NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN: 4 Questions That Help Forecast a Startup's Future

 

4 Questions That Help Forecast a Startup’s Future

They’re mainly about customers. 

 

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1

Aug 12, 2025

 

It turns out that it’s pretty easy to measure how well a relatively new startup is doing and, because such a large percentage of them rarely survive for more than a year, a lot of the evaluations take care of themselves. There are no skid marks in the startup world – one day you’re here, and the next, you can be gone. It’s not hard to track top line revenue growth and customer acquisition, but it’s a lot more difficult – given the limited time they’ve been around – to get any kind of solid qualitative idea of how they’re connecting with their target customers, how sticky their customer connections are, and how the long-term demographics of their customers will look. Getting a good idea of the expected spend per customer over time is also a very important data point.  

It’s becoming increasingly clear that understanding and evaluating the viable businesses that have survived the pandemic will require a different set of metrics and a closer look to determine the answer to several important questions before any prospective investor should consider further funding or any kind of M&A activity. Some of these companies stuck around and survived for no good reason other than the good fortune of raising a large war chest right before COVID hit. Others are still alive in a manner of speaking, but they’re really treading water as they rip through one-time and click-baited customers who will never be back.  I’d add to this population all those “entrepreneurs” hanging by a thread who are running the hundreds of “social” flow businesses that are living and dying at the mercy of the major platforms and their ad-tech and boosting algorithms. A couple of flicks in the switches and code and they’ll all be toast.  

On the other hand, I’ve seen thriving businesses such as the wine and spirits auction company Unicorn Auctions that I wrote about here a few weeks ago with an expanding model and all the right new metrics. These guys seem to be an ideal case study and example of the new metrics that will really matter, both for their enterprise and for many other mid-stage companies looking to smartly build their businesses and soundly secure their futures.  

There are four central questions to be answered and, as you might imagine, they’re mainly about customers. 

1. Do they understand how the demographics of their customers have changed over time?  

As I mentioned in my earlier article on Unicorn, they are capturing more transaction data and personal information about their customers than the whiskey and wine manufacturers and distributors will ever have. Data these days is everything. This continually expanded knowledge base helped to identify a dramatic shift and some refined thinking about who their customers were and some changes in tactics as well. Their base assumptions, initial impressions, and operating strategies were that their typical collector/customers were higher-end affluent Boomers and Gen Xers and their focus, marketing and web presence were targeted to enthusiasts and collectors.  

The updated data, however, showed that almost 70 percent of their current customers were Gen-Zs and Millennials, which was a major change in the customer base. These younger customers turned out to be consumers as well as collectors and traders and Unicorn will likely to do more than 100,000 transactions this year for bottles costing less than $100 in order to meet thousands of their new customers where they’re at and quickly and easily provide what they need.  

2. Do they understand how the needs and objectives of their customers have changed over time?  

As almost always happens, the entrepreneur’s best guesses as to what the target customers will want and need are quickly altered by their actual behavior when the rubber meets the road. Life would be so much easier if consumers would only act as we expect and behave the way we planned. The key to eventual success is the continued ability to identify emerging trends and desires, react to them by adapting your offerings, and get your responses in front of the buyers and sellers as soon as possible.  

While the Unicorn founders envisioned buyers primarily seeking rare, expensive and “collectible” bottles, it quickly emerged that two of the most critical drivers were (a) access to products that weren’t readily or easily available in the buyers’ local markets; and (b) price. The most active players on Unicorn’s sites realized that they could acquire bottles more inexpensively through the auctions than if they bought the same products at retail. Especially for everyday consumers, looking to spend around $50, the main concerns were ease of access, convenience, and one-stop shopping and delivery.  

3. Are they adding new typical customers who are keepers and are they growing each customer’s spend? 

Nothing is more important these days than customer satisfaction which drives increased retention and avoidance of churn. Unicorn is enjoying tremendous new user growth – around 1000 organic sign-ups per week – and this flow is largely driven by powerful word of mouth based on prior customers’ experiences as well as a flywheel and networking effect which is inherent in any successful two-way market. Happy customers tell their friends.  

Right now, about 15 percent of each week’s spending at the auctions is from new users and – most importantly – these newbies stick around and typically more than 70 percent of them make a second purchase within a month. In addition, more than half of what they buy in their first three months ends up sitting in the Unicorn vault for months or longer as the initial consumers turn into collectors, gifters, and traders.   

