I visit a lot of startups, the video here is of Posterous, a company that is doing it right. Usually you can tell immediately whether a startup is really run well (which Posterous is). You’ll have your own ability to “smell” real startups when you go on the Startup Crawl in SF on November 20. Start the video to listen to Posterous’s founders and then compare them to your favorite startup. Can you see the difference?

Here’s some things that startups that aren’t run well do:

1. Have plush offices in the most expensive part of town. Come on, who are you fooling? You are burning someone else’s money and you aren’t spending it like it’s your own.
2. You can’t tell me what you do in a single Tweet. See that super complicated Toyota Prius in my driveway? It gets better mileage than your car. If you can’t explain why your product is better, the way I just did with the Toyota Prius, in a short space or time on the phone you won’t make it.
3. If I look around and don’t see programmers. I can smell programmers. A good company is full of them. Posterous, for instance, has ONLY programmers. FriendFeed had something like 13 programmers and one other person. Great ratio.
4. You hire a PR firm. Now this one is dangerous, but the best companies have let their customers do the talking for them. At Rackspace, for instance, they worked to stay out of the public eye and worked on building the best service organization web hosting had ever seen. The best companies, when small, have just gotten good at telling their stories. I still remember when Stewart Butterfield showed me Flickr. He didn’t have any PR flacks with him. Now, maybe a PR company was helping them behind the scenes or to take care of leads and all the other stuff that goes with building a company but it wasn’t the first interaction I had with the company. Nothing like having a CEO or CTO just show you the product and explain why it’s better. 4b: you don’t have a blog and a Twitter account. Even worse if you have a PR firm and you don’t have both of those things.
5. They spend money on the wrong things. I’ve been in more than one startup that had bad chairs and small screens for their engineers but they had an expensive coffee machine. Let me make this clear: you have 18 months to build your business. You have figured out how to get some programmers to work with you. Make them as absolutely productive as they can be. Buy them a decent chair and get them at least two large screen high res monitors with fast computers. Remember SOASTA? Every engineer had a 30-inch monitor both at home and at work along with a MacPro (you can see one of those monitors in the interview I did with them). That was a HUGE recruiting tool and I think it was key in helping them keep their best people and, hey, I hear they are doing well.
6. (This should be #1) They don’t fire fast enough. I’ll be honest, at Podtech me and another guy were pulling the company in different directions. John should have fired one of us. He didn’t. The story got muddled. The rest is history. (In those situations it doesn’t really matter who is right, either, you gotta pick one direction and go with it, startups don’t have enough resources to try out two directions). I’ve seen lots of other startups be slow to fire people who weren’t pulling their weight. Always bad because the best people get pissed and/or leave. Again, you need to have everyone pulling with all their weight in one direction. If that isn’t happening the startup probably isn’t firing people fast enough.
7. You picked the wrong infrastructure. I’ll let you read into that what you want because I’m biased here (I’m a Rackspace Web Hosting employee), but ask great startups and you’ll hear some common themes here.
8. You let VCs control your management team and strategy too early. There’s lots of advice out on the Internet about this one, so I’ll leave it for you to figure out. But your early decisions will have big leverage on your company later. Hire the wrong management team and your company won’t make it to the B-round. I’m not experienced enough to give good advice here, but I’ve seen what happens up front. I remember meeting one CEO of one company that was just, well, let’s say clueless. How did he get hired? The VCs put him in.
9. You have a too cool name and logo. Oh, OK, this isn’t a worst thing, but companies spend too much time worrying about them (it’s a sign that you have too much money before you even have a company and customers, which is a bad sign). That said, I just interviewed a company named rrripple. Now if you end up with a name like that maybe you should spend at least 20 more minutes thinking through your name! (Sorry Rrripple).
10. You say yes too often, particularly in engineering decisions. Look at Posterous (the video embedded on this blog). They have a blog publishing tool. But are their comments threaded? No. Will they be eventually? Yes! Why didn’t they do them threaded up front? Because they set priorities on other things that mattered more. That’s actually a good sign for a startup: if you have only four engineers you can’t do everything. If there’s one thing I like about Evan Williams, founder of Blogger and Twitter, is that he doesn’t try to do it all. In fact he prides himself on NOT doing things. It takes great leadership to say “no, Scoble, you can’t have more than 500 members on a list.”
11. Startups pick old technology because it’s familiar. You’re a startup, you should be picking the best of breed for everything you do. If you are using Microsoft Office “just because” then you are making a mistake. Have you considered Jive, SocialText, Zoho, Google Docs and Spreadsheets and Wave before making your choices? Have you really looked at ways to make your small company more productive? Or you just going with the same stuff your dad’s company used?
12. You don’t change direction fast enough. Every startup should be looking at its direction every month or so. Are things going according to plan? If not, fix them. But sometimes you just made bad assumptions about what the market would want from you. That’s OK! But don’t take a year to change directions, change quickly and you’ll have a chance to save the company.

