Earlier this year, we brought the entrepreneurs from our portfolio companies together at Founder Camp, a gathering designed around the premise of the ‘unconference’: that the audience will connect and self-organize into conversations that are most relevant to them. More facilitation, less programming. For startup founders, we’ve found this is intensely valuable. The nature of what they’re struggling with is, by definition, out ahead of where conventional advice can help. The best solution is to connect with others who are at the coalface with them.
You can open up a terminal on your computer and type the following at the command prompt:
Your terminal will fill with a few pages of mostly-redacted information. This command queries a database of publicly available domain registrations. Years ago, you’d see actual email addresses and phone numbers for the people who owned and managed domain names across the internet. But in today’s world, all of that is hidden.
Recently I had the privilege of being interviewed by Om Malik at his Roadmap Conference. We were talking about about design in general and Adobe in particular, and he asked me about the project I had completed earlier in the year, in which we redesigned the entire Adobe.com experience from the ground up. It was an almost absurd undertaking, and Om rightly pointed out what had been at stake. “How do you convince a big company like that to make such a big change? Isn’t design risky?”