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Over the past 8 years Facebook has been urging its user to be more public about their lives and finally Facebook took its own advice. Unless you live under a rock, you probably heard that Facebook finally debuted on the Nasdaq. It ended the day at $38.23, valuing the company at $105 billion. Only 23 companies are worth more then Facebook and yet most of the media coverage has labeled the IPO a failure.

Why? Because all those wannabe shareholders who subscribed during the IPO roadshow did not get a pop of 25% or more on day one. Personally, I believe they got what they deserved, they didn’t do their homework and were being lazy. The real money was made by the ones who took the risk many years earlier as investors and more importantly the employees.

The biggest losers were probably the private clients of Morgan Stanley, which was the lead manager. Those clients thought they had special access to one of the most anticipated IPO’s only to find out people with an E-Trade account could buy the stock a couple hours later for the same price. facepalm.

Don’t get me wrong I still think Facebook has an uphill battle to justify the $100+ billion market capitalization it has. Do I think Facebook can go 5x or 10x from here? At 10x that means Facebook would be the first trillion dollar market cap company. Seems highly unlikely, but they seem to be in the right place to take advantage of it.

Ironically, the biggest issue they will face is being publicly listed. Those quarterly conference calls might get brutal when analysts start dissecting the quarterly revenue numbers whereas the company will be focusing on the long term strategy and numbers.

I think everyone can agree that making money is not easy, but what is even more difficult is managing it. One area within the financial services sector that is ripe for disruption is the multi-trillion dollar wealth management business. Even with all the gee-whiz technology of the internet, there has yet to emerge a company that has made a serious dent in this space. Of course, there is mint.com which aggregates all your financial data and then provides recommendations to you but doesn’t really help with the wealth management piece.

The idea of having a wealth manager, financial advisor or private banker looking after your money sounds very alluring. Typically, these managers charge you based on the assets under management (AUM) they supervise, so if they charge 1% and you have USD 1,000,000 you will be paying them USD 10,000 a year. The fees range from .5% to 2.5% and that is just the management fee, there are also the fees that the products they recommend charge. This multi-layer fee structure is what most startups want to disrupt.

One of the most respected wealth managers is Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management. Never heard of them? There is a reason, you need a minimum of USD 100 million in liquid investments to even open an account. They don’t need to advertise because they get many of their clients from the various deals they advise on around the world – M&A, private equity, restructuring and public offerings. So, who are some of the new kids on the block challenging the old boys network of Wall Street?  Betterment, FutureAdvisor, Personal Capital and Wealthfront.

Betterment, Personal Capital and Wealthfront all charge a percentage of the AUM – Betterment (.15%), Personal Capital (~.80%) and Wealthfront (.25%). FutureAdvisor charges a fixed cost whether you have USD 10 or USD 10 million, the most expensive plan is USD 195 a year.  All these ventures want to re-create mint.com for the wealth management space by relying heavily on technology and try to minimize the amount of human interaction with an advisor.

Of all of them, I believe Personal Capital might have a shot since it still relies on a traditional advisor but it’s fee structure is essentially the same as existing wealth managers. Having a slick user interface with great graphics might work for mint.com but in the wealth management space having access to an advisor on demand is really the core of the business. Working on a clients overall asset allocation is only one piece of the pie. So, is there a better model?

The existing old school wealth managers charge a hefty percentage and provide advisors whenever a client calls and even provide access to specialists for areas such as taxation and succession planning. The clients are happy but pay a heavy price. The new age websites want to limit access to advisors and use technology to streamline the advice. However, by taking a page from the health insurance playbook and implementing a co-pay system it might bridge the gap. A quick recap of the insurance industry co-payment system:

A type of insurance policy where the insured pays a specified amount of out-of-pocket expenses for health-care services such as doctor visits and prescriptions drugs at the time the service is rendered, with the insurer paying the remaining costs

A co-pay system could provide the happy balance between a wealth management firm and its clients. The management fee would be similar to the monthly/yearly insurance premium you would pay. Then if you have a specific question you would request access to an expert advisor and pay a small fee for the advice. If the advice generates additional fees for the management firm then great, if not then at least it would be able to partially cover the cost of the meeting. The co-pay system might be a radical idea but then again the industry is ripe for disruptive change.

Whether you are a CEO, sales guy or entrepreneur the fantasy of exponential growth is what we all strive for. However to experience white hot growth is a myth. Over the past 2 weeks I’ve been seeing headlines of the white hot growth of Pinterest. (Yes, it’s heralded as the next “big thing” but I have zero use for an online scrap book. That maybe a simplification of Pinteret but that’s not the point of this post.)