What other mistakes do you see startups make?

Aside, if you work for a startup, I’d love to know the tools you are using for a list I’m keeping that I call “weapons for entrepreneurs.” I would love to know what tools/companies you’re using to outrun everyone.

It’s the worst question in social media. Sorry Chris for picking on your question.

It’s actually a question lots of people wonder, but it’s the kind of thing that no one really can answer.

Why?

Because we’re not in control of who follows us.

So, I’d rather not think about it.

I rather think about things I CAN control. What are those?

1. What I write about.
2. Who I follow.
3. Who I hang out with.
4. The lists I follow and steal from.

See, the people I follow will inform my opinion. I find I use what I’m learning on Twitter all the time. So, if I follow smarter technologists, I will probably become more informed. At least I’ll be able to @reply to the best thinkers in the business.

Wait a second, did I just discover a way to get followers? Why, yes! See, if you have something smart to say back to people who are smart they just might follow you.

But, really, followers don’t matter anymore. Here’s proof. I just created a new Twitter account to display only my RSS feed (this blog will be on that new account shortly). I told everyone that I would add the first 500 people who followed that account to a list. Guess what? I didn’t need to follow them back. Here’s the list.

This list is useful to me. Why? It gives me a look into what the people reading me (and who are online on Friday afternoon) are thinking about. I might never have followed many of these people. But now I get to see them. I wish I had a list of ALL of my followers but Twitter is lame and only lets 500 people onto a single list.

So, I can “Follow You” (big “F”) without “following you” (small “F”). So, is the new Twitter goal to get me to follow you? Or put you on a list? Help, my head hurts.

Seriously, why else doesn’t getting followers matter? Twitter search. Several times a day I read every tweet that has the word “Rackspace” in it. Every day! Same for “Scoble.” Same for all sorts of different terms. Today I’m tracking “Google Chrome.” Say Google Chrome in a Tweet and I will see it.

Do followers matter in a search scenario? No! I see your Tweet whether you have 1 follower or a million!

Yesterday I was talking with @pistachio, Laura Fitton, who runs One Forty, a great way to find Twitter apps, and she told me that it’s not the number of followers that matters anymore.

It’s the content you write. Oh, geez, I’m doomed!

So, if you want more followers you gotta find a way to write better? Or do better videos?

Now THAT is the best question in social media: “how do I write better?”

Me? I’m too lazy and it’s Friday afternoon so I’m gonna give up on this writing thing and head to San Francisco for a nice meal with Maryam and friends.

In the meantime, good luck with the followers. I’ve been working in online communities since 1985 and I still haven’t figured that out.

Twitter’s new list feature is one of those things that seems simple on the surface and is easily ignored.

But it has deeply changed how I get my news and how I interact with the tech community.

Click through these lists and you’ll see a different world than you would have thought possible on Twitter. This is the order I visit the lists in the morning:

Tech News Brands. Here’s 500 tech news sources. Everything from the Wall Street Journal to TechCrunch. Watch this list for a few minutes and you’ll be up to date on what’s happening in tech right now. This is far more complete than Techmeme or Google News and far faster too.