4. Are they developing deeper connections and expanding their service offerings to their current customers?  

Since its inception, Unicorn has paid out over $150 million to sellers as its weekly auctions have continued to grow. They now regularly move about 5000 bottles each week at their Sunday evening events. But only a very small percentage (less than 10 percent) of their most loyal and longest-standing clients has ever sold anything. This would ordinarily be a concern in terms of overall sales volumes but, in addition to offering a very substantial upside growth opportunity, the impact is considerably lessened because in the most recent several quarters, more than 50 percent of the sellers in the main auctions were newcomers to the site who had never sold anything before. Here again, the composition of the customer base continues to change in multiple directions.  

In addition, Unicorn has already begun to expand its offerings and to create loyalty programs and special events – working jointly with distributors and manufacturers – to provide unique access and experiences to their best customers and to further develop the overall wine and whiskey community which they have created. 

The bottom line is that every business I know needs to be asking themselves these same four questions to make sure that they’re on the right growth path, that they’re totally focused on meeting and exceeding the desires and demands of their customers, and that they constantly upping their game to stay far ahead of the pack.  

There’s a reason that unicorns are rare.  

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

How to Avoid the 3 Most Fatal Flaws for Startups 

Here are the key pitfalls you need to look out for and regularly test your own business model against.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1

Jul 29, 2025

 

Years ago, I looked at more than 100 failed startups from my incubator, 1871, and from several other tech incubators, and tried to categorize each perished business by the primary cause of its demise. I thought that updating the list of perils and problems might be useful to new startup founders, especially since we’re seeing a new and frenzied wave of enthusiasm around all things A.I., even when the new tech has nothing to do with the proposed business being built.   

I excluded in my review all the wishful thinking stories, bizarre fantasies, and fever dreams where I thought that calling the proposed enterprise a “business” would have been too kind a statement. These were cases of the “solutions in search of a problem” that always make up a not insignificant portion of the business plans and funding proposals that we see every year at our early-stage venture fund. Many of these pipe dream projects also appear at the innumerable mini-Shark Tanks now being held by virtually every college, business school, incubator, co-working space and non-profit organization in the country. In the pitch business, success often depends on enthusiasm; in the real world, the most powerful talent is perseverance. 

In many cases, it’s not as easy as you would think to figure out just what went wrong. To make matters fuzzier and more difficult, there’s often a lot of blame shifting and whining that tends to obscure the underlying central causes. There’s also a ton of “would, coulda, shoulda” in the mix as well of course, reprising Marlon Brando’s plaintive note in On the Waterfront claiming: “I coulda been a contender.”

It seems that everyone has their own pet list of the reasons startups fail, and I’ve been amazed at the surprisingly wide variances on the compilations. You’d think, for example, that everyone would understand the Sam Walton observation that “when you run out of money, they take you out of the game” and, as a result, they would put conserving your cash at the top of their lists. Apparently not. I think that one reason for the differences in the views of various “experts” is that the individual circumstances and the limited experiences of the particular authors tend to skew their analysis and lead toward recounting, recollecting and focusing on the pain and problems that they personally encountered. That’s why broadening the window and increasing the scope and scale of the inquiry makes for a more accurate result. 

So, what are the key pitfalls that you need to look out for and that you should regularly test your own business model against in order to realistically assess your prospects and to permit you to pivot and change course, start over entirely, or abandon ship in a timely manner? It’s always important to remember that there are rarely skid marks in a startup’s evolution—one day they’re there and the next day they’re gone. 
  

1. No market need—A clear number one (after cash) on my list 

Once you get by the naïve and deluded folks and putting aside the clear killer of running out of cash and runway, you still find too many smart people who get sucked into the development and technical weeds and spend months or years perfecting a product or service without ever making sure there’s material interest and a real market need for their offering.  Anton Marchanka, the CEO of Zing Coach, calls this “building in a vacuum.” The tech may be great, but the market and the demand may not be there. I call this the greatest software never sold. Obviously, getting something simple out there first, watching and learning from user reactions, iterating and improving the product, and making sure that you’re focusing on the aspects and features that your audience values and will pay for is the safest and smartest path. Walk before you run and don’t test the depth of the puddle by jumping in with both feet. 

