On Patience, and Building Media Brands

Sarah Lacy wrote an article last week for her site, Pando Daily, that really struck a chord with me.

Her point? That new media companies like Vice (and her own) are succeeding thanks to patient founders and slowly building audience and ad revenue thanks to maintaining a unique perspective and the continuous creation of great original content.

It’s a great formula, but rare and hard to pull off. She knows it, and I know — I’ve been part of at least three companies, small and large, that have tried to build a brand as a media entity but for various reasons couldn’t pull off the kind of success the likes of Vice are enjoying. To be fair, not many are.

But this particular graf by Lacy hit home:

Nearly every single investor Pando has has asked me how more money or algorithms can scale our company faster. My answer is always: They can’t. It’s just going to take five to ten years of solid work to build the media company we want to build. There is no shortcut.

It’s the truth.

The first media startup I was part of was Click Magazine, which for most was a no-name publication that covered tech and the dot com boom. As part of 18 Media, a locally successful publishing house based on the peninsula, we were a small, scrappy team and had real momentum with readership, partnerships and ad growth. The magazine ultimately failed due to the tech advertising bust. The publisher, once upon a time, told me it’d take at least five years to be a sustainable title. He was right, but Click didn’t last much longer than two.

Next: TechTV. I was there for over four years, from its final day as ZDTV to the day it was acquired by Comcast (and became G4). We were really hitting a stride and there was a feeling we were poised to take off when we were acquired. I left for Yahoo News.

Later? I helped launch Tonic, a “good news” site that struggled with different business plans but slowly built a moderate following through the creation of a lot of quality original content sourced by a large crew of hard-working stringers and freelancers around the world. Again, the site didn’t last for more than a couple of years.

Content creation, curation, building an audience from scratch, and all that goes with running a content company is incredibly difficult. Building a brand as a media company, like any startup, is an uphill battle. So hats off to the content creators that have made a name for themselves, whether they’re niche like Pando or more mass-appeal like Vice. They deserve credit, and their founders deserve credit for setting expectations with investors and focusing on the product.

As Lacy says, “wait and watch” and committing to a game plan can be worth something. It’s inspiring stuff and should psych up a legion of content-minded folks. That is, if they can take the time to build.

Mud run. Check?

When I think “rugged maniac,” I think of someone like Bear Grylls eating worms and hacking his way through a tropical forest. But here I was last weekend, jumping over a wooden gate (the event’s first obstacle) to stand at the starting line of the Rugged Maniac 5k mud run at the Alameda County Fairgrounds in Pleasanton.

I was roped into this event after a few beers at an elementary school dads’ meeting earlier this year. Of all the things I love to do, running is not one of them. I generally hate running more than a mile or two. In an event setting, swimming to Crissy Field from Alcatraz sounds like more fun to me than a run. But it had been a few years since I had run a 5k, and the whole Tough Mudder thing had some appeal, so I enlisted with a small group of dads.

Rugged ManiacIt was a total blast.

The adrenaline started pumping at 8:30am on the drive over with some loud music. When I got there and laced up my Asics, hundreds thousands of participants from buff dudes/chicks to regular fitness enthusiasts to moms and their kids were streaming into the fairgrounds, checking in and stretching out. Many were wearing costumes, so I figured if anyone can run with a pig snout and a tutu, then I was ready to do this, too. Groups of about 150 runners were going out every 15 minutes or so, and we saw the first male and female participants come in at a blazing 25+ minutes. FAST.

Our group of about 150 maniacs went off with a whoop at 10:15 and quickly three of us broke off from the rest of our pack. We hopped over walls, scrambled up gravel mounds and stomped through soggy fields on our way to the tougher stuff.

Rugged ManiacRugged Maniac bills itself as containing the most obstacles per mile — 25 total on the 5k course — and they get progressively tougher (generally) as you run. The running, it turns out, is pretty easy for anyone who’s moderately fit and we ran at a quick pace through any lengthy sections. The obstacles provide nice breaks from running, and there are a handful of bottlenecks that force you to stop completely as you wait your turn to get through.

