EBay’s Strategy for Taking On Amazon

The passenger door opened, and out sprang John Donahoe, the chief executive of eBay, who began striding toward the store. It was earlier this year, and from the outside the Westfield Valley Fair mall near San Jose had a kind of ghost-town feel to it. But Donahoe thinks he can change that. As he walked from store to store — a nearly empty GNC, a quiet Foot Locker — he pointed out how little had changed in physical retail stores over the last 30 or 40 years and what would have to change in the next few years in order for these stores to compete with Amazon and Walmart.

As he sat in a patisserie on the mall’s ground floor, Donahoe touched on his usual themes: how technology has driven scale and automation; how the big-box retailers have crushed Main Street; the way in which our shopping experiences have become less dependent on human interaction. And these changes in the commercial landscape, he said, tend to be ‘‘phrased in zero-sum terms: big retailers versus the little guy. Local versus global. The Chinese imports will kill you. Online is going to disrupt offline.’’ 

There has been much talk about Amazon driving retailers out of business — most recently, and somewhat unbelievably, by proposing to use drones to deliver purchases. For some time now, physical retailers have lived in fear of the various ways in which Amazon can undercut them. If you’re looking for a product that you don’t need to try on or try out, Amazon’s customer analytics and nationwide network of 40-plus enormous fulfillment centers is awfully tough to compete with. And even if you do need to try something on, Amazon conveniently includes a bar-code scanner in its mobile application so you can compare prices while you’re in a store and then have the same item shipped to your home with just a few clicks. (Retailers call this act of checking out products in a store and then buying them online from a different vendor ‘‘showrooming.’’) Amazon holds such sway that for many it’s the default place to buy things online.

And yet online commerce currently accounts for only about 6 percent of all commerce in the United States. We still buy more than 90 percent of everything we purchase offline, often by handing over money or swiping a credit card in exchange for the goods we want. But the proliferation of smartphones and tablets has increasingly led to the use of digital technology to help us make those purchases, and it’s in that convergence that eBay sees its opportunity. As Donahoe puts it: ‘‘We view it actually as and. Not online, not offline: Both.’’ 

Most people think of eBay as an online auction house, the world’s biggest garage sale, which it has been for most of its life. But since Donahoe took over in 2008, he has slowly moved the company beyond auctions, developing technology partnerships with big retailers like Home Depot, Macy’s, Toys ‘‘R’’ Us and Target and expanding eBay’s online marketplace to include reliable, returnable goods at fixed prices. (Auctions currently represent just 30 percent of the purchases made at eBay.com; the site sells 13,000 cars a week through its mobile app alone, many at fixed prices.)

Under Donahoe, eBay has made 34 acquisitions over the last five years, most of them to provide the company and its retail partners with enhanced technology. EBay can help with the back end of websites, create interactive storefronts in real-world locations, streamline the electronic-payment process or help monitor inventory in real time. (Outsourcing some of the digital strategy and technological operations to eBay frees up companies to focus on what they presumably do best: Make and market their own products.) In select cities, eBay has also recently introduced eBay Now, an app that allows you to order goods from participating local vendors and have them delivered to your door in about an hour for a $5 fee. The company is betting its future on the idea that its interactive technology can turn shopping into a kind of entertainment, or at least make commerce something more than simply working through price-plus-shipping calculations. If eBay can get enough people into Dick’s Sporting Goods to try out a new set of golf clubs and then get them to buy those clubs in the store, instead of from Amazon, there’s a business model there. 

A?key element of eBay’s vision of the future is the digital wallet. On a basic level, having a ‘‘digital wallet’’ means paying with your phone, but it’s about a lot more than that; it’s as much a concept as a product. EBay bought PayPal in 2002, after PayPal established itself as a safe way to transfer money between people who didn’t know each other (thus facilitating eBay purchases). For the last several years, eBay has regarded digital payments through mobile devices as having the potential to change everything — to become, as David Marcus, PayPal’s president, puts it, ‘‘Money 3.0.’’

Jeff Himmelman is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of “Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee.”

