Quora… what AskJeeves always wanted to be

Quora is what Ask.com (AskJeeves) always wanted to be… but it’s not really anyone’s fault. If anything you could argue that AskJeeves was about 10 years too early for the perfect conditions to truly flourish. Disclaimer: I am jumping the shark. Who’s to say Quora is anything but a flash in the pan with a great team tackling a big problem in a legit bubble of hype. But then again, that’s why blogs are here… for a seemingly unqualified observer to prognosticate their opinion to an open mind.

This phenomenon of curiosity is prevalent everywhere we look, from a think tank in DC to a church congregation on Sunday to a dog sniffing new territory. At its most basic level, it’s curiosity of a subject that evokes action. A dog sniffs around the park because there is an element of unknown and the desire to discover the unknown is innate. In the simple mind of a dog, I would imagine the process goes somewhat like this:

Peanut breath > Squirrel stench > Jackpot… a furry light appetizer

This process isn’t too far from our standard method for search online… shit, Google makes billions catering to this natural tendency. Type in a single point of curiosity and bam! Sniff around all you want until you can find exactly what you’re looking for…

Now, being the intellectually superior beings that we are, humans have created a more sophisticated method of interaction… language. Instead of acting on an unknown, we question it. But it’s naïve to think that this complex system of interaction happened over night. Millions of years were needed to set the foundation for communication let alone, reason, rationality, and most importantly qualification.

And that’s the argument here. In order facilitate a legitimate interaction online in the form of Q&A, you needed a foundation. You needed to communicate and argue with reason and rationality, borne from an actual identity with some level of qualification. Applying this methodology of questioning to a world with out these structures left you with at best, an unreliable set of answer… and that’s what AskJeeves was.

Today, Quora has the foundation of communication and qualification (namely through their old employers, Facebook) to facilitate a higher level of interaction.

What’s your favorite startup?

I was in a meeting recently where the question, ‘what are your other favorite startups?’, popped up. What a great question. In the imperfect science of entrepreneurialism, our hypotheses are based on the laws of comparison. A recognized theme, trend or belief applied to a new market, group, or subject.

Now the key word in this conversation was ‘other’… being any company besides my own, Rollinglobe, which was the main topic of the meeting. My natural answer was Etsy. Etsy in the lateral comparison I use when describing Rollinglobe. Rollinglobe is the Etsy for tour operators and travel vendors (see how I just did that?). The model is solid. Use technology to enable, in our case, local service providers to reach larger markets.

That concept is part of a larger theme, which I fully embrace…. the use of technology to overcome, breakdown, or diminish barriers. While, there are plenty of examples of truly innovative ideas that create a new need or world, I’m admittedly too much of a realistic, pessimist, or idiot to identity those ground breaking concepts.

For me, I like looking at tried and true businesses, interactions that happened yesterday and will happen tomorrow, and going from there. These businesses have natural barriers and they have adapted to function within or around these walls… and the challenge is to hurdle.

I love making a standard practice easier. That’s why my second answer to the question was Venmo, and my third answer was 20×200. I threw in Flavors.me because I just think it’s cool as shit.

But which came first? There’s definitely a chicken and egg thing going on here. Did I start Rollinglobe because it emulates the theme I embrace? Or did I weave a decent sounding concept into the rationale for why my company will be successful?

I like to think the idea was always there and it’s getting nicely polished along the way.

Ding Ding…. Round 2

I started this blog a few months ago sparked by the motivation to get involved in the start up community but more importantly to reflect and categorize my thoughts as I enrolled in the greatest crash course ever created… starting a business (or at least attempting to).

I’ve been selfish… and I’m not surprised, it’s pretty typical behavior for me. In school I could sit there, listen, read a little, and understand a topic. Homework was never a strong point of my academic career. It was for those who didn’t get it, who needed the practice. Why waste my time going over stuff I already knew when there was so much out there I didn’t know. I probably spent more time trying to figure out how to get out of homework, a TA session, or going to class, than if I just followed the syllabus. But it didn’t matter… the only thing that mattered was the test and grade that followed. All those hours boiled down to 2 tests>1 grade>1 semester>1 degree. Nowadays it seems like the values of that test, grade, and even degree are diminishing with every year I get older.

No one cares where you went to school (or shouldn’t at least) and your GPA is a meaningless number to anyone worth an opinion. I shouldn’t say that, academic pedigree and performance are decent filters and indicators of general intelligence and competence. If you are in school, then test scores, clubs, and accomplishments are extremely important because it shows how you interact in your natural environment. Just like standardized tests, these aspects serve as a great basis for comparison. But it’s as much about ‘what you HAVE done’ as it is about ‘what you WILL do for me’.

So what’s the whole point of this tangent? There are no tests in the real world – save me the alpha dog, everything is a test bullshit. You’re barking up the wrong tree.

Now I like tests. It’s a method of intellectual validation that I’m generally pretty decent at. So you can imagine that in the class of entrepreneurism, without those structures of validation, I’m feeling a little at a loss in the ego department. So in the short term, I’m tending to this need with a blog. Hopefully it will serve its purpose in Round 2.

Pivot

I setup a blog through my site, www.rollinglobe.com/myblog/clarkebar, but figured I needed  a more generic home. Besides my twitter posts, @clarkebar, this will represent me and my views on everything… not just my current projects. There will be some overlap, that’s a given, but expect a lot more opinions on entrepeneurialism, web businesses, and the breaking down of barriers.

Quick shout out: although I’ve been contemplating the set up of this blog for a while now, the straw that broke the camel’s back was Matt Mireles and his blog.