There was a really great camaraderie with everyone cheering for each other through the muck, and people were always quick to help push and pull each other over and through the obstacles. Some fatigue set in late, and I found myself being ultra careful climbing and crawling over and through really slick areas that could send anyone to the hospital with serious injury. Like the 20′ high wall that we had to climb over toward the end, which was covered in greasy wet slop. Dangerous.

We also crawled through barbed wire-covered mud pits, carried 50 lb. heavy bags on our backs, swung across rings (unsuccessfully), and cannon-balled into muddy water pits. We climbed over short and high walls, fell off balance beams into muddy mud pits, ran over giant see-saws, crawled through dirt tunnels, and finally slid down a giant mud slide to the finish line. The three of us finished in our goal of about 45 minutes.Rugged Maniac

I was totally high on adrenaline, completely filthy and satisfied afterward, and was sore as hell the next day in places where I had forgotten muscles existed. The event organizers take and distribute photos to participants for free. These here are the best of our bunch.

I swore I had checked such an event off of my life’s bucket list, but now rumors are surfacing of a more au naturale mud run in Healdsburg this Fall.

We may have to sign up.

Side project: Listwatcher

For the past few years I’ve toyed with an idea to aggregate as many high quality Year in Review lists that I could find. As a former writer and editor of these lists, I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with the things. They’re relatively easy to complete since any research and editorial is either internal or all creative. Yet at the same time they’re also difficult to produce since you need to find and create stuff that readers would actually want to spend time and reminisce with.

Today, every media outlet cranks out these end-of-year lists. Online, lists are now bread and butter content (looking at you, Buzzfeed). At the end of any year, creating lists are typically easy for teams that are short-staffed during holiday down-times, and they tend to drive some traffic during what’s also generally a low point in the year in terms of site visits. And we all know that now, thanks to social media, sometimes lists go viral anytime of year.

I also have had a Tumblr account for some time, but never had much reason to play around. I have been genuinely curious about the lightweight, smart content tools it gives publishers. So it occurred to me at the end of last year: 2013 lists + Tumblr = a fun side project and maybe an interesting format for the idea. I started the project a bit late, but created Listwatcher and it’s been fun.

What started with the best year-end lists I could find has now turned into a place to capture good, unique lists in general. There are so many, and they’re generally lost to constantly updated Twitter and Facebook feeds. I’m quickly realizing this could go in many different directions with smarter aggregation and curation, and could include various categories and topics, and also multimedia like video, photos, .gifs etc. I’ve got a Twitter handle, but it could benefit from an enhanced social media presence. The Tumblr theme I chose on a whim doesn’t really support content with a more robust structure or taxonomy I could take advantage of. But for now less is more and we’ll see where it goes.

For now, BRING ON THE LISTS!

Listwatcher homepage

 

Portland: The beer scene goes to 11

In Oregon you can’t fill your gas tank without help from an attendant. So when my sister said, “There’s a gas station down the road that fills growlers…” something didn’t compute.

A what? Where? Growlers? Are you kidding?

A couple hours later we were in the car, driving from her place that sits conveniently on the edge of the Willamette Valley wine country, to a nearby Shell station that instead of junk food and soda signs outside sported placards for beer advertising “We now fill growlers!”

IMG_2245Don’t believe it? The photo is the growler fill installation, inside the Shell gas station, somewhere along Hwy. 99 in Sherwood, Oregon. There are eight beer taps, from San Diego’s Green Flash to big Widmer hefe and other Oregon craft beers. We chose the excellent 10 Barrel Brewing Co. IPA (from Bend). Turns out you can’t fill your own growler at the gas station either, but a kind woman behind the counter did it for us, just $12.50 for the fill. No tax in Oregon either, natch.

And thus began my latest NW Weekend Beer Adventure, though that’s not what I went to Oregon for. It was for a family visit, and the family is great. But so are the area beers and I always enjoy sampling the local flavors whenever I’m in town. Not that the Bay Area/California scene is any slouch when it comes to great beer experiences, but Oregon just continually blows most of it away.

