Tony Wright dot com

In the past two months I’ve been on two different panels with other entrepreneurs. The first was at WTIA in Bellevue, WA (”Cashing in on Web Services“)– the other panelists were very clearly what I’d call “business entrepreneurs”. All of them had relatively successful funded startups, but not a one of them had probably written a line of code, moved a pixel, wrangled a server, or written a line of copy in months or years (some probably never had).

In contrast, the most recent panel I was on (at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Summit) was with what I’d call “builder entprepreneurs”… All startups with great traction, some funded, but all of the founders were directly engaged with the creation of the product. They designed, coded, played sysadmin, and played all sorts of other production roles for their startups.

The contrast was startling, and it made me think hard about my earlier contention that the “business guy” doesn’t really have a useful role to play in the very earliest stages of a software startup. The first panel had a pile of examples of business guys leading startups to some significant (sometimes dramatic) success.

At one of the other panels at the Web 2.0 conference, Dave McClure (master of 500 hats and 473 font colors– and one of the smartest guys in the game) summed up the life-cycle of a startup in a great way. “There’s the product development phase, the market development phase, and the revenue development– or revenue optimization– phase.” Rings true to me.

So with this in mind, let’s track the value of a “product entrepreneur” over the early life of a company:

Now let’s track the value of a “business entrepreneur” over the early life of a company:

(note: I’m talking about one person’s ability to make a major impact with a startup– I’m not saying that either person is useless at any stage of the startup… And, of course, exceptions abound)

As I’ve said before, the business guy often doesn’t have a lot to do in the early stage of product development– especially if the builders are building something that they actually want themselves. If you’re a bunch of hackers building a simple photo sharing, you don’t need a business guy telling you what the market wants. Of course, if you’re a bunch of hackers building business time management software, you might well need that. Your mileage may vary.

But what I haven’t said before (and what I’m coming to learn) is that the product entrepreneurs have an increasingly marginal role as a startup evolves and becomes more successful. In fact, I’d argue that they are in a rude awakening– they either need to evolve into business entrepreneurs (as Gates and Jobs did, for example– both shrewd business guys) or hire people to play that role (a la Eric Schmidt at Google). Building an asset is the first (and most important) challenge. But finding the customer for that asset and maximizing the revenue/profit is also a challenge (and one that many builders are ill-suited to handle).

It feels like product entrepreneurs are oftentimes “cowboys”. Flying by the seat of their pants, they rally a small team to build a product that people want. It’s no surprise that this is really freakin’ hard and requires a mythical combination of brute force time and effort, insight, customer empathy, and a huge pile of luck. Saddling the product team with a biz guy who chases big customers and locks in the product direction too early can be deadly, as the Wizard points out:

This is one reason I hate to see very early stage companies sign a big customer before the product is baked. You are encumbered by product commitments and customer support before you truly know what the market wanted. You have to be passionate about a customer and the product when you should be laser focused on the product. The customer’s needs and your goals vis a vis the market may diverge. In an effort to show progress, however, the marquee customer is attractive in the belief it will help attract investment (and this may indeed be true). In a previous life before FeedBurner, my founders and I made the mistake of signing a big name customer to a paid monthly contract before we really knew what the product’s place in the market should be. Won’t ever do that again.

The product development phase of company needs product development people and precious little else.

But as the market development phase sets in, builder entrepreneurs are oftentimes increasingly obsolete. It’s no longer time to hurl features willy nilly at your users– you’ve already built something that they like. No you need to measure the hell out of it and turn it into something that they love. You need to iterate on it and turn it into something that confuses 4% of your new users instead of 7%. It means finding a way to tune your viral loop and conquer your SEO enemies to increase the organic flow to your product. And you need to start expoloring the market to figure out who they hell is going to pay for all of this. That means crafted adwords campaigns. That means cold calling. That means price experimentation. That means exploring the world of direct ad sales. Well, it can mean all sorts of things, depending on whether you are a free web service, a freemium product, a pure b2b play or some combination thereof.

But you are firmly out of the world of building products and drifting into the world of iterating a product and exploring a market. And, likely, you’re in the world of sales, marketing, and instrumenting the hell out of your app/site.