Editor: Dean Robinson

DealBook: PC Sales Data May Bolster Case for Taking Dell Private

Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesDell’s founder, Michael S. Dell, and the investment firm Silver Lake are offering to take the company private in a $24.4 billion deal.

It is becoming harder to believe that a turnaround of Dell will be anything but messy – and shareholders may not want to stick around for that part.

A new report released on Wednesday by the International Data Corporation appears to bolster the company’s argument for going private, noting a steep drop in global personal computer sales in the first quarter this year.

The carnage was clear nearly across the board, with sales in the United States dropping 12.7 percent from the quarter a year earlier. Quarterly shipments reached their lowest level since 2006. Virtually all major computer makers have scrambled to cope with falling unit prices and the rise of tablets and smartphones as attractive alternatives to traditional desktops and laptops.

The bloodshed certainly affected Dell, where global shipments contracted more than 10 percent worldwide and 14 percent in the United States. With its shipment of nine million units, the company claimed 11.8 percent of the overall market, again falling behind Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo.

I.D.C. attributed Dell’s problems to continued competition from an array of rivals and customer uncertainty over the company’s future path.

The report mirrors a trend Dell itself documented in its proxy statement last month. The thick document noted repeated instances of the company failing to meet its own projected financial targets for seven quarters.

Dell’s internal revenue estimates for the 2014 fiscal year fell to as low as $56 billion from $66 billion.

PC sales, according to the proxy, still account for more than half of Dell’s revenue despite a number of takeovers intended to bolster the size of its corporate services arm.

In presentations to the board explaining his rationale for what became a $24.4 billion take-private offer, the company founder, Michael S. Dell, said the necessary fixes would hammer the stock even more.

“Mr. Dell stated his belief that such initiatives, if undertaken as a public company, would be poorly received by the stock market because they would reduce near-term profitability, raise operating expenses and capital expenditures and involve significant risk,” Dell disclosed in its proxy.

Still, shareholders like Southeastern Asset Management have argued that Mr. Dell’s bid is a lowball offer, citing a belief that the worst of the turnaround is over. Southeastern in particular has supported tentative rival bids from the Blackstone Group and Carl C. Icahn that would allow investors to hold onto a piece of the company through what is known as a public stub.

Proponents of that deal structure may be heartened that I.D.C. notes that Dell slowed its overall decline in shipments from previous quarters and achieved some sales growth in Asia, excluding Japan.

I.D.C. itself appears more pessimistic about the overall prospects for the business of selling computers, however.

“Although the reduction in shipments was not a surprise, the magnitude of the contraction is both surprising and worrisome,” David Daoud, I.D.C.’s research director for personal computing, said in a statement. “Vendors will have to revisit their organizational structures and go to market strategies, as well as their supply chain, distribution and product portfolios in the face of shrinking demand and looming consolidation.”

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Taking Screenshots in Windows 8

How do you take a picture of the screen on a Windows 8 computer without having to buy special software?

As with earlier versions of Windows, you can still capture an image of your desktop by pressing the PrintScreen (PrtScr) key and then pasting the captured image into the system’s Paint program. (Holding down the Alt key while pressing print Screen captures just the active window, which can then be pasted into Paint and saved as an image file.)

In Windows 8, you can capture an image of the desktop by pressing the Windows and Print Screen keys at the same time. The screen briefly dims when you press the keys. The resulting image automatically lands in the computer’s Pictures folder, inside a sub-folder there called Screenshots.

The Snipping Tool, available in previous versions of Windows, is also available for taking screenshots in Windows 8. You can find instructions for using it here.

App City: Taking Stock of Mobile Apps

Christoph Hitz

Free for iOS and Android

For directions, the default is Google Maps. But Embark, which helps you chart a trip on the New York City subway, is the other transportation app I use regularly, largely because it can generate directions without a data connection. After all, plans can change while you are underground. Offline, you can get only directions between stations, not for street addresses, but it’s a start.

$3.99 for iOS; $2.99 for Android

Instapaper is not new, but the idea of setting aside articles that I see online so that I can read them when I get stuck on the subway never gets old.

