A friend of mine tweeted yesterday that he was skeptical of Facebook’s IPO because it seems like public attention can shift and other products could rise up and replace it in an instant.

After all, didn’t that happen to MySpace?

I was about to write a post talking about why MySpace lost. Some bad technology decisions, some really bad product decisions and a general lack of innovation.

But instead, later yesterday afternoon, Mark Zuckerberg wrote this post for me.

He posted a picture of his desk.

THAT is why Facebook is worth $100 billion dollars.

And unless there is a big wave that they can’t get on top of (I think mobile is one big risk point for them), that’s why they’ll be worth even more in the future.

Great companies focus on their users and ship great products.

It’s what we’ve tried to embody here at Riskalyze. And if you look at the arc of what Facebook has accomplished since 2003, they’ve clearly accomplished that goal.

There’s a peculiar thing that happens in many companies.

Because money is always tight in most companies (except Facebook, apparently), raises are given out sparingly. And because retraining internal employees to do new jobs feels like double work, new hires are typically selected from the outside.

So often, employees feel under appreciated or underpaid, and begin to notice that the only thing they can do to get new responsibilities or a higher pay check is to find a new job.

Of course, as soon as they do that, their old company will have to hire somebody new, and have to incur the huge costs of training that person from scratch. They would have actually saved money if they had given their existing employee opportunities and room to grow.

An acquaintance of mine down in the valley joined a startup called UpMo as VP of Product, and is aiming to change all of that.

Take a look at their short launch video…it’s a great idea and a great product that could really help companies keep their talent challenged and growing in their jobs.

Congrats to Rob and the team at UpMo!

Hollywood is really mad at the technology industry for killing SOPA, their bill to equip the US government with China and Iran-like powers to take down web sites suspected of “assisting” piracy, without any due process.

From their rhetoric, it’s clear that Hollywood still hasn’t learned anything from this. And then it struck me…why don’t we teach them?

Since they’re so persnickety about licensing agreements, let’s amend all of our terms of use to require all movie moguls to use a special “Hollywood Edition” of our products.

Here are some of the special new features we’ll be giving them…

• Before you can do a Google search, you have to sit through five minutes of ads for Google Chrome, Chromebooks by Samsung, Android Phones by Motorola, and that amazing straight-to-video blockbuster, Google+. And oh yeah, don’t even think about trying to skip the ads. A cute little red “X” appears in the corner of your screen if you try to do that.
• Microsoft Word will no longer allow you to read or edit movie scripts that are obvious takeoffs from other movies. We get the message: remixing content to make something new is wrong. Bonus for us: this would have stopped you from absolutely ruining “Arthur” in the remake.
• If you fly off to your vacation home in the south of France, your Mac won’t boot up at all. Remember, it’s your fault for traveling – just buy another one with the right “region code.”
• Twitter still works fine in the Hollywood Edition. But all tweets are delayed for about three hours, unless you want to pay $10 a day to see them immediately. Bonus for you: every other tweet will offer you some really overpriced popcorn.

So enjoy “Hollywood Edition,” you movie moguls. Remember, we’re doing this for YOU because you’re the customer, and we want to make sure you’re well entertained.

Based on what we’ve learned from you, the best way to do that is annoying you to no end.

I like order and simplicity in my life.

Then weeks like the last one come along. There’s an avalanche of work to do. And I can either choose to get the key things done, or to be organized. But not both.

I had to consciously choose to focus this week. To ignore the mounting piles of email. To ignore the stacked up voice mails. To ignore the task list with 38 overdue things on it.

I had to let go of order and simplicity, put my head down and get something done, which finally got wrapped up last night.

And while it didn’t feel good during that process, it sure feels good to have finished scaling the mountain.

Enjoy your weekend while I try to return some things back to order.

A presidential campaign is a lot like a startup in some ways.

You have a dream. You put together an organization and start raising money. You never have enough money to fund yourself forever…only to get yourself to the next big milestone.