Once I’ve gotten up to date on the news, I check out the people who write and produce the news. Here you’ll find 491 journalists and bloggers and see what the back channel is. Often this is more interesting than the tech news brands, but it’s lots of fun to flip back and forth while some big news story is breaking.

Want to know what the news will be tomorrow? Well, the rich guys who are funding companies often know what will be big and so I watch this list of 415 venture capitalists and angel investors to see what they are thinking about.

The venture capitalists, though, are fun to contrast with 447 people who founded their own companies. Often these two lists have divergent points of view that are fun to flip back and forth between.

After all that I visit the tech pundits list. These are 451 folks who love to tell you what they think happened.

If you’re an entrepreneur I’ve built a list of weapons for you. Everything from stationary companies to Yammer, for keeping your team up to date. This is still a list in progress, so if you have a company that has a weapon for entrepreneurs, let me know!

What about tech company executives? I have a list of 283 who are CEOs, CTOs, CIOs, or VPs. Lots of times news gets announced by these people. Marissa Mayer, for instance, announced that Google had made a search deal with Twitter and if you were following this list you would have seen that.

Here’s a list of 376 tech companies and their official PR accounts (everyone from Google to startups). I find a lot of new products here and find out about updates, too.

Web Hosting and Cloud Hosting/Cloud Computing list. 500 people, news sources, hosting companies (not just Rackspace, either). I’m trying to keep up to date on the hosting business and Cloud Computing and this is how I do it. Find a more complete list anywhere.

Everyone should watch their coworkers. I do the same, with a list of 302 Rackspace employees and data sources. Have you made a list of your coworkers? Why not?

These are my core information lists that I check many times per day.

But I have a few specialized lists too:

TechStartups: this is a list of 500 startups that most people won’t have heard of yet (mostly early stage). I’ll work on this list more over the next few weeks.

Geolocation (174 people and companies). I’m interested in developers and companies that are building new kinds of apps that use GPS and location. Things like Foursquare and Gowalla (both of those are on this list, along with the founders).

iPhone. 500 of the top iPhone app developers and companies and other influentials and programmers.

Twitter tools and devs (353). Twitter has a growing ecosystem of companies and people who are developing tools and services. This list has everyone I’ve been able to find so far.

Tech Event Organizers (239). These are people who run events and the events that they run. Everything from Emerging Tech to BarCamps.

Video or audio shows (101 people and shows). These are podcasts and video shows, mostly tech centric. Everything from Leo Laporte’s shows to Gillmor Gang.

My favstar list (500 people). These are the people I’ve clicked “Favorite” on the most. Favstar.fm keeps track of who I favorite the most and puts them on this list. It’s actually one of my favorite lists, but less focused than the others.

Web Innovators (79). If you’ve done something big for the Internet I put you on this list.

Programmers (306). I’m not sure what I’ll do with this list in the future (Twitter limits me to 500 people and obviously there’s more than 500 programmers in the world). But, if you are looking for what programmers think this is a good place to start.

Most influential in tech (225). This is my most followed list, but it’s also the most subjective. What makes someone influential? Well, I study who has the respect of their peers and who gets stuff done. Or, who has a bully pulpit and can get things focused on.

Anyway, if you are looking for other lists, I highly recommend using Listorious, which is a service that tracks lists (you have to add yours, if you haven’t you really should).

If you think you should be added to a list of mine, let me know in the comments here or drop me a line at scobleizer@gmail.com. Thanks and hope you get some value out of these. I know that these have dramatically changed my world.

A few other things: 1. you should check out my favorites list. Every day I put my favorite tweets on there. In about two months I’ve put 8,000 items on this list.

My favorite Twitter client is now Seesmic Web, which supports lists now (and other new Twitter features like Geolocation). The other day I interviewed the Seesmic team about these new features and the video is very telling.

