Tag: Entrepreneurs

The Problem with 20-something Brains

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

According to Zuckerberg: “Young people are just smarter.” True or false?

I responded to an ad for a Traffic Manager position at an ad agency in San Francisco 25 years ago. Downtown, in one of those glass monoliths. Eighteenth floor. Made me nauseous being up there. I couldn’t stop thinking about an earthquake waiting for my interview.

An older guy, at least 20 years my senior, sat in the lobby with me. Mid-50s, receding hairline with only a tuft left on top, but the sides were still full, more salt than pepper. He wore a wedding ring, black slacks, and a white shirt under his gray suit jacket which did not conceal his slightly protruding belly.

We’d probably been sitting there five minutes, but it felt like twenty. Was the building swaying? Sure I must be delusional, I asked the older guy for a reality check.

“Excuse me. Hi.” I flashed my friendliest smile. “Do you feel the building…moving?”

“Oh, yeah,” he replied. “These buildings are designed to sway in the wind. And earthquakes too.” He gave me a shy smile, like he was sorry he brought them up when he saw my concern. “They have upwards of a five foot arch depending on height, and design, of course. Doesn’t sit well with some people. My son hates it. You one of the motion sensitive types?”

“You bet,” was all I could manage to avoid barfing.

He smiled. “Not me so much. I’m not the sensitive type. You here for the Traffic position?”

I nodded. “You?”

“Yup.” Then the guy went on a diatribe describing his education and work history, as if I was the one interviewing him. A few minutes into his years at a compact list of famous ad agencies, a young woman, maybe early twenties hiring manager/model called the guy in for his interview.

I watched them go into the all-glass conference room in the center of the open office maze. From my vantage point, I saw him sit at the end of the long table only after the woman sat. She had a tight build, silky auburn hair, and the milky skin of youth. She sat straight, but he seemed to wilt as the interview progressed.

But why? His experience was substantial, and in the exact areas required for the job. I’d been on the creative side and knew nothing about running Traffic in a large agency setting. I’d applied for the position hoping for an entree into their creative department.

Less than ten minutes later, the hot interviewer was escorting the pudgy older guy to the glass door. He gave me a basset hound nod as he passed.

I was called in next, and felt twitchy in the fishbowl of their glass conference room the entire time we were talking. I kept losing eye contact with the young Director of Digital Traffic, focusing instead on every passerby. She went through my resume with perky interest. Reviewing my portfolio, I described my primary roles in each campaign, hoping she’d get the hint and refer me to one of the impossible to reach Creative Directors on their staff.

“Are you aware you’re dressed the epitome of chic?” she asked me, which seemed very personal. I had no idea how to respond so I kinda laughed her off with a shrug.

“The black leather jacket with that maroon lace dress. Stunning. Really. Good choice. So, do you want the job, or what?”

And I would have said, ‘No, not really,’ and launched into why I was a better fit as a creative consultant, but then she told me the salary.

“$110,000 to start. Full medical. And for coming on board, there’s a $5,000 signing bonus.”

I was working my ass off for around $70k annually—getting the clients, hiring the teams, doing everything from the creative, to production, to accounting as a consultant, and paying over $500 a month for medical insurance. An annual salary over a hundred grand seemed easy money working for someone else, performing a single job function.

I told her I needed 24 hrs to think about it and I’d get back to her tomorrow.
“Well, I hope you join us,” she said as she walked me out. “I think you’d be a great asset to the team, and our agency.”

On my drive home across the Bay Bridge her words echoed. Why exactly would I be a great asset to their production team? Unlike me, the older candidate had the experience and education the agency’s ad asked for. And he surely needed the job more than I did, with a wife and at least one kid. I told the young director I’d only trafficed my own projects, but she didn’t hear that. She was too busy checking out my attire. She based my fit into the agency’s misguided ‘brand’ on my looks, and my age.

Fast forward 25 yrs…

I applied for a Marketing Copywriter position at Facebook a few years back. They rejected me. Bewildered, as I had every qualification required, I asked the HR woman why.

“We are looking for someone less qualified.” Her response.

Hmm…Less qualified. Why would that be? We’d discussed no salary expectations. The FB’s job post didn’t ask me for any. Someone at FB had looked extensively at my online portfolio, as I had a huge spike in page views, from one source, in Menlo Park. The HR woman began her personal rejection email with: “Your portfolio is amazing! However, we’re looking for someone with less experience…”

What she meant was, “We’re looking for someone younger.”

Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg, who is now over 40 yrs old, which, according to his own words at Stanford in 2007, makes him unemployable since “young people are just smarter.”

Why would anyone with half a brain say something so stupid? Oh, I know, at 23, he only had half a brain to work with. OK. I’ll give him ¾. No. ⅔. His parents were wealthy, and provided their kids with every opportunity for financial success.

The problem with 20-something brains— their neural connections aren’t fully established yet. Until our 30s, decision making skills, complex reasoning from navigating life experience, and regulating impulse control, are just a few of the skills young people generally lack. Additionally, different areas of our brain peak (and degrade) throughout our lives. Our brain’s raw speed data processor peaks around 19. At 23, Zucky’s was still 20-30 years away from the ability to evaluate other people’s emotional state, rendering him unable to process the complex ripple-effects of what he’d created.*

Well, our omniscient Zuckerberg built a global company, his converts proclaim. And that he did. He started FB (then Facemash) in 2003, at Harvard, copying the site Hot or Not, which put up pics of female students for others to vote which was hot, and not. As a woman, and mother of a daughter, WTF, Mark! As a purveyor of human behavior, I get that, much like teens, young adults are often still motivated by appearance, not the complexities of substance.

Mark was verging on 30 when FB became profitable through PPC advertising revenue. And Zuckerberg didn’t make that happen alone. Peter Thiel, at almost 40 yrs old, invested half a mill in 2005, and helped The Facebook 20-something founders get $13 million from Accel Partners a year later. And you can bet, Accel didn’t leave it solely up to Mark and his young, naive crew to make them billions.

Mark’s not proselytized this truth. He’s now old/smart enough to know that if you stroke the ego of the young, which is still fragile and forming, you’ll get them to work 24/7† for a 5th of the salary he’d have to pay experienced pros. Young people aren’t particularly gifted, talented, or brilliant. They’re cheap to employ, and easy to manipulate.

Facebook is the 8th largest employer of H1B foreign workers as of 2025. Not because Asian college grads know more, as tech is an emerging industry we are all learning dynamically, but, again, because they are a fraction of a U.S. worker’s salary and required benefits. Limiting hires to young (and immigrant) workers is shortsighted at best. Study after study show older employee’s productivity, creativity and reliability is higher than that of their younger colleagues.

Until the startup boom in the late 1990s, most corporations valued experience and skill, substance over looks and cheap labor. Zucky and his Silicon Valley friends like Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google), and Evan Spiegel (Snapchat) helped cement the lie that innovation comes from youth. Venture capitalists looking for “the next Zuckerberg,” reinforced the belief that younger = more disruptive.

We now know that ‘disruptive’ often leads to ‘destructive.’ Most apps and platforms were, and still are designed to addict users while stealing our private data to sell us more crap. Most middle-man SaaS apps and social media platforms have proven to be costly, unproductive, emotionally damaging wastes of our life’s time.

Hooray, to the youth who has invented, and keeps pumping out crap that’s creating personal and global meltdowns, not to mention getting fascists elected—from Trump to Netanyahu (PM of Israel). It’s made/making a few rich though, as if that’s all that matters.

  1. We are ALL born solipsists—our brain power so limited that our only awareness of others is how they serve our needs.
  2. We grow to narcissists in our teens—we gain awareness of others, but coming out of solipsism, we don’t care so much.
  3. We advance to maturity with age. Experience teaches us we serve a greater purpose than just ourselves. We recognize we are part of a family, community, planet, and our actions have consequences beyond just us.

Youth grows old, if you’re lucky. Wealth may provide a comfy life for the very few, but regardless if it’s millions or billions, their children’s children’s children may likely have no life at all.