Free for iOS and Android

This tool for placing orders for delivery or takeout food through a smartphone app has drastically increased the likelihood that I will order in on any given day. I do not know if this is a good thing, but it is certainly a testament to its effectiveness.

Christoph Hitz

Free for iOS

Apps for finding restaurants are plentiful, but most of them leave me feeling overwhelmed. I want someone to choose for me, and I trust the authors of this app to do that. Their taste has never led me astray — although unlike them, I have no problem with the immense popularity of brussels sprouts.

The iEconomy: Signs of Changes Taking Hold in Electronics Factories in China

At first, Ms. Pu wondered if someone had made a mistake. But when her bosses walked by, they just nodded curtly. So Ms. Pu gently sat down and leaned back. Her body relaxed.

The rumors were true.

When Ms. Pu was hired at this Foxconn plant a year earlier, she received a short, green plastic stool that left her unsupported back so sore that she could barely sleep at night. Eventually, she was promoted to a wooden chair, but the backrest was much too small to lean against. The managers of this 164,000-employee factory, she surmised, believed that comfort encouraged sloth.

But in March, unbeknown to Ms. Pu, a critical meeting had occurred between Foxconn’s top executives and a high-ranking Apple official. The companies had committed themselves to a series of wide-ranging reforms. Foxconn, China’s largest private employer, pledged to sharply curtail workers’ hours and significantly increase wages — reforms that, if fully carried out next year as planned, could create a ripple effect that benefits tens of millions of workers across the electronics industry, employment experts say.

Other reforms were more personal. Protective foam sprouted on low stairwell ceilings inside factories. Automatic shut-off devices appeared on whirring machines. Ms. Pu got her chair. This autumn, she even heard that some workers had received cushioned seats.

The changes also extend to California, where Apple is based. Apple, the electronics industry’s behemoth, in the last year has tripled its corporate social responsibility staff, has re-evaluated how it works with manufacturers, has asked competitors to help curb excessive overtime in China and has reached out to advocacy groups it once rebuffed.

Executives at companies like Hewlett-Packard and Intel say those shifts have convinced many electronics companies that they must also overhaul how they interact with foreign plants and workers — often at a cost to their bottom lines, though, analysts say, probably not so much as to affect consumer prices. As Apple and Foxconn became fodder for “Saturday Night Live” and questions during presidential debates, device designers and manufacturers concluded the industry’s reputation was at risk.

“The days of easy globalization are done,” said an Apple executive who, like many people interviewed for this article, requested anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “We know that we have to get into the muck now.”

Even with these reforms, chronic problems remain. Many laborers still work illegal overtime and some employees’ safety remains at risk, according to interviews and reports published by advocacy organizations.

But the shifts under way in China may prove as transformative to global manufacturing as the iPhone was to consumer technology, say officials at over a dozen electronics companies, worker advocates and even longtime factory critics.

“This is on the front burner for everyone now,” said Gary Niekerk, a director of corporate social responsibility at Intel, which manufactures semiconductors in China. No one inside Intel “wants to end up in a factory that treats people badly, that ends up on the front page.”

The durability of many transformations, however, depends on where Apple, Foxconn and overseas workers go from here. Interviews with more than 70 Foxconn employees in multiple cities indicate a shift among the people on iPad and iPhone assembly lines. The once-anonymous millions assembling the world’s devices are drawing lessons from the changes occurring around them.

As summer turned to autumn and then winter, Ms. Pu began to sign up for Foxconn’s newly offered courses in knitting and sketching. At 25 and unmarried, she already felt old. But she decided that she should view her high-backed chair as a sign. China’s migrant workers are, in a sense, the nation’s boldest risk-takers, transforming entire industries by leaving their villages for far-off factories to power a manufacturing engine that spans the globe.

Ms. Pu had always felt brave, and as this year progressed and conditions inside her factory improved, she became convinced that a better life was within reach. Her parents had told her that she was free to choose any husband, as long as he was from Sichuan. Then she found someone who seemed ideal, except that he came from another province.

Reclining in her new seat, she decided to ignore her family’s demands, she said. The couple are seeing each other.

“There was a change this year,” she said. “I’m realizing my value.”

