New goal: Meet everyone on the SA 100 List
The other day I was thinking about the NYC tech community and how most of the events I've been to lately are about up and comers, which is great, but I feel like I still have a lot to learn from those who are a lot more experienced.
So, I'm going to try to make a concerted effort to meet up with more folks that have had prior successes and try to learn from them. Hopefully, they'll get something out of meeting me as well.
Seems I've met about a third of the list already... I don't know if I'll get to all of these folks (how likely is it that Barry Diller will grab a Jamba Juice with me, right?), but given the aggregate wisdom of these folks, I think it's a worthwhile pursuit.
Here's where I'm starting from:
Bonus: The Newcomers list
Ariane de Bonvoisin, First 30 Days - Met her at Laurel's breakfasts, but she's lovely. I'd meet her again in a heartbeat.
Jonathan Butler, Brownstoner - NEVER MET
Court Cunningham, Yodle - NEVER MET
Rich Greenfield, Pali Capital NEVER MET
Darren Herman, The Media Kitchen - Played dodgeball with and against him, and he's a Path 101 angel
Mike Hudack, Blip.tv - Met lots of times - cool guy
Alex Iskold, AdaptiveBlue - Met several times, part of the USV fam
Michael Jackson, IAC - Never met
David Karp, Tumblr - Met... Meeting David at the W should be on everyone's NYC tech scene todo list.
Alexis Maybank, Gilt Groupe - NEVER MET
Caroline McCarthy, CNET - She needs to play dodgeball with us... obviously met.
Douglas McIntyre, 24/7 Wall St. - NEVER MET
Scott Meyer, About.com - NEVER MET
Betsy Morgan, Huffington Post - Just met at Laurel's breakfast
Chris O’Brien, Motionbox - Met several times
Anand Subramanian, ContextWeb - NEVER MET
Andrew Weinreich, MeetMoi - Met at USV
Nate Westheimer, RoseTech - Duh
Bryan Wiener, 360i - NEVER MET
Benjamin Wolin, Waterfront Media - NEVER MET
Jeffrey Zeldman, Happy Cog Studios - NEVER MET
July 17, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Sign us up, VC Mike: The Burn/Risk Ratio
Mike Hirshland nails how I feel about the timing of Path 101 (except for the market part--there are more people trying to figure out what to do with their careers than you can shake a stick at):
"For the immediate future, what makes sense is to iterate and experiment. During this phase, product, market and adoption risk remains high. The idea is to learn as much as possible about all three of these, and remove a big chunk of these risks, but to burn as little capital as possible during this phase. In the experimentation phase, we want to learn a ton but spend a little.
Once we think we have learned what product will get adoption in the market, and how we will make money from this product/market match (which nearly always takes a few more iteration cycles than originally thought), we then should kick into execution mode, in order to get real live proof points that the model actually works in practice. This is the time to staff up with the team necessary to go to market.
But until then, no need for the bus dev and sales guys that had been in the plan."
July 16, 2008 in Path 101, Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Smart thinking about alumni social networks
"Telling alumni what tools to use, and how to use them is old school, and they won't care one way or the other that we have certain information on our web sites...We must let alumni build their own online activities, using a framework we provide for the purpose of enabling that process."
- Andrew Shaindlin - Alumni Futures
July 15, 2008 in Teaching, Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
What do the right investors do for you? Summize vs. Tweetscan
There's often a bit of anti-VC sentiment among the entrepreneurial community. You hear how VCs just want to smash you down, force you out, control your company.
So when the news was officially confirmed that Twitter bought Summize, I got to thinking about Tweetscan.
Tweetscan came out with their Twitter search earlier than Summize--who changed their product model. However, it was Summize that went out and took some funding ($750k) from Betaworks.
Tweetscan seems to have remained a one man show--built by David Sterry, who remarked recently that "Running a search engine is a very hardware intensive task and it's a challenge to keep it fast while providing the results people want." Tweetscan seemed more like a really interesting side project than an attempt at company building. Maybe David wasn't looking for anything more. That's fine. It was a great project, but clearly now that Summize IS Twitter Search, it will likely become the default. By the looks of the traffic, it already had:
Not only was Summize able to build a team, but they got some really thoughtful, well connected investors on board. Their investors and advisors helped them with the decision to focus on Twitter search--which was a reapplication of their technology away from generalized web sentiment. Of course, not to mention the fact that John Borthwick says specifically:
"The deal started with a conversation with Fred Wilson about how conversational search can evolve into navigation, about how important navigation becomes for UGC as you go mainstream — it concluded with the deal that was announced this morning. Betaworks is now a twitter shareholder, and excited to be one."
So, when your investor is having this kind of smart conversation with an investor in one of your likely acquirers, you're at a HUGE advantage. This isn't someone pitching your company to get flipped--this was some pretty high level thinking (and outside the valley thinking, I might add).
