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Warm Inside With A Blanket

I had lunch with an old friend the other day and he shared with me a great story.  I liked it so much, I asked if I could blog about it, and he said “yes” but asked me not to attribute it to him, lest his investors get worried.

The preamble to the conversation was that we were discussing his current life as a startup CEO, and my former life as a startup CEO.  I was sharing some story about how it felt like I knew all of these amazing people who had achieved amazing success, and that by most any measure I am a success, and yet I feel like a mid-level achiever at best.  The relativity of success can really be a pain, and I work really hard to not forget that.

He thought about what I said for a bit, and he then started telling me about a guy he met who was still at Microsoft, and was going on and on about how much he loved my friend’s app.  LOVED it.  And that he was so jealous that “he was out there making it happen” and “working on such a cool app” and “how [he] wish[ed he] could be doing that.”  To which my friend replied (and this is the part I love):

So I tell him - Hey dude…you’re inside under a blanket.  It’s warm under that blanket.  Food is on the stove.  Someone’s cooking it for you.  And paying for the heat.  You want to pull back the curtains a bit?  See me outside?  Alone?  It’s cold out there.  In fact, it’s freezing.  Look at that.  I have no shoes on.  And it’s snowing.  Wait, what’s that?  I’m naked.  And hungry.  And being chased by a wolf.  No, wait, I didn’t hear them right.  A wolf pack is howling on the hill.  Did I mention I was bleeding?  And the only place for me to hide is in that lake over there.  It’s freezing out, so, you know, it’s iced over.  To survive, I have to break through the ice with my bare hands before the wolves get me.  And sharks are swimming in the lake.  I hope they’re sleeping.  Man it must be warm in there under that blanket.

One could not be faulted for confusing this with a “grass is always greener” parable.  It’s more than that.  This isn’t about longing for something new, nor a scare tactic from a whinging CEO.  Ultimately, it’s a vivid picture of what it is like to be in a small company, when you aren’t sure if your last pivot was your last one because you have no more pivots to make, or because you need make no more pivots.  It’s great because it speaks to the fear of being out there on your own.  It highlights that even when you know that what you have to do will lead you to a bad outcome, you choose it because it appears to be a lesser of two evils outcome, and what you are trying to do is live to fight another day.

UPDATE:  I love good old fashioned marketing and gumption.  A friend of mine with a presentation builder app said this story would make a great deck using his app.  I was skeptical, but he proved me wrong.

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New Ad Model by Facebook

Facebook continues to be on the mind.  I took a quick read of Michael Wolff’s piece which suggests that Facebook lacks big ideas to justify their valuation.  I am not sure I agree with that.  The folks that I have met at Facebook have plenty of ideas.  Outward appearances seem to indicate that they are lacking a bit of focus around their revenue model.

Their currently executed ad model is the same as what we have had on the Internet for the last 15 years, though they could argue that they have better data.  Data is not the asset they think it is.  It’s scarce, so it appears to have value.

What Google has, which Facebook does not, is intent.  Customers are searching for something, and, in some cases, their intent is to purchase something, whether now or soon.  People go to Facebook to socialize.  I’m not generating any new ideas here.

What Facebook does have is loads and loads of users, and a platform for applications.  They also have a strong brand, and businesses who believe that there is a better model to be had for reaching customers on Facebook.

I’d like to turn the clock back and revisit the reverse auction model.  My co-founders from IMSafer went through Y!Combinator in S09 with their awesome service Carwoo.  They have build a great reverse auction site for cars, and it’s working.  Cars are really expensive, and harder to change the model for both buyers and consumers, but their success demonstrates that this model can work online.

Way back in the day (read: the late 90s) there were a couple of companies that tried this sort of thing for regular everyday items.  They also tried models that allowed groups of people to get together to buy the same item en masse, thus reducing the price.  None of them worked.  There’s a variety of reasons, but a prominent one is that they all had to boil the ocean.  They had to do customer acquisition, build a seller network, and design and build a platform to bring it all together.

No imagine a place where a customer can go, and type in the name of a product that they would buy, what price they want for it, and be bound to that offer if their price is met.  This is how open orders work for stocks.  There’s actually two models here: 1) that you have your “sell it to me now” price, and 2) that you will definitely buy, but want to see all your offers.  The first is easy to police and apply quality of service, with the intermediary acting as escrow for funds.  The second is much harder to ensure a low abandon rate on the part of buyers, which wastes sellers’ time.