We have the power to annihilate each other and most everything on this planet now. Along with disruptive, youth is generally arrogant and impulsive, their brains not yet fully-matured for controlling behavior. Humanity can’t thrive, and likely most won’t survive if the generations following Zuckerberg and his like continue repeating the same destructive mistakes by ghosting those with the experience and knowledge that only comes with age.

—

*The debate over the value of Facebook, Insta, all social media is ongoing. Its contribution to humanity is proven rather negative.

†Studies show working long hours does not improve productivity, and hurts a company’s bottom line.

My First, Last, and Only MVP

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

Startup MVPs are a FAILED biz model, but I did one anyway…

“Looks like cancer to me,” the PA said while I wiped off the ultrasound goop. She’d just taken samples of the 15mm ‘lesion’ in my neck with a fine needle.

I stared at her trying to process what she’d just said while she continued.

“I’ve been doing this for 20 years and your tumor looks wonky.”

“You mean with tendrils?” I’d found through my research that tendrils mean malignant.

“Yeah,” the PA said casually. “It has an irregular border and that’s a tell-tale sign of cancer.”

I continued staring at her, tears welling then spilling down my face. It wasn’t her job to give me a diagnosis. That was for the biopsy labs, and the radiologist who read my scans. Regardless, I believed her, thanked her, and left. I willed myself to stop crying as I navigated the hospital maze to meet my husband waiting in the lobby.

“What?” he asked the moment he saw my face.

“I’ll tell you in the car.” I wanted to stave off crying till then but tears fell in the elevator and didn’t stop when we were both safely ensconced. “She said I have cancer.”

“What?”

I told him in detail exactly what she’d said. “Seems to me nurses and PAs must know what they’re talking about since they’re the ones doing these procedures all day long,” I added, sinking further into darkness.

My husband sat there trying to process what I’d told him. The silence under four floors of concrete in the parking garage made it feel like a tomb. Dying was suddenly real, present. Cancer. Would I die like my mother, a slow, painful death ‘before her time,’ lingering as a guinea pig with every new drug and treatment trial? I don’t want that for my family.

“I’m here for whatever you need,” my husband finally said.

I felt him looking at me but I didn’t look up. “Thanks.” And I took his hand as he slid it onto my leg. “Right now I wanna go home.”

My husband driving, we were crossing the bridge, the water sparkling in the late morning sunshine, the forested hills beyond, and only one thought kept looping in my head. “I haven’t had enough fun,” I said. “I’ve worked since I was 14 and I haven’t had enough fun.”

The next six weeks I could not wrap my head around writing fiction or anything else while I waited for the complete test results. I spent the first week in my office researching cancer malignancies. Death rates. Age. Weight. Race. Genetics. Environments that increase cancer rates. Too much information turned into self-sabotage.

I vowed to stay busy between the travel and venue experiences my husband and I arranged. By week two I’d abandoned all hope of producing even a blog and defaulted to social media marketing my body of work. I’ve done SMM for 20+ yrs. Creating digital campaigns and posting them organically is a lot simpler — takes way less thought — than, say, writing The Power Trip. Except I hate marketing! It may come more easily to me, as it’s been my ‘real job’ for most of my career, but I really don’t like doing it. I like creating the campaigns. I just don’t care for posting them, responding to comments, monitoring for spam…etc. Admining SMM is mind-pummelingly dull. And now, more than ever, I want fun!

Week three we’re traveling, staying along the coast off Hwy 1, when My Chart emailed me test results, which were inconclusive and recommend nuclear testing on my biopsy samples. I’m back in my office midweek in hopes my muse will emerge from the blackness within and join me in my head, but no such luck. Again I defaulted to SMM, but am so disgusted I’m doing so with my limited life’s time, I go on Amazon and look for “relaxing activities” that don’t take much thought or require continuity of focus like writing does. This was my introduction to Adult Coloring Books.

I perused Amazon’s selection and don’t find anything that strikes me. They were either too complicated, too spiritual, or too realistic. I’ve never liked coloring in the lines, but clearly others do, as several of the coloring books had thousands of 5-star ratings. I clicked on one with over 6,000 ratings [ostensibly] from satisfied customers. The author/illustrator had a How To video on her sales page on coloring techniques with markers. She kept up a light patter as she colored, at one point saying that her coloring books practically “sold themselves” with just “organic SMM.” She assured her viewers that adult coloring books are a vibrant, growing market, ripe with targets looking for ways to unplug and relax, “guaranteed.”

Waiting for definitive test results, I still could not sustain the extended linear thinking that writing requires. Books that sell themselves instead of me having to market them sounded too good to be true, but it was hard to think right then, and I wanted it to be true so badly. The siren of Hope taunted, lifting my muse from the black hole she was in and sparking creative thoughts. I’ve been drawing since I was a little kid. My undergrad degree is in art/design. And the best bit — drawing requires very little brain power. It’s easy, simple fun! And maybe I could finally make some money on a book.

This was the birth of my MVP: Flowering Fractals and More: YA and Adult Coloring Book.

I’ve taught hundreds of student entrepreneurs at Stanford and Cal Berkeley that launching an MVP without PRODUCTIZING their IDEA BEFORE BUILDING IT was ignorant in the extreme — a waste of time, resources, and money. I’ve presented countless examples of startups that never launched, or failed in the first few years — and that’s for the few that lasted beyond their first.

In deciding to create a coloring book without establishing any real differentiators, without targeting any specific markets, without researching competitors, their sales, their ratings beyond the bestsellers presented by Amazon, I simply ignored a decade of the advice I’d been preaching. I went after doing what was fun — illustrating a coloring book I’d enjoy coloring.

I should have recognized the fatal flaw in my thinking right then. I wasn’t creating art. I’d made a business decision to build an MVP. For money, not the love of the craft, as I do with fine (fiction) writing. From a marketing perspective (my ‘real’ career), creating products and in-person or online services isn’t only about pleasing ME. Producing sellable offerings is about the utility/solutions [like nothing else out there] that it offers other people.

I projected a month to produce the coloring book. I’d know if I have cancer by then, and I played out scenarios for both positive and negative results as I created pages of line renderings. A few weeks into completing under 10 canvases that I considered worthy of publishing, I realized I’d taken on a project that was guaranteed to exceed deadline, which I’d never done before in my consulting gigs.

“Benign!” my husband read my nuclear biopsy results aloud on My Chart [since I was too scared to read them].

We exchanged places and I sat in front of his laptop and read the entire report, which, indeed, indicated the “lesion” is benign. After kisses and a long hug, I went back to my office to continue working on my MVP coloring book. On the walk there I considered ‘what’s next.’ The diagnosis had given me Time, but the experience has been a stark reminder I don’t have much left.

My muse was suddenly beside me, lacing her fingers in mine and flooding my brain with The Power Trip edits and additions. Writing fiction seemed doable again! By the time I sat down at my desk and opened my laptop on the illustration I was currently working on, finishing my MVP seemed a lot less fun.

Creating MVPs — building, and often launching a product or service BEFORE PRODUCTIZING the IDEA — came from Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup. A Yale BS in CS graduate, Eric co-founded IMVU and built a similar platform to the metaverse Second Life. IMVU released their metaverse in 2004. The MVP had a ton of bugs, crashed constantly, and had little function beyond what Second Life had launched a year before them.

In 2004, ‘pick your skin’ interactive virtual communities, where you could be whoever you wanted to be, were just coming online. Most gamers were playing FPS on Nintendos back then. The few who chose to engage on real-time metaverse platforms were either curious, or lonely, or pervs. (LOTS of porn on SL and IMVU.) Until 2008, this small group of gamers, mostly incel coders (their primary target market) were the dedicated user-base of IMVU. They helped turned the piece of crap software Eric Ries and his co-founders launched into a functioning interactive platform. It peaked in 2011 and has been losing users ever since. Too buggy. Not enough functionality, are some of the complaints. In today’s world, gamers have enough choices that they don’t have to tolerate crap. And now there are fewer incel coders willing to work for free to improve some startup’s MVP.

