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“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
Chris McCandles (aka Alexander Supertramp)

Distribution is not my problem
As a product manager, engineer, or designer at any large scale 20M+ users web consumer company you have distribution. Vic Gundotra said it well “We are Google. We can get anybody to kick the tires of a product.” Somebody many years before you figured out the distribution problem that took the company from a few thousand to 20M+ users. So you spent 95% of your time focused on building products and 5% on distribution – if that much. Distribution is a dirty problem that the business development team has to deal with you tell yourself – I just build awesome stuff. The process of designing, iterating and shipping new features becomes second nature to designers, engineers and PMs, and they take incredible pride in shipping delightful product experiences. The moment you leave BigCo to startup your startup those 20M+ users don’t leave with you, but your habits do, and that is where the trouble begins.

Distribution is Sexy
Building an awesome and delightful product is a necessary but insufficient way of building a successful web consumer product. It used to be that you could build a crappy product with great distribution and be successful, that is a very rare breed these days. Yet, there are hundreds of superbly executed products with limited traction, because the distribution problem hasn’t been solved. A well designed and executed set of features may get you a talent “acquisition”, but not much more. If you are focused on building a business you need to believe that solving the distribution problem is sexy.

Wait…but Apple is just about incredible design?
I was having a conversation about distribution and somebody responded, well Apple just builds awesome products and everybody just buys them. Even Apple understood that it needed better distribution and so they spent heavily on building up Apple Stores (it was a rather unpopular decision ten years ago), and today these stores deliver billions in quarterly revenue.

The luxury of built-in-distribution is a crutch
Folks like Brian Chesky & Joe Gebbia (co-founders of AirBnB) never learned the bad habits that come with being a designers or product managers at Google, Facebook, Yahoo. He never had the luxury of working for a company with millions of users, so he had to figure out how to rise above the noise and market and distribute his product from day one.

I haven’t been posting to my blog much lately as I’ve been busy.  Very busy building Gigwalk with my co-founders Matt and David and our founding employees Joel and Pushkar.  We haven’t talked publicly about Gigwalk much till today…

Today, after a few months in private beta we’re thrilled to publicly launch Gigwalk and announce our seed funding. Our free Gigwalk iPhone app is in the App Store, and starting today you can post Gigs for the Gigwalk mobile workforce. continue reading

no lavish presidential inauguration parties or anything of that sort; rather just a simple post to welcome myself (can you do that?) into the blogosphere.  ok, lets briefly cover a few points…

why join the blogosphere?

i come from a family of 3 brothers where our weekend dinner conversations would involve discussing (euphemism for argue and yell) everything from politics (heavy on the politics), sports, and business.  well, the blogosphere is nothing more then a big dinner conversation.  while there is plenty of noise to be sure, the dinner conversation is usually an exciting one, so i thought what the heck i used to enjoy these conversations so why not join this virtual conversation.

what will this blog cover?

• some of my thoughts on wide-ranging topics from:
  • the role of a product manager (lots to say on this one)
  • media + technology (already lots of people commenting on this, but every so often i will add my thoughts)
  • clean technology (this is where the action will be over the next 10 yrs.)some of my thoughts on the political landscape (try to keep this to a minimum as i have no interest in becoming part of this red vs. blue war)
  • cycling, surfing, and these teams (bears, bulls, fightin illini, northwestern wildcats, and 49ers)
  • updated (1/30/2007): commercial aerospace industry will be another topic.  commercial aviation was the key enabler of globalization and IMHO was the greatest and most important innovation of the 20th century.

who am i?

• name: ariel seidman
• married: yes, to ilana
• live in: bay area
• currently work @ yahoo and previous to that siebel systems

cheers,

-ariel