What’s prevented this from model working online?  For starters, bringing customers and sellers together, as well as the built-in behaviors and expectations of the players in these transactions.  Only now is it clear that your average consumer is as comfortable ordering online as walking into a store.

Facebook has certainly changed many built-in behaviors of customers.  They have created a new adjective for business transactions – social.  How would you build social into this?  Easy.  For any goods (including non-standard ones like services), your friends can see what offers you have in your queue and comment on them.  Reviews from your friends can be persistent, meaning that they would get shared again and again as more of your friends look for items of that type.  Sounds a lot like the open graph, no?

The idea is simple – allow users to make declarative statements about things they want to buy/rent/etc, and have a marketplace where vendors can service those calls.  This may happen because of a status update they just read (“I’d love to see Avengers tonight!”) or some pictures a friend posted (“That hotel looks amazing – I want to book a 5 day vacation to Maui”).  For hard goods, matching price and seller is easy.  For services, allow consumers to evaluate different offers which fulfill their needs.

The nerd in me wants to explain like this: Allow individuals to create objects in a personal queue, which gets flushed to a global queue, accessible by all vendors, and when an offer is made, the vendor sends their offer out, where it is routed to the right personal queue.  This would be anonymous for “buyers”, but “sellers” would at least be able to see the relevant social graph data – i.e. age group, number of friends, size of network, location, their interests, their friends interests, etc.  Lots of data to help the sellers decide what they would be willing to pay for customer acquisition.  Sellers pay Facebook for completed offers.  Buyers are contract-bound to complete the transaction – which gives sellers certainty that they will get the business.  A queue item could be made cancellable at any time by the buyer for a fee, but that’s an advanced topic for another time.

Facebook has the infrastructure.  They have the open graph.  They have the customers.  They have the advertisers.  This may not meld with the worldview inside of Facebook of how they will ultimately monetize.  It certainly feels less creepy to me than the current model in terms of how customer information gets shared and when.  It also changes the behavior queue of the consumer.  Right now the queue is the desire to buy something and the reward is the completion of that transaction.  The behavior (searching for things on Google) can be replaced with a new one (make declarative statements about things I want to buy) without having to change the trigger or the reward.

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What Kind of Entrepreneur Are You

I got asked by a young local entrepreneur to be his mentor.  He was looking for help in how to think about his most recent pivot, and how to take his newest creation to market.  As I started asking some questions about what he was doing and why, I found myself wandering into racing metaphors.  They made sense at the time, so I wanted to share them here.

Two Stroke

Do you require constant fiddling?  Are you extremely temperamental?  Likely to just up and quit because the conditions are not just right?  These are the hallmarks of the two stroke engine.  They have more power for their mass than their four stroke cousins, but mainly are they a pain to maintain.  If not properly lubricated (substitute money for oil), things just seize up and die, usually with painful results:

HighSide

Casey Stoner going over the high side – (purists will note this is not a 2 stroke engine). Photo credit.

NASCAR

Ahhh NASCAR.  It’s a lovely form of racing.  To the casual observer, they might think I was making a comment about going round and round but not actually getting anywhere.  Funny, but no.  What I mean when I use this term is the money, or rather, the amount of it a founder will require:

61082947

Lineup of NASCAR race cars. Photo credit.

It’s not an insignificant amount of money to get that car rolling.  Much less out of the garage.  All that money means overhead, management and complications.  Being a NASCAR team owner means you are basically spending all of your time raising money.  Spending time chasing dollars and managing your commitments to your sponsors.  In short, you are more focused on getting the sticker on the car, and not getting the car across the finish line. [note: I am using NASCAR as a metaphor, and not saying that actual NASCAR owners are not concerned with winning.]

Club Racers

The club racer is a special breed.  They are dedicated.  They are die hard.  They are crafty.  Only a club racer could find so many uses for duct tape.  More importantly, a club racer knows the details.  They know how many miles are on those pistons.  They know how many heat cycles your tires have seen.  They know what the weather is going to be, and thus the required jetting and tuning for the engine.  They know.  Not someone else somewhere else on the team.  They are obsessed with knowing these things.  They measure everything and look for any incremental improvements they can get.  They will live out of the back of a van, driving themselves from race to race, living on bare minimum budget to ensure they live to race another day.  Tenacious.  Budget conscious.  Racing because they love it.  It’s not a job.  It’s a passion project.  It’s what they breathe.

