Dr. Dre

This is a great article. I think there’s another interesting part of the Dr. Dre story: the part where he had to pay a lot of dues. I’ve read other articles and seen interviews where Dre is described as a workaholic. He puts in the time necessary to get the job done. Something anyone who has ever started something should be able to relate to.

Seriously… what kind of drivel is this?!

I know you’re trying to get a new blog off the ground, but filling an article with such ‘salient’ facts as “100M records > 100M Ipods” is exactly what’s wrong with most of journalism. What does it benefit does the reader gain in this comparison? Are these two things even comparable? Why not compare profit $/item, or total revenue generated, etc?

One thing I don’t get is the comment about being a perfectionist. Sure it’s great when things are perfect, and they have to be on an album because it’s a one-shot thing. Software app / web app development need not be PERFECT the first time around, and builds can be released often. Ever hear of “release often, release early”? I just think those two items lend themselves well to comparison. Any one else agree / disagree?

Even for the blogosphere this is really weak. This article perfectly illustrates whats wrong with Giga-Om TechCrunch and their ilk. The kind of thin surface level crap that passes for journalism.

Although I liked Broadbandits because of my personal interests, in retrospect, it lacked any real investigative reporting just a simple retelling of the public record. When compared to Conspiracy of Fools it comes up woefully short.

I thought the relaunch of Giga-om would be a serious effort something along the lines of “The Industry Standard”

While not perfect, TIS had a very strong reporting staff and provided good back story and reporting on their subjects. I dont know if Web 2.0 is dying or not but I do know what passes for Tech related journalism is not helping matters. A bunch of pithy “reports”( passed along from blog to blog) that read like a bad inside joke. I hope you can do better than this.

Richard, agreed. Are there any sites/blogs that you recommend?

While I cannot understand the obsession with celebrity. Both TMZ and TheSmokingGun have excellent staffs, who have developed sources and “digg” below the surface not just “report” on the latest press release.
That report on ” A Million Pieces” was outstanding. I suggest Arrington and Malik take that VC ( or in TC’s case their profits) money and hire Gaspirino or James B. Stewart as contributors

A couple thoughts:

1) Requiring people to register to the blog just to leave a comment is EXTREMELY LAME. If you’re worried about spam, getter a better spam filter. Since you use WordPress for the majority of your web properties, I’m sure you can hire a solid programmer to write a plugin for you if you don’t feel that Akismet is up to task.

2) I think this was a cool first article. As a current purveyor of Hip Hop music on a daily basis, Dr. Dre is one of the few producers that gets a constant rotation in my iPod. The work he did on the new Young Buck CD is breath taking.

With that said, I do have a few annoyances with Dre and feel that because of these, it hurts him to be looked toward for inspiration in starting a business:

A) He’s a perfectionist, as you already mentioned. But I think sometimes that this actually HURTS him rather than helps. Rakim sat on Aftermath for nearly 6 years and the whole entire time that he was there we only got a few guest verses on other artists works. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but an artist with no music out doesn’t eat (read: make money). Sure Rakim has plenty of old-school music that he can perform, but the market that he’s trying to reach now doesn’t know that music. They want something new.

So I say all of that to say that sometimes, it’s just better to get the music (read: product) out there and improve upon it as you go. After all, nothing is perfect.

B) Tying into my first point about being a perfectionist is the idea of vapor-ware. Dre has been working on Detox so long that it is now considered vapor-ware among the Hip hop community. No product (music or otherwise) should ever take so long to come to fruition. Again, nothing is perfect…it never will be. Even when we deem an item to be classic, there is always going to be something about it that can be improved upon. If this wasn’t true, then why do we release multiple versions of products?

C) My last point deals with loyalty. Everyone knows the sordid details of Dre dropping Truth Hurts and The Game from Aftermath (I only include these two as they actually dropped solid, credible CDs). In my view, if you don’t exzibit any loyalty in the products that you put out, why should I exzibit any loyalty to you and keep spending my hard earned dollars on you and the products that you release? Loyalty in and among the people that you work with and the products that you release can be a strong motivator for workers to keep working and for others to develop partnerships with you. Loyalty goes a long way in the public perception and if you don’t give any, you’ll never get any.

In the end, Dre is still a great producer and business man. But IMHO, if he worked on fixing those couple of points, he could be THE GREATEST producer and business man.

Frank,

one of the main reasons we have registration is less to do with spam, and more to do with how this CMS works.

Once the voting system kicks in, your comment can be voted and can become a stand alone post, if the community chooses to do so.