In addition to the taps, the Shell station had a small fridge in back with nothing but Oregon craft brews. So I picked up a couple of 22 oz bottles, including some Pelican and Ninkasi Maiden the Shade, which has the best metal-inspired label this side of their great Sleighr winter ale. Then we went to Safeway for some groceries and OMG another NW craft beer section. I bought a bottle of Elysian Loser pale ale (from Seattle, a partnership with Sub Pop records featuring a great anti-corporate Kurt Cobain-inspired label), another Pelican and a Burnside IPA. For the record, I’ve had Burnside before and it’s the best IPA I’ve had from the region.

Let’s pause for a second. If Portlandia isn’t making a growler-fill sketch or episode ridiculing the beer scene, then they’re doing it wrong. Also doing it wrong is the state of California, where you’re lucky to get a growler fill anywhere you haven’t bought a growler from. Despite recent efforts to loosen up, the state law is still ripe for change. I’m not asking for gas station fills, but we’re behind the times. And let’s not get started with the silly Russian River policy. I digress…

IMG_2257The next day, we headed to Base Camp Brewing Co. They distribute a couple of their beers to the Bay Area (a surprise to Joe our beer pourer), so they’re not totally unfamiliar to me. However, I was totally unprepared for their awesome tasting room, which made me want to go camping and rock climbing and canoeing and rafting. It’s one of the most beautiful brewery taprooms I’ve ever set foot in. We ordered falafels from the food pod parked outside, and went through the 10 beer tasting “log.” All the beers were great but the touch with the hand-roasted marshmallow with the S’more Stout was ridiculously yummy.

For a couple years now, I’ve wondered what Portland’s response to sour beers would be. Of all the beer I’ve seen and had from the Portland area, I’ve never seen a sour. And then my brother in law told me about Cascade Brewing Barrel House which oh, by the way, is a couple blocks away from Base Camp. So we walked over and it’s not like they have a couple of sours, they have about a dozen of them, from light and fruity, to wild, to weird to wonderful and intense. And that’s in addition to the other ales they serve. So does PDX get sour beer? YES.

But we weren’t done. On the way home we stopped in at another supermarket with a “real” beer section. Actually, it has two. The biggest and best beer selection I’ve ever seen in a supermarket. So we picked up a few more bottles to take over to dad’s house, to enjoy while watching the 49ers fall to the Seahawks. In all, I tasted and shared a ridiculous number of great beers that day (I won’t list them all here). And since it’s the Big Year in Beer, I was committed to putting some points on the board.IMG_2269

The next day we toned things down a bit and toured around the up-and-coming NE Portland Alberta Arts District. We ended up – surprise! – at The Mash Tun brewpub for lunch. After the previous day, I couldn’t stomach a sampler of their half-dozen beers, but had glasses of their very good IPA and porter. I had a couple other tasters at home from the bottles we had bought, and began getting ready to leave town.

I bought a few sours from Cascade, which my parents will kindly deliver next time they drive down to visit the Bay Area. You can’t get bottles of beer through airport security, but at PDX one can buy bottles of beer (and wine) in the terminal after security. All beer’d out, I decided to pass on a to-go bag.

Holiday surf surprise

At the beginning of December, we spent a day and night in Santa Cruz. The surf was flat so we enjoyed a walk along West Cliff Dr., had lunch at Kelly’s Bakery, and stumbled into a new shop (well, new to me) in the Swift St. Courtyard called Sawyer Land & Sea Supply. As is always the case, I was immediately drawn to a small selection of surfboards on the shop’s back wall. The boards matched the understated, soulful and rustic aesthetic of the shop. They were tinted with earth-toned designs and handcrafted by board builders who take pride in their work. A few from familiar names like Ashley Lloyd and Travis Reynolds were on the wall. These weren’t machine-cut pop-outs made with epoxy resin and didn’t scream with any neon logos. The longboards were throwback single-fin designs.

