Technology

When you look at any successful company, the chart is up and to the right. It looks fantastic.

However, the zoomed in reality of the day to day is not that. It’s a rollercoaster of metrics and emotions.

Being a founder or CEO is hard. You live zoomed in. Don’t compare yourself with the zoomed out chart of others.

The internet is, at its best, about human connections, trust between strangers and the power of people to help one another. It is on this foundation that Koko is built. Koko is a peer-to-peer network for emotional support that uses artificial intelligence and positive reframing to bring well-being to all users.

The premise is simple: We know that positive reframing can be a powerful tool to build resiliency. But doing it alone is challenging. We get caught up in unproductive thought patterns and hamstrung by our own biases. “You’re not alone” is a common refrain, but one that is of little comfort when you don’t feel like you have the support of people who understand what you’re going through. Koko democratizes access to emotional well-being by empowering anyone who can help to help.

Koko is meeting a fundamental need for emotional support that, to date, has really only been filled by friends, family, baristas and the like. But it’s often hard to share feelings of self-doubt or difficulty with bullying or loss with people we know. Koko is filling this gap by creating a completely new source of support. Koko is an anonymous, real-time emotional support tool that anyone can draw upon, when and where it’s needed, as often as needed, for free.

We’ve seen crowd contributions dramatically improve access to information (Wikipedia), knowledge (Quora, Stack Overflow) and capital (Kickstarter).When we first met co-founders Fraser Kelton, Rob Morris and Kareem Kouddous, they told us about the early inspiration for Koko. Rob was working on his PhD at the MIT Media Lab. With a background in psychology, Rob was new to coding and frustrated by code that didn’t work. He turned to Stack Overflow and found more than just answers. He found an unexpected source of mental and emotional support from fellow frustrated coders.

Like Stack Overflow, Koko harnesses the crowd’s desire to help one another by providing anonymous, one-on-one emotional support. Koko users see therapeutic benefits from contributing on both sides of the network. More than 80 percent of users both post and reframe, making the network that much stronger. Today, someone sharing a stressful situation receives an average of four responses, with the first arriving within five minutes. Ninety percent of responses are deemed helpful.

Unlike most other sources of emotional support, Koko reaches users when and where they need it most. With the launch of Kokobot, Koko extends the ability to give and receive support beyond the iOS environment. Kokobot works directly with messenger platforms like Kik to proactively identify individuals in need of support. For example, with the integration of Kokobot into Kik’s developer infrastructure, users don’t even have to recognize their need for support. When a Kik user shows signs of emotional distress while chatting with a third party bot, that bot can invite the user to meet Kokobot and receive support. Support is delivered seamlessly within the messenger platform, in real time. With Kokobot, we see enormous potential for any bot, messenger or conversational agent to provide its users with emotional support.

We are excited to lead Koko’s Series A, alongside existing investors Union Square Ventures and Joi Ito. With the new funding, Koko will focus on expanding its reach across messengers and improving the AI engine.

Earlier this year, a group of Stanford and UCSF researchers evaluated the performance of 77 conversational agents, including Siri, Google Now, Cortana and S Voice, in responding to simple questions about mental health, physical health, and domestic violence. Some performed better than others, but none was fully equipped to deal with users’ concerns. The researchers concluded: “if conversational agents are to respond fully and effectively to health concerns, their performance will have to substantially improve”.

As users continue to engage with bots and conversational agents, the need for emotional intelligence by these agents will only grow. We see emotional intelligence as a potentially enormous source of competitive advantage for these agents and their platform hosts, as well as a boon for human resiliency. While we’re not there yet, we look forward to a world that brings the best of human interactions to non-human interfaces.

It’s one thing to say, “you’re not alone”. With Koko, it’s nice to know that you truly aren’t alone.

Could not agree more with this post by Fred Wilson. One of the things we told PMs at eBay is “You are the CEO of the product”. It is great training to become the CEO of the company.