An Inspector’s Push

“This is a disgrace!” shouted Terry Gou, founder and chairman of Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer and Apple’s most important industrial partner.

Keith Bradsher reported from Chengdu and Chongqing, and Charles Duhigg from New York. Yadan Ouyang contributed reporting from Chengdu and Chongqing.

@ThisIsVt, Vermonters Taking Turns On Twitter

The Vermont tourism department was watching, too. And at a brainstorming session this month, its employees wondered if Vermont could follow Sweden’s lead, creating a Twitter account to be used each week by a different Vermonter.

“At first I was like, ‘What are we going to do here, this sounds like a train wreck!’ ” said Jen Butson, the director of communications for the state’s Department of Tourism and Marketing. “That’s the communications mind.”

Still, Ms. Butson said, the project could offer this rural state — where the population has the second-oldest median age in the nation, according to the 2010 census — a chance to present a contemporary, humanized narrative as it works to attract more tourists and young residents.

“It’s neat that we can introduce a Vermont that is Web- and tech-savvy to people who wouldn’t assume that’s part of what Vermont is,” Ms. Butson said. “We’re kind of hip. We like to have a good time, we like to share our stories.”

So on Monday, less than three weeks after that first meeting, the department fired up a feed called @ThisIsVt, as well as a Web site where Vermonters can nominate one another (or themselves) to be the state’s Twitterati.

Within four days, the feed had over 560 followers, and, according to a metric provided to Ms. Butson by tweetreach.com, messages from the feed have showed up on people’s Twitter feeds more than 430,000 times.

A local advertiser, Ken Millman, is the first at the helm.

“I thought about it for, like, one second, and said, ‘Yeah, that’ll be a blast,’ ” said Mr. Millman, 53, who once used his personal Twitter account to start writing a novel, one burst at a time.

Mr. Millman is not being paid by the state to post messages this week, although his company, Spike Advertising, works with the state’s tourism department.

Some of Mr. Millman’s Twitter messages have been wryly — if predictably — bucolic. “I don’t care how clichéd, I love cows. Love ’em,” wrote Mr. Millman, posting a picture of himself lying on a hammock in front of several cows during a shoot for a TV spot.

Another took a morose turn.

“Home of a neighbor hermit who was a picker, collector, inventor of things,” wrote Mr. Millman, with a picture of a modest aluminum-roofed house. “He died under his tractor this past winter.”

Mr. Millman said he has heeded lessons from @Sweden’s experiment — as when Sonja Abrahamsson, who was designated to message in mid-June, generated controversy with a string of questions about Jews’ place in historical discourse. “Sonja’s kind of famous — it was pretty obvious what not to do, from a common-sensical point of view,” said Mr. Millman.

The tourism department is taking its own steps to ensure the feed stays clean. They are asking prospective users for their occupations, “so they’ve got some stake in Vermont,” said Ms. Butson.

And they have a few words of advice. “Don’t say anything that you wouldn’t say to your 12-year-old neighbor or your grandmother,” Ms. Butson said. “But that’s the strictest parameter we’ve been having.”

It’s an edgier-than-usual approach to social media for a state agency. Although some politicians have colorful, busy feeds — Mayor Cory Booker of Newark comes to mind — many government feeds typically read like canned communications copy.

“It’s the first time here in the States where they’ve actually turned the account over to citizens, but it’s not surprising,” said Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Media, which tracks the intersection of technology and government. “There’s more integration going on between the way citizens use technology and the way governments use technology.”

By Thursday, more than 80 Vermonters had been nominated to tweet in future weeks. A bookbinder named Elissa Campbell had been selected to follow Mr. Millman, who says he looks forward to returning to anonymity. He had been spending two hours a day on @ThisIsVt, sharing his thoughts and conversing with the feed’s followers.

“My wife this morning said, ‘O.K., to get a good morning kiss, do I need to send you a tweet?’ ” said Mr. Millman.

DealBook Column: Taking a Risk, and Hoping That Lightning Strikes Twice

Simon Dawson/Bloomberg NewsSean Parker, 32, was a co-founder of Napster.

