Jason Cianchette

Last night I attended a Dartmouth Entrepreneur Network event where Steve Hafner the CEO of Kayak spoke.  Below are some of his thoughts that I found interesting.

Drag Coefficient

Your risk tolerance and passion are often highest while you are young.  As you get older and your life changes your ability to work hard and take on risk typically diminshes.  Steve described this as a drag coefficient.  The higher your coefficient the more difficult it is for you to sustain the demands of being an entreprenuer.   My coefficient is 4 and I’m trying to keep it low.  Calculate your drag coefficient.

• Add 1 for every 5 years of age above 20
• Add 1 if you are married
• Add 1 for each child you have
• Add 1 for a mortgage

Hire the Best and Fire the Bottom 10%

Only hire the best and start at the top.  Mediocre performers hire mediocre people to work for them.  When he hires people he looks for talented people that do their own work and are great to work with.

Each year Kayak force ranks the team and fires the bottom 10%

I purchased a BlackBerry 8830 from T-mobile yesterday.  The phone is great! It is smaller and lighter than my previous phone.  Plus it has wi-fi and UMA.UMA allows me to seamlessly place voice calls over my wi-fi connection at home and work. 

My friend has this same phone and 85% of his calls have been using UMA instead of the carrier network.  I had a 1500 minute plan at AT&T and due to UMA I have switched to a 700 minute plan with T-mobile.

Telco voice revenue was $2 trillion dollars last year, but technologies like UMA are going to put enormous pressure on this revenue stream as VOIP becomes easier.

I was a panelist today at Jumptap’s Mobile Advertising Summit.  It was a great opportunity to meet some other people in mobile.  It was clear from the event that many advertisers have been experimenting with mobile, however they still do not view it as an essential channel and it is usually the first item cut from a budget.

My employer MocoSpace announced our funding today through TechCrunch.  Now that we are out of stealth mode, I hope to use this blog to publish some of my thoughts about mobile internet and startups.  All of these thoughts are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.