The more informed you are, the better you feel about yourself

Yesterday we had our first board meeting of the year for Inside.com at Sequoia Capital (on the world-famous Sand Hill Road).

It’s been a long journey for me with this particular startup, which started as Mahalo.com and after a pair of pivots locked into the Inside.com mobile news opportunity.

It’s going well, and we are just finishing up our first year in public. We don’t have as many millions of users as we did at Mahalo, nor is the growth as staggering (Mahalo was a rocket ship, getting to 15m monthly uniques and the 140th largest site in the USA in under 30 months).

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However, the users we do have are really in love with the product and seek it out daily -- they are not just passing through from a search engine. We can tell we are making something of true value that is delighting our consumers.

Inside just feels much more grounded than Mahalo which, although was perfectly aligned with where the world wound up (search + content), was up against a formidable competitor -- which also controlled our distribution (Google).

[ Note to self: write a post about how being right is only half of winning. ]

I’ve been lucky enough to have Roelof Botha on my board since day one, when he was just starting his venture career. He’s one of those steady, hard-working people you have in your life that you’re sometimes apt to under-appreciate.

He’s the kind of guy who shows up an hour early to the board meeting, having read all the documents and done some additional research on the market. He’s also the kind of guy who stays an hour or two after the board meeting and talks to you about life.

Just a class act, across the board. If you can get him on the board of your company I would jump at the chance.

After I gave the board an overview of why we’re building Inside (to get people to the truth faster), I showed them my big idea to grow our user base, revenue, and relevance in the world. Everyone instantly got the model and agreed on the strategy (it was from my old playbook, you’ll see in Q2 what it is).

Then Roelof said something profound. He flipped through his journal, “I have something for you.” Then he dropped the quote:

“The more informed you are, the better you feel about yourself,” he said.

Whoa.

It hit me like a ton of bricks.

That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to explain to people about what is wrong with the media right now. It’s what “The Newsroom” tried to capture, and it’s what all of us are debating on Twitter all week.

People are slurping up Buzzfeed, Business Insider, and Upworthy content like greasy fast food -- empty calories -- all day long. It tastes really good on the way down, and it smells even better!

However, as anyone who has had one too many “belly bombers” knows, you’re going to pay for it later.

What we are doing at our core at Inside.com is trying to get you to the best journalism on the planet, while removing all the bad junk (link-baiting, reblogging, etc.). We want you to efficiently visit Inside.com/drones or Inside.com/space and get more informed about those topics.

We want you to feel better about yourself after you use our product -- not icky and bloated.

We haven’t perfected any of this yet, but we have figured out three things really well -- and we’re the first to do it:

1. Curators: We have defined a new class of content creators in the world. Their job isn’t journalism or marketing. Their job is to read everything on the planet about a subject and present to consumers the absolute best of that topic. We have many members of the public submitting, in aggregate, over 200 links per day (and that’s in week two of the program!). More here.
2. Updates: The format of our product is two sentences and about 250 characters. In that space we try to tell you as concisely as possible what is in the story we are linking to. We invented the concise nature of the “Update” format so that you can in minutes catch up on everything in a topic -- or in the world.
3. Mobile news: Our current product is among the best designed in the news space, putting a massive emphasis on getting consumers to the truth quickly and elegantly. I give our current design a 7.5 out of 10. Our 3.0 design will get us -- objectively -- to the 8.5 or 9 level. Yes, even as much as I bark at founders about how important design is, I don’t have a magic wand to make a 10. Only time, talent, and iteration can make a 10.

This year you’ll see Inside.com launch a couple more killer features and products, all in service of trying to make folks more informed because …

“The more informed you are, the better you feel about yourself.”

Boards and board meetings have a lot of important functions, but the most important for me is to have brilliant people thinking about my product -- and giving me candid feedback.

Thanks, Roelof.

best @jason