My eye was drawn to one longboard in particular, an all-white 9’6″ “Grebe” model with three colored resin bands separating the nose from the rest of the deck. The board sported an unfamiliar Migration label and had a cedar stringer and redwood tail block. I looked at it, fondled it a bit, dreamed about buying it and talked to my wife about what made it so nice. She suggested half seriously that I get it. It’d be great to support an up-and-coming independent shaper, I thought. For the next two weeks I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It looked like it fit my surfing style and the thing just looked like fun.

In 1996 while still living in SLO, I bought the only brand-new board I’ve ever owned. I sold my lovely Epiphone guitar so I could afford a custom-made hybrid built by Cole Simler, so I could ride bigger waves on the central coast reefs that a traditional longboard couldn’t handle. Since then, I’ve been through a few longboards all purchased used through Craigslist and they’ve certainly served me well.

Sawyer was offering a slight discount on boards through the holidays and the price on the board, made of such quality, felt like a deal. Stacy Forrester, the shop’s owner, also said she could arrange for me to meet the shaper, Tim Folkert, if I was interested in buying it. I’ve never been too keen on just picking a board off the rack in a shop. If I was going to put real money down on a board, I always thought it’d be best to chat with and get fitted by the shaper. I really liked Tim’s work, so I considered contacting him directly to talk about getting something custom. But that board. It was calling me from Stacy’s shop.

Tim FolkertA week later and after a surf session I decided to take another look. I dropped back into Sawyer, put a deposit down on the board, and set up a time to meet Tim. A few days later, I met him back in the shop and we discussed the his take on the board, our backgrounds, and surfing at length. He placed the fin for me (that’s him setting me up in the photo), gave me a T-shirt and a couple of stickers, and I nervously walked out with the board under my arm. It’s not lost on me how fortunate I am to be able to do this.

Tim seems like a great guy and I wish him all the success in the world as he gets his label off the ground in the competitive market of Santa Cruz. I’m happy to be riding one of his beautiful boards. Also, Stacy at Sawyer deserves a shout-out for opening and running such a great shop. It’s my kind of place, top-to-bottom.

With a couple hours of daylight left, I headed straight over to a familiar spot on the east side and anxiously waxed it up, afraid to even scratch it on her maiden voyage just down the steps to the beach. The surf looked small and the tide was dropping but it was breaking over my favorite section of reef. For a minute I thought about not going out, for fear I’d hurt my new board. Then I came to my senses: there’s surf, you’re here, you’ve got a new surfboard. GO.

The board paddled through the late-afternoon glass like a hot knife through butter and I immediately caught the best wave of that session, a belly-high right that held up over the inside section and 50 yards down the line. I kicked out and smiled. The board rode like a dream, and I was stoked.

On Dec. 30, my good friend came down for the day and the forecast looked great with amazing weather and a long-period NW swell in the water. We went straight down to Capitola and saw chest- to head-high + sets breaking right and left, rolling quite far out in front of the main jetty. Being a goofy-footer I’ve always loved the lefts there, and on this day they were breaking more powerful than normal. With the tide low, the sets were even a bit hollow off the peak which normally is mushy on smaller days.

We waited for a long set to wash through, then paddled straight out to the peak. I caught two of the best lefts I’ve surfed in years, slightly overhead and bowling off the drop. The drops were steep, bottom turns were fast, and the waves held shoulder-high down the line with enough punch to dig the tail and carve some big turns off the waves’ faces. The Grebe was absolutely performing.

On the second big left and after a late drop, I looked back over my left shoulder to see the lip throwing out over my hand. The board picked up speed, asking me to have my way with it. I dug my toes in, carved up the face, shifted my weight back and threw the nose around toward the beach to my right. I could feel the foam flex under my heels and the board screamed and snapped into another bottom/toe turn. A guy on a shortboard sat on the shoulder watching me carve the face down the line, and I kicked out with the biggest surf-induced grin I’ve had on my face in years. Heart pumping, I turned her back out to get another, and another…

New year, new board — it’s going to be a good one. Interested? Go see Tim and/or Stacy.

Side note: Now I’ve got a board for sale!