Tara Tiger Brown and MC Hammer, 2008
Dear MC Hammer,
This week I attended the Web 2.0 Summit 2011 (#w2s) in San Francisco and listened to your talk introducing WIREDoo. Generally speaking I would describe you as a musician, a dancer, a frequent attendee at San Francisco tech parties, and fluent in social media. Imagine my surprise when you presented your new "relationship" search service on the same stage as presenters from Google and Microsoft Bing. Needless to say, I came away from your presentation with some concerns and decided to give you some open and honest feedback.
This feedback is specifically for you but applicable to any entrepreneur introducing their new product or service to an audience of industry veterans.
To give some context to my concerns, I have a list of expectations at a high calibre conference such #w2s. The speakers must be:
- major players in the tech industry
- experts in their domain
- highly regarded amongst their peers and industry professionals
- laser focused on solving hard problems
- respectful of their audience
I wouldn't have been surprised to see Ashton Kutcher present because he advises and invests in 40 tech startups. In your case, other than the defunct DanceJam social website, there hasn't been anything to prepare me for you suddenly appearing on the $5000/ticket Web 2.0 Summit stage. I've been in the software business since college, so I was there to see the greats: Sergey Brin of Google, Chris Poole of 4Chan, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, Mitchell Baker of Mozilla Foundation, just to name a few.
My surprise with seeing you on stage is mainly because you aren't easing your way into being a tech entrepreneur, you are taking on SEARCH! The thing is, Steve Ballmer still hasn't convinced me to use Bing (and I'm a former Microsoft employee) so convincing me that you are going to build the next great search service is a huge challenge. To add to that, your slides and description of the service didn't inspire any confidence. I would have been OK with wireframes, but you showed some really bad user interfaces that distracted me from your pitch.
I also found it really hard to believe based on what you presented that you are going to release in December. The WIREDoo website doesn't help the matter. I won't provide any user interface and experience guidance here, but I definitely think that there are some excellent examples out there on how to build a landing page that invokes professionalism and anticipation. Your new search service "coming soon" webpage does neither. Take some notes from Kevin Rose who did a great job introducing and pitching his new product, OINK. His slides were beautifully designed, simple and the mockups he showed made me want to download the app asap.
Announcing your product at Web 2.0 Summit to brilliant and influential attendees is a pitch, and I think you missed the mark.
Your background is varied including being an innovative hiphop musician, dancer, and minister. but it does not include a background as a technologist. Building a search engine, which requires deep knowledge in algorithms and scale, means you must have an excellent team working on WIREDoo. During your talk, I don't recall hearing any other names attached to the project. Who is building the service? What is their tech background? Do they have experience in the search space? Do they understand scale? In order for me to believe that you and your team will be successful in building a new search service that will take on the likes of Google, Bing and Yahoo!, I'm going to need some names.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to sound like a non-believer. I know you are considered an innovator in the world of hip hop, but this is a brand new domain for you and you have to set yourself up for success. In order to do that you need to convince your customers (me) why you are qualified to front this operation and take on very well known and successful competitors. You mentioned Steve Jobs when you were explaining why you considered yourself a tech entrepreneur and you said music and technology go hand-in-hand. You misquoted him, but I think you meant this quote, "The Macintosh turned out so well because the people working on it were musicians, artists, poets and historians who also happened to be excellent computer scientists." The key thing to note is the combined skills of being a computer scientist plus an artist. I'm not saying you need to be a computer scientist, but who is your Woz?
In the process of doing research on your new venture, I did a Google search for your company Alchemist MMA. Initially I thought that I had landed on the wrong company websites. Alchemist MMA is an athlete management and marketing company plus a clothing line for said fighters. What exactly do fighters have to do with "deep search and relationship search?" Having multiple ventures is not the problem, the problem is that this company name is attached to your new search service and yet has nothing to do with what you pitched to us at the conference. Hopefully you are following me on why this is a problem - it's bad enough when there is name confusion in the marketplace but it's much worse when you are causing that confusion. In your interview with Alex Howard of O'Reilly, you said, "People's time is limited. This search engine helps you with your time." When you are pitching your new service on a conference stage or online, keep that same frame of mind. Don't make me work too hard to find out about what you are doing and definitely don't confuse me.
The bottom line is, I don't think that you were ready to present your new venture on the Web 2.0 Summit stage. You came in totally out of left field and it was like I received a cold call from Toys"R"Us convincing me I should buy their new loaded hybrid car. I won't go on and on, but I'm a 15 year software veteran and a partner in a music label so I felt compelled to offer some honest feedback to you and to other tech entrepreneurs out there that are pitching their new product or service.
My hope is that you take this feedback to heart before you do another presentation; take a big step back, hustle to prove you are ready to enter the search space, practice your pitch, improve your slides, and include your technology partners on-stage with you.
All the best,
Tara Tiger Brown
