The word “passion” is terribly over-used regarding startups

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

There is little that justifies the usage of the word “passion” in this critique. I think it is reasonable to talk about “time on task” as useful to someone working on a project, but that would apply to the Project Manager at Facebook as well. The below description sets up an entrepreneur-versus-corporate-drone conflict that does not need to exist.

Why does Foursquare just keep winning? If I could tell you the specific features or user interactions that are lacking in Facebook Places, I’d be a rich man. I’m in the Facebook mobile app 3 times a day, minimum, let alone being on Facebook over the web at least twice a day – I should be using Places all the time, and yet I just keep coming back to Foursquare. Somehow Foursquare just hums.

This, to me, is the difference between a product built by someone who is deeply invested in the in the underlying product idea, as compared to a product built by someone who is just trying to check off a set of feature boxes. This is what I think of as the Passion Gap.

If you’ve ever heard Dennis talk about Foursquare, or mobile devices, or cities, you can’t help but see that everything you think of, he’s already thought of, turned over in his head eight times, and reached the conclusion that you would eventually come to if you spent eighteen months in deep thought about the topic. Does Facebook have a Dennis Crowley? Or do they have a product manager who just started thinking about location-based services eight months ago? That PM may have 600 million users and every engineering resource they desire, but they haven’t spent the last ten years thinking about how to get people more engaged with their cities via their mobile devices. The difference between Dennis Crowley and that Facebook PM is the Passion Gap.

Post external references

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    http://blog.jayteebee.org/2011/03/foursquare-facebook-founders-and.html
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