Sean Parker, the 32-year-old billionaire and former president of Facebook — played by Justin Timberlake in “The Social Network” — was sitting on the top floor of his town house in the West Village of Manhattan last month, lamenting that too few entrepreneurs continue taking big risks after their first great success.

“Every good entrepreneur I know ends up in the wasteland of being a venture capitalist. It’s really frustrating,” he said.

Mr. Parker was sitting, or more accurately, slouching, on a couch next to his best friend and business partner, Shawn Fanning. Together, they founded Napster in 1999, the online music service that upended the entire industry before closing and filing for bankruptcy after losing a court case over piracy.

“How can you as an entrepreneur that’s had success, has a reputation, ever build the courage to go and do something again?” he asked, almost rhetorically. “Most entrepreneurs don’t remain entrepreneurs. It’s just too psychologically draining to have to constantly start over.”

More than a decade later, however, Sean and Shawn are at it again. The two recently started a video chat service called Airtime. (Think Skype, mixed with Facebook and a twist of Chatroulette.)

Mr. Parker and Mr. Fanning are the exceptions to the successful-entrepreneurs-still-working theory. Sure, there are a handful of serial entrepreneurs out there in Silicon Valley: Jack Dorsey started Twitter and Square, for example, and Elon Musk, who was behind PayPal, now runs SpaceX and Tesla.

But the career trajectory of many tremendously successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley often looks like a rocket ship that stops in midair. Less charitably, Mr. Parker suggests some could be called one-hit wonders.

“The list of people who have started from scratch over and over and succeeded systematically over a long period of time is incredibly short,” he said. “The only person I can think of off the cuff is Jobs who had Apple, Next, Pixar, continued doing Pixar and Next and then Apple again, which is really a different company.”

He said that the tendency of great entrepreneurs was either to become merely an operator of one company or, like Sumner Redstone, move into an investor-ownership role.

The Silicon Valley version becomes a venture capitalist. For example, Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal, has gone on to be a successful venture capitalist through his firm Founders Fund, investing in other companies’ businesses, like Facebook and Spotify. But Mr. Thiel hasn’t endeavored to start a new company himself. (He did start a hedge fund, but that’s still investing.) He happens to be in business with Mr. Parker, who is a partner in the fund, which also invested in his Airtime.

Marc Andreessen, a longtime star of Silicon Valley, co-founded Netscape in 1994. He started two companies after that: Loudcloud and Ning. Both had modest success, but neither was comparable to Netscape. Mr. Andreessen became one of those venture capitalists Mr. Parker dreads, but with an extremely successful track record of having invested in some of the most promising technology companies, including Facebook, Groupon, Twitter, Zynga, Pinterest and Instagram (which was sold this year to Facebook for $1 billion).

Perhaps surprisingly, Mr. Andreessen said of Mr. Parker’s theory: “I sort of agree with him.” In an interview, he said many “former entrepreneurs crossed over to be V.C.’s and it hasn’t worked out well.” He added, “You don’t want to be Michael Jordan playing baseball.”

Mr. Andreessen said he differentiated his decision to pursue investing from that of other entrepreneurs-turned-investors, because he approached it as an entrepreneurial effort to “rethink the model of venture capital.” He has sought to reimagine the way a venture capital firm works from top to bottom, and so far, it appears to working quite spectacularly.

Still, to Mr. Parker, most entrepreneurs who seek out investments do so as “a total cop-out.” He explained his thinking: “You have a whole portfolio, you only focus on your successes, you ignore your failures and you get to continue looking like a player, but you’re ultimately not in control of anything.”

He continued: “Everything is probabilistic, nothing is deterministic, so you never have that satisfaction of knowing that you’re in control of an outcome. So you spend all of your time managing your reputation, managing your relationships and you spend almost no time thinking creatively or doing the things that an entrepreneur is good at doing.”

If it sounds as if Mr. Parker is talking only about others, he’s not. He’s also talking about himself.

After stepping down from Facebook in 2005, he joined Mr. Thiel’s Founders Fund and for several years worked on making investments, including in Spotify and Votizen.

