One of the best lessons I learned from my time working with Mark Cuban was that the only way to be successful is to focus. By hedging your bets, you diminish your chances of being successful at either of (or all) the things you’re trying to do. This advice became painfully clear in 2005 when we started development on Whirl.net, a P2P sharing service that would loosely fill some of the gaps that Box didn’t solve. Our resources for both projects were wearing thin and we were starting to lose our edge in both spaces. Eventually Mark told us that he would not support the two-pronged approach, so we chose to drop Whirl – trusting his advice over our limited experience. We’ll never know if we chose the right path, just because the web is so unpredictable, but I think we can confidently say we would have ended up with two mediocre products instead of a leader in one space.

Now, with the Facebook platform in full force, I’m discovering parallels between our experiences with Whirl and developing an FB App. If you look at what applications are popular on Facebook, they’re commonly not just ports of their parent services; they bring new or enhanced functionality tailored to the Facebook experienced. This of course produces a resource crisis: we have so many things to worry about already, so many deadlines to hit, so many more enhancements we want to make… How can I sanely divert a reasonable amount of our attention to a fairly “unproven” platform just because it’s the hot new thing? Perhaps, if Box wasn’t doing well and it was a good time to iterate, then it would be more easily justified – but this isn’t the case. Would Cuban say this is hedging our bets, or just a cost of doing business nowadays? For now, at least, my feeling is this:

Facebook represents a new opportunity for Business Development. Previously, the Book almost notoriously did not partner with anyone. If we had been granted an exclusive partnership with them 4 months ago, it would have been hailed as a major business boon. So what’s the difference? In fact, I would argue it’s even more important to focus on Facebook now as there will be clear winners decided for various categories of services – once these “winners” are chosen by the users, their services will stick, making it difficult for others to wedge in later. And let’s be clear about this: Facebook is not Myspace. In many ways, this has nothing to do with having a “Widget strategy,” but rather, Facebook is letting other providers build out features that are as accessible and functional as their own. This means there is significant lock-in if you produce a valuable service. As Facebook eventually looks more and more like a “Portal 2.0,” people will want access to various types of information (social and not-so) from there. To us, we see Facebook as an opportunity to extend our reach – it represents a new distribution channel for our services, one which we think will be important in introducing the concept of online storage to millions of people.