MVP is a failed business model and a primary reason that 90+% of all startups fail. Investing your time, talent, and even money into doing the “fun” part of building your idea into an MVP before PRODUCTIZATION is a fool’s play. And I know all this, but did one anyway.

Took me a total of three months — two over scheduled — to complete the coloring book, publish it, and create SMM to organically promote it, (per the bestselling author’s ‘guarantee’ of sales in her How To video). Most MVPs run over-schedule (and often budget) to produce. I never bothered to develop a business/marketing plan with hard deadlines; or defined unique features/benefits of my coloring book idea, or specific target markets who may find value in my offering.

In the weeks that followed, while posting my digital campaigns on Pinterest to Insta, their rec engines pulled up thousands of adult coloring books I did not see on Amazon with my cursory search which started me down the MVP path. I hadn’t done competitive analysis, nor identified my product’s differentiators before I built and launched my coloring book, so I had no idea that regardless how uniquely beautiful my illustrations, thousands of adult coloring books preceded me. Flowering Fractals and More was going to be a tough sell. And marketing is not fun!

A cancer scare wiped my ability to write, which led me to look for a relaxing pursuit, which led me to adult coloring books, which inspired me to create an MVP — a business offering. But truth is, it was more hobby than business. Ultimately, investing my limited life’s time creating a product that doesn’t sell is not fun.

The TRUTH about Mark Zuckerberg

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

IMAGINE working your ass off all through high school, studying instead of partying, volunteering with school and community groups so you can get into a good college. You send out your applications, to Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, as you have a 4.8 GPA, and all the right clubs on your resume. Your mom kisses each envelope before mailing, “for luck,” then hugs you, with her silent prayer that you’ll be accepted everywhere, that the world will see her beautiful daughter the way she does.

Pins and needles until the letters start coming in, or maybe they won’t, and no college will want you, keeps playing in your head, until March rolls around and letters DO come. Cal Berkeley wants you! UC Davis wants you! Stanford wait-listed you. And Harvard ACCEPTED YOU!! You’re dancing in the kitchen with your mom, dad, and little brother, laughing, hugging, celebrating your achievement of hard work and tenacity. For the moment, you let yourself bask in the glow of your family’s pride.

August comes around, and you are settling into your dorm room at Harvard. Your roommate is nice enough, though she’s hardly there. Unlike you, she’s very social. She got into Harvard on her daddy’s dime. He went there too. She has a 3.6 GPA, but got a free pass into the school, as did ex-president George Bush Jr (with a 2.35 GPA). If nothing else, Harvard is incestuous. Known as ‘Legacy students,’ over a third of Harvard students are related to past students, with money.

You love your classes. Your professors. A few months into your Harvard experience you are doing well academically, even if you haven’t made any real friends. You assure your mom you’re fine, though you don’t tell her you’re feeling more than a bit lonely. The popular girls, like your roommate, came in with money, and come from money. They dress trendy, buy expensive, look sharp, act confident. Make it in Harvard, or not, they have no worries after school. The rich rarely have to worry like the rest of us.

You come back to your empty dorm room one afternoon, turn on your computer, and are about to get started on the paper you have to write for Expository, but the image on the screen stops you dead. Your face stares back at you, next to some sexy female student. Headline reads, “We were let in for our looks? No. We will be judged by them? Yes.” Subhead says, “Who’s Hotter? Click to choose.” Under YOUR PICTURE voters agree you’re not.

This is the beginning of Facemash, which eventually became Facebook. This is MARK ZUCKERBERG’S idea of fun — making women feel like shit for his entertainment. IMAGINE what that girl must have felt when she saw NOT under her Harvard profile picture. IMAGINE if it was YOUR CHILD. Or YOU.

And here’s what ZUCKERBERG said the first night he released Facemash: “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”

This is MARK ZUCKERBERG then, and THIS IS MARK ZUCKERBERG NOW! He is still the same ugly, petty, small man/child, pulling the same ugly crap, indifferent to anyone but himself, ignoring the pain he is causing around the globe now.

Zuckerberg was already a second-year student at Harvard when he began Facemash. He was not a child. If ZUCKERBERG was a decent man, a man of compassion, empathy, not cruelty, he never would have COPIED HOT OR NOT, an app that was already out there. Zucky just ripped it off! To debase Harvard WOMEN. Shame on you ZUCKY, and your MAMA and PAPA, for not teaching you how to treat others with respect and kindness!

ZUCKERBERG is still indifferent to anyone but his own needs, even today. His Facebook recommendation engine helped get TRUMPY ELECTED! Twice! How? Facebook only shows you what ZUCKY WANTS YOU TO SEE. You do NOT see all your connection’s posts. ZUCKY only shows you posts that REFLECT YOU. Upset about inflation? FB will show you Russian and Republican advertisers (disguised as friends and connections) who sell you that Trump will fix the economy. We are all merely seeing posts that reflect our personal concerns and opinions now.

ZUCKY only sees his own reflection too. It’s what allowed him to debase women at Harvard. It is allowing him to keep his screwed-up recommendation engine on and running. Republicans spreading lies, ZUCKY doesn’t care. He cares about getting and keeping advertisers. His “fake news” AI department is a joke. I know someone working there, and they tell me he isn’t trying to stop it at all. It doesn’t serve him to do so. He wants advertisers, and you don’t get them, and keep them, limiting ad sales.

He got lucky debasing women from an app he RIPPED OFF. Now he’s god to so many in Silicon Valley. Sadly, they are so blinded by his “success” that they cannot see the ugly little man/child he was @Harvard and still is. Humans get our moral fiber, our value systems, between 0–8, maybe up to 10 years old. Mark clearly didn’t get much moral guidance from his parents. And amoral people rarely change. They need a brick to the head, to ‘hit bottom,’ and ZUCKY ain’t fallin any time soon. In fact, Mark’s aligned himself with powerful Republicans to protect his self-interests.

The spoiled, self-serving brat is guiding the world to disaster after reaping huge profits on fake news without restraint to get Trumpy elected again. We now have a fascist running our country [into the ground] for the second time. Why? On top of getting him elected again, ZUCKY is paying Trump millions (billions?) to stop the Fed’s from breaking up Mark’s META monopoly.

MARK ZUCKERBERG, your power was wielded by the wealth of your parentage — mere chance, dumb luck. You’ve prioritized status and image over compassion and authenticity. Behind every great fortune is a great crime. Your crime, Mark, is the narcissist you’ve chosen to be.

Imagine how you and your wife, Priscilla Chan, would feel if YOUR DAUGHTERS, Maxima and August, were voted NOT HOT, deemed UGLY their first year at Harvard, as no doubt they’ll go there with the money you have made on the wasted hours all of us have spent on FACEBOOK and INSTAGRAM.

DELETE Facebook

DELETE Instagram

Parenting

Trump

Musk

WhatsApp

The AI in Your Pocket or WHY TO BAN TIKTOK

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

I’m on Facebook, whining to my friend about a fight with my husband through their IM.

In my typical “melodramatic,” (my husband claims, but I call “passionate”) fashion, I’m furiously typing how much of a jerk he is, how often we fight, basically questioning if the sanctity of marriage is sustainable.

My friend is empathetic. She reminds me that I am always welcome to visit her in Britain, especially if I decide to leave my husband. She’ll help me kick off my newly single life with a bang!

I have no intention of leaving my husband. I am sounding off, as women so often do to other women, about our marriages. And my friend knows this. She also knows her offer is giving me ground, a place to land. She is kind in the extreme, and I am honored to know her.

Unfortunately, Facebook is not so kind. They are collecting the IM exchange between me and my friend. Their data science team then runs Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning algorithms on our text exchange. They categorize and classify our exchange to ‘improve the engagement and response’ of their advertiser’s campaigns. In marketing speak we call it “Personalized Targeting.” They also sell our data to their advertisers, and you agree to let them do this when you download Facebook to your mobile, or sign up on your PC to engage with their platform.