Lest someone be confused that the club racer ethos can’t find it’s way to the big stage, allow me to introduce you to Romani Fenati.

Fenati

Romani Fenati at Jerez, Moto 3 race 2012

What you may not immediately notice is the utter lack of stickers and sponsors.  To have that much empty space on the side of the bike, never mind a plain white helmet, is unheard of at the world level of racing.  He finished his debut race in Qatar in second place.  He was a last minute addition to the Moto 3 roster by the Italian Motorcycle Federation, completely unknown and completely unsponsored.  And he crushed it.  Always be ready to capitalize on those opportunities when they arise.

I’ll leave it to you to sort out what type of entrepreneur you are, or with which ones I prefer to work.

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Facebook and Instagram - 37 cents to 19 billion dollars

It seems I can’t have any discussions with entrepreneurs without the topic of Instagram coming up.  They all think that now is their time to strike the iron since the valuations are going to the stratosphere.

I want to be very specific and clear on this point.  Facebook bought Instagram.  Instagram was not sold to Facebook.  That’s an important distinction, and lends well to the conclusion of this discussion.

Before we get there, for all the entrepreneurs out there, I wanted to share some experience on the topic of road shows.  The very first road show in which I participated was Cymer, way back when I was a summer associate at Morgan Stanley.  It was extremely exciting for a young guy, and unbelievably grueling for the management team.

The essence of the road show is that a company wishing to go public works with their investment bank to travel around the world meeting with institutional investors to convince them that they should buy stock in the coming offering.  The process is a real slog, riddled with questions about the business and why the investors should invest.  Those questions can make the difference in the price of the offering to the public market.

It’s critical to understand a few things here.  Companies, when they go public, book the cash from the sale of the shares based on the first price.  When a deal sets its price range, as Facebook did today of $28-$35, the company will receive their cash based on where that price lands.  The employees and shareholders who continue to hold through the offering benefit from the price appreciation which comes in the months and years following.

The person who stands to benefit the most from future price appreciation is none other than Zuck.  He wants the price to go up.  More to the point, he wants to limit the possibility of the road show landing on the price at the bottom of the range, and potentially impacting the day 1 pop, future excitement, etc.  Based on the S1 capitalization table, the valuation implied by this price range is between $75B and $94B.

Now, back to Instagram.  People seem to be universally of the opinion that Instagram was not worth $1B.  They are wrong.  A thing is worth what someone will pay for it.  Zuck was willing to pay $1B.  Apparently without the consent of his board (since he controls voting).

If Zuck was worried about protecting the value of the stock, and maximizing his upside, it would behoove him to remove from the table any questions he might get from investors about “this Instagram thing” or “what are you going to do about Instagram and your mobile users” or “isn’t your engagement model based on traffic, and you are not the leading photo solution for mobile, which you have identified as critically important since mobile users are 2x more engaged?”  You see where I am going with this?

So Zuck uses some stock to increase the likelihood that the price lands at the top end of the range.  Doing some quick math reveals that the $1B price was really only worth about $0.37 per share of Facebook stock (based on the pricing range).  Remember, this money he’s getting from other people when the stock prices.  So Zuck spent $0.37 per share to protect his personal downside.  $0.37 per share to maximize the likelihood that the price of the offering lands at $35 and not $28.  It’s a very smart move.

The counter argument would be that investors would not have ascribed so much value to Instagram.  They may not have…directly anyway.  Investor sentiment is fickle and needs to be nurtured.  The job of Zuck, the management team, and the bankers is to remove doubt.  Doubt can cause the price to land at $28.  Still a great day for employees, but the company loses $2.3B in cash from the sale of the stock.  Further, the value of the company would be $19B less if it priced at the low end of the range versus the high.

In the case of a pricing of $28 versus $35, Zuck would lose $211M on the shares he is offering, and $3.5B of post offering share value.  Is the $1B payment for Instagram starting to make a bit more sense?

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Three Steps To The Developer Heart

One theme that surfaced for me at SxSW this week was the incredible amount of energy being expended trying to find developers for projects.  It certainly is a theme that should help the guys at StackExchange, if only they figure out how to reach this audience.  I was in so many rooms where the number of companies with ideas needing devs outnumbered the developers in the room - sometimes as high as 25x in a single room.

