Boston: August 22, 2012

Obligatory Conversation About Advice For Start-Ups

Start in a market with an easier barrier to entry then expand to your originally desired market.
- SRRN Games started with iOS games and are now trying to move into other platforms.
- Netflix started with DVDs by mail but had always planned to focus on streaming.
Narrow your focus within a market.
- travel website just focused on Costa Rica at first
- Facebook, just students initially

Shakespeare used to be performed to a loud, rowdy audience
- Boring to just sit respectfully with your hands folded in your lap and not talking to anyone
- Let’s try to attract a younger audience, a new generation of theater-goers
- Maybe the actors (and other kinds of performers) are creating this atmosphere as a response to an otherwise casual and irreverent culture?
Examples of this already happening:
- July 4th @ Hatch Shell
- Shakespeare on the Common (but people are kinda quiet)
- Hollywood Bowl
- Sleep No More
- Renaissance Faires
- Medieval Times
- historic villages
- comedy shows / improv.
  - the interaction is with the performer, not to other audience members
  - only when called upon by the performers
- vaudeville
- Rocky Horror Picture Show
- The Donkey Show
Strategies:
- musicals
- shorter acts
- lights on
- dinner theater
Clearly there are cultural differences in expectations

Restaurants can get feedback quickly, iterate faster.
Must incentivize the customers to give opinions.
Restaurants can opt-in to a shared network of data.
- Give your anonymized data.
- See other similar restaurants’ anonymized data.

Reach more people to make running for office a more realistic possibility.
Conventional social networks are too polluted.
Target college students
- who might still be on the fence or are more open-minded
- stubborn affiliation hasn’t taken root yet
- Facebook started with college students and grew into a more general user base as those students graduated
- especially those at Harvard, etc.
  - when they enter the US Government, they will bring these ideas and use of this tool with them
Media cannot be unbiased.
- American news outlets are just part of the entertainment industry.
- Artists have a responsibility to educate the public instead of commercializing and dumbing it down.
- Can it be like Wikipedia but in a very fast way?
  - Independent, neutral moderators
    - Do they exist?
    - Let people vote to establish a "neutrality meter" for each article or editor.
  - citation needed, footnotes
    - then we wouldn’t have the news
    - we’d have to report less news
  - just report the facts, no editorials
    - how to verify disputed facts (like, how many people attended a rally?)
    - trying to calculate would be more analysis and not just fact-reporting, could be biased
We need a disruptive political movement.
How to get independent things mainstream exposure?
We need better public education
- so citizens can think critically about issues
- instead of just consuming what the media is force-feeding them.