As Papa PG says, if you look at the leaders of successful tech companies you see more CS degrees than you see MBAs. That makes sense– geeks are critical to conquer the first (and most important) problem of a startup… Building a badass product. But if you look at these same tech companies, you see CS geeks who’ve actually set aside their geeky roots (though maybe not their geeky instincts) and become very very shrewd business guys. And you also see inferior products kicking the crap out of superior products through better sales/marketing/and distribution.

So to all of you builders out there… Beware! When you reach a challenge in the evolution of your business, the most natural thing in the world is to frame it as a product problem. “If we just build this new feature/product, we’ll be off to the races and we’ll never have to do any of that business crap!”. Keep your eyes peeled for the time when you have to personally evolve and start tackling business problems, or step out of the way and let someone else do it for you.

This will be a small post, but I stumbled onto some interesting data that I thought I’d share. As a background, we’re currently searching for a great C++ dev to work at our startup here in Seattle. I decided to do a bit of research to see other job postings, compensation packages, etc.

I was startled to find that (in Seattle) C#, C++, and Java jobs are hotter than everything. Period. By a monstrous margin. Take a look (numbers in parentheses are the results counts as I write this):

Jobs with C# in the title (759)
Jobs with C++ in the title (537)
Jobs with Java in the title (307)
Jobs with ASP in the title (209)
Jobs with Ruby in the title (85)
Jobs with PERL in the title (50)
Jobs with PHP in the title (46)
Jobs with Python in the title (26)

Wow. C++ jobs almost end up being more plentiful than all of the major scripting languages combined. C# jobs are even more plentiful. Toss the word “startup” into your search query and it reduces all of the results, but the big-iron languages still win by a wide margin. Really interesting to contrast these numbers with San Francisco, where you see fewer C++ and C# jobs (predictably as you move away from Microsoft-country), more Java jobs as well as a few more Rails and PHP jobs (but Java wins in SF by a landslide).

So if you could snap your fingers in Seattle and be a rockstar/ninja programmer in one of these languages, which would you pick (from a career perspective)?

(nota bene: recruiters who use the word “rockstar” or “ninja” in a job posting deserve to be flogged. While we’re at it, anyone using the phrase “FAIL” or “EPIC FAIL” deserves a healthy thrashing as well.)

My first experience with stock options was at the ripe age of 34 years old, when I was selling Jobby (retired) to Jobster (Gah, make the Web 2.0 names STOP!). Before that, I’d been running my own business for close to a decade– with good success, but there really wasn’t any sense in setting up an options plan.

So when selling our company and getting presented with a cash/stock options package, I was damn excited about the options. I dutifully did a bit of research to try to understand how they worked, asked some smart questions, and was a proud new owner of startup equity. 365 days later, I left Jobster– on good terms, but I chose not to exercise my options.

Now, as RescueTime is expanding its team, I’m on the other side of the equation– putting together stock option plans for new hires. So I figured it might be useful for folks we’re talking to for me to put together so thoughts and resources about startup compensation, particularly in the area of stock options. A big part of my motivation here is that I think most startups are QUITE content to let employees think that options are this magical ticket to wealth and prosperity… It feels dishonest.

3 Harsh Realities of Startup Options

1. Employees with decent salaries and options will almost NEVER get rich in a liquidity event. The people who might get rich with startup equity are the founders and the investors (not coincidentally, the people who took significant risks). There are obviously exceptions here– I read that Google minted 900 new millionaires when they IPO’d. Good for them. But when you do the math on probably exits for most startups, it’s good– but it’s not quite so rosy. VentureHacks has a breakdown of what startup employees might expect in terms of equity. Assuming you don’t get diluted with further investment down the road, a lead dev or director might expect 1% ownership (vesting over 4 years). So in the event of a $50,000,000 exit, they’d walk away with a cool $500k, IF they’d been there for 4 years or longer.

2. Options vest over 4 years. Everyone loves the idea of the overnight success with a quick-flip to Google. It’s vanishingly rare, but it does happen. When it does, the founders generally do okay, but what happens to the late-comers with unvested options is a question mark. Those unvested shares COULD accelerate (meaning they could all vest when the buy happens). Or they could convert to options in the purchasing companies stock (par value). That’s all part of the negotiation and it all depends on the leverage you have with the buyer.