In simple terms, personalized targeting means collecting as much data on an individual as possible, then correlating that data with people having the same or similar characteristics and online behavior. With enough data, patterns of our personal behavior emerge. Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok and every other social network, and most every site we visit puts “cookies” on our devices, essentially tracking where we visit and what we do online. And they use that data against us, manipulating us to buy, try, or subscribe to whatever they’re selling through “Recommendation ‘engines,’” aka algorithms.

RME, right? Another bullshit conspiracy theory.

What IS bullshit is you not knowing any of this is happening, and even if it is, you believe it does not affect you. Every call, every text, every place you search on the net, everything you buy, all your contacts, and every location you are IRL at any given time is taken from your cellphone. The data collected is used to convince you to buy a product, service, or into an ideology.

In fact, “Recommendation” is selling us so much more than business offerings. Rec engines are telling us how to think and what to believe. And we don’t consciously know it. En mass, we are buying into too much of what is being sold to us online, aka “fake news.” The Recommendation algorithms behind Google, Facebook, Insta, X, YouTube…etc., are creating a FEEDBACK LOOP, showing you ONLY what you’ve expressed interest in, or someone like you has engaged with — IMed, emailed, searched, clicked, tried, bought or subscribed. You will rarely, if ever now, get a differing point of view, or opinion other than your own when you engage online. The Recommendation Effect is shifting politics — the global resurgence of right-wing nationalism influencing elections, and the precise reason ex-president Trump was elected in 2016, narrowly lost in 2020, and is projected to win in 2024.

“Collaborative Filtering” is a form of Machine Learning, aka AI, that correlates your characteristics/behavior with people ‘similar’ to you. With enough correlations (data), computers can now see patterns and beliefs of individuals. In other words, if I buy X, and your data correlates with mine, you will likely buy X too. Advertisers use this data to slam you with ads their algorithms ‘think’ that you’ll respond to.

So, after whining to my friend I’m off Facebook and on to my day. I social media market in the mornings for my books and entrepreneurial workshops before I start my day gig. I go to Instagram. My feed is filled with dating site ads, and many are, “Here is your second chance at love,” type campaigns targeting divorced women, or women considering divorce. Or women having a rough patch in their marriage. The ads keep flashing images of happy couples and my heart sinks a little. Instagram is owned by Facebook, in case you didn’t already know.

For the next few weeks, many of the text ads in my feed on Gmail are for divorce lawyers in my area. Sure, I’ve considered divorce. Any couple married for 27 yrs likely has. And with my husband and I still at odds, and I’m feeling lonely, and craving intimacy, these ads present an option to staying married to a man that at the moment I’m not getting along with.

Over the next month or more, usually way more, I get slammed with ads, essentially recommendations for dating sites and divorce lawyers wherever I go online. The more I whine to my friends through IM, even emailing her or others about my marriage, the longer I’ll get slammed with dating and divorce site ads. The idea of dissolving my marriage, once inconceivable which encouraged me to work it out with my husband, is now not only an option but a promising one at that. Beyond just ads, I get recs for articles and blog posts about divorce, and second chances at intimacy, trying to convince me my life would be better if I divorced because ‘the love of my life’ is out there just waiting for me to swipe right.

Facebook, Google, all of them justify their use of Recommendation with marketing like, “more relevant and enjoyable ad ‘experiences,’ delivering content YOU want.”

Seriously? I don’t want to divorce, so why is their Rec engine suggesting I should through the ad content they are continuously serving me?

Simple answer: so their advertisers — the dating sites and divorce lawyers — SELL more.

Conspiracy theory? Bullshit! The conspiracy is that you don’t know, or even care this is happening to YOU too.

Machine Learning and Natural Language algorithms are behind most everything we do online now. They are the gun on the table. But Recommendation engines are picking that gun up, targeting us, and pulling the trigger. Quite literally.

Psychology 101: “Primers” (like the endless dating and easy divorce ads) and “Triggers” (like finding ‘the love of my life’ when I’m feeling lost and alone) are what motivate us to take any action.

Conspiracy theory, my ass. The Machiavellian effects of Rec engines are real. And it is dangerous — socially irresponsible — to let social media and search platforms continue to collect our data and misuse it for profit.

AI is NOT the light at the end of the tunnel to circumvent laborious and repetitive tasks. It really is the freight train comin at us…

Heads up to all you digital marketers out there: SEO based on relevance, link-backs, or even the number of unique hits, is, well, gone for the most part. Returns on Google are now based on Recommendation — what Google’s algorithms ‘think’ you want to see based on your past behavior and the behavior of others similar to yours. Google’s “organic search” returns are also based on how much money they make from any given advertiser. The more they make from, say, Progressive Insurance Corp, the more likely Progressive will be close to #1 in their search returns, regardless of SEO keywords and phrasing.

The Cost of Convenience

by jcafesin, posted in saas, social media

It’s surprising how little I think of my daughter now that she’s living 2,000 miles away at school. We talk on the phone frequently, but since she’s not involved in my daily life anymore, she’s more of an abstraction (when we’re not directly talking), a pleasant thought when she crosses my mind.

I figured she was having the same experience I was when she went off to college. The thought of me made her feel glad (or angry, or… since I’m her mother and that comes with mixed feelings), but I didn’t consider she thought of me often in her busy life. So, when I recently had exploratory surgery looking for cancer, I did not realize she even remembered me mentioning the appointment on the phone a couple of weeks ago.

This morning I’m in my office going through my email. I find one from my husband letting me know he and our daughter signed me up for online notifications of my medical records, including test results, last night while I slept. They gave the MyChart app my husband’s phone number and his email because they both know how much I hate putting my data online, never stopping to consider that my husband would be notified of my test results likely before I would by snail mail.

I’ll be getting my test results by snail mail because I do not want my medical information online. I get that it already is, which my daughter reminded me when I came at her full bore with anger on the phone this morning for signing me up without my permission (after coming unglued on my husband).

It isn’t just my medical records that shouldn’t be online, sitting in a cloud, accessible to everyone from Walgreens to United Health Care [insurance]. It makes my skin crawl that almost every time I want to access anything on the net now, the site attaches ‘cookies’ to my machine that track my usage. Many sites require I fill out forms for entry, collecting, aggregating and categorizing even more of my personal data to sell and/or exploit with targeted marketing.

My daughter is on the medical track studying to become a physician. She works as a scribe in a medical practice, and is an intern at Palomar Medical Center and uses MyChart on the job. So do the patients of the practice and the hospital, she assured me. They all love the convenience of being able to look up their medications and/or test results as soon as they’re posted on their e-chart.

She was trying to sell me on the real world, the one she, and most everyone else lives in daily—perpetually attached to the net via cellphones, laptops and tablets. Banking to paying bills to shopping, my daughter uses these online ‘services’ (which is kind of an oxymoron since these apps make it self-serve), to ‘keep it simple’ while juggling two internships, a job, and a full course load every quarter, including this summer.

Do you understand there is a cost to convenience? I asked her on the phone, after she apologized for setting up the account without my permission and promised to delete it when we disconnected.

She did, she assured me. But she really doesn’t. She’s too young, too many generations removed from WWII.

“The Third Reich was a diagnosis regime, obsessed with sorting the population into categories, cataloging people by race, religion, politics, sexuality, criminality and purported biological, mental and behavioral defects. Nazi officials created massive population indexes that compiled individuals’ medical, financial, educational, criminal and welfare records — even sports club files. By 1942, approx. ten million Reich citizens had been indexed. These files, then, established the grounds for sterilization, deportation and extermination.” (https://lnkd.in/d9txaahS)

Nothing to hide? I rhetorically asked my daughter on the phone, still admonishing her for signing me up for an online account of my medical information and then giving access to her dad via email. She placated my perceived conspiracy theory with, I get it, Mom! I do. It’s likely dangerous to have all our personal information online, but it already is, Mom.

1942 may as well be 1642 to my daughter, and [ostensibly] most of her gen— too far back to remember or care.

