peter Sims, a former venture capitalist and now friend.
Pete and I share a number of common interests: wine, K-os, long dinners, and above all… little bets.
It’s a favorite topic of conversation.
Perhaps a year ago, after a quick tour of the Stanford Institute of Design (d.school), Pete and I sat talking about start-ups in Tresidder dining hall. He was working on a new book about innovation, which he wanted to bridge different worlds, to explain the shared traits of the game changers.
The question he posed was simple: if you look at the biggest successes in the world, whether Apple CEO Steve Jobs, comedian Chris Rock, or award-winning architect Frank Gehry, what do they have in common?
Answer: the bigger they are, the more small bets they make.
Becoming the best of the best is less about betting the farm (a common misconception) and more about constant tinkering. Within Pixar or within Amazon, there is a method to the madness, but it’s not haphazard risk-taking.
In the following guest post, Peter will look at the unlikely evolution of a little tool. It’s a little tool now used to overthrow governments, and a tool that’s become a company some value at more than $10 billion: Twitter.
How the hell did it happen?… Read More
April 18th, 2011
Waterfall in Aix-en-Provence, France. (Photo: Mat3270)
“Didn’t you write that you believed BrainQUICKEN couldn’t be sold?”
The question — a common one — was from writer John Warrillow and for an article in Inc. Magazine.
The embarrassing answer was “yes.” In 2005, I had assumed it was impossible to sell my then start-up and, as with most assumptions, I was dead wrong. I sold BrainQUICKEN in 2009 and learned volumes in the process.
For example: counter to expectations, I ended up caring more about lack of strings than maximizing price… Read More
April 12th, 2011
(Photo: E. Murray)
The most frequent question I get is:
“How did you hit #1 on The New York Times bestseller list?”
Historically, I’ve answered with “That’s a long, long story.” If pressed further, I would explain that I couldn’t go into the details until I hit #1 a second time. Alas, in publishing and in life: once you’re lucky, twice you’re good.
Now, I can finally share the inside baseball of all I’ve learned (and witnessed) over the last five years.
For the first time, I’ll be deconstructing the biggest hits in publishing, including the preparation and execution of launches for my two books, both of which hit #1 New York Times:
The 4-Hour Workweek… (published April 2007)
#1 New York Times, #1 Wall Street Journal, #1 BusinessWeek
Called “The most surprising self-help hit of the decade” by Men’s Journal
More than 1,000,000 hardcovers sold in the US alone
Nearly four years unbroken on the New York Times Business Bestseller List
Sold in 35 languages, 60+ printings
An Amazon Top-10 Reader Favorite of 2007
AdAge “Best Product Launch for 2007”
Digital sales: 4.8% of total units
Advance paid: < $100,000 (signed before publication)
The media were kind in 2007, with quotes like “best self-promoter of all time” (Wired) and “branding wunderkind” (FastCompany).
But it wasn’t me. Not at all. It was due to process. To wit, the 2010 release of The 4-Hour Body:
The 4-Hour Body… (published December 2010)
Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller, #1 six out of the first eight weeks
Nearly 500,000 books sold in the first four months
Selling at FIVE times the rate of The 4-Hour Workweek
The #1 most-highlighted book of all time on Amazon (screenshot here)
[Note: The 4-Hour Workweek is currently #5, just below the Bible]
First business author to jump non-fiction categories and create another instant #1 hit
Digital sales: 30% of total units, 90%+ of which is Kindle
Advance paid (largely based on the proposal’s marketing plan): $2,000,000+
For the first time, I’m going to explain how my team did it all, ranging from flexible first principles and guidelines, to trench warfare and exact wording in pitches and partnership proposals.
It will be covered in a single seminar, planned as one-time-only –
OPENING THE KIMONO
Repeat Engineering of #1 — The Future of Book and Content MarketingDates: August 19 – 21, 2011
Location: California wine country, confidential retreat location. Details sent upon sign-up.
Available spots: Limited to 200 people.
Policies: No media coverage, no Twitter, Facebook, or other coverage of the event, and no recording whatsoever.
Who is it for?
Authors – Increase both advances and bestseller probabilities
Publishers/Agencies – Know which authors to bet on, sign bigger authors or win auctions, and increase your homerun ratio
PR/Marketing Professionals – Attract and retain the best clients who believe digital execution is the future
Anyone who wants to compete with (and learn from) the newest generations of whiz kids, rather than be defeated by them.
This seminar is not about buying your way onto the lists or the latest social media fads, though we’ll explain how people do the former. This seminar is a roadmap for the rarest of recipes: a repeatable and ethical content-creation and launch process that will put your product at the top and keep it at the top.
In sum: We’ll cover all of the most important lessons I’ve learned (and witnessed) over the last five years — and discover how to find elegance in the chaos.
The experience will include exact details of:
* Building marketing into content creation, and the value of working backwards
* First principles and overarching strategies in a digital world: the core of testing
* Timing of PR and phased outreach — exact calendars and e-mails
* How to build a high-traffic blog in minimal time, plus fatal mistakes
* Borrowing approaches from movies, and the art of the calculated tease
* How and when to use pre-sales (almost no one gets this right)
* Tools and tricks for project management without micro-management
* Secrets of the “Lean Launch” model
* Review copies and advanced copies — viral approaches
* Uses and misuses of Twitter and Facebook (I’m an investor in both)
* How to test high-leverage contrarian approaches without betting the farm
* How to combine offline with online, and when not to
* Dozens of real-world case studies
* Special guests seldom or never seen in the book world
* Much, much more…
It will also include fine wine, extensive Q&A opportunities to address your specific situations/challenges, high-level networking, and, of course, the beauty and wonder of wine country.
Once this event is sold-out, it is sold-out. There are no plans to repeat it.
Cost: $10,000
Just like TED and similar high-end events, flights and hotel are not included, but numerous surprise goodies will be provided on-site.
To sign-up for one of the 200 spots, please fill out this form. If you are new to this blog and are wondering — who the hell is this guy? — here is a short bio.
I look forward to meeting you and sharing a glass of Malbec. This will be an event to remember.
April 7th, 2011
The following is an interview with Daymond John, CEO of the clothing brand FUBU, whom I’ve come to know and respect. If there were one mantra I’d associate with him, it’s “where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
Can’t afford billboards? No problem — just pay retail store owners in key areas to let you spraypaint “FUBU” on their overnight roll-down security walls. His drive and improvisation has led him from sewing cloth in his kitchen to #15 on Details magazine’s list of “50 Most Influential Men.”
It would seem he’s just getting started, but I’ll let him tell the story… Read More