3. How the options are set up very much effect how attractive the company is to a buyer. We’d LOVE to offer 100% acceleration upon change of control to our hires– that’d mean that all options would immedietely vest and our whole team would be rich and happy– but not particularly incentivized to stay and work for the buyer.

So are Options a Crappy Deal?

The best way to look at options are as a high-risk investment– it’s important to look at the cost of the investment, the chance that the investment will “hit”, the likely magnitude of the return on investment, and the percentage you’ll likely have in your pocket at the time of a liquidity event. Here’s the best way to look at the math.

• The COST of the investment is the difference between what you could be making (your market value) minus the salary that you are offered. So if you’re worth $85k/yr and the offer is $75k/yr, you’re investing $10k per year in this high-risk opportunity. If you’re getting paid market value, then… Well, there’s no risk– and you shouldn’t be expecting much reward.
• The CHANCE the investment will hit is a huge question mark. Think hard about the market for such a company. Who would buy it? Can you imagine Google and Microsoft fighting over the company?
• The MAGNITUDE of the return is another question mark. If it’s a web startup, there’s lots of data out there about sale prices. The question is: how big is the opportunity? What are companies in your space getting bought for? It’s easy to test a few scenarios.
• The PERCENTAGE of ownership is a bit of a moving target, but you can at least know where you start. Again, take a look at VentureHacks for a reality check.

So to boil it down in an example, let’s say we have an engineer who is getting .5% of the company vested over 4 years. He’s making $80k, but probably could make $90k at a company with limited equity opportunity. Let’s assume a target exit price of $50,000,000 (oh, happy day!).

Our engineer is spending $10k per year to have a shot at a $62,500 per year. If he spends the full four years there, he’s “invested” $40k for a shot at $250k (a 6x+ return– not bad). When you run the same scenario with a billion dollar exit, it’s starting to look a lot prettier. When you run it at a Flickr-sized exit ($20m), it’s not looking like that great of a bet. If you want to get into the finer points, you should probably consider the benefits as well as the cost of the options.

The only way to buy more reward is with more risk. Some founders will be willing to give up lots more equity if you’ll work for less, but it’s honestly fairly rare if they’ve reached the point where they have enough cash to hire people for them to be terribly eager to part with lots of equity. There’s obviously a small army of “idea guys” out there who would happily give you huge piles of equity if you’ll work for free. And, of course, the best way to get rich with equity is to start your own company.

If you don’t fancy rolling the financial dice by “investing” in a startup, most startups are probably happy to pay you market rate and dial down your options… But either way, there are lots of career perks that you’re buying by working in a startup. Which brings me to…

You’re Buying More than Just a High Risk Investment

Needless to say, most options aren’t a very good investment. A chance at a 5x return is great, but most startups are facing longer odds than 5 to 1– so you should be damn sure that you believe in the company, the team, and (most importantly) your ability to influence the outcome.

I think it’s important to note that our engineer in the above example is buying a heckuva lot more with his $10k… Though they are things with a very subjective value.

• He’s buying startup experience. If you plan on spinning up your own thing someday, there is no substitute for working in a startup to learn what works and what doesn’t. You don’t have to sign on with a experienced startup founder… It’s good enough to get paid to watch them make mistakes that you can avoid when it’s your turn.
• He’s buying a “clean slate”. If you get to a startup early enough, there is lots of blue sky. The early days of product development (for many people) are the most rewarding.
• He’s buying startup cred. When it comes time to spinning up his own thing or getting his next gig, it’s a big plus to have that background. It’s obviously a HUGE plus to be part of a winning team (if an exit happens).
• He’s buying relationships. One of our investors says that 99% of his deal flow comes from people he’s previously invested in or people on their teams. Working at an early stage startup is an opportunity to meet investors and other important startup folks– good leads for future endeavors.
• He’s buying a work environment that is comparatively bullshit-free. Little bureaucracy, few meetings, flexible work schedule/environment, etc. If you’ve ever had an environment like this, you know how addictive it is and how elusive it is in larger companies.
• He’s (hopefully) buying a chance to work on a product he likes/wants to use.

