Mandy de Waal's Blog

The secret to joyful living

I don’t get people who say they don’t want to get hurt. Who close themselves off to pain. Who do this because they maintain the only way to live a life that is scary and dangerous is to find safety in shelter and protection from risk. Who live an avoidance that amounts to a small, harbored existence.

To hell with that! Johnny Cash is singing right now and he knew. Although he was a Christian he understood a lot about life and suffering, more so when he was singing Nine Inch Nails:

“I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that's real.”

Lately I have been obsessed with Nietzsche who said: "The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously." Imagine that. Joy. Bliss. Easily found out there in the darkness, on the edge, strewn abundantly across a pioneering path. That happiness lives breathing deeply in discovery. That you meet it again and again in great adventure where there is no full stop because you never see the end. In heroic gnosis where one wades ever fully into perpetual experience to encounter deepening truths.

My friend and fellow writer Alasdair Cameron can’t sleep so he’s been reading “A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love”. This is a book of remarkable essays written by Richard Dawkins. Al tells me of one called “The Joy of Living Dangerously: Sanderson of Oundle.” In this essay Dawkins tells us to forget about the exams and the league tables. He says that real education is about: “the power of knowledge and the thrill of discovery.”

In this essay Frederick William Sanderson (1857-1922) who intuitively knew how the best life was lived is quoted by Dawkins as saying:

"I agree with Nietzsche that 'The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously.' A joyful life is an active life - it is not a dull, static state of so-called happiness. Full of the burning fire of enthusiasm, anarchic, revolutionary, energetic, daemonic, Dionysian, filled to overflowing with the terrific urge to create - such is the life of the man who risks safety and happiness for the sake of growth and happiness."

Sanderson’s own words are a living and liberating tribute to a headmaster who demanded that laboratories be left unlocked so the boys at Oundle School could explore unfettered and unsupervised. During Sanderson’s time the school library was never locked. One of the school boys – now a man – speaks about being discovered in that library in the dead of the night by his headmaster.

Instead of booming admonishment Sanderson sat down next to him and nudged him deeper into adventure: “He began to talk to me of discovery and the values of discovery, the incessant reaching out of men towards knowledge and power, the significance of this desire to know and make and what we in the school were doing in that process. We talked, he talked for nearly an hour in that still nocturnal room. It was one of the greatest, most formative hours in my life...”

As I read Dawkin’s essay and marvel at Sanderson, Johnny Cash is singing:

“Everyone I know
Goes away in the end
You could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt”

This song, Sanderson and Dawkin’s essay is a reminder of how little we know about life. How the most dangerous people are the most certain. Those who would have us believe or have faith in how the story should unravel or end. That the most foolish people are those who keep themselves in the dark for fear of pain or suffering or experiencing disappointment. This despite the startling truth that all of life’s inevitable miseries will find us all, no matter where we seek to hide.

It makes me certain that great men and women are those who live fearlessly knowing that their hearts will be broken countless times as they wade deeper and deeper into delicious discovery. That the greatest people are those who know this secret and inspire others to live its indisputable truth. The libertarians who encourage bright young minds to recklessly ransack the world’s wisdom and burn their fingers on the blistering heat of experience.

For who can sincerely and authentically offer another protection from hurt? It is coming to get us all regardless of whether we hide or live fully with courage and curiosity, craving the great adventure.

“Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.” Let’s run into truth, wisdom and experience and live like heroes before we’re dead.

Free for all brawl

When Chris Anderson launched his book Free – The Past and Future of a Radical Price, it sparked a 'clash of the titans'. The world's top intellects thrashed out the 'freeconomics' debate in what was little more than a civilised brawl. A lot was at stake given that the debate centred on the Internet and its influence on economics as we know it.

The Wired editor and author of New York Times bestseller The Long Tail believes giving consumers something free can be a great moneymaking business model. In Free, he supports this by advising that anything digital is on a direct glide path to being free.

“In many instances, businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them,” says Anderson, who adds: “Google offers nearly a hundred products... almost all of them are free of charge. Really free – no trick. It does it the way any modern digital company should: by handing out a lot of things to make money on a few.”