At first I thought that this was a systemic problem with SxSW.  I’m not sure I have the data to support that conclusion, but there was a different problem afoot.  Each and every one of these entities with ideas was going about their developer search completely wrong.  Showing up with an iPad with large font text saying “I need devs” is not a good marketing strategy.

I also met quite a few companies trying to hawk their API wares and didn’t know how to go about getting developers excited.  The skill set I have been building over my working career is understanding the mind of the developer, and how to reach them.  I wanted to share this out so that others can reduce what was perceived as frustration as a lack of ability to find developers or get them excited about a project they had.

Go Where Developers Are

It’s a bit of an obvious statement, but seriously, if you are a company looking for developers, go where they go.  If you are at SxSW, they may not be at the meetups.  Why?  Because they are off demoing/showing their apps.  They are at these broader events for the same reason you are – to do business.  Developers are in hot demand right now, and that supply/demand imbalance dictates that they are not only busy, but not partial to interruptions.

Go where they go.  Is there a local iPhone developer group in your area?  What about a technology specific show (PyCon FTW)?  If the developers are at the event to learn versus to do business, you are likely better off.

Be a Coder

I got called a “marketing douchebag” on a panel at SxSW.  I tried not to take offense.  I am a product manager after all.  However, I am a hobbyist coder.  How can you be a developer marketer and not be?  I love spending time writing code to make something cool.  Is my solution the most elegant and efficient?  Probably not.  Can I wax philosophically about string interpolation of C#?  I can now (thanks Miguel).

If you cannot speak the language, or understand the issues, how can you have a constructive conversation?  More importantly, it’s just not as hard as you think.  Seriously.  We have a Windows Phone series for absolute beginners.  I know the notion of downloading tools may seem scary.  Try it.  Most of the dev communities have walk throughs to make it mostly doable by anyone who can install Office.  If you can wrangle an XLS, you can likely get through some of the really beginner stuff.  You may even like it.  Net net, being credible in conversations in the dev user groups means at least being conversant.

Have a Prototype

Even if your design is awful, getting your concept across with working code is FAR FAR FAR more effective than PowerPoint slides or your highly polished 25 words or less routine.  Here’s a secret about developers – any one worth their salt will see what you have and want to make it better.  They may want to join your project, or they may just give you some tips on how to improve on what you are showing so that the next dev who sees it may get interested.  Either way, you get some good feedback which is actionable by you.  You are more likely to not change your slides or 25 word pitch, and just move on to the next developer, but getting actionable feedback from a developer is priceless.

The other benefit of having a prototype – a completely unpolished turd even – means you have had to communicate your ideas to the screen.  That will show you the flaws in what you are trying to explain in words or PowerPoint, and makes for a much more constructive conversation with potential devs.  Your idea gets better simply by trying to work through it on the screen.

So there you go.  I hope that’s helpful for all the non-technical types looking to get to the dev community.  It’s a great time to be a developer, and so much positive energy around projects.

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Developers: Why You May Not Want To Listen To Robert Scoble

I love Scoble.  I really do.  He’s a great source of content, and occasionally controversy.  In a post today, he suggests that developers should build for Android tablets.  I am left a little confused as to his overall logic train, so let’s poke at a few of his points.

The Bar is Low

Really?  The last time I checked, developers were not the types who wanted to walk into a room barely filled with mediocre people and declare themselves the best.  The lure of trying to unseat Angry Birds is a strong siren song.  Using Robert’s logic, the ones who couldn’t cut it are currently developing for Android tablets, so you should go hang out with them.

Crowds = Death

This is fairly well reasoned notion.  Having to deal with immediate scale is killer.  Robert is pointing to the Twitterati as the arbiters of a developer’s success.  What he doesn’t take into account is that editorial selection from the AppStore tribunal would result in a similar challenge to scale.

Hard Earned Dollars Results in Scrapiness

This is a true statement.  However, the uber point is lost in his analysis.  Android is a more difficult platform on which to monetize.  No amount of scrapiness is going to overcome flawed platform decisions.  You can be pretty scrappy when you are making no money on a platform designed to enable marketplace transactions too, and you have the benefit of knowing that as you succeed, the dollars are a result of your actions, and not failings on the part of the platform provider.

Build Unique Stuff

That’s an interesting statement.  I am sure it’s true to some extent, but most developers are looking for interesting scenarios to that lead to sales, not gee whiz factor.

