Om Malik is the founder of GigaOM. He is a venture partner at True Ventures. Om is the author of Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist. He has been blogging for over a decade and in the past held various staff writing positions at Forbes.com, Red Herring and Business 2.0. He also has contributed to the Wall Street Journal and the Economist. He is the founder of Desiparty.com. His full bio is here.
“We had periods, like the early Macintosh, when we had more people working on it than they did. And then we were competitors. The personal computers I worked on had a vastly higher [market] share than Apple until really the last five or six years, where Steve’s very good work on the Mac and on iPhones and iPads did extremely well.
He spent a lot of his time competing with me. There are lots of times when Steve said [critical] things about me. If you took the more harsh examples, you could get quite a litany. I got a fair bit of time with him in his last year. We spent literally hours reminiscing and talking about the future. I told Steve about how he should feel great about what he had done and the company he had built. I wrote about his kids, whom I had got to know.
There was no peace to make. We were not at war. We made great products, and competition was always a positive thing. There was no [cause for] forgiveness.”
“There is no technology, no time-saving device that can alter the rhythms of creative labor. When the worth of labor is expressed in terms of exchange value, therefore, creativity is automatically devalued every time there is an advance in the technology of work.” Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World [via]
P.T. Barnum once famously said that there is no bad publicity. Of course, if you are, say a guy who is going bankrupt, or marrying and divorcing blondes or hosting an outrageous reality television show where you are firing people, like say Donald Trump, you probably like the idea of bad publicity. But if you are an entrepreneur running a technology company, let me tell you, there can definitely too much publicity. Infact, overexposure in media is actually bad for you. Let me elaborate.
In my long tenure as a technology writer, I have seen many patterns. The worst of them, from a startup perspective, is overexposure. During the dot-com mania of the 1990s, there were a few people who were constantly in the press — Naveen Jain (Infospace) and Jeff Dachis (Razorfish), to take just two examples. (See 60 minutes: DotCom Kids) They were always available for a quick “quip.”
Most of these quips were pretty worthless. The more these experts talked to the media, the less they had to say. After a few months of seeing their quotes, I had developed a certain kind of blindness to these entrepreneurs and what they had to say. I mean, if you read something again and again in half-a-dozen magazines and a handful of online publications, you kind of stop paying attention. Today’s technology media landscape is worse – there are just too many publications, both new and old, all looking for comments.
I totally understand that startups need attention. In order to get it, they hire media relations professionals who try and get their comments into every possible story, regardless of its impact on the overall strategy of the company. That’s their job. In fact they get paid by the media mentions! But it is the wrong approach — and extremely short-term thinking.
Why? Talk too often, and the media will soon think: He has nothing new to say — didn’t I hear him talk about this recently? Too much media exposure means that the focus of media attention starts to shift from the product (and the company) to the person, and that is never a good thing.
Now look at Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook. She doesn’t make a statement every day and doesn’t comment on everything. Whenever she speaks to the media, it is about Facebook’s operations, revenues, goals and company’s strategy. It is a good strategy to emulate. Say you are Brian Chesky (of AirBnB), it makes perfect sense for you to talk about the emergence of people-to-people economy and positioning AirBnB from that context. It makes AirBnB seem part of a much bigger movement. Staying focused on the bigger picture and your product is what it means to be “on message” without being boring or obvious.
So unless you are the equivalent of Donald Trump, keep in mind, too much publicity is bad for you.
In 2009, I saw TV presenter James May wax eloquent about the Mercedes 300 SL Gullwing on British motoring show Top Gear. He said that it was a super car long before there were super cars. Sort of like the 2G iPhone before everything else. (Okay that’s just stretching the truth too far.) Anyway I was fascinated by that clip, and that is why I was drawn to this piece of news on the AutoBlog.
Standard 300SL Gullwing prices can exceed a million dollars, but this particular example was expected to sell for anywhere between $2,500,000 and $3,000,000. These alloy 300SL Gullwings come up for sale infrequently, though, which is perhaps why the final bid of $4.2 million was so high. With auction fees, the final selling price of the 300SL was an incredible $4.62 million, a new record for this car.