2. Team troubles—egos, expertise, experience or patience

No startup springs to life fully formed with a management team equipped to meet all of its eventual needs. With luck, you’ll add key players as the business advances and, inevitably, you’ll also lose some early members of the team for a variety of reasons. Unsuccessfully managing the development and growth of the team is among the most frequent causes of failure. 

Sometimes there are competing egos, personality conflicts, and irreconcilable differences which waste time and resources, distract the team, and dilute both company momentum and team enthusiasm. Just as often the team will lack the necessary technical expertise and be unable to attract critical additional talent, which leads to growing tech debt and loss of competitive advantage. 

In other cases, groups of techies who have bolted in bulk from their prior employer to start a new business only belatedly discover that there’s a great deal of work and other mundane but essential matters that make up crucial parts of the business operations where they have no experience, ability or interest, and no one else on board to handle these matters.  

And finally, especially about 18 months from inception, it turns out that some critical employees didn’t appreciate the length and complexity of the journey they were signing up for and didn’t have the necessary patience or perseverance to stick with the project. They leave and leave the remaining founders holding a badly leaking bag and a failing business. Every business is basically a people business and nothing’s more critical than assembling and retaining the right team. 

3. Companies that can’t reach or connect to target customers

Even if you’ve built a great product or service and there’s a clear market need, you’ve still got to deal with four main concerns: (a) getting your message out to the right buyers through new channels and platforms; (b) busting through the massive noise and clutter in the digital marketplace; (c) setting yourself apart from the enormous number of look-a-like competitors; and (d) making it quick, easy and painless for consumers to access and try your product or service as soon as possible. Marchanka calls this last obstacle “onboarding friction.” It’s a problem especially for eager entrepreneurs that’s far too easy to overlook. Overcoming these barriers takes time and money which are scarce commodities in every startup.   

We’re seeing numbers of new apps introduced in the primary online stores approaching 50,000-60,000 units per month which are completely overwhelming prospective customers and users. In addition, virtually every application consumers have on their phones will be updated four times a year on average (along with operating systems upgrades) which simply generates more work and confusion for the end users. The truth is that no one these days is anxiously looking for the next new thing to add to their phone. The best new app I can imagine would be one that painlessly wiped all the accumulated zombie and garbage apps off my phone so I could see on one screen what I actually use on a regular basis and dump all the rest.   

4. The best plan to protect your business and your sanity

Knowing what the biggest and most likely survival issues are for your business is half the battle. The most critical next step is to do whatever you can to protect yourself. Here are the four most essential guidelines: 

1.    Set concrete performance milestones that the whole team (and your Board and investors) agree to and stick to them.  

2.    Be honest and realistic with yourself and your team as to your progress and prospects. 

3.    Don’t keep going for someone else – whomever that might be. 

4.    Know when to quit because that is just as important as knowing when to start.

 

New INC. Magazine Blog Post from 1871 CEO Howard Tullman

READ IT ALL HERE: http://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/four-critical-capabilities-an-incubator-can-teach-you.html

READ IT ALL HERE:http://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/four-critical-capabilities-an-incubator-can-teach-you.html

Google-Backed Incubator Looks to Increase Women in Tech by 25 Percent

Google-Backed Incubator Looks to Increase Women in Tech by 25 Percent

LUCY WESTCOTT

A high-profile launch pad for startups is teaming up with big business to increase the paltry numbers of women working in the technology industry. With a big assist from Google, tech incubator 1871, is launching a new initiative, 1871FEMtech, to foster female-led startups, John Pletz writes at Crain’s Chicago Business.

Based in Chicago's Merchandise Mart — the biggest building in the world when it opened in 1930 — FEMtech, which starts in the fall, will help 10 to 15 women-owned tech start-ups a year and will launch with $500,000 to $1 million in support. Google's involvement in the project is part of a #40Forward, a $1 million effort to boost the number of women in tech by 25 percent and launch 40 incubators. 

About 28 percent of the teams or companies at 1871 have a woman among their founders, and Howard Tullman, CEO of 1871, says the success rate of tech startups with women is about 30 percent higher than startups overall. 