He also worked on Causes, a site to raise money and awareness for issues and nonprofits. That venture only muddled along, and he said he did not commit to it wholeheartedly enough.

He said the biggest challenge for any new start-up by a previously successful entrepreneur was focusing too much “on downside protection, which is just assuming failure from the outset.” Being worried about failure and its effect on one’s reputation, he said, is “very dangerous.”

He said he was reluctant to start a new company like Airtime until just recently.

“The expectation thing definitely weighs on me. There’s a sort of fear of launching something and failing,” he said. “I had to decide I am going to try to go the road less traveled and just be an entrepreneur that’s willing to go back and start things from scratch.”

Stockholm Journal: In Sweden, Taking File Sharing to Heart. And to Church.

Even as this Scandinavian country, like other nations across Europe, bows to pressure from big media concerns to stop file sharing, a Swedish government agency this year registered as a bona fide religion a church whose central dogma is that file sharing is sacred.

“For me it is a kind of believing in deeper values than worldly values,” said Isak Gerson, a philosophy student at Uppsala University who helped found the church in 2010 and bears the title chief missionary. “You have it in your backbone.”

Kopimism — the name comes from a Swedish spelling of the words “copy me” — claims more than 8,000 faithful who have signed up on the church’s Web site. It has applied for the right to perform marriages and to receive subsidies awarded to religious organizations by the state, and it has bid, thus far unsuccessfully, to buy a church building, even though most church activities are conducted online.

As regular church attendance drops among the 9.4 million Swedes, the Church of Sweden has been selling off disused churches, but it has not yet responded to the Kopimist bid.

“We have something similar to regular priests,” said Mr. Gerson, 20, who claims a permanent link to the divine through a Nokia smartphone. “We call them ops, or operators, and their task is to help people with things like meetings. There are not that many rituals. We are a tolerant community.”

Asked whether he believed in God, Mr. Gerson replied: “No, I just believe in our values. It’s just a belief in holy values.”

The Kopimists rose out of Europe’s growing piracy movement, which was born in Sweden about a decade ago. In elections to the European Parliament in 2009, the country’s Pirate Party got 7.1 percent of the vote, though in national elections the next year its share plummeted to less than 1 percent.

The movement has spread abroad, to at least nine European countries. In May, Germany’s Pirate Party won almost 8 percent of the vote in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state; in Berlin last year, it won 8.9 percent in elections to the state Parliament.

But Kopimists like Mr. Gerson, the son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, insist that the church does not sully its hands with politics, though they admit that the line between politics and religion can be elusive.

“Look at the United States, in the primaries, the importance of religion, or in the Middle East,” said Gustav Nipe, another church founder. Mr. Nipe, 23, who studied economics, illustrates the thin line — he is chairman of both the Kopimist Church and the Pirate Party’s youth group.

Mr. Nipe, whose parents are churchgoing Christians, emphasizes with his coreligionists that Kopimism’s purpose is not to directly promote illegal file sharing, but rather to focus on the values of sharing information.

“I think we see it as a theological remix,” Mr. Gerson said. “Christianity took from Judaism and turned it into something new, and the Muslims did the same. We are part of a tradition.”

The government has no problem with that tradition, as long as its adherents do not break the law.

“It is our responsibility to register religious communities that fulfill certain criteria,” said Mareta Grondal, an official at the government agency that registered the church. “We do not look into how communities act in a practical way.”

A religious community is recognized, Ms. Grondal said, if it fulfills certain requirements, like writing a charter and filing it with the agency, electing a governing board and paying an annual fee, now about $70. The Kopimist request for registration was twice refused on technicalities before being granted.

“The government cannot, should not interfere with what people believe in,” Ms. Grondal said. “That would be a dangerous path to take.” But the government has been interfering with what people do of late, and shows few signs of allowing religious freedom to justify copyright infringement.

@ThisIsVt, Vermonters Taking Turns On Twitter

The Vermont tourism department was watching, too. And at a brainstorming session this month, its employees wondered if Vermont could follow Sweden’s lead, creating a Twitter account to be used each week by a different Vermonter.