Looking at the comments from my Droid vs. iPhone vs. Palm Pre post (hundreds of them) there are quite a few that think I wasn’t fair to the Droid. They think the Droid completely beats the iPhone.

They are wrong. Totally wrong. But, at least in Arrington’s case I can understand it. Yesterday on the Gillmor Gang (hopefully the audio is up soon so you can hear the disagreement) he explained why: he is looking for a device that runs Google Voice. Now that I’ve installed Google Voice on my own Android I sort of get where he’s coming from.

It’s just that I don’t care all that much about voice. As long as I can talk for a while on the phone I’m happy. The iPhone fits that bill. But Arrington wants a voice-routing machine. With Google Voice he can tell it to route calls to other phones. Plus anyone who leaves him a message has their voice mail turned into text and something that he can listen to from his desktop.

Arrington is voice centric. If you are voice centric the Droid already is better than the iPhone (it has better voice quality, which I’ve tested out with Dave Winer and it’s on a better network too — provably so in my case because the Droid lets me talk all the way to San Francisco while iPhone cuts out for about five minutes of the drive while you go over Devil’s Slide).

So, why do I disagree with him over the Droid even though it’s arguably a superior voice phone to iPhone?

Because I’m web and Twitter centric. I use my phones for Twittering far far more than I use them for voice. So I care about things like how easy is it to navigate through Tweets. Or how easy it is to zoom in the web browser to check out pieces of photos and such.

From this aspect the iPhone kicks ass. The Facebook app is far better. The selection of Twitter apps are far better, have more features, and are far nicer to use. The Web browser looks better and is easier to enter data into. Plus, the iPhone has multi-touch everywhere while the Droid doesn’t have it (although some say you can load an app to give you multitouch, but that’s really a lame answer).

Anyway, I’ll do a video to show you some of the differences and why I disagree with Arrington and you can listen to the Gillmor Gang when Steve gets the audio up.

But really this isn’t all that interesting to me. If the Droid works for you, wonderful. It works for me too. It just isn’t a great product yet. I have a feeling the a great Android device is coming, though. I’ll see you then!

Last night my friend Luke Kilpatrick came over and we compared the Droid to the Palm Pre and iPhone. He’s a bit biased toward the Palm, and ran the first Palm Pre Dev Camp but he’s also a mobile freak and has an iPhone and an HTC Hero, which runs an older version of the Android OS. Plus we get together with other people at the Ritz and compare phones regularly and I know he is fair and knows his stuff.

Why did I buy the Droid when I’m a happy iPhone? Because for the past two days Dave Winer has been praising the Droid and because I want to stay up to date on what’s going on on the Android OS. It’s one thing to try a phone for a couple of minutes, it’s a whole nother thing to force yourself to use it.

For instance, if you see it in the store you might not see that the battery door keeps popping off. If it does that after only a few hours of use it’ll really bug the crap out of you after a year.

And that gives you some insight into why the Motorola Droid fails AS A PRODUCT when compared to the Palm Pre and iPhone.

Now, thousands of words have been written about the Droid here’s Chris Brogan who praises the Droid. CrunchGear did TWO in depth iPhone vs. Droid phone comparisons. Here’s the first. Here’s the second. I HIGHLY recommend reading these.

They are right that Android is an interesting phone because it has interesting technology that goes further than the iPhone. What is better about the Droid?