There is continuing debate over how to include more women in tech, an industry which suffers from a severe gender gap at the highest levels. Getting more women to enroll in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) degrees is a start; only 15 percent of freshman women at American colleges plan to declare a STEM major, compared to 29 percent of men, according to the Association of American Universities and Colleges. Women hold less than 25 percent of STEM jobs, which the U.S. Department of Commerce attributes to a lack of female role models and gender stereotyping.

While there are reasons to celebrate female success in tech — Christian Science Monitor’s Karis Hustad lists companies like Goldieblox and Marissa Mayer’s leadership at Yahoo as recent examples — there is still a long way for women to go.

"We know the percentage of women in tech hasn't improved, that it's hovered around 7 to 8 percent," Tullman said. "There are a massive number of companies who want to make this sort of commitment, but we didn't have the mechanism to do anything."

Sharon Schneider, a CEO of Moxie Jean, a Chicago-area e-commerce startup, told Crain’s that Chicago’s startup scene doesn’t have such an “bro-gramming” culture as San Francisco, which some say is one of the "worst places" in America for the healthy development of companies and people.

Motorola Mobility Foundation and the Lefkofsky Family Foundation, the charitable group set-up by Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofsky and his wife, Liz, are also underwriting FEMtech.

Speed wins the startups game, according to entrepreneur Howard Tullman

By Brian Taylor March 7, 2014, 11:50 PM PST

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Howard Tullman has been called "the most accomplished, best-connected entrepreneur you have never heard of." We recap his keynote from CEC Forecast about six tech trends to watch. 

 Image: iStock/bowie15

Howard Tullman, CEO of digital startup incubator 1871, was the keynote speaker at the third annual Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center (CEC) Forecast in January 2014. CEC manages 1871, which is located in Chicago's Merchandise Mart. 

Tullman has founded 12 companies, including the Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy, CCC Information Services, Tunes.com, the Rolling Stone Network, Imagination Pilots, and Experiencia. He is or has been at various times "a serial entrepreneur, investor, advisor, art collector, teacher, lecturer, lawyer, (and) marathon runner." Inc.com called Tullman "the most accomplished, best-connected entrepreneur you have never heard of."

After several insightful opening comments, including our expectations about the quality of our experiences and utility, rather than possession, Tullman organized his talk around six topics: niches, speed being the state of competition, connected devices, video "everything," collaborative commerce, and wiki work.

His talk was never dull (he often employed, ahem, colorful language) and included observations and insights on major trends in technology and entrepreneurship from someone who's been in involved in both for decades.

Key takeaways from the talk:

• We are more concerned today with the quality of our experiences and the utility of things than with possession.
• The "sharing economy": we will use assets more efficiently and economically, saving time and money, and acting more responsibly.
• Beyond interest graphs, the next level is to know where the consumer is going. Digital prognostics will supplant diagnostics and analysis.
• If you are "stuck in search," you are losing a step on the competition. Projection and prediction of online behavior matters.
• Speed is most important today. Speed and not size wins.
• Companies can make a personalized offer in the short time required to load a webpage. Think of this as the "shifting sands" underneath digital conversations.
• Computing advances from "big guys" like Google are squeezing out smaller competitors. It's great for consumers who enjoy mass customization, but entrepreneurs need to produce solutions for SMBs.
• Wearable technology enables us in every kind of business sense and context.
• Analog is moving to digital, and digital means video. Video-enabled communication is the default way we share.
• For anyone under a certain age, the first screen is the mobile device. Video is how a lot of learning will take place. The world, including education, will adapt to this model.
• Collaborative commerce is the idea that, if we're sharing, we'll be able to work together. It provides a powerful set of resources that people are still figuring out. Collaborative commerce will be become a bigger part of the economy.
• Wiki work: the workplace is everywhere today and is no longer constrained by time and place.
• Wiki work can pull together an enormous talent of people, recapture opportunities that were previously downtime, and increase the productivity of the whole country.
• With the trend to crowd-sourced, individual work, places that create community, like 1871, will be valuable.

Opening comments

I spoke last year, much to the disappointment of the organizers of the Chicago Auto Show, on how nobody under 35 cares about cars anymore. They were happy to have me kick off the auto show! (laughter)

It had to do with this idea that we are more concerned today with the quality of our experiences than owning and controlling things. And we're also more concerned with the utility of things, than about possession. If there's a single thing that is most exciting in this whole world, then it is sharing.