Define Google’s Marketing

One of the core principles of our team is to make sure we are 100% focused on the success of the developers.  We give them whatever they need to be successful, and engage with them wherever we can to find out what we can be doing better.  Robert is making a suggestion that Google is going to reach out to the dev community for help in this regard.  Unless he has inside knowledge, I haven’t seen this actually occurring in the market.  He does make one very good point – Google hasn’t figured out how it will sell its tablet.  The same can be said for the how they promote developers on their platform.

Access to Lacking Features

See point above about unique stuff.  I am confused.  Using widgets + getting on Oprah means your app is more polished than Flipboard?  That’s a damn polished app.  I am not sure widgets would make it more so.  Notifications certainly enable an entirely new way to interact with customers – we’ve got them on Windows Phone 7 and devs are making some cool uses of them.

“Smooth” is Harder

I get that if you figure out how to optimize on the platform, and figure out all kinds of neat tricks, you will be a better programmer.  Totally agree.  You know what else makes you a great programmer?  Getting to focus on your algorithms and overall experience, and not dealing with ridiculous, time consuming, soul sapping optimizations which shouldn’t have to be discovered in the first place.  Developers universally tell us that they love working with the Windows Phone Developer Tools because of the maturity of the tools, the smoothness of the UI, and the ability to focus on the experience, and not nonsense.  You shouldn’t need an additional toolkit for dealing with fragmentation.

Get Noticed

I don’t buy this.  I am not likely to pay more attention because someone has something I don’t.  It may work for the first 2 people to come up to me with a Xoom, but after that, it won’t.  At SxSW, this will not be the case.  Too many plugged in people.  Getting noticed is about having something of value, or being able to cut through the clutter.  Having a Xoom is not a marketing strategy.  Being awesome is.

Fandroids

The fans matter.  Absolutely.  Do they have influence?  That’s the question.  There’s quite a lot of fans of the WebOS as well.  Getting more people to yell into the Techcrunch/Scoble echo chamber is not a marketing strategy.  It’s simply not.  Robert highlights the very difficult part of being a mobile app developer: getting noticed.  The fan boys are fine for an initial early adopter push, but to really get noticed, there’s a much larger problem to be solved.  What is the “backrub algorithm” equivalent for apps?  That’s a post for another time, but the company that figures that out is going to be unbelievably wealthy.

Iterate Faster

Being able to publish faster into a broken marketplace is not a suitable replacement for a broken marketplace experience.  There’s a reason Robert pointed out that people are having a hard time monetizing on Android.

At the end of the day, developers want sockets.  Android tablets will lag iPad for some time in that regard.  As they will also lag iPhone/iPod Touch and Android handsets.  Android hasn’t clearly demonstrated you can make money on their platform when they are supposedly activating 300,000 handsets a day, what makes Robert think that targeting a smaller target market (Android tablets) is a more viable alternative when the underlying marketplace flaws around monetization remain?  That’s not to say developers aren’t making money on Android.  It’s just not as easy as other alternatives in the market.

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Kryptonite and SAT Analogies

I was listening to the most recent TWiT where there was discussion about the recent algo change at Google.  During the conversation, there was an off-hand comment about whether or not the following relationship held water:

Google:Social as Microsoft:Search

That one kind of bent my mind around a bit.  There isn’t any new thought here.  Social is presenting all kinds of problems for Google, and despite their success in South America and some other locales with Orkut, they really haven’t made much of a dent in social.  A fact made more known by the recent additions of the talents of Marissa Mayer to the task.

Some have argued that social isn’t in the DNA at Google, and that’s the source of their problems.  It’s not too hard of a stretch to make the same claim about Microsoft: that we never had search in our DNA.

The analogy, however, breaks down when you spend a bit more time thinking about the subtleties of the companies.  Microsoft, at the core, is a platform company.  This is an important distinction, and one we will revisit in a little bit.  Microsoft started with dev tools, moving to operating systems, into desktop publishing and productivity, into the enterprise with OS and database, and branching ever more from there into mobile, cloud, web, etc, and of course into search.

Microsoft has had many successful forays beyond what is viewed as it’s knitting.  I have tried, quite unsuccessfully, to drive home the following point to people: Microsoft is a tremendous business even without Office and Windows Client.  Think about these businesses:

  1. Windows Server
  2. SharePoint
  3. SQL Server
  4. Project
  5. Visual Studio
  6. System Center
  7. Exchange
  8. Xbox

Those are businesses which are very, very large.  As in, start thinking about three commas.  Think about that for a moment.  Let that wash over you.  What else does Google have?  Search is their hit.  It’s a master stroke sort of hit, but really, what else have they done?  Android is big business, to be sure, but it exists to serve search.