To gain market traction, you focus in on your niche. On the Republican side, Mitt Romney is focused on economic and national security conservatives. Rick Santorum is focused on social conservatives. Ron Paul on the libertarian-minded folks. They’ve each gotten some level of traction with their respective “niche markets.”

But one key difference comes after you start getting traction.

If you’re a presidential candidate, you really have to expand beyond your initial niche market and start appealing to a broader coalition (hopefully without losing many initial supporters) or you’ll never win a diverse set of primaries, much less a general election.

But if you’re a startup and you’ve chosen your niche well, you can build a profitable, growing and incredibly successful business without expanding your target much at all. You certainly might want to at some point, but there are plenty of successful companies who never do.

Riskalyze is laser-focused on the needs of non-day-trading self-directed investors. The folks who open an E*TRADE or TD Ameritrade or Charles Schwab account and manage their own brokerage or retirement account.

I don’t know if we’ll eventually expand our focus beyond that market niche. But I do know this: we’ve got a game-changing product that has clearly struck a chord with that kind of investor.

So that’s where our focus will be for a long time.

One of the mantras right now in the startup world is “doing your startup lean” and building a “minimum viable product.” The idea is to build something with minimal effort (or even just saying you’ve built it) and see if people want it before you waste a lot of time.

There’s definitely some value to the concept, but if there’s one thing 2011 taught me, it would be that you can take it too far.

We kept Riskalyze pretty tightly held to a small group of beta users. But we probably tried to hit the press a few months too early. It wasn’t a big problem, but comparing our product between October and today, there were clearly things we still needed to learn and figure out.

I haven’t come full circle on this issue. The underlying driver for “ship and learn” is still there and it was incredibly valuable to us as a brand new startup.

But as we watch Verizon announce a major policy change (a $2 fee for paying your bill online or by phone), only to reverse themselves a few hours later, it begs the question: are companies thinking things through? Are they just throwing things out there to see what the reaction is?

Or are they thoughtfully building a new product (or policy), testing the impact with a small group, and then launching publicly after all the kinks are worked out?

That’s the kind of thoughtful company I want to build in 2012. One that takes risks and tries revolutionary things with its beta users, but builds a reputation of stability and trust with the public and users at large.

That’s a tall order but it’s one of my goals for 2012.

I spent the morning doing something interesting: exercising the right side of my brain designing icons for a big new part of Riskalyze that’s going live next week.

A few of these icons are unchanged from the art we purchased, but most of them were completely different. I spent several hours in Photoshop changing their meaning to fit our purposes.

Anybody care to speculate what each of these icons represent?

I’ll give you a hint: the new feature is called Snapshots, and it’s the obvious next step after you’ve built a Riskalyze portfolio that you love.

The first person to accurately guess the purpose for even one of these icons gets a brand-new Riskalyze t-shirt. (They’re the comfy American Apparel kind, too.)

Guess away! You have to put your guesses in the Disqus comments below to qualify, otherwise I won’t know who wins.

Yesterday I wrote about Wikipedia’s refusal to tap sustainable capitalism to fulfill their mission, instead choosing to rely on donations. I made the point that I consider it a waste of my giving budget to sustain something perfectly capable of sustaining itself. I love and use Wikipedia but any good organization should be self-sustaining if it can be.

That post exploded on Hacker News and on Twitter with hundreds of comments, tweets and posts.

A good number of those comments were focused on the fact that Wikipedia would “lose its objectivity” and be “subject to bias” if it used ads or affiliate links to raise its annual budget.

• Never mind that Wikipedia could use an ad network to avoid a direct relationship with any advertiser.
• Never mind that Wikipedia already accepts donations from the corporate interests that so many of the commenters decry as evil.
• Never mind that Wikipedia keeps the identities of more than 200 of their major donors a secret, not allowing us to know who has influence over them. (How is THAT more transparent than an ad?)

The commenters from this point of view betray a distinct lack of understanding of how the indirect model works, whether we’re talking business or non-profit.