Not so simple
Malcolm Gladwell didn't agree and delivered a very public blow in his book review for The New Yorker:

“There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively free), a psychological claim (consumers love free), a procedural claim (free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological free and the psychological free can make you a lot of money). The only problem is that in the middle of laying out what he sees as the new business model of the digital age, Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, 'has so far failed to make any money for Google'.

“Why is that? Because of the very principles of free that Anderson so energetically celebrates. When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That's the magic of free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down”, “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube's bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars. In the case of YouTube, the effects of technological free and psychological free work against each other.”

The spat played out in the media, with Anderson striking back at Gladwell through his blog at Wired Magazine and on The Charlie Rose Show. Here Anderson flat out said that Gladwell didn't understand Google's business model:

“Malcolm would say it's all a Ponzi scheme, it's all a bubble, and that sooner or later, bandwidth bills are going to come in and all these companies are going to go bust.

“Malcolm doesn't understand that Google doesn't buy bandwidth retail. They have wholesale, they're buying dark fibre. They have server farms the size of printing plants. They're massive... They're losing a lot less money than people think and I suspect they'll break even with YouTube this year.

“So, not only is it not a bubble, but I think that as the advertising industry learns to take the video ads that work so well on television and fine slice them so they're super granular, the way the video is on YouTube, that we're going to see an economic engine that's powerful.”

Taking sides
Seth Godin added his weight to Anderson's camp with a blog called “Malcolm is wrong”, saying that "like all dying industries, the old perfect businesses will whine, criticise, demonise and, most of all, lobby for relief. It won't work. The big reason is simple: In a world of free, everyone can play.”

So who's wrong and who's right?

The Times Online declared Gladwell the overall winner, but said Gladwell's review was more of a demolition job. The media then astutely stated that both men are journalists, successful authors and are vying for the same audience. Gladwell and Anderson are the storytellers for our time, and have captured the popular and business imagination to make them the world's leading theorists.

Regardless of Gladwell's attack and apparent subjugation of Anderson, Free is worth the read, and not only because you can get Free for free in various formats (iTunes audio, Kindle and Google Books) or by going to Anderson's blog The Long Tail.

Buckland's second act

Matthew Buckland commands envy and respect. Envy because he's created a remarkable career for himself, captured the limelight, and been a driving force behind some of South Africa's more spectacular Web stories. More often he's respected because of a steady stream of successes, and the contribution he's made to the local industry during the past 15 years.

And the hard work is paying off. The former Mail & Guardian poster boy has stepped onto a global platform at Naspers, with the kind of mandate any member of the local digerati would have given their right arm for.

As the head of 20FourLabs, a division he founded, Buckland has his greatest opportunity in what will also be his biggest challenge to date. Buckland will be pressed to deliver if his career at Naspers will flourish. Not shy about bringing down the axe on non-performing human resource, Naspers has a ruthless reputation for culling staff when they get in the way of profitability and shareholder returns.
Fresh-faced

I caught up with Buckland as he edged towards his 200th day in his 'new' job. The first thing we chatted about was 20FourLabs, which has amalgamated of some of 24.com's top talent into an inventive, entrepreneurial hub, as well as bringing in fresh new talent.

“We recognised that as a major player in the Web industry, we needed to be more agile and nimbler when it came to developing Web applications and Web sites. Big organisations tend to generate quite a bit of bureaucracy that is often a necessary evil, but limits a business' ability to innovate and be experimental. However, in this market, you see a lot of innovation coming from start-ups. At 20FourLabs, we want to capture some of that mindset and culture.”