It’s not really different from what we look for in startup founders. Most of the time, the founders we back come from product backgrounds. They have a track record of building and shipping products. They are technical and can go toe to toe with their engineering team. They understand where technology is headed and they understand how software products are made and evolve.

When young people tell me they want to start or run a tech company, I always tell them to go work in product at a big tech company. I believe that product is the heart and soul of tech companies, it is where it all comes together. You can’t build a great company without great products (or great people).

Yes, Silicon Valley does amazing things – creates and changes industries, impacts people, imagines the future. Given that, one can either look at the rest of the country as a burden or an opportunity. One can either say “screw them, let’s move forward alone” or say “let’s help everyone move forward”.

The latter path is, obviously, much more painful.

What I love about the tech folks working in Obama’s “Stealth Startup” is that they are choosing that path.

Oh, and the stories about Weaver. “First name is Matthew,” Weaver says, sitting on a cheap couch in a makeshift office near the White House. But no one calls him Matthew, he explains, since there are too many Matthews in any given room at any given moment. Even among D.C.’s new technorati, people view Weaver as someone separate from the fray. Maybe it’s because he once lived in a camper in the Google parking lot without going home for an entire year. Maybe it’s because he was the one guy who, if he didn’t answer an emergency call, the whole search engine might go down. Or maybe it’s because in a group of brilliant engineers, Weaver, as one of his new colleagues puts it, stands out as “someone who is, like, superhero-fucking-brilliant.” Recruited from California last year by these guys Mikey and Todd to work on the broken Healthcare.gov website, Weaver decided this year to stay in D.C. and leave behind the comfort of Google and a big pile of stock options. He recalls it in terms that suggest the transfixing power of a holy pilgrimage. “That”—he says, meaning the Healthcare.gov fix-it work—”changed my life in a profound way. It made it feel like all my accomplishments in my professional life meant very little compared to getting millions of people through the hospital doors for the first time. And that made me see that I could never do any other work without a public impact.” Weaver now spends his days in the guts of the Veterans Administration, helping the agency’s digital team upgrade their systems and website—and trying to reboot the way government works. As an early test to see if he could challenge the VA’s protocol, he insisted, successfully, that his official government title be Rogue Leader. And so he is: Rogue Leader Weaver.

The popular history of science is full of such falsehoods. In the case of evolution, Darwin was a much better geologist than ornithologist, at least in his early years. And while he did notice differences among the birds (and tortoises) on the different islands, he didn’t think them important enough to make a careful analysis. His ideas on evolution did not come from the mythical Galápagos epiphany, but evolved through many years of hard work, long after he had returned from the voyage. (To get an idea of the effort involved in developing his theory, consider this: One byproduct of his research was a 684-page monograph on barnacles.)

The myth of the finches obscures the qualities that were really responsible for Darwin’s success: the grit to formulate his theory and gather evidence for it; the creativity to seek signs of evolution in existing animals, rather than, as others did, in the fossil record; and the open-mindedness to drop his belief in creationism when the evidence against it piled up.

The mythical stories we tell about our heroes are always more romantic and often more palatable than the truth. But in science, at least, they are destructive, in that they promote false conceptions of the evolution of scientific thought.

The mythification of very hard work makes for a good story, but it minimizes the effort that went into it.

The oversimplification of discovery makes science appear far less rich and complex than it really is.

This very good op-ed in the NYTimes is focused on science, but this is true not just for science – it’s true for almost anything. In tech, it’s the pithy “and now it’s a unicorn”. In film, it’s “and it premiered at (insert name of festival)”. The punchline ignores all the decisions and work that went before it.

While you are in the middle of the struggle, it’s easy to be seduced by the thought that others had it easy, that somehow it all came together instantly. But it’s the grind, the perseverance and the hard work that matters, even though it is unglamorous and hard and unreported. It’s the only thing you control.

The myths can seduce one into believing there is an easier path, one that doesn’t require such hard work.
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The Darwin, Newton and Hawking of the myths received that instant gratification. The real scientists did not, and real people seldom do.

