Daily Dose of Pras

I’ve recently been researching a fascinating startup called AdMob. After doing some research, I would compare them to the DoubleClick of mobile - they essentially are a mobile ad platform that brings together advertisers who want to spend marketing dollars to reach people, with developer, who are building mobile webpages, and, most recently, iPhone and Android apps. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve come to a bit of a quarter-life crisis. Questions have been raised that I don’t have good answers to. “What’s the next step? “Where do you want to be in 5 years?” It seems we are all struggling with such questions. I can’t tell you how many amazing young people I know who have been axed in the past month - and how many more I’m talking to every day, who are 22, graduating, ready to take on the world, but can’t find a place to start. One recently came to me, asking for tips on how to approach his job search. I told him I wasn’t an authority on the subject, but I’d read a ton and talked to plenty of people who did know a thing or two. I decided to write some ideas down, especially the more unlikely ones.

There are better places to read about finding mentors; I’m going to teach you how to take over a small South American country, and how to turn bar buddies into valuable connections. I’m going to share with you what I learned from Seattle’s finest connectors and some of my wisest friends back in Texas. So here are a few ideas, none of them mine, to help you and I both get better at networking:

1. Build Your Personal Brand

I was recently talking to a friend and recent transplant to Seattle, and he said that he had gotten really aggressive about cultivating his social brand, and that he was now going to do the same thing with his professional one. Personal brand is a lovely buzz word, but I wanted to know, what did he really mean? “You’re actually really good at this,” he told me. He had looked at some of his friends who were more established in Seattle, and had modeled his personal brand on theirs. He started with amping up his presence on Facebook - more pictures, more activity, more effort to reach out to friends. He said he wanted to start a blog - which now he has. Now he was going to move on to his professional brand, and was stepping up his efforts to connect to people on LinkedIn.

I personally am a fan of blogging because it’s healthy for me, it’s how I sort out my issues, and I enjoy writing. But one of the things that Career Distinction, a book Ahmed recommended, taught me, is that your blog also becomes an extension of your personal brand, it becomes your online portfolio, a platform from which you can demonstrate your business acumen or tech savvy. I believe that everyone should start a blog. And if you’re interested, here are some tips on getting started.

In a world where we use more plug-and-play services than ever, where we plug people in and out to solve specific problems, where there is reduced friction and companies are adaptive (see a previous post on this concept: My Vendors Have Vendors) your personal brand becomes the way people gauge your value, and how they chose who needs to get plugged-in in order to solve a particular problem.

2. Pay it Forward

Last weekend NetIP Seattle (the Network of Indian Professionals) recently hosted a networking workshop with Hoan Do, an up-and-coming speaker who talks to young people about time management, networking, and success. One of Hoan’s key points was the idea of paying-it-forward, reminding me of one of my favorite recent reads, Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi. The idea is that when you meet a new person, rather than asking all the usual dull biographical questions like where are you from and what do you do, ask them what they are passionate about. If they came to a networking event, ask them what brought them there? Then ask “how can I help you in your passion?”

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Twitter built a powerful service - a great tool for communicating. And then one day looked up and realized their best shot at monetization - searching through tweets and people for information - was being done by someone else. They went and bought that company, and incorporated it as Twitter Search. The fact that they did so highlights the importance of search as the go-to monetization strategy that companies like Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, and Google see as the next big “vertical” within Search.

There was a fantastic blog from Jon Battelle where he discussed this idea that Twitter was the next YouTube - the next search vertical with huge traction - and that Google would do everything in it’s power to own this new search vertical. Meanwhile, we saw attempts by Facebook to acquire Twitter, and when that failed, we saw Facebook lightning-quick roll-out FriendFeed and Twitter-esque features to compete and build out it’s own microblogging platform. And sure enough, yesterday TechCrunch had a post on acquisition talks between Twitter and Google. Biz Stone today responded with a blog post stating “Sometimes We Talk” with companies about acquisition, but “Our goal is to build a profitable, independent company and we’re just getting started.

So far, no one seems to have released a fantastic and powerful search coupled with a good monetization strategy, but one must imagine that Facebook, Google, and Twitter are all working on. There are signs at least Twitter is advancing in that direction. As my friend Akshay stated last week, in a moment of insight around who would win the war to own your lifestream, “Facebook can become Twitter, but Twitter can’t become Facebook.”