Coefficients of Friction

• What is it about?

  Alistair: You were literally born to think. Your brain is huge; but the real world gets in between your ideas and making them happen. For hundreds of thousands of years, the human race has been trying to overcome the coefficient of friction of the real world by building more and more thrust—bigger, vaster enterprises. That's why the industrial era was so cool: we finally had machines to turn our dreams into reality.
  But it turns out we were wrong. What we needed wasn't more thrust—it was less friction. Electrons are frictionless, which is why the Internet age is better than the industrial age.
  
  In this talk, Alistair Croll will discuss how the dramatic reduction in friction that the Web provides is breaking down old barriers to entry, and what that means for startups. He'll look at why attention is the only sustainable competitive advantage, what you can do about it, and how to apply Lean Startup concepts to the data all around you.

• What will the visitors get from it?

  Alistair: Learn how to use data to build a better business faster
  Understand what your advantages are as a startup, and how to use them
  Figure out how to find the One Metric That Matters to your organization
  Hear examples of companies big and small that have launched successfully

• For whom it is?

  Alistair: Entrepreneurs, founders, and intrapreneurs (people within a company trying to innovate.
  Investors and technology analysts
  Business students
  Web developers wanting to optimize their business and their applications

• What do I presently work at?

  Alistair: Writing, starting and helping companies, and running events. I write about web performance, analytics, and entrepreneurship; I run startup accelerators; and I'm the content chair for Bitnorth, Strata, CloudConnect, Startupfest, and a bunch of other conferences.

• Which of my existing achievements do I value the most?

  Alistair: Creating and growing Coradiant; launching the Bitnorth conference; and graduating startups from Year One Labs. But those pale in comparison with my daughter.

• What would I like to achieve?

  Alistair: The freedom to work on things that matter.

• What do I look forward to at the WebExpo?

  Alistair: Learning about the startup scene in the Czech Republic, and bringing back plenty of stories for Lean Analytics (http://www.leananalyticsbook.com), the book I'm working on with @byosko.

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