They PR company is good, that's for sure.

Rumor has it, they do most of their own PR.

Perhaps they'll start a PR company some day as another line of business.

Dharmesh,

I got a kick out of this one. Thanks for posting your thoughts openly on this subject.

The way I see it is that the tantalizing hype being implicitly referenced here is not beyond being quantified and explicitly understood.

If there is anything the human brain cannot do then it is to stop thinking when faced with such an interesting puzzle.

I've been thinking about it for at least since 2001, and I have had one failed attempt where I funded people who were once famous (who were far bigger than Dave Hansson but in their own field which happens to be the music industry. In other words: rockstar celebrities) and I plugged them into my own venture (mobile phone music application, entertainment and service startup) iin the hope of leveraging their magic. As it turned out, they did not know what their magic was and had no way of recreating it. They had no abstract principles to work with. They just happened to have fell into the right setting at the right time and their natural approach was perfect, so they did not know how to sustain their success nor could they port it over to another field. Today, they're successful again in the fashion industry, but they had lots of time to reflect on what they did that made them so successful and come to clarity about it.

Likewise, I have been able to observe software companies become very hyped up in the same exact way, i.e.: they just fall into the right setting and where their natural approach happens to be the right approach.

Such companies/individuals often don't fully understand what the behavior that allowed them to be so hyped up. They just do it, as it comes natural to them, but so does failure. They go up fast and come down faster. It's only after they understood what they had done in clear terms that they start to develop a way to sustain a career or a company.

Studying such "Former Rockstar" personalities and companies has given me an understanding about the reasons they became so popular. An understanding that most of the currently super hyped up companies and individuals are not consciously aware of. However, I'm still in the process of reaching clarity on this "super hype" phenomenon.

It can be replicated consciously. I just need more time to think about it, but it's definitely a science and not something magical.

Obviously, cult psychology is part of it but so are other vital concepts.

Marc

P.S. It's funny that you quote Dave Barry on your homepage. He's my favorite source of quotations.

As I said, once the brain sees a puzzle it can't stop thinking of solving it :)

So here is what I've come up with as an introduction to a multi-week (or multi-month) series on the subject of Superhype, both the accidental and by-design types.

This post is concerned with the accidental variety.

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This post started out as a conscious attempt to start formalizing and clarifying Superhype: the phenomenon were skillful-but-otherwise-perfectly-mediocre individuals go up in fame and popularity with so much tantalizing hype that leaves those who are both much more skillful as well as much less mediocre wondering how they did it.

From the time I was exposed to Superhype I have known that it involves subtlety and design that go beyond what those at the heart of the phenomenon can intellectualize while they're experiencing it. I'm not talking about Bill Gates or Michael Dell or anyone who consciously, deliberately and thoughtfully plans and executes successful strategies. I'm talking about those who get carried on top of a massive wave of hype because they happen to be in the right place at the right time doing something that can only be described as perfectly mediocre.

You can seek an area of the market that has awesome hype waves and be ready to surf the biggest hype wave that comes your way. It's a statistical process, which is not the same as "luck." You try to optimize the chances of a major wave coming your way by knowing the market and knowing where to stand at any given time for the biggest wave possible. Or you can be a statistical oddity and get "lucky" without understanding why and how all the sudden you seem to be riding the biggest wave in history, without even having the knowledge to surf it but getting carried on top of it anyway as if on a flying carpet. Speaking of riding major waves without knowing a thing about surfing waves, it actually happened to me once in Puerto Rico. I was trying to do what the cool kids where doing so like them I stood behind a giant rock waiting for the next wave to hit. Well, as the wave approach they all ran off and left me standing there. The wave carried me for at least 100ft on top of sharp-edged volcanic rock but, fortunately, on a bed of water. When I finally landed people rushed to the scene and started yelling "loco! loco!" … That's how I learned my Spanish. That is a perfect example of how one could surf the really big waves by chance without having any formal knowledge of surfing. Just be at the right time at the right place and have the courage to explore. The rest you can leave up to the odds.

There are many examples of "Web 2.0" celebrities (both companies and individuals) who are currently surfing some big waves (pretty much with their behind as I did in Puerto Rico) without any insight how to properly surf the hype wave they're riding, yet they seem to be magically levitating above it on a carpet of thin air. When they finally land, and land they will, we'll all rush to the scene of their landing and yell "loco! loco!"

But for those of us who cannot delegate our success to a statistically odd event (as in being at the right place, the right time and being carried miraculously by a massive wave of hype simply due to curiosity and good luck) we must strive to understand how to find locate the big waves across time and space and how to properly surf them.

This is where the discussion changes from simple metaphors to a rigorous analysis of the temporal, social, psychological and power mechanics of hype.

And this is where I have to stop, as I'm in the middle of a learning process in each of those four frames of hype mechanics.

In the next post I'll try to tackle the "power" frame in the context of the new emerging "Web 2.0 Order."
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Marc
P.S. The rest of the serious will be on my blog and on Onstartups