In the direct model, your incentives are focused on who gives you money. Your customers.

In the indirect model, users are the stakeholders who drive the real value. Without users, you have very little. So your incentives change and the person writing you the check is no longer the most important stakeholder in your mission. The user is.

My company, Riskalyze, is a great example. We’re building an incredible free product to help self-directed investors search the world’s investments to find a portfolio that fits them.

And that is spawning a marketplace for investing ideas and execution, which will involve connecting a small percentage of our users with partners, in a way that indirectly makes us money.

95% of our users might never do anything that makes us money, but the indirect model allows us to sustainably empower 100% of the world with an incredible investing tool they would never have had access to otherwise.

Our user community has to be first and foremost in our minds when we make product decisions. We know that maximizing user delight and satisfaction is what will actually drive our growth and maximize our revenue from partners.

Sustainable capitalism, especially as implemented in the indirect business model, is a huge force for good in the world. Wikipedia should give it a try.

This morning, I tweeted this.

Dear Wikipedia, stop begging for handouts. A single ad + Amazon affiliate links = swimming in money. Capitalism won, try it.

— Aaron Klein (@AaronKlein) December 27, 2011

Some friends re-tweeted it or gave it a like. Others probably silently disagreed. One wrote that he had to laugh at my critique after all of my tweets and posts about raising money for the Adami Tulu Project.

I thought that was a great point and it gave me the chance to be clear about how I think about non-profit fundraising.

We’re raising money at Adami Tulu and Ziway to build something that changes the world. That takes upfront capital, and it’s not a project that can attract investment dollars (yet). So we’re using fundraising to do the initial construction and operate the schools.

But that’s only the first part of the vision. We’re also working to lay the groundwork for in-country business ventures (mostly focused on food production) that will be able to sustainably support the operating costs of these schools.

Capitalism will be the force that sustains our work in Adami Tulu and Ziway. Otherwise, what we’ve built won’t last, and it will be gone as soon as we are.

On the other hand, Wikipedia is already built.

It’s one of the most powerful media properties on the web today. They could generate every penny they need for their annual budget (and more) with the simple tools they have at their disposal.

I love supporting creative projects. I’ve donated to a few of them on Kickstarter. I’d have donated a few bucks to help build Wikipedia in the first place.

But I’m not going to waste my money supporting something that could easily be supporting itself.

I wrote much of this as a comment on Fred Wilson’s AVC post about the concept of Open Science. Most of the AVC community is largely against patents, and there have been so many abuses of the patent system, that’s understandable.

But there’s a key distinction between patents for concepts and patents for real, non-obvious scientific breakthroughs that enable us to do things we’ve never been able to do before.

Patents on concepts – like one-click ordering, or tabs in a spreadsheet, or using two fingers to navigate a phone, or inviting people to a meeting – are just utterly absurd. They should be abolished and all of those patents should be nullified immediately.

But let’s say that you invented the first-ever capacitive touch screen. It’s amazingly responsive and better than any touch screen technology out there. You file a patent, which requires you to publicly explain that if you put A+B+C+D together in this way, you get this result.

In exchange for publishing that out to the world, you get a patent that allows you to monetize your invention. That’s only fair. You invented it.

You could have kept it a secret and not shared the details of A+B+C+D with the world. You’d have the risk that someone else could reverse engineer and figure out the formula, but that’s a huge investment on their part, so it’s a decent risk. Prior to the patent system, many inventors just kept their work a secret.

Because of the patent, every other inventor now knows about the formula. Which means that another inventor can come along, build an even better capacitive touch screen that uses A+B+C+E, and they owe zero royalties to the first patentholder. (The only way the first inventor can sue the second inventor is if the second formula is A+B+C+D+E.)

A fairly administered patent system is the greatest platform for open science we’ve ever seen. It desperately needs reform so we can stop giving Apple patents for the idea of using your fingers.

(Which, by the way, God originally had the patent for, but thankfully for Apple, it has since expired.)