Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist at Harvard Business School, finds that your body language can almost immediately change how you feel and directly influence how well you perform in social situations.  

For example, make yourself small. Look down at the floor. Maybe put your hand on your neck. Cross your legs.

Whether or not you originally felt great, just two minutes of holding this kind of pose has been found to lower testosterone and increase cortisol, making you feel less confident than you did before you started posing like this.

Conversely, try to take up as much space as possible.

Sit like you own the place, with your feet propped up and your hands behind your head. Stand like you're a rock star. 

Your body will start sending signals in the opposite direction, making you feel more powerful than before you began posing.


Primates ascending into alpha roles in their social group experience changes that result in

1) heightened testosterone, driving increased dominance
2) lowered cortisol, leading to less stress-reactive behavior

Effective human leaders are found to have similar patterns of testosterone and cortisol in their body, resulting in dominant and non-stress reactive behavior. These are leaders who are assertive yet laid back. 

In Cuddy's experiments, people with higher levels of testosterone and lower levels of cortisol were more more likely to be positively evaluated in a job interview. They were more optimistic, even at games of chance. They seemed more able to simply be themselves, and were more likely to be described as "authentic," "enthusiastic," and "comfortable." 

The most interesting part of these experiments is that Amy Cuddy did not identify powerful and powerless candidates through any sort of screening process, or through in-depth psychological tests. She simply by posed people in either a high power pose or lower power pose, selecting at random, before putting them in a stressful experimental situation. Two minutes in one of the high power poses is all it takes for a person's testosterone to increase and cortisol to drop, both at statistically significant levels. The low power pose had a similarly significant effect in the opposite direction. 

In other words, the difference between feeling powerful or powerless could be as simple as changing how you stand or sit. 

Amy Cuddy delivers a great twenty-minute talk about her research here. 

To me, this suggests a reason why yoga is so popular. Yoga is essentially a 60 to 90 minute flow from one high power pose to another. 

In light of these findings, yoga is not just a good workout, but also a practical way to regularly train yourself to feel more confident and powerful. 

(If you don't think yoga is a good workout, you need to do a real yoga class). My understanding of the origins of yoga is fuzzy at best, but it seems agreed that yoga was originally developed thousands of years ago as a tool to help meditation, not as a form of exercise. Meditation was the main task, and yoga was simply a tool to help train the mind.

It makes complete sense to me that yoga can actually change how you feel and how your mind works. That's what it was made for, and Amy Cuddy's research provides a nice piece of science to support the continued practice of an ancient art. 

Why has Google+ failed to take off since its launch June 2011? 

Initially, it got a lot of buzz, people clamored to get invitations to join, and it became the fastest growing social network in history. But then... nothing. 

And now, it's become fairly obvious that it simply hasn't found a place in people's lives:

The main reason given for lack of adoption is that people don't want to invest the effort needed to recreate the social network they've spent years building on Facebook. Old photos, wall posts, getting friends to move over... Google+ is a nice product, but not so different that it's worth the hassle. Paul Tassi at Forbes compares Google+ competing with Facebook to Bing competing with Google search:

"When’s the last time you got THAT frustrated with the Google search engine? Sure, you might not find what you wanted on occasion, but 99.99% of the time, it fulfills its function exceedingly well. So why on earth would anyone feel the need to switch to Bing? It may work yes, but to the average user, it doesn’t offer anything above and beyond what you’d find with Google, and in some avenues, is actually worse."

He makes a good point, but Google was not out to make just a marginally better product. Google knew it needed a fundamentally different value proposition, much like how the other whiteboard sites have been able to carve out a community because they ARE doing something different.

Google thought it understood something important that Facebook did not. And it did. However, Google was still wrong. 

Google's belief is that people's social networks are not, in real life, lumped into one single group of Friends. Facebook's Friends failed to reflect how relationships are actually organized. Google wanted to create a network that could elegantly accomodate different types of relationships and organize friends into independent groups, allowing users to send intimate updates to best friends and broadcast to the public with the same level of ease.

Paul Adams was working for Google when he gave the below presentation. It's a great talk, and it captures Google's thesis for why Google+ would work: 

When PayPal was sold for $1.5B in 2002, employees moved on to new projects. It was shortly after the dot com bubble, and there were few people making significant investments in tech start-ups. The PayPal mafia came into existence because the founders and early employees were willing to recycle the capital they acquired, starting new companies themselves or bank-rolling the companies of other PayPal employees. This second generation of projects included Youtube, Yelp, Tesla, Yammer, Slide, Kiva.org, and LinkedIn. 

There were only 200 PayPal employees at the time of acquisition. What was it like to be at PayPal, and why were so many of those subsequent investments astoundingly successsful? 