I didn’t care about using internet-based services either until the ‘cloud.’ It was mid-2000s and we were all on the free and open information highway when Amazon introduced its cloud-based storage service, but I didn’t get its impact until my bank started offering SaaS [self] ‘services,’ like Direct Deposit and online payments ‘for our convenience.’ At first I didn’t care about that either, as I had no intention of banking online since putting my bank account numbers through unsecured servers didn’t, and still doesn’t seem wise to me. Banking security is another oxymoron, and my internet connection through Xfinity isn’t exactly an impenetrable firewall.

By the mid-2010s cloud computing had scaled, especially with the advent of the ‘smart’ phone. Bank of America started making it hard to come into their branches in-person, cutting its staff in half and forcing customers to wait in long lines to talk to a teller. Many young people adapted quickly to avoid the hassle the banks created, which left a lot of older folks, and holdouts with old tech cellphones like me, having to wait sometimes 45 minutes to deposit a check.

I had a red slide phone with a real [small] keyboard and no internet connection until 2021 when AT&T switched to 4G and forced me to “upgrade” to a ‘smart’ phone [like the rest of the known universe did a decade earlier]. I’ve yet to enable an internet connection on my new cellphone, and don’t use location SaaS apps, ever. I navigate using printed maps, or use my memory the second visit to anywhere I’ve been. With my phone offline and not accessing any location services, at least it stops communicating with nearby cell towers so Google and State Farm [car insurance] doesn’t know where I am on the planet (GPS), or how fast I’m driving. They also don’t know whether I’m in my car, or on a plane, through the accelormeter sensor now inside our ‘smart’ phones which detects motion—whether we’re still, walking, biking, driving, flying.

I used to be among the 2+ billion frequent users of Amazon’s marketplace until every bookstore, hardware store, curio, card and gift shop in my neighborhood closed. And while it’s ‘convenient’ to get things delivered to my front door, not so much when it’s snowing out and UPS won’t deliver to our house on the hill and I need a specific tool to fix my irrigation pipe that froze and busted open. I now drive 12 miles, instead of the 3 it used to be before the local hardware store closed. I’m back to buying my tools directly, in-person, as I do for most everything else I shop for now to support the survival of local businesses.

Intellectually, I know I am fighting Goliath with a slingshot trying to retain even a modicum of my privacy from the Content Monster we call the ‘cloud.’ Stalking us everywhere we go IRL, and visit online on our devices, to everything we buy, to our marital status and genetic offspring, corporations have created and continue to create—unobstructed by laws or ethics—“massive population indexes that compiles individuals’ medical, financial, educational, criminal and welfare records — even sports club files,” or lack thereof since most Americans don’t exercise. Insta, Google, FB, TicTok, ChatGPT and every other big data SaaS app out there is “sorting the population into categories, cataloging people by race, religion, politics, sexuality, criminality,” including biological and mental characteristics of behavioral and genetic health.

Many, in fact most large corps these days are marketing us into buying, and believing (religion, politics, social views and values) by targeting their messaging using the very data we give them with every click on a webpage, swipe on a screen, every text or IM, every form we fill out, every poll we take, questionnaire we answer, and every medical exam or procedure we have now is stored on a cloud, and not just one cloud, but many. Redundancy is key in data storage.

I feel like the Borg is trying to assimilate me into submission of my privacy for the convenience of becoming part of the hive—i.e. ‘cloud’[ed] mind, I tried to explain to my daughter on the phone this morning. And the convenience [of self-service] turns out to be for the corps, killing customer service, tying us up in phone loops, and making their mistakes our problems to fix while continually charging our credit cards their monthly fee. So much for the convenience of AutoPay.

Mother, my daughter proclaimed in all seriousness, all our information is already online and in the cloud, or separate clouds that are all connected, or whatever, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. I signed you up for MyChart last night because I want you to get your test results as soon as they’re posted and then share them with me so I can stop worrying, or, at least know what is going on with you. I love you, Mom, and I feel really scared about your biopsy results.

Heavy sigh. She played the Love card.

Assimilation is hard to resist when delivered by those you love most.

I apologized for making her worry, and again felt surprised that my daughter remembered and was concerned about my biopsy. I promised to tell her the test results as soon as I get them, which is likely a lie, unless they’re good. I’ll need to privately process bad results before making her worry even more.

Regardless of whom I choose to share my biopsy results with, they are mine alone to share, or they should be. The fact is, my insurance company will know if I have cancer before I will. If my doctor prescribes me drugs, Wallgreens will know what kind of cancer before I will by snail mail. Under the Affordable Care Act, my insurance can not charge me more, or exclude coverage for pre-existing conditions, but get another Republican president, and that can change. We’ll go back to leaving diabetics to the disabled uninsured.

My world growing up was much like my parents. In my day, corporations worked for their customers and clients. With the advent of SaaS and the ‘aide’ of apps, we are now all products of these corporations selling us on using technology with the lie of ‘convenience’ while hording our private information to maximize their profits.

Nothing to hide? Nazi Germany won’t ever happen here?

  • Trump, and his millions of minions.
  • Fox ‘News.’ Newsmax. Breitbart…etc.
  • Conservative Christians
  • Catholic Supreme Court (8 out of 9 justices)
  • Neo-Nazis
  • White Nationalists/Supremacists/Warriors
  • …etc.

SaaS Apps that F**k You

by jcafesin, posted in saas
Saas Apps that Screw You
or
Why U Can’t Get that House, that Job, those Tickets…

I’ve been house hunting on REDFIN for over 5 yrs with no luck. The homes I want are either too expensive, a flat-out ripoff, or an offer is accepted within 24 hrs of listing. We’ve bid on 5 houses, and we’ve been ‘out bid’ every time.

I’ve defaulted to using Redfin.com almost exclusively, as they released MLS (Multiple Listing Service [of homes for sale]) data within minutes of the broker’s listing. ZILLOW, REALTOR.com, and their like often show new MLS listings hours later.

I assumed that Redfin was helping me find a home. But what this SaaS (Software as a Service) offering is really doing is screwing most potential home buyers like you and me. Making MLS listings available the moment a property is listed for sale to everyone online, globally, does NOT ‘level the playing field.’ Democratizing MLS listings introduces 50+ interested buyers at every doorstep, jacking up housing prices with fierce competition for the same property.

Real estate brokers love this software! They now give you access to their paid MLS subscription (Matrix), knowing we all get it from Redfin anyway. Promoting “competitive bidding” makes them richer with every sale.

Book a trip on HOTELS.com or EXPEDIA lately? Ever? If you use travel apps you are spending more than you need to. Guaranteed! You’ll get a better hotel rate if you call the places you’d like to stay, and talk directly to their front desk. I’ve booked family vacations for 21 yrs now, and every single time, without fail, from Victoria, Canada, to Venice, Italy, the rates are cheaper if you book directly by calling the places you plan to stay.

The original idea with travel apps was they’d buy in bulk and sell at a discount. But like Pets.com, these sites quickly learned the destinations were not very flexible on their rates, so they ‘pivoted’ their SaaS with marketing. They sold users on ‘Packaged Deals,’ but you’ll be locked in to their ‘deals,’ which often aren’t ideal, and your vacation will cost more booking through them, even though they advertise that they save you money. Travel apps offer you no real value, and often rip you off, adding charges to cover the cost of maintaining their business.

Same goes for most middlemen SaaS offerings. It cost money to run their platforms, and they pass that cost on to their paying customers.

Ever use ANGIE’S LIST, or HOME ADVISOR, or THUMBTACK to get recommendations for services from contractors to dentists? Most of their good ratings are LIES. Angi’s, and their like, are advertising platforms. They are like Phone Books in the olden days. The BUSINESS PAYS these SaaS apps to have their name appear in search results. Even on Angi, the listing may be free, but your business will be buried in their search returns if you do not pay their ‘premium’ rate. Few (if any) of the good ratings and reviews awarded the businesses are real. Either the business solicited friends and family to post good reviews, and/or they hired an outside marketing firm to create high ratings (usually from India or the Philippines doing click scams). Angi and their like bury the negative reviews (as does Google), as pissing off their paying clients would be bad for their SaaS business.