Obviously, all of these perks are really only perks for people who see themselves working on/in startups in the future… For people like this, the $10k price tag (when you roll in the high-risk investment op) is a great investment. For folks who are just chasing the idea that they are going to get rich taking decent-paying jobs with post-funding startups, they are in for a long series of disappointments.

(note: if other folks have insights on startup compensation/options, please chime in. Despite writing a Newbie’s guide, I am, admittedly, a bit of a newbie! )

Last night I spoke at Seattle Tech Startups. Given that lots of people who go to these meetings tend to be wantrepreneurs (aspiring startup folks), I focused on early decisions that need to be be made. Do you shoot for a great lifestyle business or do you aim for a grandslam? Services biz or product biz? Bootstrap it, find angels, or court VCs? And when you answer all that, how do you settle on an idea when you have lots of them bounding around in your head (for this part, I liberally borrowed from Ev Williams’ great post on evaluating startup ideas, which I posted a riff on a while back).

After my short presentation, there were some really fabulous questions. Two of ‘em kept me thinking and I wanted to expand on the answers a bit. Here they are.

Question (paraphrased): “Given that takinghuge piles of VC money both has the dangers you describe and and firmly closes the door on most early acquisition opportunities, why are people still going after big VC?”

My response was two-fold at the time. First, there are some ideas that require a lot of money– as an example, I mentioned a local northwest guy who is working on a really cool electric motorcycle… It’d be hard to imagine getting that business off the ground with $500k of angel money. I also mentioned that some entrepreneurs look at their valuation as a score. Taking $4m on $12m post-money is essentially saying that, on paper, your company is worth $12m. Feels pretty cool, I suppose.

Two more things to add here.

First, I think people chase VC because it’s available. Angels are purposefully elusive– they don’t exactly hang out a shingle saying, “I’ve got $50k burning a hole in my pocket”. VCs, on the other hand, have a web site, and processes to handle/process deal flow. They almost always want to lead the investment by negotiating terms and putting in a big chunk of the money, while angels sometimes shy away from leading/negotiating, but are happy to pile on with other investors.

I think there is a big hole to be filled here by institutional investors who aim at a larger number of smaller deals (something that most VCs can’t handle because they have too much money under management, take too long to do the deals, and have too few people to sit on boards). There are smaller funds out there that are starting to fill the “early/small” niche (with $250k-$1m investments) but they are rare and (from an outsider’s point of view) are buried in interesting startups to invest in. The good news is that they’re seeing great success, so more are popping up every day. If you want to see a good list of folks who are really looking at early-stage/lower-dollar deals, here’s a great article profiling a few. You’ll notice a decided lack of ‘em in the Northwest. Madrona is mentioned but I think they very rarely do a deal less than $1m.

Second, B2B. Despite Web 2.0 hype, there is tremendous money to be made with B2B software. Going the B2B route requires a sales engine or some clever distribution innovation. If you’re spinning up a sales team, that requires LOTS of money flowing out of your business (salary, commissions) before you recognize revenue for their efforts.

Question #2: “Can you talk about how to decide whether a business/idea should fall into the “lifestyle” category or the “get funding a go big” category?

My answer last night centered around overall magnitude of the idea. Could you imagine it being the next Google/Facebook/Salesforce.com? Is it that ambitious? Can you set out milestones where you end up selling for $100 million? I also mentioned that how much you NEED is important. If you can “run the experiment” for $500k to see if your market/team/idea are as good as you think, raising $10m is silly. If you can roll those same dice taking no funding and working on weekends, raising ANY money might be silly.

What I want to add: Think about how you fit into recent investment trends. Investors closely follow trends. Most seem to focus on trends and recent acquisitions that you’re already reading about– the top tier ones often try to anticipate what’s going to be the next trend. Imagine yourself pitching your idea to someone who religiously follows and tries to anticipate trends. Will their eyes light up? To my amateur eye trends that are important out there right now are: Ad networks, widgets, casual gaming, video advertising, iPhone/mobile apps, Facebook/MySpace apps, social aggregation, and (of course) anything that could credibly take a shot at killing Google. Am I missing any? There are a few tired trends that probably still have legs with some investors like niche social networks, social news sites, photosharing, etc.