I hate to beat a dead horse but again this Katie used Dr.Dre and it seems as if google wikipedia were her sources. This is a start-up blog so here is where the story should have gone:
1. Dre was a young black male could not get traditional funding so his “angel” VC was a criminal enterprise (dopeman dopeman)
2. His “co-founder”, originally considered the muscle behind the product actually became the the better business person by demanding long term controlof the companies master recording ( a move that on a smaller scale is similar to the many the moves of a young Bill Gates and Microsoft)
3. Egos clash and Dre now has corporate cred and can no get legit funding…he goes his separate way
4. then he goes Steve Jobs and despite a slow start, a new take on an old idea ( enimen v “traditional” rap….ipod v old ways of portable entertainment ) he now is on top of his biz

Om,

I’m just now seeing that you aren’t using WordPress, but a different service entirely. For the most part it’s cool, but again I think needing to register just to leave a comment takes away from the spirit of the moment. Let’s say you came to my blog and read a post that you were compelled to comment on, but before doing so, you had to fill out a form and “register” with my blog first. In doing so, I may make you for get what you were going to write or make you lose the ferver in which you were going to comment by taking your attention elsewhere and then trying to return back to the original post as if you never left. As far as I know, Time Machines don’t exist (although I’m sure that Steve Jobs is working on iTime as we speak).

I’d also like to point out that (even though you can’t control this) there seems to be a disconnect between the services User Profile editor form and the blog from which a reader comes. When I was editing my profile, I noticed that once I was finshed, the form didn’t have a link to take me back to foundread.com; I had to re-type the URL just to get back here. That’s kinda not a good look to me. Again, I know that you’re just using a hosted service here, but you might want to speak to higher-ups to see if they could get that changed or no. It would make the whole experience of foundread.com much more fluid.

Frank,

thanks for your excellent feedback, and you raise good points. I will work with the folks who are behind the service and see if we can address most of the issues. Thanks for keeping it real for us.

Appreciate it!

Hey Frank—Please bear with us.

Registration does more than let you leave a comment. It lets you own your words, and build a reputation around them. Your photo, your bio, a list of every story you wrote and every comment you make will exist here. And more than that—if you hop over to Boxes and Arrows, or other sites that use (or will use) PublicSquare your reputation and your identity can follow.

We’re fixing some bugs, but comment management—tools that will let you flag and rate comments—will be up shortly. And you are deadly right about the problem with universal log in: it needs to be MUCH more clear where you came form and where you are going. It’s next on our bug list!

I think between the whole Kathy Sierra mess and the endless struggle with spammers and trolls what being anonymous on the web means to us.

Om is trying to build a *real* community here at Found | Read. one price to being a participant is to OWN your words, OWN your actions and sign up to be YOU.

In order to keep this thread on topic, I’d like folks who want to talk about this to comment here

And let me echo Om—thanks for keeping it real. We’re all founders here, and we’re all looking to learn from each other.

For every perfectionist who is successful, there is somebody who goes out with a half-ready product and uses feedback from the marketplace to improve it, or do better next time, and reaches equal success. What you can really learn from this is that there’s no one right way.

pretty good article but really could have been a little more in depth. I did however pick up on the references and similarities to Dr. Dre’s career and how it relates to what we do in business. From what I’ve read Dre is a perfectionist and there is nothing wrong with that unless it stands in the way of creativity and prohibits you from actually getting your work done, in his case, releasing a new record. I am the same way, I won’t start a project unless I can devote 100% of my energy to it but there are times when I am just not as productive as I should be because of this. Sometimes you do have to have a starting point and just get your work started and out there because the results could turn out to be much better than you imagined. You can’t always know how someone is going to react to it, in Dre’s case it’s the music. No matter how long you’ve been in your career, you will never know everything there is to know otherwise everyone would be successful, there would be no failures and life would be boring!

The article says: “Be a perfectionist. If the product or service (in his case an album) isn’t ready, don’t release it.” I think that’s really, really bad advice. Maybe it works for some products (like medical devices) but for things like software waiting until you’re “sure it’s ready” can be the worst possible choice, because you’ll continue second-guessing yourself forever and in the end will just miss your market opportunity.

A better approach would be to follow the Open Source mantra: “Release Early, Release Often.” This gives you a chance to get feedback, make adjustments, and truly meet the needs of your customers.

Om,

Is there any reason why you don’t use OpenID for comments authentication?

If this is an issue with your CMS platform, then I would like to have a chat about how you can achieve the following (unobtrusively):

1. OpenID Support
2. Comment Mangement using a Comments Mangement Oriented Protocol such as NNTP
3. Transparent integration with the burgeoning Semantic Web via SIOC data generation

Anyway, let me know.

Additional Info at: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen