Matt wrote a thoughtful post last night about the progression of whom you’re designing for. I really enjoyed it and think you would too. Take a minute to read it.

Sorry for the slow posting pace last week. I was on an east coast business trip, but managed to squeeze in a great evening in Cambridge meeting Paul Graham and some really awesome founders of this cycle’s Y Combinator companies.

I’m back in the office in Seattle, but have more travels in the not too distant future. If our paths cross, I hope you’ll reach out and suggest getting together.

This Thursday evening through Saturday evening I’ll be at Gnomedex here in Seattle. I’m really excited as I’ve heard great things about this event. I can only describe it as Lollapalooza for bloggers. It’s going to be especially awesome to attend a conference in my home town where I can sleep in my own bed at night. I’m hoping to meet some of my favorite bloggers including Chris Brogan, Marshall Kirkpatrick and Beth Kanter.

I’ll be speaking at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco September 3-5. It’s at the fabulous St. Regis Hotel. There are going to be some great speakers I’m personally eager to meet, including Sunir Shah of Freshbooks, Jeremiah Owyang, Sam Lawrence, CMO of Jive Software and my good friend Bruce Henry of LiquidPlanner. For those who don’t know, September is the best month of the year to visit San Francisco. It’s spectacular. Come join the discussion.

Finally, I’ll be Silicon Valley September 16-17 for some work and play, including what sounds like a stimulating CEO dinner for Morgenthaler backed companies, which humbly includes blist. I’m looking forward to learning a lot from some of the industry’s finest entrepreneurs. If you’re in the valley and we should meet, drop me a note and let’s set something up. Or if you’re Dave McClure and you feel the slightest bit guilty for blowing me off two are three times now, let’s be sure to meet for a big pancakes and sausage breakfast while I’m in the neighborhood.

I never worked with Jim Gray. During my year at Microsoft, where Jim also worked, I had the pleasure of attending one internal discussion he led. He exchanged a few emails with me on another project I led. One of the amazing things about Jim was how he made everyone even remotely connected to him feel like they knew him well.

Read the short account of his farewell tribute in this month’s ACM. It’s a marvelous human interest story. If you’re interested in humanity, you won’t be disappointed.

I’m not sure what’s more impressive, Jim’s accomplishments as a computer scientist or as a human being. His is a wonderful story.

Some of you know that one of my passions is wine. My wife and I try to visit one of the wine regions once or twice year for some relaxation and wine tasting. Lately that has meant visiting Oregon’s Willamette Valley or the Napa/Sonoma region of California. Some day when we have a little more time we’ll expand our wine tasting travels to Bordeaux, Tuscany and Argentina among other places. A lot of my friends ask me what I’ve been drinking lately. Now I can combine my passion for wine with my passion for blist. You can bookmark this page and come back as often as you like to see what I’ve been tasting lately. It’s a real-time feed of my my wine tasting blist.

Of course, if you’ve tried a great wine I should know about, I hope you’ll let me know either in comments or by email.

We submitted an important idea for a panel discussion at the South By Southwest Conference (SXSW) – this needs to happen – and you need to help by voting for it now.

Part of the way that SXSW designs their program is from community voting through their Panel Picker, so we need your help.

blist is all about democratization – empowering mainstream people to do important things like working with data. Everyone knows that there is enormous value in mashing up two or more disparate data sources, but to date, only programmers (or at least script kiddies) have been able to build mashups. Attempts to build tools for mainstream users have not been successful so far – our SXSW session is about what it’s going to take to get there:

“Mashups: Easy Enough For Normal People?”

On Friday, August 8, the Panel Picker voting interface went live. This interface allows all of the online community to vote on which ideas they believe are most appropriate for the 2009 event. The SXSW Panel Picker voting will close on Friday, August 29. This is also the time period when the organizers will solicit extensive feedback from the SXSW Interactive Advisory Board as to which programming ideas they find most intriguing (the input of the Advisory Board is just as important as Panel Picker voting).
Vote for blist at SXSW!

Little embellishment is needed for these gems. Next time you plan to be on a plane for a few hours, on the bus for half an hour or having breakfast alone by moonlight, read these timeless classics on personal productivity:

Paul Graham’s marvelous Power of the Marginal.

Marc Andreesens’s Guide to Productivity.

What’s ironic is that the folks who’ll take the time to re-read them word for word are the ones who are already highly productive and the folks who can benefit by them the most will be turned off by their length and will read something shorter and easier to digest.

Last week I wrote a post about how I thought Microsoft should create a low friction seed investment program similar to Y Combinator. Startups would receive between $100,000 and $175,000 in cash plus all the Microsoft development tools, office space and cloud computing resources they could consume. Microsoft would get 10% of the company without any other rights plus a commitment that the startup would use Microsoft development tools and operating systems.

The post triggered some interesting reactions and good discussions. Among others, Ray Ozzie and some folks in Microsoft corporate development sent me private emails.