“At first I was like, ‘What are we going to do here, this sounds like a train wreck!’ ” said Jen Butson, the director of communications for the state’s Department of Tourism and Marketing. “That’s the communications mind.”

Still, Ms. Butson said, the project could offer this rural state — where the population has the second-oldest median age in the nation, according to the 2010 census — a chance to present a contemporary, humanized narrative as it works to attract more tourists and young residents.

“It’s neat that we can introduce a Vermont that is Web- and tech-savvy to people who wouldn’t assume that’s part of what Vermont is,” Ms. Butson said. “We’re kind of hip. We like to have a good time, we like to share our stories.”

So on Monday, less than three weeks after that first meeting, the department fired up a feed called @ThisIsVt, as well as a Web site where Vermonters can nominate one another (or themselves) to be the state’s Twitterati.

Within four days, the feed had over 560 followers, and, according to a metric provided to Ms. Butson by tweetreach.com, messages from the feed have showed up on people’s Twitter feeds more than 430,000 times.

A local advertiser, Ken Millman, is the first at the helm.

“I thought about it for, like, one second, and said, ‘Yeah, that’ll be a blast,’ ” said Mr. Millman, 53, who once used his personal Twitter account to start writing a novel, one burst at a time.

Mr. Millman is not being paid by the state to post messages this week, although his company, Spike Advertising, works with the state’s tourism department.

Some of Mr. Millman’s Twitter messages have been wryly — if predictably — bucolic. “I don’t care how clichéd, I love cows. Love ’em,” wrote Mr. Millman, posting a picture of himself lying on a hammock in front of several cows during a shoot for a TV spot.

Another took a morose turn.

“Home of a neighbor hermit who was a picker, collector, inventor of things,” wrote Mr. Millman, with a picture of a modest aluminum-roofed house. “He died under his tractor this past winter.”

Mr. Millman said he has heeded lessons from @Sweden’s experiment — as when Sonja Abrahamsson, who was designated to message in mid-June, generated controversy with a string of questions about Jews’ place in historical discourse. “Sonja’s kind of famous — it was pretty obvious what not to do, from a common-sensical point of view,” said Mr. Millman.

The tourism department is taking its own steps to ensure the feed stays clean. They are asking prospective users for their occupations, “so they’ve got some stake in Vermont,” said Ms. Butson.

And they have a few words of advice. “Don’t say anything that you wouldn’t say to your 12-year-old neighbor or your grandmother,” Ms. Butson said. “But that’s the strictest parameter we’ve been having.”

It’s an edgier-than-usual approach to social media for a state agency. Although some politicians have colorful, busy feeds — Mayor Cory Booker of Newark comes to mind — many government feeds typically read like canned communications copy.

“It’s the first time here in the States where they’ve actually turned the account over to citizens, but it’s not surprising,” said Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Media, which tracks the intersection of technology and government. “There’s more integration going on between the way citizens use technology and the way governments use technology.”

By Thursday, more than 80 Vermonters had been nominated to tweet in future weeks. A bookbinder named Elissa Campbell had been selected to follow Mr. Millman, who says he looks forward to returning to anonymity. He had been spending two hours a day on @ThisIsVt, sharing his thoughts and conversing with the feed’s followers.

“My wife this morning said, ‘O.K., to get a good morning kiss, do I need to send you a tweet?’ ” said Mr. Millman.

DealBook Column: Taking a Risk, and Hoping That Lightning Strikes Twice

Simon Dawson/Bloomberg NewsSean Parker, 32, was a co-founder of Napster.

Sean Parker, the 32-year-old billionaire and former president of Facebook — played by Justin Timberlake in “The Social Network” — was sitting on the top floor of his town house in the West Village of Manhattan last month, lamenting that too few entrepreneurs continue taking big risks after their first great success.

“Every good entrepreneur I know ends up in the wasteland of being a venture capitalist. It’s really frustrating,” he said.

Mr. Parker was sitting, or more accurately, slouching, on a couch next to his best friend and business partner, Shawn Fanning. Together, they founded Napster in 1999, the online music service that upended the entire industry before closing and filing for bankruptcy after losing a court case over piracy.