 

People who change the world for the better should live to be a 100. Rest in peace, Steve Jobs. Thank you for everything. You changed my life. The world will miss you.

There’s a video doing the rounds of a young woman on the Metro North train who gets into a verbal altercation with the conductor¹. She keeps bringing up how “well-educated” she is. Her behavior is disgusting and despicable. Education has nothing to do with classy behavior. Neither does money. We’ve all seen enough examples of that.

BUT – what’s happened to her is also unacceptable. Her name has been made mud across the internet, people have posted her resume, there’s a Facebook page in her name where people are calling her a c**t. This stuff never goes away – ever. In 20 years it will still be there when you Google her name².

Is it a violation of her privacy to take video of her without her knowledge even though it’s a public place? I am not sure, but the person who took and posted the video is equally vile and despicable and has taken an unpleasant and disgusting situation and potentially ruined her life. That’s not fair punishment.

Why is there no repercussions to that person? He/she was being surreptitious – it’s not like he/she was bold and brave – the video was taken on the sly. This is the downside of videos on cell phones and instant uploads. The person probably posted it without thinking through the consequences. And now, there is no going back.

A sad situation, made sadder. Two wrongs were done here – let’s be very clear about that.

1. She happens to be South Asian, but that has little to do with this post. ↩

2. For that reason, I will not post any links to the video or any articles. ↩

If you read this blog, you know that I rarely, if ever, blog about food. Living in New York, it easy to eat at great restaurants and I manage to do that every once in a while. But at the core, I’m a reluctant cook.
If there was ever going to be a site that could change that, however, it would be Yummly¹. Billed as having “Every Recipe in the World”, it is incredibly well-organized and just… beautiful. I love beautiful sites – they make you feel good.

When you do a search for a recipe, the search results are well organized and each recipe is shown with a star rating, and how long it will take you to make it. For the reluctant, like me, this is excellent – it’s always a tradeoff between time it will take and yummyness. And yes, I am personally willing to trade off a bit of yummyness for oodles of time saved.

Each recipe is also ranked by flavor – Salty, Savory, Sour Bitter and Sweet. And a slider on the right side lets you specify if you want more and less and shows you options that fit your requirements. All this to say – it’s how a site should be designed. You want to find something? It has all the ways to help you refine and find exactly what you want. And since Yummly pulls in recipes from all over the web you will find a recipe for pretty much anything you want.

Try it out and let me know what you think!

1. Full disclosure: Yummly is founded by ex-eBay friends and colleagues and I’ve been aware of it since it was a sparkling little PowerPoint presentation in the founders’ hands ↩

Experts and developers say that is in part because the Android Market, the dominant store for Android apps, has some clunky features that can be annoying to phone owners eager to make a quick purchase. For starters, Android uses Google Checkout rather than an online payment system that more people are familiar with, like PayPal. As a result, many Android developers make their apps available free and rely on mobile advertisements to cover the cost.

In large companies, when a team is building a new product, there is often pressure to use other products/services offered by the company, even if they are not the best products in the market or the best user experience.

That is a mistake.

Google’s Android Marketplace product and development teams should build the best product they can. For the checkout component, they should use the best product out there – the one that guarantees the best user experience.

Internal and external products should be treated the same and allowed to compete for the right to be part of the product. For example, if PayPal is the best product, they should use PayPal for checkout. This puts the onus on the Google Checkout team to improve their product – it forces them to be competitive and up to scratch. It ensures that the Google Checkout team is never complacent, never just expecting to be slotted in just because they are a part of Google. It forces a startup, competitive mindset onto the team.

This open, competitive approach is not easy to do. In fact, it is very hard. There will be a lot of voices that say that Google should push Google Checkout in order to get adoption up – basically, prop it up. It’s almost always the wrong way to go, in this case for the Android Marketplace and if you are willing to take a bigger picture, for Google Checkout as well.