Three PayPal employees describe the entrepreneurial culture of PayPal on Quora:

 1. Keith Rabois, third-party relations manager at PayPal, now COO at Square

Extreme Focus (driven by Peter [Thiel]):  Peter required that everyone be tasked with exactly one priority.  He would refuse to discuss virtually anything else with you except what was currently assigned as your #1 initiative.  Even our annual review forms in 2001 required each employee to identify their single most valuable contribution to the company.  (Although I resisted some of this approach during the PayPal years, I am now a proponent of it and have even devised a theory of why it is crucial.)  

Dedication to individual accomplishment:  Teams were almost considered socialist institutions.  Most great innovations at PayPal were driven by one person who then conscripted others to support, adopt, implement the new idea.  If you identified the 8-12 most critical innovations at PayPal (or perhaps even the most important 25), almost every one had a single person inspire it (and often it drive it to implementation).  As a result,  David [Sacks] enforced an anti-meeting culture where any meeting that included more than 3-4 people was deemed suspect and subject to immediate adjournment if he gauged it inefficient.  Our annual review forms in 2002 included a direction to rate the employee on "avoids imposing on others' time, e.g. scheduling unnecessary meetings."

Refusal to accept constraints, external or internal:We were expected to pursue our #1 priority with extreme dispatch (NOW) and vigor.  To borrow an apt phrase, employees were expected to "come to work every day willing to be fired, to circumvent any order aimed at stopping your dream."  Jeremy Stoppelman has relayed elsewhere the story about an email he sent around criticizing management that he expected to get him fired and instead got him promoted:I was a 22-year-old whippersnapper, and I remember firing off this e-mail that disagreed with the entire executive staff," says Yelp's Stoppelman. "I didn't get fired--I got a pat on the back."
Peter did not accept no for answer:  If you couldn't solve the problem, someone else would be soon assigned to do it.

Radical transparency on metrics:   All employees were expected to be facile with the metrics driving the business.  Otherwise, how could one expect each employee to make rational calculations and decisions on their own every day? To enforce this norm, almost every all-hands meeting consisted of distributing a printed Excel spreadsheet to the assembled masses and Peter conducting a line by line review of our performance (this is only a modest exaggeration).  Even after we had our IPO, Peter impelled our legal counsel to allow us to continue 95% of this practice (basically stripping the explicit revenue line off of the printout).

Meritocratic opportunity &  opposition to traditional general management:   Just as responsibility for initiatives was frequently re-allocated based upon performance, so was "management."  Peter and Max [Levchin] crusaded to replace under-performing senior colleagues, which introduced some fear and less stability into the office, but, also forged new opportunities for new stars promoted from within to thrive.  Peter and David also were opposed to general managers or hiring people whose core skill was "managing."  People were promoted based upon their technical proficiency at a given role--i.e. the best engineers would manage engineering, the best product people who be running product, etc.  I still recall concluding my first week at PayPal by jogging around the Stanford campus on a Saturday afternoon with Peter when he explained this philosophy to me; any other approach he argued would breed resentment by talented employees.  This approach was perceived as radical in 2000, by now it is much more "acceptable" in the consumer Internet realm, at least.

We did not invest in many other traditional management techniques (which are poorly suited for managing talented employees anyway).  As David summarized, one's prestige at PayPal was measured by how few people could stop you from proceeding with a new idea.

5) Vigorous debate, often via email:  Almost every important issue had champions and critics.  These were normally resolved not by official edict but by a vigorous debate that could be very intense.  Being able to articulate and defend a strategy or product in a succinct, compelling manner with empirical analysis and withstand a withering critique was a key attribute of almost every key contributor.  I still recall the trepidation I confronted when I was informed that I needed to defend the feasibility of my favorite "baby" to Max for the first time.

2. Yee Lee, early PayPal product manager, now Google+ Product Manager

Four aspects of early PayPal culture really stood out to me when I joined as a product manager:

1) Self-sufficiency -- individuals and small teams were given fairly complex objectives and expected to figure out how to achieve them on their own.  If you needed to integrate with an outside vendor, you picked up the phone yourself and called; you didn't wait for a BD person to become available.  You did (the first version of) mockups and wireframes yourself; you didn't wait for a designer to become available.  You wrote (the first draft of) site copy yourself; you didn't wait for a content writer.

2) Extreme bias towards action -- early PayPal was simply a really *productive* workplace.  This was partly driven by the culture of self-sufficiency.  PayPal is and was, after all, a web service; and the company managed to ship prodigious amounts of relatively high-quality web software for a lot of years in a row early on.  Yes, we had the usual politics between functional groups, but either individual heroes or small, high-trust teams more often than not found ways to deliver projects on-time. 

3) Data-driven decision making -- PayPal was filled with smart, opinionated people who were often at logger-heads.  The way to win arguments was to bring data to bear.  So you never started a sentence like this "I feel like it's a problem that our users can't do X", instead you'd do your homework first and then come to the table with "35% of our [insert some key metric here] are caused by the lack of X functionality..."  