If you’re outside these trends, that’s okay (we certainly are, though we think that productivity/information overload is a meme that is growing like gangbusters). It just means that you’re going to have a harder time raising money and you’ll need a bit more traction to pique VC interest. We’re just about ready to close our angel round with a fairly platinum-plated group of investors, so it’s certainly do-able. I’m just glad our founders all had hefty personal bank accounts to allow us to grow the business over the 3 months of fundraising. I know plenty of people who’ve needed 6-10 months to raise a round, so be prepared for that if you’re bucking trends.

Remember, Google came to a market that had well-funded mature players at a time when a lot of really smart people were saying that search was a dead business where you couldn’t make any money.

Another thing to consider on this front is this: Do you have some unique aspect of your business that allows you to acquire new users/customers for zero or near-zero cost? SEO, viral marketing, user-generated content are all fabulous ways to get an organic flow of visitors to your product. VCs love clever distribution wrinkles, and most successful startups have a fabulous (if sometimes accidental) story to tell here.

And finally– the best way to decide whether it’s a small biz opportunity or a huge business opportunity is to launch. If you’ve got something big, the market will start dragging you down the growth path. If it’s a big opportunity and you’re growing like gangbusters out in the wild, funding isn’t hard.

Anyhoo– hope folks enjoyed the talk– I’ll post the video if STS puts it up.

It’s official.

All the cool kids are coming to Seattle (at least temporarily).

First, Mike Arrington relocates to Seattle for the Summer.

Now Pete Cashmore and friends from Mashable are throwing a bit of a party here as their kickoff to their “SummerMash” US Summer Tour.

The event costs $10 (there’ll be food, drinks, and DJ there, so it’ll be well worth it). Hope to see you there!

Christian Anderson (a former colleague at Jobster) had an interesting (and well-researched) post on his blog called “How to Pitch Robert Scoble — HINT: No Direct Tweets“… , which led to a discussion on FriendFeed (with Robert himself weighing in) that was pretty interesting.

I had a contribution bouncing around in my head but held off responding until I read an absolutely fabulous quote from one of my favorite books on marketing:

““No one ever got anywhere by lavishing calls on Oprah. The only time I’ve succeeded in my career with Oprah was [when] Oprah called us.”

— Barry Krause, in Made to Stick

This advice can be generalized to getting PR, blog coverage, angel and VC interest, and more… And can be summed up in one tight little phrase: “Be worth talking about.”

So how do you get to be worth talking about? Redirect every bit of outgoing energy you’re spending on getting noticed to being worthy of notice. Near as I can tell, this isn’t just a matter of building something great… It seems to be some arcane combination of:

1. Building something people want.
2. Find a parade that’s forming and start walking in front of it. We’ve (by pure luck) done well from PR perspective by diving headfirst into the “information overload” meme that seems to have growing interest and press coverage. Whether you’re building a comfortable lifestyle business or shooting for the moon, it’s great thing to be topical. A great contempory example of this is FriendFeed– they’ve (perhaps accidentally) inserted themselves into the Twitter conversation. If Twitter had never existed, would FriendFeed have gotten a tenth of the organic PR?
3. Figure out the best way to deliver your message– find a way to make it sticky (”Made to Stick” espouses being simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, a story). Entrepreneurs (especially if they are web geeks) notoriously marginalize this step, but there’s all sorts of great stories about simple messaging shifts making a huge difference. I don’t think we’ve nailed the perfect message for RescueTime, but I’m in a fairly constant state of brainstorming and experimentation… I’ll tell our story with a new permutation just about every day to see if I can find something that resonates just a little better (this is one of the many reasons that “stealth” companies are so often ridiculous).
4. For God’s sake, get some freakin’ traction. Bloggers and reporters are in the business of reporting on the metaphorical parades that I just talked about. The best way to prove that you’re at the front of a parade is to have an army of enthusiastic users who are already using assorted channels (word of mouth, blogs, twitter, etc) to tell the world how important you are to THEM. It doesn’t take MUCH traction– two or three vocal users is often enough to convince a blogger than you’re worth a second look.