Continue reading “Kryptonite and SAT Analogies”

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Paul Graham’s Dilemma

I have to make sure I don’t take 4 months off from blogging again.  Having re-read this for editing, I had a lot to say, but more importantly, I enjoyed the mental exercise it put me through.

I am not sure that I am going to tread much new ground in simply covering the weekend news of Yuri Milner and Ron Conway basically blanket offering $6M to the Y!Combinator crop.  There’s been plenty of analysis and moaning about this being the beginning of the end for the tech market.

As a former founder, and venture capitalist (late stage, but investor in private companies nonetheless), I wanted to touch on a few points I hadn’t seen elsewhere.

Yuri is a genius.  Why?  Think about what you need to do when you are an angel investor.  You have a little bit of money (relative to the overall venture pie) that you want to get into deals.  There are quite a few more angels then there are venture funds.  Competition is fierce and getting into deals is really all about who you know.  As a venture investor, your primary concern is “proprietary deal flow.”  In English, that means having sources of deals that other guys don’t have.  That problem is somewhat exacerbated when there is fierce competition for deals.

Further compounding the problem of the angel investor is the high beta nature of the deals.  In short, you have WAY more company failures than wins.  You just hope to make the winners payout more than the losers.  You expect to be compensated for that risk.  So even if you have proprietary deal flow, you need to get into good deals to reduce your risk.  Investing is supposed to be about risk management after all.

Paul Graham acts as a (so far) pretty good filter function for deals.  By just writing a check to all the companies in the portfolio, Yuri solved two problems in one swipe – Paul did the work to get the a good portfolio of angel deals, and Yuri now has access to all of them.  Further, he has put money to work evenly in a portfolio of deals which are more or less not competitive.  He didn’t have to spend 2 years putting money to work in 40 deals.  He did it one shot, effectively enabling himself to have a nice angel mutual fund.  Genius.

Continue reading “Paul Graham’s Dilemma”

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Epic Book Fail

I was watching Colbert the other night, and caught the very tail end of an interview with author Annie Leonard.  She was promoting her new book, “The Story of Stuff.”  I didn’t catch enough of the interview to know if I wanted to buy it, but did catch enough to grab my Kindle to order up a sample chapter.

The subtitle of the book is: How Our Obsession with Stuff Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-and a Vision for Change.  Let’s stop and think about that one for a second.  The author is railing against how the obsession with consuming, ostensibly, atoms is ruining the planet.  OK, I get that.

Imagine my surprise when I could only purchase her book in atom form.  Not available on the Kindle.  Wha?  Look, I get that not everyone has a Kindle, and that reading devices aren’t quite mainstream, but doesn’t this hypocrisy sort of negate her whole message?  Dave Ramsey rails against the use of debt for anything.  He’s a man who stands by his principles.  You cannot use a credit card to purchase wares from his site.

What principles is Ms. Leonard standing by when her book is not available at ship date in any form other than atoms?  The lesson here for entrepreneurs is pretty clear.  Know what you stand for, and why, and stick to it, lest you ruin your credibility.  This is an epic fail.

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Simple Tax Idea For Students And Businesses

I have long held that our current system of taxation is a bad one.  It’s oppressive, is changed too often, and encourages cheating.  Further, the more complicated the tax code, the more likely you are to have to spend more time, and in many cases money, sorting out what you do and don’t owe.  It’s onerous and I hate the current system.  I want to hack it.

With that out of the way, it was with some interest that I was reading this article about the multitude of tax programs which are being enacted to help students get out of debt post school.  When thinking about any program, I view it in the same lens as I would a product that I would take to market.  First is who is my customer, but second is how do they become aware of the product.  For the average person, staying on top of all of these government programs is challenging at best.  In times like these, I prefer to opt for simplicity.  With that, let me propose some assertions, and then a potential solution:

1) As a country, we should aspire to have a more educated work force

2) The cost of college, university, and graduate education is rising faster than the rate of inflation, making it more un-affordable with each passing year

3) With the current tax system, a higher paid, and more productive, work force should, ceteris paribus, generate more tax revenues

If we can all agree on those assertions, then I propose this simple tax plan:

Continue reading “Simple Tax Idea For Students And Businesses”