4) Willingness to try -- even in a data-driven culture, you'll always run in to folks who either don't believe you have collected the right supporting data for a given decision or who just aren't comfortable when data contradicts their gut feeling.  In many companies, those individuals would be the death of decision-making.  At PayPal, I felt like you could almost always get someone to give it a *try* and then let performance data tell us whether to maintain the decision or rollback.

Those four cultural attributes actually make up a lot of the attitudes and beliefs that you'd expect to see in great entrepreneurs -- i.e., multi-disciplinary, self-sufficient, action-oriented, data-driven experimentalists.  So it's no surprise to see the number of successful startup ventures founded by PayPal alums.  To be sure, PayPal is/was not unique -- I would expect any company that established these kinds of cultural norms to produce a lot of entrepreneurs.

3. Mike Greenfield, designed many of PayPal's early fraud detection models, now founder at TeamRankings.com

Keith and Yee both have great answers.  I'd add one additional point.

PayPal had a strong bias toward hiring (and promoting / encouraging, as Keith mentions) smart, driven problem solvers, rather than subject matter experts.  Very few of the top performers at the company had any prior experience with payments, and many of the best employees had little or no prior background building Internet products.

I worked on the fraud analytics team at PayPal, and most of our best people had never before done anything related to fraud detection.  If he'd approached things "traditionally," Max would have gone out and hired people who had been building logistic regression models for banks for 20 years but never innovated, and fraud losses would likely have swallowed the company.

If you wear eyeglasses, you're aware that a good pair of eyeglasses are hard to buy. At an optical store, designer frames with nice lenses will run you over $500 a pair. Virtually nothing is less than $200 and anything in the $200-500 range looks like they've been selling that same style for the last decade. Furthermore, you're going to be choosing from the same frames as any person who lives in your area. 

This is a market where sales channels are fragmented and undifferentiated. The product being sold is either the equivalent of the "CVS store brand" or has the prices inflated two-fold. Brick-and-mortar stores are expensive to maintain, inevitably adding a lot to the price of every product, but bring little value to the customer, except the ability to try on glasses.

This market was just waiting for someone new and good to come into the game. This is a broken system.

The obvious innovation is to take the sales channel online, which brings down the cost of the product and increases selection. Virtually every consumer product has seen challengers do that, from DVD rentals (Netflix) to toilet paper (Amazon Subscribe & Save). The other crucial problem is that the product design is dated and stale, which allows designer brands to take a fat margin simply for not being horrible. So the second innovation is that you need to vertically integrate the supply chain and sell your own product through your new online sales channel.

But with these two basic problems addressed, where do retailers still naturally have an advantage over an online store?

1) They let you try on glasses 
2) They have salespeople who, theoretically, can help you
3) They could (but don't) sell toward a specific style and build a brand geared toward that type of customer taste, the way clothing stores specialize by age, gender, and lifestyle (for example, Ann Taylor vs. Urban Outfitters)

An online eyeglass store that has something better than the "CVS brand" product AND can compete with retailers on the three fronts above will naturally blow competition out of the water. 
 

Price: All eyeglasses are $95, come with excellent lenses, free two-day shipping and free 30-day returns. 

Warby Parker prices undercut the competition by 5x. Furthermore, it chose a transparent and simple pricing system that cuts down on indecision.

Product and Brand: It uses in-house designs and built its own manufacturing supply chain, so doesn't depend on existing products. It created a collection that is trendy, with a look that is urban, a little hipster, and meant to appeal to the under-40 crowd. 

It's created a product that is, to its target audience, far and away superior to what's already out there.  

Trying on the Product: They'll ship you up to 5 frames to try on at home and send back to them when you've decided. 2-day shipping, free both ways. If you live near a showroom, you can book an appointment to visit in person. There's also an addicting "virtual try-on" feature that automatically fits glasses to a picture of you from your webcam or computer:

They've made it easy and free for customers to feel confident that they like the product before they commit to buy.

Customer Service: Warby Parker is one the many tech start-ups who recognize the importance of the Zappos customer service model. Their Yelp reviews show that their customer service is consistently available, helpful, knowledgeable, and nice. 

Their website tools, coupled with a strong customer service team, make their support better than many optical stores.

Warby Parker understood the business opportunity thoroughly, and is executing its business model with flair. The company was founded only a year ago, and is now being valued at +$100 MM. 

My analysis of their success makes it clear why I think they deserve to be VC darlings. They found a big consumer-facing industry with high prices and poor products where, because of fashion and style, the product will always resist being commoditized. This is a classic disruptive technology that will quickly be moving up-market. The question now is, how will Warby Parker ward off the competition?

Update: There is a great discussion about this post at Hacker News 
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4208222
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