If there's a single thing that is most exciting in this whole world, then it is sharing. - Howard Tullman

It's this idea that we'll use assets. We'll use things in ways that are efficient and will save an enormous amount of time and money, and become more economically responsible and ecologically responsible—all through this idea of the "sharing economy."

Two years ago I talked about hyper personalization, the idea of knowing everything about everybody, and that's sort of old news, sort of table stakes. And then the following year I talked about Facebook's launch of the interest graph and this idea that it wasn't enough to know about me, you have to know what I'm interested in, and it's a moving target.

So, interest, information, it empowers us. But now we are going to move to the next level, which is, where are you going? Not just what you're interested in, not just who you are, but where are you headed? That's the case, those are the stakes.

[For example] Google now does a better job of tracking real estate trends than the organizations in the real estate business. Google is more effective and more accurate in terms of the next 90 days of the market.

If you are "stuck in search," if you're looking for results, you're actually losing a step on the competition. So the idea of moving from diagnostics and analytics, to prognostics and projection, is where we are going. Those are the kinds of tools that we are going to see, and those are the tools that will put in our hands at exactly the right time the information that we really need and value.

Niches: The audiences you want to reach

Niches—they are not small, they are highly curated and very, very valuable, because they are authentic, if you do it right. The truth is that they are interactive and have enormous value, because they tend to be the audiences that you really want to reach.

Nobody wants to ship "tonnage" anymore. Everybody wants to ship to people that matter, to people that are engaged, to people that are going to consume and value your communications to them, and your products or services.

Speed is the state of competition

Speed, not size, wins today. Speed "kills," and speed is the most important thing. And you know the world that we are living in today, you can make dust, and be running ahead of people, or eat dust and sort of sit there.

[One example] is Safeway. Real-time pricing on an individual basis. Does Safeway give me the best price for my Charmin? No. Why? Because I love Charmin. So they give the best price to somebody who uses Kleenex, whom they want to incent to use Charmin. And they do this at a speed that is astonishing.

We're in a position now, where in the time that it takes (roughly 10 to 30 milliseconds) to load a webpage we can fashion and perform a personalized offer to the consumer, based on everything we know about you. So think about that kind of time frame. Think about this as the "shifting sands" underneath these kinds of conversations that are going on.

Another interesting thing that's happening is, if you haven't seen the Google PLAs (Product Listing Ads), basically, they've upped the ante. They have figured out that it is not enough to give you 22 million responses for an inquiry. So what they are doing now is feeding back a much more particularized set of information.

But when you hear people talking about "A/B testing," where the game is going because of high velocity computing, and because of the extent of the information we now have, think about "A to Z testing." - Howard Tullman

And this is really good news for us, as people seeking products. Now, having said that, the other thing is that Google [is making it] tough for small competitors, who don't have the tools and the engines to let you do this—to have your products be dynamically priced, imaged, supplied in real time to people searching. The little guys are going to get killed, unless we as entrepreneurs figure out ways to empower them with comparable tools, that is, compete with the big guys.

And so, from a consumer standpoint purchases are going to get better and faster and more particularized, but from a competitor's standpoint and from a product standpoint, it's going to get really tough.

What that has permitted is mass customization. And what I want to share with you about this is not that simple. But when you hear people talking about "A/B testing," where the game is going because of high velocity computing, and because of the extent of the information we now have, think about "A to Z testing."

And during the last (presidential) campaign, one of the great things was to sit next to Harper Reed and to watch him put up 20 different offers, and in a minute and a half kill about 16 of the 20 offers. They could see which dogs were eating the dog food.

So they would do these against tiny, tiny samples, across huge sets of variables, and then they would instantly react and go deeper and longer into the stuff that was working. But not after 12 weeks, or after three months of a print campaign—they were in real time, in minutes.

So again, speed is the state of the competition. Speed is how the game is going to be played.

Connected devices empower us

The idea that we are connected has more value now, not just due to devices, but also due towearables—devices that in every sense enable us, empower us in every kind of business sense and context.

We are all tethered. But not only are we tethered to devices that we think about, all of the devices around us are also becoming enabled and will communicate. This is the Internet of Things.

