Rafe's Radar

This week's failure to communicate, from Path, was hardly a unique event. Companies--especially fast-moving startups--screw up all the time. The issue is how they react to their errors. Can Path recover, as Facebook and Google have from their privacy flaps, or will this flub hurt the company over the long term?

And how can you prepare for your own inevitable, and public, failures, if you're running your own company?

I have two guests today well-versed in the art of failure and graceful recovery:

• Brooke Hammerling, founder of Brew Media Relations, and
• Owen Thomas, the founding editor of The Daily Dot

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"Play a game you can win."

--Rick Marini, CEO, BranchOut

There are very few green field opportunities. Most of the time, when you start a business venture, your success will have to come at the expense of another company. Obviously, no company gives up its incumbent position willingly.

Rick, whose company is a job-finder's network and thus aiming to be a direct competitor to LinkedIn, talked to me about taking on the big, public business networking site.

"If I just thought I could beat the competition," he says, "and that was it, I would have been wrong." BranchOut would more

The great, free car navigation app Waze (see Rafe Recommends) is getting an update today that gives it a limited hands-free, voice-controlled interface.

Waze is now perhaps the only app to use the phone's promixity sensor to turn on the input interface, since Google removed that feature from its iPhone Search app. A wave of the hand over the iPhone brings up the voice control prompt.

Waze only accepts a limited set of voice commands. You can navigate to two pre-sets ("Drive to home," and "drive to work"), and you can create traffic alerts, to tell other Waze users more

Gawker published this evening an apparently damning story to further the day's drama over Path sucking down contact lists from its iPhone users.

The story says that Morin has misled us in the past about Path's use of personal data and that it is safe to assume that Morin is playing fast and loose with customer data again. The evidence is an e-mail Dave Morin wrote to Ryan Tate at Gawker in 2010, saying:

One of our core principles here is that you must have contact information for someone in order to find them on Path. Usually, you

Was Path's data privacy flap so bad? Or Pinterest's revenue revelation?

These Web ventures have both taken heat in the last day or so because they were doing things with their users' data or activity that those users didn't sign up for. I mean that literally. Implicitly, it's a different story.

When people signed up for Path (before today's update), they didn't see a disclosure statement to the effect of, "We read your phone's address book and correlate it with other users' address books that we've read in order to connect Path more

Dave Morin is sorry.

In reaction to the disclosure that the social networking service Path absorbs iPhone address books to connect users together -- without asking users first for permission to use that data -- Path CEO Dave Morin has posted an apology. He also says that Path has deleted all the address book data it has, to date, collected, as Path investor Michael Arrington suggested.

A new version of Path for the iPhone, 2.0.6, which should be live in the App Store now, prompts users for permission before it uploads the phone's contacts to the Path more

"No career consultants."

--Jeremy Toeman, chief product officer, Dijit Media

Sometimes you need hired guns. People with specific knowledge to help you do something no one on your team has the expertise to do. Consultants.

But when running a startup, what you need in a consultant is serious operational and practical advice, and consultants with years of, ahem, consulting experience may not be able to provide what you need. Especially in the tech startup world, the landscape can shift extremely quickly.

"You want someone in touch, not

The last time I went to talk with venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, I spent more time ogling his museum of NASA Apollo gear than I did talking about his startup investments.

Click through our slideshow for a view into this small, private, and unique collection of space artifacts.

"Never stop raising money."

--James Joaquin, partner, Catamount Ventures

What is the real job of a startup CEO? To get most companies to escape velocity--that is, to the point where they are actual companies, to the point where you, as CEO, can go on vacation and not worry yourself sick about the company surviving until you get back--you need to make sure your baby has funding to make it to your next milestone, and then beyond.

Your seed investment won't be sufficient. Why not? Because no smart investor is going to give you enough funding to make you comfortable. more