“How can you as an entrepreneur that’s had success, has a reputation, ever build the courage to go and do something again?” he asked, almost rhetorically. “Most entrepreneurs don’t remain entrepreneurs. It’s just too psychologically draining to have to constantly start over.”

More than a decade later, however, Sean and Shawn are at it again. The two recently started a video chat service called Airtime. (Think Skype, mixed with Facebook and a twist of Chatroulette.)

Mr. Parker and Mr. Fanning are the exceptions to the successful-entrepreneurs-still-working theory. Sure, there are a handful of serial entrepreneurs out there in Silicon Valley: Jack Dorsey started Twitter and Square, for example, and Elon Musk, who was behind PayPal, now runs SpaceX and Tesla.

But the career trajectory of many tremendously successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley often looks like a rocket ship that stops in midair. Less charitably, Mr. Parker suggests some could be called one-hit wonders.

“The list of people who have started from scratch over and over and succeeded systematically over a long period of time is incredibly short,” he said. “The only person I can think of off the cuff is Jobs who had Apple, Next, Pixar, continued doing Pixar and Next and then Apple again, which is really a different company.”

He said that the tendency of great entrepreneurs was either to become merely an operator of one company or, like Sumner Redstone, move into an investor-ownership role.

The Silicon Valley version becomes a venture capitalist. For example, Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal, has gone on to be a successful venture capitalist through his firm Founders Fund, investing in other companies’ businesses, like Facebook and Spotify. But Mr. Thiel hasn’t endeavored to start a new company himself. (He did start a hedge fund, but that’s still investing.) He happens to be in business with Mr. Parker, who is a partner in the fund, which also invested in his Airtime.

Marc Andreessen, a longtime star of Silicon Valley, co-founded Netscape in 1994. He started two companies after that: Loudcloud and Ning. Both had modest success, but neither was comparable to Netscape. Mr. Andreessen became one of those venture capitalists Mr. Parker dreads, but with an extremely successful track record of having invested in some of the most promising technology companies, including Facebook, Groupon, Twitter, Zynga, Pinterest and Instagram (which was sold this year to Facebook for $1 billion).

Perhaps surprisingly, Mr. Andreessen said of Mr. Parker’s theory: “I sort of agree with him.” In an interview, he said many “former entrepreneurs crossed over to be V.C.’s and it hasn’t worked out well.” He added, “You don’t want to be Michael Jordan playing baseball.”

Mr. Andreessen said he differentiated his decision to pursue investing from that of other entrepreneurs-turned-investors, because he approached it as an entrepreneurial effort to “rethink the model of venture capital.” He has sought to reimagine the way a venture capital firm works from top to bottom, and so far, it appears to working quite spectacularly.

Still, to Mr. Parker, most entrepreneurs who seek out investments do so as “a total cop-out.” He explained his thinking: “You have a whole portfolio, you only focus on your successes, you ignore your failures and you get to continue looking like a player, but you’re ultimately not in control of anything.”

He continued: “Everything is probabilistic, nothing is deterministic, so you never have that satisfaction of knowing that you’re in control of an outcome. So you spend all of your time managing your reputation, managing your relationships and you spend almost no time thinking creatively or doing the things that an entrepreneur is good at doing.”

If it sounds as if Mr. Parker is talking only about others, he’s not. He’s also talking about himself.

After stepping down from Facebook in 2005, he joined Mr. Thiel’s Founders Fund and for several years worked on making investments, including in Spotify and Votizen.

He also worked on Causes, a site to raise money and awareness for issues and nonprofits. That venture only muddled along, and he said he did not commit to it wholeheartedly enough.

He said the biggest challenge for any new start-up by a previously successful entrepreneur was focusing too much “on downside protection, which is just assuming failure from the outset.” Being worried about failure and its effect on one’s reputation, he said, is “very dangerous.”

He said he was reluctant to start a new company like Airtime until just recently.

“The expectation thing definitely weighs on me. There’s a sort of fear of launching something and failing,” he said. “I had to decide I am going to try to go the road less traveled and just be an entrepreneur that’s willing to go back and start things from scratch.”