Not adverse to risk, Naspers' investment strategy in emerging markets like China is yielding strong results, with the likes of Tencent contributing R1.2 billion to the group's earnings for 2009. However, recent discussions with Internet division head Antonie Roux shows that the pipeline for growth by acquisition or investment has been badly affected by the recession. Although share prices have dropped, good companies are sweating out the storm. In view of this, an internal hub that can spark start-ups, seed inventions and inject innovation into the wider group makes great sense if it delivers to mandate.
Fear factor

“Innovation is all about not having a fear to experiment and not having a fear to fail,” says Buckland. “From a business perspective, you need an environment where the cost of failure is low. If the cost of failure is high, this stifles innovation. If the cost of failure is low, then you have much more experimental activity. The focus we use is to create Web applications where the process is not over-complicated. We're using open source resources; we don't over plan, and build iteratively. We're not afraid of plugging into another Web site's API, and don't shy away from aggregating content from other sites,” says Buckland.

Since creating 20FourLabs, Buckland's biggest lesson has been the benefit of simplicity, and understanding the different phases that products go through. “Fewer people are more effective in the emergent phases of products, so we start off with a small team to incubate. Only when we see traction do we take the decision to build the start-up into a much bigger business. The philosophy here is less is more.”

The team of 30 people, which includes the 'wunderkids' from Naspers' Blueworld Communities acquisition, has been mandated to ignite the start-up flair and entrepreneurial culture within the bigger media group. The lab is also busy building apps and extensions for existing Naspers offerings.

“The Web is levelling the playing field, and it's cheaper and easier than ever to create your own business and to create your own media online,” says Buckland. “What this means is that the Web – more than any other industry – is an entrepreneurial medium. Here you often find smaller and nimbler start-ups beating slower corporations because they lack agility.”

A key focus for the lab will be mobile, given the reach of this medium. “We're looking at local and international products and start-ups, and our focus is on social projects, because these enable us to build audience in a viral manner. We're working on aggregation and user generation content projects, as well as multi-media projects, because this is the next phase of the local Web, which has, up until now, been an under-performing area,” adds Buckland.
Flirting for fun

What has Buckland delivered in the past four months?

One of the lab's first start-ups is a mobile flirting and dating site called Flirtaroo.mobi. “Flirting and dating sites are social networks where there is a settled business model, and users actually want payment mechanisms to keep the quality of the social network up. The business model is a 'freemium' model, with micro payments that are SMS-based. What's interesting about the offering is that it is locative.” Buckland says on Flirtaroo.mobi, people can find friends within a certain location. “The offering includes messaging, profiling and will be cross-platform. It was launched for mobile but a Web version is imminent.”

iPhone apps and a Nokia widget has been built for News24, while an Android App was launched for News24, Sport24 and other related content sites. Then 24.com blogs were relaunched, getting a much-needed upgrade. “24.com's blogs had become dated and were very basic. They needed a complete overhaul. We introduced LetterDash.com with templating for users, more intuitive navigation, and features where users can promote their blog. In the pipeline, a more sophisticated dashboard and the ability to combine social networking with blogging. The aim here is to add a social networking layer onto LetterDash, and develop relationships between bloggers and their readers. We have made some revenue off the platform, but it hasn't been significant. We'll only aggressively pursue a business model once we're happy with usability and audience numbers. When we do look at monetising blogs, this will include giving users a cut.”

Buckland says the biggest project they've tackled is an aggregator-cum-social network called “The Hub”.

“This is essentially a social network wrapped around a content site, which is currently in development. Content publications have natural networks around them, but traditionally do a bad job of formalising those networks. For example, Facebook and I have a sophisticated relationship because it knows all about me, but if I go to CNN.com they don't know who I am, and when or why I was there. The idea is to build a social network around content sites that capture and formalise that network, allowing us to provide a richer experience with targeted content and services, but also to allow users to connect with each other. Our initial focus will be to create a better experience for the user who will be able to broadcast and interact with other users more meaningfully. The second will be to monetise the relationship with these communities.”

Other projects include j2me apps, a new mobile portal, revamping 24.com's mobile offerings, a local Twitter aggregator, a niche social network maker, and a personalised homepage offering.

Given Naspers' online and mobile focus in key emerging markets, this creates a much bigger platform for Buckland to step up to the plate. Creating an innovation hub at Naspers was his first clever move. Delivering quickly and smartly, his second.

Originally commissioned by ITWeb.