1. It has a FAR better screen. The screen is amazing on the Droid. The Palm Pre is similarly sharp but is very small.
2. Verizon is amazing. It didn’t drop on the usual dead zone on my route home. I have 3G in my house. AT&T? Major fail.
3. The call quality is noticeably better. Dave Winer and I did a comparison last night (we both kept our iPhones) and the phone quality is noticeably better.
4. There are some apps that are dramatically better. Google’s Voice (which Mike Arrington loves) and Google’s Sky Map are two that have already stood out. Other apps are noticeably not even close to as good. Facebook and all the Twitter apps, for instance, are a LOT better on the iPhone.
5. There are some features that are better on Android. The text completion, for instance, is better on Android. It shows you a selection of words it thinks you are trying to type. Dave tells me it learns, too, from your usage. Something iPhone doesn’t do nearly as well.
6. It has a physical keyboard. More on that later.
7. Developers say they like the Android platform better and find that they are able to push apps to customers faster than on iPhone. (Palm Pre has the same advantages and Kilpatrick points out that its developer platform is based on web technologies (Javascript and CSS) rather than on harder-to-learn Java.
8. Integration with Google’s apps (calendar, mail, etc) is better and deeper into the phone than on iPhone (new Gmails pop up on top with an icon, for instance).

Anyway, if you read all of these you might be already headed out the door to buy the Droid.

Here is why you might not want to head out the door yet and why the Droid just isn’t a great product (and, why, on the other hand, if you are a developer you should run now):

First, the out-of-box experience. My first reaction was “boy is the screen beautiful but boy am I overwhelmed by the complexity.” What do I mean by that? the iPhone has a far simpler UI. You can only drag it one direction, left and right. On the Droid you can drag the UI left and right and up and down. This introduces a LOT more complexity. I can see how geeks love it, though, because it’s like getting another monitor. More places to stick icons! Dave Winer told me I would get over this complexity. He’s probably right, because I’m a power user and can see the power in such an approach. It just doesn’t give you a nice out-of-box experience the way the iPhone does. Normal people will try this phone at a Verizon store and not even understand why it feels more complicated.

Second, the hardware. I totally disagree with CrunchGear on this point. Greg Kumparak said that the Droid is “a shining example of great industrial design.”

Oh, please.

It’s a phone an engineer could love. Compared to the iPhone or the Palm Pre it isn’t even in the same league. The battery door on the back proves my point. The iPhone? They just got rid of the idea of replaceable batteries and the Palm Pre spent a LOT of time making sure that having a replaceable battery did NOT make the phone have a noticeable door. The back of both the iPhone and the Palm Pre is smooth. The back of the Droid is not. That is NOT a shining example of great industrial design.

So, where else does the phone not measure up AS A PRODUCT?

The Web browser. Here, go to http://www.techmeme.com. The iPhone displays it properly. The Droid does not (the right hand menu is underneath the content area). This is one reason I’ve turned away from Nokia phones. If your web browser doesn’t work right on the first few websites I visit, what’s the chances it’ll work right on your banking site, or when you go to ESPN or something?

Where else does the Droid fall flat?

Well, last night we went to YouTube on all of the phones. Every phone displayed the high res videos except one: the Droid. Come on now, this is a Google OS running a Google service. It should work far better than the iPhone or the Palm Pre. But it doesn’t and there isn’t an obvious way to force the HD version to come down. Major fail.

What else does it fall flat on?

Most people, when I look at their iPhones, have a common set of apps. Facebook is #1 amongst them. When I visited Apple’s headquarters recently they had a huge screen with the top 3,000 apps displayed on it. Each app blinked when the app was downloaded. Which app was blinking the fastest? Facebook’s.

But Facebook’s UI sucks on Droid compared to iPhone.

Most people will see this and say Droid sucks. Just this one app will affect millions of people’s decisions as to whether or not the phone is a real product. If I were Google I’d make sure that Facebook had BY FAR the best app on Android and if they weren’t willing to play ball with you I’d build my own and put my best engineers on it.

And that comes to Twitter. The best Twitter app on the Droid sucks (everyone told me that Twidroid was the best app on the Droid for Twitter and, indeed, it has the highest ratings in the app store on the Droid). It does not even come close to ANY of the top five apps on the iPhone, not to mention my favorite, Tweetie. It is clear that the bleeding edge app developers are not yet putting their best work into the Android platform. That is quickly changing, Pandora’s founder, Tim Westergren, told me he is seeing the most growth in Android of all the platforms Pandora is available on and they are putting a lot of work into making sure Pandora rocks on Android, but it hasn’t shown up in the apps most people will try. At least not yet.