These SaaS recommendation sites say they do a standard background check, meaning criminal records to professional license, but that’s about it. A few say they reach out to the vendor’s customers by phone, which they may, but with contacts the business gives them. Maybe they get the wife of the vendor on the phone, and of course, she just loves his work! High ratings mean you’re more likely to hire them. And the business is more likely to keep paying Angi and Thumbtack to appear on their lists.

Developers and marketers of middlemen SaaS apps will argue they are “doing good” for the world, whatever that means. (Doing good for them?) They are ‘setting information free to form an egalitarian society,’ Silicon Valley types profess. But I’ve already established that these apps, and their like jack up the cost of goods and services, as IRL middlemen do. Creators of middlemen software will tell you they are offering you a ‘convenience.’ Bullshit. With a few clicks you too can book flights, hotels, car rentals, arrange appointments with contractors, find a [good] dentist. Do your research and go beyond Google to Bing, DuckDuckGo, Reddit, ChatGPT, Nextdoor…etc., and you can find all kinds of information about a company or vendor, including reviews across a broad spectrum, not just the paid ratings on Expedia or Angi.

Most SaaS apps today require you give them a ton of personal data to utilize their ‘service.’ Additionally, they put ‘cookies’ on your mobile and PC that track everywhere you go online, and IRL (through your phone). Not conspiracy theory. Cookies (sweet and inviting name, right), track and log your behavior to ‘improve your overall [online] experience,’ as well as more tightly target you with advertising the app believes you’re more likely to respond to.

Ever wonder why entertainment events have gotten so expensive? The only way to buy tickets these days is through a SaaS app like TICKET MASTER. And you better hope when you log on the broker site doesn’t crash, or sell you fake tickets, or sell out in the first 3 minutes with millions vying for the same show. And good luck getting a refund if you need to cancel, or the event is canceled. The software IS the service, which generally means little to no actual customer support.

Wanted to go see Barbie a week after it opened with my daughter on her short visit home from college. There were no tickets available at any theater within a 100 mile radius the 5 days she was home because they’d all been purchased in advance online. Before the ‘convenience’ of apps like FANDANGO, or AMC, or REGAL, we’d at least have had a chance to see the movie if we waited in line, even if it meant getting to the theater early to ensure we got tickets. It is neither convenient nor cost effective buying movie tickets with SaaS apps. In addition to the high costs of the tickets, these movie apps charge an additional fee for ‘online processing.’

Look for a job on LINKEDIN or INDEED lately? Find a job post that interests you, and even if the ad has been online less than 24 hrs it still has hundreds of applicants. You’d better have one hell of an amazing skill set, and a CV with all the right keywords that fit the exact niche of the job requirements to get noticed among your competition.

Democratization [a la Google]:

  • The introduction of a democratic system or democratic principles.
  • The action of making something accessible to everyone.

SaaS developers and marketers inject this buzzword into most pitches these days. They’re democratizing the web, upholding democracy, doing good, they’ll tell you. Not sure how many buy into this rhetoric to make themselves feel and appear philanthropic, or it’s all a big sales pitch while they’re dreaming of a billion dollar acquisition or going public and becoming instant millionaires.

Seriously, how convenient is it being robbed of our money and information every time we use software ‘services’?

Let’s get real. Democratizing MLS listings—making them accessible to everyone on the internet—is a BAD IDEA for home buyers, now forced to compete for a home against 20 other offers, a third of those offering cash by corporations that can afford to pay tens of thousands over asking. Democratizing movie tickets forces movie goers to buy tickets sometimes weeks before the film’s release without ever hearing if the movie is any good. Democratizing plane tickets to hotel reservations raises the cost of travel for everyone by exponentially increasing the demand.

Democracy [a la Google] “is a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.” As for upholding democracy, I had no representation to help me get back the over $300 AMAZON PRIME ripped off from me when they signed me up without my knowledge and then made it almost impossible for me to cancel the account.

We are not a democracy, as this country is run by big business, in particular FAAMG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google), the gatekeepers of our personal data run [a muck] by greedy, unregulated children.

Want to know why you can’t afford to buy a home today?

Is the cost of events and movie tickets keeping you home watching NETFLIX (yet another SaaS app that eats up your money, and worse your life’s time, but at least they deliver entertainment)?

Even ChatGPT could not give me an estimate on the number of SaaS applications online today. (It had no clue what ‘middlemen’ software is.) The consensus of search results from multiple sources agree the SaaS industry is growing so rapidly, virtually exponentially, estimates have to be based per industry. According to Statista, the SaaS industry is worth $197 billion U.S. dollars and estimated to reach $232 billion by 2024.

While many SaaS apps provide value, especially for running a business, from CRMs, to CMS, to ERP, most consumer-facing middlemen SaaS apps are not only valueless, they are dangerous. Sucking people in with lies about savings on movies or when booking travel through their app; democratizing information making it impossible for anyone but the uber-rich or cash-flushed corps to act on, and rising the cost of, well, everything, ultimately is neither convenient nor cost effective for 99% of us.

The Psychology of Marketing

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

I teach my students at Berkeley and Stanford that the foundation of marketing is psychology. Marketing is manipulating people to do what we want, so to get people to do what we want, we have to understand how they think, what they feel, and why.

I also teach that the foundation of psychology, what motivates all of us to do whatever we do, is self-interest. I explain that even saints like Mother Teresa, who spent her life feeding the poor, caring for the sick, did so out of self-interest. Mother Teresa was not altruistic. There is no such thing as Altruism. It is a religious construct to motivate good deeds, to get people out of our own heads, even for a moment, to consider others.

Many students, especially believers of religion, have a problem with this lecture. And, no doubt, many reading this blog are bridling right now. “Of course Altruism is REAL. It’s what we strive for, our highest attainment— to give selflessly, because we are fundamentally caring, loving beings.”

Not so much. We are fundamentally self-serving.

And this is NOT a judgment call. This is a fact of human nature. What can be judged is what we DO with this fact of our nature.

I teach self-interest religiously with every Marketing lecture I give. As Mother Teresa spread the word of Christ around the world with every sick child she fed, she was fulfilling her function as a nun. And her brain rewarded her efforts with Dopamine, Serotonin, Oxytocin— ‘happiness’ hormones that made her feel good. In the face of that kind of poverty, I’d be crying daily. I don’t do what she did because it would not make me feel good in any way. I’d be profoundly sad, every day, knowing Christ will never save these children. People are going to have to do that.

We ALL act in self-interest. We scoff at Chevron fracking as the height of corruption, yet we blithely ignore our roles in global warming by driving SUVs we don’t need, or leaving lights or electronics on all the time because we’re too distracted to turn them off. Or we drive while on our cellphones, and cause over 1.5 MILLION accidents annually, and KILL, murder, 9 or more people A DAY so we can check our Instagram or Tiktok feeds.

I teach Marketing, not Morality, I tell students who balk at my contention our motivation, without exception, is self-interest. It is important to tell them this fact about us, this truth, giving them the ability to produce effective advertising down the line when they begin marketing their startups. To get people to buy into your product, service or message, you must understand their psychology— what they think they need or want, and why, then offer them solutions to their issues and desires.

Bernie Madoff did it to a lot of greedy people. He fulfilled their desire to get rich quick without effort when he convinced them to invest with him. Purdue Pharma fulfilled the desire of people in temporary and chronic pain, while simultaneously fulfilling the greed of medical professionals with kick-back payments that turned doctors into drug pushers.

Humans are self-interested beings. What we do with this fact is what matters, NOT that we ARE.

On the other end of the spectrum, Toyota fulfilled the desire of people interested in preserving our planet when they invented the Prius. And Tesla and other car makers have done the same with their all electric vehicles. Toyota and Tesla produce the cars they do to make money. And while serving themselves, they are moving closer to serving the greater good, by producing cars that have low emissions. Even better than electric cars, is solar and wind to power them, since over 60% of our electricity still comes from burning coal and other fossil fuels, which continues to do immeasurable damage to our planet.

