Uncrunched

What happens to Apple now that Steve Jobs is gone? Check out this 2009 post from Chris Dixon that compares Apple and Steve Jobs to Sony and Akio Morita titled MAN AND SUPERMAN.

Akio was famous for slamming focus groups, instead focusing on building things that consumers didn’t know that they want until it already exists. Steve Jobs felt the same way. Few consumer electronics companies have that kind of courage.

Reprinted in full below, with his permission:

MAN AND SUPERMAN

There are two broad philosophical approaches to explaining the forces that drive world events. The first one is sometimes called the Great man theory, neatly summarized by the quote ”the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” This view was famously espoused by the philosopher Hegel and later Nietzche, who called such great people Ubermenchen (“supermen”).

The alternative view argues that history is largely determined by a complex series of societal, political, institutional, technological and other forces. This view argues that great people are more a product of their time than the times are a product of them.

You can apply these theories to companies, in particular to the founders of technology companies who keep their companies great long after their “natural” life cycle. Most successful companies start with one great product and ride its growth but fail to pull off a second act.

The companies that defy this natural cycle are invariable run by “supermen” (or women). Akio Morita founded Sony in 1946 and was a very active CEO until 1994. At the time he left, Sony had a $40B market cap. Today it is valued at $28B. Akio had an incredible run of hit products: the first transistor radio, the first transistor television, the Walkman, the first video cassette recorder, and the compact disc. Akio ran Sony based on his intuitions. For example, he ignored focus groups that hated the Walkman, saying:

“We don’t ask consumers what they want. They don’t know. Instead we apply our brain power to what they need, and will want, and make sure we’re there, ready”

Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976. He was pushed out in in May 1985 when the company was valued at about $2.2B. He returned in 1996 when Apple was worth $3B. Today it is worth $169B. Jobs famously micromanages every product detail and like Akio makes decisions based on intuitions.

Bill Gates was the co-founder and CEO of Microsoft, building it to an astounding $470B market cap. Under him, Microsoft had multiple acts, among them: DOS, Windows, Office, and enterprise server software. Since Steve Ballmer became CEO, the company’s value has declined to $223B. I’m sure Steve Ballmer is a smart and passionate guy, but he’s no superman.

Some observers like the author Jim Collins think great companies are all about culture, not a singularly great leader. Collin’s “built to last” case study companies included Circuit City and Fannie Mae, both of which have been catastrophic failures. His “portfolio” has underperformed to S&P.

It is convenient to think you can take greatness and bottle it up and sell it in a book. In fact, life is unfair: there are geniuses and then there are the rest of us. When great leaders go away, so does the greatness of their companies.

TechCrunch Disrupt champion Shaker, an Israeli virtual world startup, has closed a $15 million round of financing. The round was led by Shervin Pishevar at Menlo Ventures. CrunchFund was already an investor in Shaker, and participated in this new round as well.

Other investors in this round include Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Troy Carter and Rami Beracha from Pitango.

Here’s the TechCrunch post about Shaker winning Disrupt last month, and here’s their launch post and demo video.

The company was founded in Israel but recently opened a San Francisco office, which will be the new company headquarters. Shaker was founded by Ofer Rundstein, Yonatan Maor and Gad Maor.

Pishevar has a serious crush on the company. I asked him to tell me why he invested, and how he first met the team. In his own gushing words:

I was blown away by talent of the Shaker team. I’ve been searching for many years for what only Shaker has accomplished. We at Menlo Ventures are excited to be leading this major investment in Shaker. Shaker is the human serendipity engine. Shaker is going to touch and transform human connection and entertainment worldwide.”

Mike, so here’s the crazy story of how I met them. I was working on scouting a Jedi Council retreat in Cabo. I met these amazing guys from Mexico at Summit Series who are were working on an entrepreneurs resort. I began mentoring one of them, Bear. He wanted to learn how to become an investor and VC in the future. My advice was to go forth and travel around the world scouting for amazing startups and bring it back. I didn’t expect to hear from him for months. Instead, a mere 3 weeks later he had traveled to Egypt and Israel, and I flew into Burning Man. He said, “Shervin, I listened to you! Thank you! And I found this amazing startup, Shaker. And they are flying into the Playa tonight and they are competing in Techcrunch Disrupt!” That night I met them and was very impressed with them and their vision. But with no connection I had to wait until the following Tuesday to get the demo at a Samovar in San Francisco. Within a minute, I knew what I saw was the future. I had been looking for this for years. Their product execution was nearly flawless. A very hard feat to accomplish given the vision. The next day I brought them in to meet the rest of the Menlo partners. They agreed and we were off! Meanwhile, while we tried to come to an agreement on an investment, Shaker won Disrupt! I actually got the term sheet done and signed from the streets of Haiti the following weekend while I was volunteering in Haiti for jp/hro! Hopefully, there will be karma in that and all of the serendipity that brought us together.

I am very excited that Shaker is my first major investment at Menlo! Go Shaker!

Why’d we invest? Like Airtime, Shaker addresses the difficulty in meeting new people on the Internet:

“We are trying to address the problem of what has happened the last 10 years of social media,” says Parker, who was also the founding President of Facebook. “Your social network has become more rigid and constraining.” Airtime, it seems, will be more about meeting new people. “Facebook is about identity, the people you already know,” says Parker. “It has little to do with people you don’t know.”

Shaker is a virtual world where you can meet new people using your Facebook identity (picture and basic information). It’s strangely addictive. And we’re very excited to be investors.

…which you can only get if you have a blog and replace the header logo with the Apple logo 🙂 . Or you visit an Apple store three times. A nice surprise, I didn’t even know it existed (here’s more on it).

This was a real checkin, even though most of my Foursquare checkins are part of my fantasy life. Just bought a shiny new Macbook Air.