Some other reasons why the Droid isn’t a great product?

The keyboard and cursor control just don’t come up to the standards set by the Blackberry I had 10 years ago. It’s a low-cost glued on keyboard that just doesn’t offer that many benefits over an optical keyboard. I said on the podcast that I need a week to really give you feedback about why it’s unsatisfying, but here’s an example from my friend Steve Repetti: if you buy the optional case it peels the keyboard off! I talked with Steve last night and he said he almost didn’t write the blog post because he really wants Android to succeed (he’s a developer, are you noticing a trend?) but that he wanted to warn people not to use the rubber “bra.” This is an example of how the industrial design just wasn’t thought out. More and more I’m liking Apple’s decision to just get rid of the physical keyboard. Yes, people gripe about not having a physical keyboard, but no keyboard makes the device a simpler and better-thought-out product.

Another reason?

No multitouch. I just talked with Dave Winer about this and he says it’s the number one thing most people mention to him after he shows them his Droid. It doesn’t make sense, either, because other Android phones support multitouch (pinching to make things zoom in and out). If you really can’t use multitouch you MUST provide a better UI to zoom in. Last night I was at the Ritz with my Droid and tried to show some people some photos of Mavericks. I could not figure out how to zoom in. Later I found that the zoom control was hidden in the corner. Nice way to make me feel stupid. iPhone never had this problem.

Another reason?

In Verizon you could barely even tell that this was a huge product launch weekend. One dinky little sign. Now compare how Apple does the full-court press on its new products. Everyone is wearing T-shirts. There’s tons of signage. There’s tons of excitement. Our salesguy was excited but he was still carrying his old Blackberry. That spoke volumes to me that Verizon really isn’t behind the Droid. It’s just another phone in a long list of phones to them.

Another reason?

The camera sucks. First of all, it’s crashed on me several times. The iPhone and Palm Pre cameras have never crashed on me. Second, the iPhone camera seems magical. You can touch the screen to tell it where to focus. Don’t care about that? Yeah, the Droid has a flash but the flash in the Palm Pre works a LOT better (we took pictures last night in near darkness to compare). The iPhone also has a much better selection of photo apps to use and manipulate your images. Since the camera is an integral part of the experience, this one will leave most people unsatisfied. I do love that the phone says “5 megapixel” right under the camera. The iPhone doesn’t (it’s only a 3, but I found the camera quality to be about the same so far, so even the extra megapixels amount to little more than talk without action).

Anyway, I could keep going. I’ll keep it at least a week and push myself to use it. The voice quality is so much better that I might just use it as my phone and keep the iPhone for other things. I’m fortunate that I can afford to do that, but if I were forced into picking one, today, I’d pick the iPhone without hesitating and I’d recommend the same to everyone.

I told Dave Winer that it looks a lot like Windows 3.1. The Mac back then was way better, but we all know that Apple ended up in 1995 with a small market share compared to Windows 95. The thing is, the Droid is Windows 3.1. It is showing the momentum is shifting but now Google has to ship their metaphorical equivalent of Windows 95. It isn’t this phone.

That said, what do you think? Am I missing something?

But now that we have Twitter lists, I’m finding I read Techmeme differently. Why? Well, TechMeme has a Twitter account.

So, when something gets added to Techmeme it gets added to my tech news list. (By the way, refresh the list every minute or so and you’ll see just how much news this industry generates).

But something else is also on that list: 492 other news sources!

So, now you get Techmeme AND you get a large diversity of news that you can’t get on Techmeme.

Which is better? You tell me!

And I still think it’s funny that people are arguing with me that Google Reader is better than this. Um, really?

UPDATE: I see that TechCrunch is keeping a list of news sources too. Its list only has 30 news sources on it. Which do you like better? Mine or TechCrunch or TechMeme?