Month: January 2009

Best reality TV show format

Yaron Galai3 Comments

So here is proof that something good can emerge from a war situation. Israeli TV has pretty much become 100% reality shows this year, importing all the American/European junk TV formats (Survivor, Big Brother, etc). Ugh…

It took a war in Gaza for Israel’s Channel 2 to come up with an original, and incredibly good, reality show format. The kids in southern Israel have not been going to school for over two weeks now, and are at homes and shelters with not much to do. The idea for the TV show (named “Learning Together”) is super-simple – Put cameras inside a classroom and bring the most interesting people in the country to give a lesson on a subject of their choice. There are several “classes” each morning, passed by people like: Presidents of Israel, book authors, etc. For example – as a kid (and even an adult) – could you hope for anything more interesting than getting a class in citizenship by Nobel Prize winner, President Shimon Peres?… Wow.

I’m not sure what the ratings are for this show, but I love how for a near zero production cost a new format emerged which is intelligent, educational and original.

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Moneyball – highly recommended

Yaron Galai4 Comments

moneyballLast week I participated in a roundtable organized by Carmel Ventures, with probably 20-30 entrepreneurs in the room. I recommended they all read Moneyball by Michael Lewis – a book I read a couple of years ago. I think most of the people in the room didn’t have a chance to take note of the recommendation, so I’m repeating it here.

Moneyball is a must-read for any entrepreneur. It has nothing to do with entrepreneurship (it’s about baseball), and it’s not a very good book (in the literal sense, I mean).

But if you read it with an entrepreneur state of mind, there are great lessons to be learned… 2 have been particularly useful for me:

  1. Look at the same game differently – Most startups compete with many other companies for the same market share. In the online world in particular you are likely to be competing with hugely successful companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, etc. You can’t win by playing their game. But you can absolutely win by playing a different game in the same space. An example that comes to mind is Yelp – while all other yellow pages and review sites are focused on getting readers and selling to advertisers, Yelp seems to be playing a completely different game. It looks like they are focused obsessively on their reviewers – giving them tools, recognition, community etc. Yelp is looking at the exact same market as all other yellow page companies are, but playing a totally different game.
  2. Understand what metrics really matter for your business – the metrics that *seem* to matter for your business might not be the ones that really determine your eventual success. Moneyball shows how the Oakland A’s found that most of the metrics that baseball teams have been using for decades (batting average, # of steals, etc) had little or nothing to do with how successful the teams were. Another example is a post I wrote recently about how PV’s and ad revenues might not be the best success metrics for publishers.

Bottom line – highly recommended. Get it here at Amazon or here at Audible.

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