So while you're protecting all your equity from those big bad investors, ask yourself the question of who's having these types of conversations with key decision makers and thinkers about your company. "Who's a lot more experienced than I am that thinks intelligently about my company's strategy--and cares about it?"
THAT's the kind of investor that makes the rest of your equity worth multiples of what it is the moment they take their 20-30%.
July 15, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Fun with data: Personality Test Dropout Rate
One of my favorite things about actually having a live site up at Path 101 is having user data to play with.
Since we started broadcasting the availability of our personality test, we now have some neat data and feedback on it--like the fact that some people think it's too long. That begs the question of wanting better data or more completed users... and whether or not there are some people who just won't do anything longer than a minute anyway. I'm sure we could shave a few questions here and there, and provide some better motivation to strike a balance, but here's what we've got so far:
So basically, if we can get someone to the midpoint of the test, they're going to finish. I don't now if that's normal for these kinds of tests, but that's about what I would expect. At the end, about 52% percent of the people who started on Page 1 actually finish it. That's pretty good for a 90 question, 25 minute test.
One thought might be to move some of the "filling buckets" to the front of the test. People seem to really like those and mixing up the questions better might break up the monotony of the test.
Perhaps some teasers, too... like telling them we've found some industry matches for them, but they have to finish to see them or something.
Any other ideas?
What about letting people save it midway? Will you lose people who would have otherwise finished it? Will people really come back? Certainly that might drive registrations. Time for testing!!
July 10, 2008 in Path 101, Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
My Path 101 Personality Test Results
There are certainly a lot of places out on the web where you can take a personality test, but for the more serious ones (not the Superhero test), comparing results to others isn't always easy.
That's going to be our next update to the test... the ability to compare your results with other people.
For now, though, people have been sending me screenshots of their Path 101 personality test results and asking me what I got on mine, so I figured I'd share:
Interesting that I'm empathetic, but kind of emotionless. "I understand your problems, but I just don't care about them." :)
What did you get on your test?
Haven't taken it yet? What are you waiting for? A Beta? :)
July 10, 2008 in It's My Life, Path 101, Random Stuff, Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Twitter buys Summize
MediaEater said so, but he got scooped by some dude with 3 readers.
I suppose it was just easier to buy it out than to distract themselves with their attempts to fix their scaling issues by building something new.
Plus, I imagine it came pretty reasonably, because at the end of the day, they could just decide to shut off the API for Summize and then where would the company be?
Updated thought: Who the hell is Josh "3 readers" Chandler and how'd he get this scoop?
July 7, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
An experiment: Who's really out there and how do you measure influence?
Fred brought up the issue of deceptive statistics today--RSS readers, Facebook app installs, Twitter or Friendfeed followers, etc. I'll add one to the mix. Registered users. You name the social network and chances are I'm a registered user on it. Check to see what I've actually logged in to in the last month--very very different numbers there.
So what are we really talking about? People who are concerned with such numbers are usually trying to figure out and compare influence and perhaps maybe engagement. If the people reading aren't doing anything, either passing your message on or responding, what's the point of having readers?
That made me think about my readership. What do all the numbers mean? Do I really have 2600 readers? How many of them are really paying attention? What about twitter followers? LinkedIn, AIM, etc? How big an impact could one really make?
So, I've decided to make this post an experiment. I'm asking you to please link to this post, digg it, tag it in del.icio.us, Tweet it, retweet it, triple tweet it, Stumble on it....whatever. And please comment the hell out of it, too. Blog about the idea on your own blog... blog about the concept of influence... just make sure you post a link.
In fact, if you read this post, please leave a comment on it and tell me how you found it. Were you reading anyway or did you see it somewhere else? Where? If you're new here, did you know how I was or am I new to you?
What I want to do is see where people wind up coming from, how many links in I can get to it, and where the engagement (if any) comes from. I'll post as much as I can learn from all the linking and traffic after a couple of days--like who drove the most traffic (with links back, of course), what service drove the most traffic, etc.
Can I just will myself up to the top of Techmeme? (Or will you to get me there, rather?) del.icio.us popular? Digg popular? How much does it take?
Ok, ready, go... Swarm! Swarm!
July 7, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Why there will never be "One Ring to Rule Them All" in web services for groups
I'm involved in more groups than you can shake a stick at--in a leadership capacity in most of them. Being a web guy, I've always been struck with how poor the offerings are for managing groups--particularly within other social networks. LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook groups do little to encourage engagement within the application beyond the join. Most are pretty inactive--a lot of missed potential if you ask me.
Why, though? Why is it that no one's been able to come out with really great group software?
Thinking about the groups I'm in gives me an answer.