One of the new things at Disney, and this is really interesting, is MagicBand. Instead of a simple free app that would have committed your phone to do this, they sell you this bracelet that you take home, and it's useless as soon as you take it home. But on property, it opens your room, it pays for your goods, it identifies you, it moves you into the fast pass lanes. Very powerful.

And it's just one of many devices like this. Electronic leashes will keep us from losing our cars. This is cool (on screen): these are little tiny stickers you can put on anything that will GPS-enable and locate those kinds of things.

And my favorite is actually this—has anybody in the audience not moved? So if you've all moved, you all understand how that works. You give your precious possessions to a bunch of guys with no teeth, and you hope at the other end of the journey some of the stuff will be there. This is a fake little box (on screen) that you add to your moving load, and it sends GPS signals to you throughout the move so that you know that the guy isn't at some truck stop in Indiana for two days.

Video "everything": The default way we share

Where are we going on video? "Everything analog" is moving to "everything digital," and digital means video. That's how we learn, that's how we share, so more and more video. Basically, what you want and where you want it and when you want it, everything will be on-demand.

The truth is that for anybody under a certain age the first screen today is your mobile device. - Howard Tullman

We don't talk about television anymore, because we talk about video assets that are going to be distributed across all kinds of channels. And you know, interesting enough, TV is not suffering, but it is sort of selectively being depopulated. So in certain age groups, online viewing is exploding, and TV watching is diminishing significantly. The truth is that for anybody under a certain age the first screen today is your mobile device.

 But we've discovered, and this is from the last Olympics—we expect to run this analysis again. We discovered the good news is these devices are completely additive. They don't diminish the TV experience, they enhance it. More and more of this is permitting us to do shorter and shorter communications. We see video-enabled communications as basically the default way that we share.

Again, [video is] how a great deal of learning will take place. The kids who are in school, who think of school increasingly as a sort of prison, they are doing their learning everywhere but school. So the whole world is going to adapt to this model as we move forward.

Collaborative commerce is powerful

Collaborative commerce... this idea that [if] we're sharing then we are going to be able to work together. When you go back not so many years, the personal computer permitted us for the first time individually to create powerful digital assets, and when the web came along it permitted us to share those digital assets. And then collaborative tools came along to let us work together worldwide. And lastly, after all that stuff was created, Google came along and let us find it, which turned out to be a fairly important thing as well.

[Collaborative commerce is] not taxable, or measurable. There are a lot of things that will come where people are going to have to figure out how this works.

But for now it's powerful… [for example] One Hour Translation or TaskRabbit. And look who these people are, look at who the 5,000 rabbits are on TaskRabbit. They are stay-at-home moms, they are retirees, they are college students.

It's a really powerful set of resources. It's way more powerful than something you could hire, than something you would want to hire. You want to use these as a variable cost. So you can push out just about anything. All of these are very, very powerful. You can hire an expert to help you raise money, just about anything. And that's just the beginning--we are going to see more and more of this.

Wiki work: Beyond constraints

We all know of Wikipedia. Wiki work is this idea that the workplace is everywhere today and it's so exciting because we are no longer time- and place-constrained, we are no longer location-based, we can be working anywhere in real time, and that's much more important than places tend to be.

We are going to be able to pull together an enormous talent of people: stay-at-home moms, PhDs, all kinds of people. [They] can join your team, join your workforce, in really amazing ways because of connectivity and because of the web.

And we are going to recapture opportunities while we are commuting, when we're stuck in places, all of these things are going to increase the productivity of the whole country in very, very powerful ways. If you don't understand how big Wikipedia now is—70,000 people work for free for Wikipedia these days.

And just to give you one example, I don't know if many of you know this. For about 10 years or more scientists were trying to solve a particular protein issue connected with AIDS and couldn't do it. And they pushed this problem out to about 200,000 gamers. They solved the problem in about 10 days, because they thought of it as a puzzle, they didn't know it was science. They said, oh wow, we just have to figure out how to do this.

More and more of us are going to work for ourselves, this trend is going to just expand and increase. That's exciting in some ways it's also lonely in some ways. And places that create community, like 1871, are really valuable. And we are going to have more and more services that are going to grow up and connect us to other services and connect us to other businesses, [and not through] traditional channels.