I’ll finish with a great quote from Seth Godin on “grand openings“:

“The best time to promote something is after it has raving fans, after you’ve discovered that it works, after it has a groundswell of support, [ed: and after you’ve figured out how to effectively talk about it]. And more important, the best way to promote something is consistently and persistently and for a long time. Save the bunting for Flag Day.”

I just got word that I’ll be speaking at the Information Overload Research Group 2008 Conference in New York City on July 15th (though I’m not on the page yet… ).

This is the grassroots organization mentioned with RescueTime in the New York Times article “Lost in Email, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Monster” (well, it’s probably fairer to say that this is the article where RescueTime was mentioned with them!).

The conference looks like it’s going to be real interesting (and not just because I’ll be speaking there– I’m positively riveting!). If you’re in the neighborhood (or if you need an excuse to visit NYC), you should sign up (the conference only costs $150 and includes lunch– it’s a helluva deal). Brian Fioca, one of my co-founders will also be in attendance.

If you don’t want to go to the conference but want to grab a beer on the 14th, drop me a line!

A lot of people are damn religious about bootrapping businesses. Especially nowadays when it’s so easy to start a software business– you just need a few hackers, Ruby on Rails, a cheap virtual server and you’re ready to roll, right?

Sure.

But just because it’s cheaper to start a software company, doesn’t mean that it’s that much cheaper to make it from when you launch a product to the point where you’re sitting back, drinking a margarita, and marveling at the recurring revenue machine you’ve created.

The way I look at it, there are three bars that matter to me.

1) Making enough money that the business brings in enough money to pay the overhead. Rent, servers, lawyers, whatever. Hopefully you keep this really lean.
2) Making enough money that the founders get an insultingly low (but still existent) salary.
3) Making enough money that the founders can take home roughly what they’d make if they went and got a real job.

Bootstrappers are woefully bad at guessing how long it’ll take to get over these bars.

Let’s look at everyone’s favorite example of bootstrapping: 37signals (whose products and philosophies I love, by the way). According to a recent post, it took them about 6 months to build Basecamp, with DHH spending 10 hours a week (they don’t mention how much time other folks invested, but let’s assume it’s 2 other people at 10 hours a week). It turns out that with a really popular blog, a very successful consulting firm, and all of the attention that they got with Ruby on Rails, it took them about a year to get to the point where they could give up consulting and work on it full-time. I assume that they were somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd bar (mentioned above) before they made the leap, though they might’ve taken a pay cut as a leap of faith in the growth that Basecamp was experiencing. DHH sez:

“It didn’t turn into a smash hit overnight either. We ran Basecamp for a year alongside our other obligations before it was doing well enough to pay all the bills and afford our full-time attention. Most good businesses didn’t become great ones within the 12-18 months that the poster boys of the startup lottery did.”

Amen!

I’ll give you an example closer to home. RescueTime (my baby) was on TechCrunch 3 times, LifeHacker twice, and add in a few thousand other blogs (of varying flavors and colors). We are a Y Combinator company, which gives us plenty of geek cred. We’ve been [edit for clarity] mentioned in an article on the cover of the New York Times, and have gotten mentions in PC World, US News and World Report, BusinessWeek, and more. More important than that, we’ve got happy users who seem to like telling their friends (the old fashioned kind of viral marketing!). I think most SaaS startups would feel very lucky to get this kind of attention– we certainly do. But for all of this attention, I really don’t expect to clear that second bar for many many months (we’re only a month or two into having an offering that people can pay money for, so give us time!).

Let me be clear about the type of startups I’m talking about– I’m talking about low-cost (or free) product companies with price points low enough that having a human being actually SELL the damn software would be inane. Whether it’s a payout of $.83 for an ad click or $24 bucks a month for BaseCamp– having a human being wandering around selling this stuff doesn’t scale, and chances are your founding team doesn’t consist of anyone who is a motivated (and skilled) software/ad salesperson anyways.