Martin Andrew Green is an Australian professor at the University of New South Wales who’s dedicated his career to developing solar cells. Mr. Green’s self-interest is scratching a mental itch. He’s curious about light energy, and in learning how to manipulate it, his brain rewards him, makes him feel powerful, smart, valuable, serving his emotional needs.

Self-interest is NOT a curse. It is simply a state of being… human, in our case, but self-interest seemingly dictates the behavior of everything else that lives on Earth. Survival of the fittest is how species last over millennium. Not survival of the kindest, whatever ‘kind’ means. With every mouthful of food, every article of clothing, every vaccination Mother Teresa provided the sick and poor, she also fed them Christianity. She was not kind in spreading gospel that Jesus saves their souls. Instead of teaching the value and necessity of socially responsible behavior, which would have served the greater good, preaching rewards in the afterlife does not serve the living or their future.

There is no need to fear the fact that human behavior is driven by self-interest. Regardless of the religious allegory that Altruism is not only real, but mandatory for society to function, self-interest does NOT need to manifest as narcissism. Green, or Toyota, or the parents who work to provide for their kids, or helping a friend in need, most of us contribute to supporting our society or there would be no human race at all. We have no great physical strength or stealth prowess. Building communities, exchanging ideas and skill sets, being here for each other is all we have to sustain us.

We all have the capacity to be giving, generous, thoughtful beings. Our motivation is irrelevant. It is our ACTIONS that determine our morality, whether we are contributing to creating a society that thrives, or participating it our own demise.

Self-interest is encoded in our DNA, and is not a threat to humanity, but a valuable characteristic, a useful asset. We just need to lengthen our time horizon beyond our own lifetime, broaden our self-absorbed view. We must learn that acting ‘altruistically’ means recognizing our impact on each other and this planet, and that accounting for the needs of others as well as our own IS in all of our self-interest.

The Truth About Mark Zuckerberg

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

IMAGINE working your ass off all through high school, studying instead of partying, volunteering with school and community groups so you can into a good college. You send out your applications, to Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, as you have the 4.8 GPA, and all the right clubs on your resume. Your mom kisses each envelope before mailing, “for luck,” then hugs you, with her silent prayer that you’ll be accepted everywhere, that the world will see her beautiful daughter the way she does.

Pins and needles until the letters start coming in, or maybe they won’t, and no college will want you, keeps playing in your head, until February rolls around and letters DO come. Cal Berkeley wants you! UC Davis wants you! Stanford wait-listed you. And Harvard ACCEPTED YOU!! You’re dancing in the kitchen with your mom, dad, and little brother, laughing, hugging, celebrating your achievement of hard work and tenacity. For the moment, you let yourself bask in the glow of your family’s pride.

August comes round, and you are settling into your dorm room at Harvard. Your roommate is nice enough, though she’s hardly there. Unlike you, she’s very social. She got into Harvard on her daddy’s dime. He went there. She had a 3.6 GPA, but got a free pass into the school, as did ex-president George Bush Jr (with a 2.35 GPA). If nothing else, Harvard is incestuous. Many of Harvard students are related to past students, with money.

You love your classes. Your professors. A few months into your Harvard experience you are doing well academically, even if you haven’t made any real friends. You assure your mom you’re fine, though you don’t tell her you’re feeling more than a bit lonely. The popular girls, like your roommate, came in with money, and come from money. They dress trendy, buy expensive, look sharp, act confident. Make it in Harvard, or not, they have no worries after school. The rich rarely have to worry like the rest of us.

You come back to your empty dorm room one afternoon, turn on your computer, and are about to get started on the paper you have to write for Expository, but the image on the screen stops you dead. Your face stares back at you, next to some other young woman. Under her picture it says, “HOT!” Under YOUR PICTURE voters say you are not.

This is the beginning of Facemash, which eventually became Facebook. This is MARK ZUCKERBERG’S idea of fun—making women feel like shit for his entertainment. IMAGINE what that girl must have felt when she saw NOT under her Harvard profile picture. IMAGINE if it was YOUR CHILD. OR YOU.

And here’s what ZUCKERBERG said the first night he released Facemash: “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”

This is MARK ZUCKERBERG then, and THIS IS MARK ZUCKERBERG NOW! He is still the same ugly, petty, small man/child, pulling the same ugly crap, indifferent to anyone but himself, ignoring the pain he is causing across the globe now. Zuckerberg was already a second year student at Harvard. He was not a child. If ZUCKERBERG was a decent man, a man of goodness, not cruelty, he never would have COPIED HOT OR NOT, an app that was already out there. Zucky just ripped it off! To debase Harvard WOMEN. Shame on you ZUCKY, and your MAMA and PAPA, for not teaching you how to treat others with respect and kindness!

ZUCKERBERG is still indifferent to anyone but his own needs, even TODAY. His Facebook recommendation engine helped get TRUMPY ELECTED! And he’ll likely do it again. How? His recommendation engine only shows you what ZUCKY WANTS YOU TO SEE. You do NOT see all your connection’s posts. ZUCKY WON’T LET YOU. He shows you only posts that REFLECT YOU. It helps his advertisers sell you more, to show you only what you’ve shown interest in, or people like you have clicked on. We are all merely seeing posts that reflect our own opinions now.

ZUCKY only sees his own reflection too. It’s what allowed him to debase women at Harvard. It is allowing him to keep his screwed up recommendation engine on and running, as you are more likely to BUY from people reflecting your position. Russians, Republicans spreading lies, ZUCKY doesn’t care. He cares about getting and keeping advertisers. His “fake news” AI department is a joke. I know someone working there, and they tell me he really isn’t trying to stop it at all. It doesn’t serve him to do so. He wants advertisers, and you don’t get them, and keep them, limiting ad sales.

He got lucky debasing women from an app he RIPPED OFF. Now he’s god, to so many. Sadly, they are so blinded by his “success” and they can not see the ugly little man/child he was @Harvard, and still is. Humans get our moral fiber between 0 – 8, maybe up to 10 years old. He clearly didn’t get much moral guidance from his parents. And amoral people rarely change. They need a brick to the head, to ‘hit bottom,’ and ZUCKY ain’t fallin any time soon. Now, he’s guiding the world to disaster, to make money from advertisers, to keep FACEBOOK and INSTAGRAM going. (And this is what Millennials, and MBAs deem “success.”)

Now he’s on to #THREADS, to collect MORE DATA on you to SCREW YOU, this country, the world. Don’t let him! Don’t get on THREADS!

My hope, MARK ZUCKERBERG, is that you learn to THINK beyond yourself, and to ACT with kindness and empathy, instead of what you were obviously raised to be— mean, thoughtless, sexist, totally and completely self-interested. Your power was wielded by the wealth of your parentage, mere chance you were born into money—dumb luck, literally. Imagine how you and your wife, #PriscillaChan, would feel if YOUR DAUGHTERS, #Maxima and #August, were voted NOT HOT, deemed UGLY their first year at Harvard, as no doubt they’ll go there with the money you have made on the trillions of wasted hours all of us have spent on FACEBOOK and INSTAGRAM , and coming soon THREADS.

#DeleteFacebook

#DeleteInstagram

How to Raise a Genius

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

Went to the Jelly Belly Factory on a field trip with my daughter’s 2nd grade class. The young man assigned to escort us on the tour misquoted a brilliant saying by one of my favorite icons.

The guide delivered his canned speech, spoke of how long and complex the process to make even one single jelly bean, but that nothing great ever came easily, “as the inventor, Thomas Edison said: ‘Genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.’”

But that is NOT what Tom said. He said, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”

So what is my issue with the mere 9% our tour guide misquoted?

Mr. Thomas Alva Edison was trying to tell us that to get good (‘genius’) at ANYTHING takes HARD WORK (‘perspiration’), and a lot of it. He should know. It took him, and an educated team of men many years and over 5,000 exploded glass bulbs to invent the light bulb.