Pinterest is the latest in a series of similar stories such as “XYZ is growing faster than Facebook did in its first 18 months” or “XYZ has more 1/4 the page views of Twitter”. The headlines are supposed to grab the attention of the reader and I assume make the reader want to get on the latest bandwagon social platform. The thinking is “wow I’m on Facebook and if XYZ is hotter than Facebook then I should be on XYZ.”

If you look at the early growth curve for Facebook or Twitter in retrospect it was good but not phenomenal. Twitter was slow and steady in the early years in the past 2 years the growth has really accelerated. In fact, when Facebook was launched it was not for you and me, it was targeted at the Ivy League schools.

Recently, Dennis Crowley of Foursquare summed it up best:

Everyone thinks the Foursquare experience is this rocket ship that started at SXSW 2009 and it hasn’t let up, when in reality it was a little spike and then a summer of nothing

The truth is Dennis can say this now and be open about it, back then if it said the same thing it would have surely killed the enthusiasm. Because, from a startup perspective you want everyone to believe that your company REALLY is the hottest thing since Facebook or Twitter. Which is exactly what Pinterest is doing. The question is, will they be around to be as honest as Dennis is.

We’ve all heard the saying “the customer is always right”, it stems from the fact that the customer has money and never argue with a potential paying customer. Based on Apple’s latest earnings, I’m starting to rethink that age old quote. Apple announced a record $46.33 billion in revenue, of which 73% came from iPhone’s and iPad’s. The iPhone and iPad were created completely in-house with zero customer interaction or focus groups. One of Steve Jobs quotes about product developement:

It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

Can’t really argue with Steve. Customers are really good at asking for incremental improvements. At MProfit we field 100′s of request a month and many are useful but most are not. Most are requests for a single feature to help that person but of course that’s not how a customer spins it. They usually tell us “if you add XYZ feature you will get 1000′s of new customers.” However, companies don’t grow exponentially by adding one feature here or another there, it’s about completely flipping the mindset and getting many more new customers in the door.

One of my favorite quotes in regards to product development supposedly came from Henry Ford:

If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse

The car industry for the past 50 years has been stuck in this add one feature here or increase gas mileage by 5% sort of mentality. Innovation has been slow and hence General Motors, Toyota and Volkswagen each have taken turns for the top spot for most number of cars sold every year for the past 3-4 years. As a consumer, I would ask for a 500hp car that gets 50 miles a gallon, which is what Henry Ford was getting at.

Companies big or small need to think about innovation on a much larger scale and not get trapped in a feature war.  It’s tactical thinking vs strategic thinking, but many people forgo the strategic thinking because it sounds too dreamy/fluffy and doesn’t bring in revenue right now. However, Apple has shown it really pays to think different and essentially tell it’s customer to buzz off because they don’t know any better. And yet I still come back to Apple…genius.

Sadly this blog past has been in draft mode for over 6 months and since then it seems everyone is coming out of the woodwork to say the same thing – user interface (UI) design isn’t everything. Lately, it’s been a beauty pageant of sorts when a new product comes out, everyone says “wow, looks great and the interface is awesome” then the next question is “what the fuck does it do?” and that’s the problem.

Something might look beautiful but if it has no real purpose…who cares how great it looks. You’ve heard this same story before in the context of dating, “he is really good looking but talking to a door knob is more fun” or “she is a California dime but absolutely dumb as a rock.” Instead of focusing on the needs of a customer, many startups are spending way too much time on packaging (user interface, funding sources, PR, etc…).  A great example of this is Color.com, it received a ton of press because it was funded by Sequioa for $41 million and when the application was released people were clueless about its usage. Since then they have gone back to the drawing board for version 2.

Some of the comments from the web that really got me to think about this user interface debate:

@erickschonfeld For social apps design matters very little. It's all about being where your homies are at. Most were on FSQ.

December 5, 2011 11:52 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@Percival

Sean Percival

Design and user experience is the new intellectual property. --Ron Conway #sus11

October 30, 2011 5:50 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@garrytan

Garry Tan

Ron Conway is a legend in the VC space and you can’t really argue with his track record but I disagree with his comments. Not only that, but I’m pretty sure you can’t have IP rights to the way something looks.

Design is becoming a competitive advantage for startups http://t.co/j5Or9Wd8

December 5, 2011 4:00 am via BufferReplyRetweetFavorite

@sahilparikh

Sahil Parikh

Design might be a competitive advantage if there are many players in the same space, but it really depends on the category. Facebook had a pathetic website when it launched in 2004 when compared to Friendster. But people gravitated towards Facebook because it served a social utility, gradually over time the Facebook interface got more polished.

An example of an interface that is absolutely horrible to look at is Tally – an accounting software for the Indian markets. Most people still use the MS-DOS version and it’s reported it has 90% of the market in India. Why does it dominate the market? Because it does one thing really well – calculate numbers.