I want to clarify a few points that weren’t clear in my original post.

I spent a year at Microsoft post acquisition of my first company. That said, I’m neutral and agnostic about Microsoft. I still own some stock, but not enough to matter. I have friends there. My time there was fun, but not as much fun as a startup, so I’m back at it again. At blist, we don’t use any Microsoft technologies anywhere in our stack.

The program would truly be seed stage. You can vet lots of business concepts for $100,000 to $175,000. I think it should buy a typical 3-person startup a year to: build a product, launch it, demonstrate some traction, figure out how you can turn it cash flow positive or start the series A fundraising process. Nobody’s getting rich in the program. If you have 3 co-founders, maybe they pay themselves each $3,000 per month, which leaves about $65,000 for operating expenses.

One interesting concern that was raised was what I thought about dealing with conflicts and overlaps between two seed funded companies. Would the first to be funded exclude another startup? That’s simple. Microsoft decides to invest in each company in isolation. If two companies come through with similar ideas and Ray Ozzie, Don Dodge and Dare Obasanjo like both, so what? Invest in both. At this stage a startup’s one and only competitor is themselves. You aren’t a competitor of anyone if you have no product and are in no market. Focus on execution, your product and your prospective customers. What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen? Your company and some other fledling company are going to do exactly the same thing and decide to join forces? Maybe 6 guys with $350,000 has a better chance at success than 3 guys with $175,000.

Another concern that was raised was the risk that Microsoft would steal the best ideas and just run with it themselves. You obviously didn’t work at Microsoft for a year like I did. Trust me, you could give them your business plan and they’d be none the wiser for it. OK, that was too harsh. I’m poking fun at them partially, but realistically Microsoft is better off having you innovate without their meddling. You get the product into market, demonstrate traction and they’ll try to buy you later. While they have no official rights, they’ll play their “but we backed you when nobody else would” card for all it’s worth and you’ll enjoy the affection and attention.

The point that’s lost the most in my original post is that it’s time for Microsoft to take some risks. Starting a seed fund, housing startups, backing ones that compete with each other and even Microsoft itself are all acceptable risks. This is about as close to cannibalizing your own business as you can get. Maybe it doesn’t entirely solve the Innovator’s Dilemma, but it certainly gets them closer than what they’ve done to date.

Keep the dialog going - either in comments or via email. I’m at kevin.merritt _at_ blist..com.

Most good product managers learn this lesson relatively early in their career, but it’s an important one and worthy of a blog post. The subject is predicated on a concept from statistics; namely, the larger the sample size is from a given population, the more representative the sample is of the entire population and a concept from psychology, called “confirmation bias.”

Talking with customers about their pain with your product is an excellent discipline. These conversations provide a product manager with impactful anecdotes that a PM can internalize and spread within his or her organization. But a PM needs to understand the inherent flaw with only speaking 1:1 with customers.

When you’ve spoken directly with a good sample of customers, you generally have awareness of customer requests, but – and this is critical — you don’t have an understanding to the extent to which the requests are important, or how strongly they are affecting your total customer base. Generally speaking, it is difficult to talk with enough customers to understand how you should focus a very limited resource — in the case of software development — engineering time and brainpower.

Of course, there are exceptions. If you meet with 20 customers and they all have the same product pain, your job is done. But that is usually not the case. Usually, you talk with 20 customers and receive 20 different feature requests or product quibbles.

Furthermore, product managers are human and, like everyone, are subject to a phenomenon from psychology called “confirmation bias.” Let me know if this scenario sounds familiar: You have a gut feeling that everyone wants Feature X. You find one or two customers that want Feature X, and you unconsciously inflate the extent to which this need is requested by the user base. It happens — you need to be aware of the bias and work to overcome it.

So what’s the cure? True perspicacity into the needs of a user base is the result of talking with customers, and complementing that direct knowledge with data from a larger sample. Qualitative research alone gives you direction and awareness of issues – and I fully admit that awareness is 70% of the solution. But quantitative research gives you conviction regarding the extent of issue.

With both perspectives, you have a better understanding of how deeply to apply limited resources to a problem, as well as minimize your personal bias.

We’ll save the topic of actually executing a valuable and statistically valid quantitative study for another blog post.

I’m really looking forward to attending my first Gnomedex later this month. It looks to be a great event with a number of interesting speakers and bloggers. If you plan to visit Seattle for the conference and want to meet for coffee or breakfast, let me know. I’ll be going to learn, meet new folks and to give some people a sneak peek of something we’re working on at blist that we think bloggers will find pretty cool.

Don’t forget that you can follow blist on twitter. CEO Kevin Merritt is kmerritt. Our director of online marketing Matt Johnson is matjohnson. Chris Metcalf, our technical program manager is chrismetcalf.  A number our engineers are too.  We’re here to help, advise, discuss - just say the word.