On the other hand, if your price point is high (generally requiring a more complex or premium offering) or if you have a services component (web development consulting, managed hosting, etc)– you’re golden… Or at least you have great potential to ramp up revenue fast (as you can justify a sales effort and fairly easily convert time into money). Of course, there are the obvious downsides– for enterprise software you have to build… enterprise software (capital intensive and damn ugly). And then you should expect to spend 60-70% of your cash on sales and marketing. If you go the services-heavy route, you’re simply selling time for money… You can make a nice business out of this (I ran a consultancy for 7 years which I eventually sold out of) but there’s virtually no equity to be built– no one wants to buy a consulting business.

In my opinion, if you aren’t prepared for 18-24 months before you actually get your first paycheck (either through savings, doing it part-time / half-assed, or seed funding) you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

Just a short note to let folks know that I’ve switched my commenting system over to Disqus.

Disqus is a hosted commenting system (free) that offers a few clear benefits:

• 2 way communication with people who comment. This is the one I care about. Very often, someone leaves an interesting comment on my blog that I want to respond to. I usually do, but it’s unlikely that that commenter will ever know about it… Disqus allows the commenter to be alerted to any replies to their comment, which can continue an interesting conversation.
• Threaded conversation. No-brainer. No longer will I have to say “@PersonName:” to make it clear who I’m responding to.
• Persistent reputation. The biggest problem (IMO) with conversation on the Internet is that the average Joe has trouble being polite– and some people are being impolite and just cruel. I love the idea that Disqus saves everything you say and you can vote up (and down) any comment. If Disqus gets big enough, you could imagine being able to set rules like “no comments from non-registered users who have an average comment vote of less than 1″.
• SEO Benefit. To be fair, Disqus (right now) hurts your SEO on one front. Given that I don’t really care too much about traffic to this blog, I’m okay with that (they are working on an API version that calls the comment content with their API rather than JavaScript)… It’ll be interesting to see if there is an effect on search engine traffic. But it’s not often mentioned that Disqus drops links to your blog (and each post) on your community page (mine is at http://tonywright.disqus.com/ ), which provides some nice positive SEO juice.

Disqus offers quite a few other benefits– the above are the ones I care most about. If you have a blog, check out their tour or just take it for a spin. It’s a breeze to set up!

There are people in the world who make a living communicating and living “in the noise” of email, IM, Twitter, Digg, TechMeme and the like. For them, the parade of communication and and information is probably a boon.

Unfortunately, for the rest of us (who make a living producing stuff– whether it’s software, design, written words, business plans, law briefs, or whatever) communication and social software is a necessary evil that’s getting to be… more evil.

Think about what the knowledge worker looked like 15-20 years ago compared to today. What frightens me is how scientific social software developers are getting about separating people from their time. We’re well beyond cowboy coders building something neat that people latch onto and have some fun with. Instead, we have analytics teams measuring how software is being used in a way that’s really never been done before. Hovering over our LCD cages like BF Skinner, they are watching what we’re doing, tweaking things to make it more engaging and more addictive, and measuring some more.

I liken it to the evolution of casinos and cruise ships, who basically run human cattle through finely tuned funnels designed to fleece them of money at every step… But instead of money, what we’re being fleeced of on the Internet is time and attention.

Again, for some people– this is fine. For some people, it’s literally building a career. In a way, I’m envious of them– they get to spend their lives immersed in a life-long party. I’m kind of envious of people who work in Vegas, too.

But for the quiet army of knowledge workers who are actually creating stuff– the boots on the ground in our knowledge economy– I think the increasingly personalized infoporn delivered to us through a broadening array of channels (like RSS, alerts, Twitter, Digg, Email, IM, Social Networks and more) is a looming disaster.

I imagine some people are shaking their heads reading this stuff and saying, “But people can choose not to indulge in this crap. We’re all perfectly capable of behaving like adults and working when we need to.” Indeed, maybe people will wake up and we’ll see a renaissance of attention.

I’m not so sure.

As I look at industries ranging from the gambling to alcoholic beverages, and as I watch very smart people fall prey to the attention-vultures, I think I’m more and more convinced that a concerted and scientific attack on the pleasure centers of our monkey brains will win the day.