Takeaway on Bing Gordon's talk on how to be a great CEO

Bing Gordon gave the keynote at 2011 Endeavor Entrepreneur Summit.  His speech centers around traits of good CEO's.  Much of the talk is more relevant for CEO's of later stage startups (50+ employees),   however one phrase he used is relevant to anyone.  What determines "killing it" in your business.  If everyone in your startup is aware of what they have to do to make the business turbo charged, it makes a huge difference.

When scaling our dating business, we built a web page we called the "money page."  It told us how much money we had made and how the key ratios of our business were doing right up to the second. All of our top management would constantly hit this page to see how we were doing.  It was also a key indicator as to what type of conversation I would be having with them in the near future.  This doesn't mean we had this page day one, but it grew organically out of trying to answer the question, "What is the score today?  Are we winning or losing?"

In Bing Gordon's keynote, the tactical information was around the 20 minute mark where he discussed gamification, social, and mobile tactics.  The major points were:

Gamification:

• make your users fill like a hero and get +25% engagement
• badges for accomplishments double hours per week spent on application
• virtual assets can increase customer life by a factor of 3

Social:

• social obligations create lock in - Solo play versus Guilds
• gifting not competition (only boys 15-25 prefer competition)

Mobile

• if app doesn't prove valuable in the time it takes a stop light to cycle it is no good
• SMS is dominant communication channel among younger users