Still, you say, it’s only 9%. The 8 year old’s the tour guide was talking to didn’t even know what “percent” meant. And while this may be true, there were 15 adults with the pack of 40 kids the guide was leading. And the parents understood. Most had probably never heard the quote before. It is somewhat obscure, which is a shame because it is an astounding insight. What the tour guide misquoted did not communicate the gravity of Mr. Edison’s meaning.

In the beginning of the 4th grade our son failed several math tests in a row, and upon inquire we found he didn’t understand the material. When asked why he hadn’t asked for help from either his teacher or us, he confessed he felt afraid he’d look dumb. Having always done fairly well in math, when he got lost, he felt too stupid to ask for help. He was supposed to be smart, but maybe he wasn’t, he cried, clearly shamed.

I hugged him, held him, and reminded him of old Tom’s saying for the hundredth time. Then my husband and I got to work, played tag team, alternating afternoons, evenings and weekends to teach our son what he needed to know. Within three months of daily math lessons he not only grasped the material presented but excelled to the top of Math Swap in his grade level and remained there through elementary school.

Our son now loves math. It’s his favorite subject. He works hard at it and that hard work just placed him in the most advanced math class at his new middle-school. Failing those math tests in the 4th grade turned into a great education for all of us. We got to see directly how hard work pays off. And though our son may not always tow the line of excellence, he now knows that ‘smart’ is not given, but earned.

The New York Times Magazine had an article a while back on ‘genius.’ It sited Anders Ericsson’s research on The Making of an Expert, which concluded ‘genius’ wasn’t born, as previously thought, but made.

“Outstanding performance is the product of years of deliberate practice, not any innate talent or skill,” according to K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula, and Edward T. Cokely.

Most everyone starts out with the 1% inspiration. It comes with being human, and our ability to think abstractly.

Few of us have the tenacity, or the determination to endure failure after failure and continue through that last 5-10% it takes to achieve excellence. Most of us settle on gawking at greatness instead of pursuing it.

So, the question is not, ‘What is genius,’ or even excellence, but what motivates persistence?

Achieving good grades, or becoming a killer guitar player, or great at soccer, or even parenting, takes “deliberate practice.” We need to impart Tom’s wisdom to our children, teach them by example, with unwavering diligence, that reaching their potential can not be achieved blowing most of the day binge watching Netflix, or YouTube, or gaming. To actualize ‘greatness’ means devoting the 99% perspiration— the time, energy and effort necessary to create anything of lasting value. Whether it be a school report, a science project or a math test, genius is not only doable for most every child, but for all of us with hard work and persistence.

The Virus Killing Silicon Valley Startups

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

There is a pandemic in Silicon Valley. It is making startups sick, and 90+% of all small businesses fail. This virus didn’t start in China, or any country. It didn’t begin in crowded, filthy wet markets from different animals swapping genes. It began with Google and Facebook, and their unrelenting greed for profits.

I am currently mentoring startup students at Berkeley-Haas. I also teach entrepreneurs at Stanford and Cal how to achieve that illusive 10% of sustained business success. Without exception, all are starting up in the exact same backasswards way.

1. They begin their business by developing their product or service.

These entrepreneurs have invested their time, and often their own money in creating a MVP (minimum viable product), a concept introduced by Eric Ries in 2011, and the 2nd of 3 primary reasons most startups fail. NEVER begin your business by producing two-thirds of an idea hoping to ‘find’ your customers, and get them to tell you how to improve your offering. In fact, producing your initial offering at all is the wrong way to start any business.

2. The startup, with their developed MVP, create ‘digital’ marketing campaigns.

They launch their website, and create SMM (social media marketing) and PPC (pay per click) ads to get ‘traction.’ Impressions, Engagements, and Likes are virtually meaningless. Sure, Branding is essential to build awareness of a startup, but sales are what makes a business successful. SALES. That’s it. Without sales, or paid subscriptions, or donations in nonprofits, you have a hobby, not a viable business.

Let’s get real. It’s ridiculously simple to use Google Ads, or to place Facebook ads. These platforms spend millions annually to convince entrepreneurs that slamming the net with crappy advertising will make your company successful. It’s BULLSHIT. They are lying to you, pocketing your $3,000 – 5,000 monthly to ‘train’ their AI engines to “target” your business better than you can. In fact, you should KNOW YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE BEFORE YOU PLACE ANY ADS, or even develop your website.

Beyond Google and Facebook, there are tens of thousands of “Digital Marketing” agencies, selling you the same crap Google and Facebook are. They promise to make you money if you spend your money with them because it is equally easy for them to place these PPC ads as these platforms have made it for you. Stop buying into their deadly virus!

The real ROI on “digital advertising” is very hard to find. Google, Facebook and ‘digital’ agencies make these stats almost impossible to come by. Reality check on ROI of “digital” advertising, according to Search Engine Journal: “the average ROAS (return on ad spending) for small accounts is 1.5 to 1% – or barely break even.” Additionally, PPC or CPC means COST PER CLICK, not sales. It is estimated that 25 – 40% of all clicks on ads are fake, meaning you are paying for clicks from Click Farms in the Philippines, or automated systems meant to profit Google while costing you for every fraudulent click.

3. The startup goes after “building market share” with freemium offers, hoping to convert users to paying customers somewhere in the theoretical future.

It’s easy to get people to try, or even use your offering for free, when they have no skin—money—in play. SALES means getting folks to pay for your offering/s. Getting actual sales is a lot harder!

To garner actual SALES, you must first understand the competitive landscape of your product or service. Many startups have no idea the market share they’re seeking has been garnered by another company with the same or similar offerings. And here’s a heads-up to all the entrepreneurs who think your offering is so unique there’s nothing out there like it. Bullshit. In 5 minutes I can find similar offerings to just about anything. Even if your offering has a few more bells and whistles, it’s hard to get people to pay to switch from what they’ve become accustomed to using.

First and foremost, MARKETING is NOT “digital advertising.”

Broadcast, to PR, to networking, the ROI from these mediums average between 2 – 20+%, way more than the .05 – 1% ROI of ‘digital’ advertising.

BUSINESS, any business, BEGINS with MARKETING. Regardless how great your products or services are, your business will NOT be successful without constantly marketing your offerings. Branding is a tool of marketing—campaigns meant to build awareness of your offerings and company. And Marketing takes many forms, way beyond the extremely low ROI of “digital” campaigns.

The Marketing process is far more complex than designing a logo, putting up a website, and slamming the internet with “digital ads,” organic or paid. BEFORE you build your offering, construct a MARKETING FOUNDATION for your startup, (or existing business—better late than never) to create a thriving, sustainable company.

Before investing the time and money to build a product or service, then waste more countless hours and dollars advertising it, BEGIN any startup or business venture by PRODUCTIZING each and every offering IDEA.

PRODUCTIZATION begins by getting intimate with the offering you hope to create. Make lists, actual, physical lists of your idea’s FEATURES, and the BENEFITS or SOLUTIONS the FEATURES your potential offering will provide. Next, create lists of who will benefit from the features of your offering. These are your TARGET AUDIENCES, the people you will market your offering to. These lists also provide SEO content marketing when you begin the process of creating advertising campaigns.

PRODUCTIZING your offering/s means doing COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS every month or so, to be sure you understand what companies are producing similar offerings, and the market share they’re collecting. If your startup has any success at all, others are going to copy what you’re doing, and go after the same targets you’re hoping to attract, and keep. Understanding what your competition has will help you define what makes your offering unique. Your startup’s marketing should always be selling your UVPs (unique value propositions)—what makes your offering better than your competitors.

It is a lot more fun developing products and services—turning a concept into a reality—than PRODUCTIZING an idea. PRODUCTIZATION is time consuming and detail oriented, and a drag comparatively speaking. If you want to have fun, then enjoy your hobby of creating offerings. If you want to be among the 10% that build SUSTAINABLE companies, you must first build a MARKETING FOUNDATION under your startup, which begins with the PRODUCTIZATION of each and every potential offering.