Let's start with nextNY. For one, we wanted a strong brand identity, which meant the ability to control look and feel, and live at our own domain. That's pretty much why we didn't go with a Meetup group. On top of that, when we first started, we also wanted both a website and a listserv, and no site actually offered that functionality. Now, Meetup does, which is great. Still, Meetup doesn't offer the ability to post blogs from the group, which nextNY didn't even want at first. Then we realized what we really wanted wasn't just a blog, but a way to aggregate the blog posts of our members that were already being posted. Perhaps its better that Meetup didn't offer that, because offering a full fledged blogging platform when others exists seems like a waste of resources--especially to a bunch of geeks who were bent on using Wordpress anyway. Perhaps that would make more sense for a Grandmothers Meetup group in Des Moines.
We thought we wanted several types of aggregation--to aggregate events, Flickr photos, Twitter messages, links, etc. Then, we realized that the group had gotten so big that some of those things weren't as relevant. Just because someone is in the group of 1700+, doesn't necessarily mean I want their del.icio.us links or to see their Tweets. What if they're a hardcore C++ programmer? That's not so interesting to me. Well, so maybe we don't want that much aggregation.
You seeing a pattern yet? Different groups want different things.
The group of Downtown Boathouse volunteers I belong to does not want or need a discussion listserv. Most of the members already belong to paddling listservs elsewhere--no need to reinvent the wheel.
At the same time, my sports teams--also groups--need some really kick ass scheduling tools, with smart RSVPs to tell everyone when a critical mass of people has not been achieved for a game.
My group at work uses Chatterous. We love it. It's a really simple way of doing group chat where each person can have their own input mechanism. I can text from my phone or e-mail while others use Jabber--kind of like how Twitter works, but closed for a group. Does my ZogSports softball team need that, not at all?
There's a company called Wild Apricot that has a cool web service for associations and professional societies--and yet even with a targeted audience, the entrepreneur behind it told me that they have a feature request list as long as your arm.
The point is, every group is different, so the idea of one particular group software solving everyone's problem is never going to work. However, I do think there are a few things that most groups would want out of a web service:
- A customizable site to call their own, even if it just has information as to what the group does and how to sign up.
- A way to communicate internally, via a one-way or two-way listserv, depending on the group.
- A way to do RSVPs for events.
Right now, only Meetup has all those features for general kinds of groups. Sportsvite has that for sports teams. However, I'll tell you that most groups do just fine by using Eventbrite to do RSVPs and a combo of a blog or site for their group and a Google Groups or Yahoo Groups listserv for communication. It's not that hard, and besides, it's the web. Your users are going to use lots of different tools for lots of different tasks--you can't solve all of their problems, nor should you attempt to.
Still, it is sort of bewildering that functionality in Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn groups is so lacking. If any one of those companies improved their group tools, I think that could be very powerful, because they already have the networks built in.
July 5, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Friendfeed replacing Twitter? Yeah, and sometimes when I want an apple, I eat fish instead.
"Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm for Friendfeed has to do with my goal to reduce the amount of digital noise..."
Mark Evans nails exactly how I feel about FriendFeed in his post: "The Digerati’s Love Affair With Friendfeed".
He points out how Haterington says people are just moving from Twitter to Friendfeed, because of Twitter's scaling issues.
For the 99% of us on Twitter who don't follow 8,000 people, that makes no sense at all. I get a big chunk of my tweets on my phone, because I like knowing, in short, real time snippets, what my actual friends are up to. That's what I think of Twitter as. Do I need to know, on my phone, in real time, when they all post photos, blog posts, favorite music, comment on other people's blogs, etc... Yeah, not so much.
To me, they're two totally different apps...not even close. Friendfeed is basically an RSS reader for the social actions of a critical mass of people--all of their social actions. It's built to be a firehose--a completely out of context firehose of all sorts of different content. Twitter, on the other hand, is built off of short messages in real time. How this is supposed to be a replacement for Twitter I have no idea.
How exactly does FriendFeed help me meet up with people at the Shake Shack...like now?
I think some of the digerati need to understand that they don't use these applications like most of the rest of us who are using them do, and that even just being in the groups that do mean we're a small segment of the population.
Call me old fashioned, but there's a group I want to see Flickr photos from, a group I want to share music with, some people I want to see the tweets of, and so on... and these groups hardly overlap at all. Not only that, I want a relevant set of features in each context..."loving" certain songs, sending certain blog posts to del.icio.us and labeling certain photos with funny notes.
FriendFeed seems to cater to the same kind of crowd that treats content consumption and audience creation like some kind of contest that involves belt unbuckling and rulers.
June 30, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Buried in your own startup? Who's going to get buried in yours?
When's the last time you offered help to another startup? Even if it's just sitting down and listening to someone's pitch for them, or giving product advice, spending a few minutes with someone else's big idea can reap tons of benefits, and not just for them.
First off all, being selfless generates goodwill. Any time you spend on someone else's project will be more than reciprocated when you need something in return. So when you're looking for people to invite their friends and spread the word about your app, don't be surprised when your strongest supporters are the guys you went to lunch with last week to be an elevator pitch sounding board. I think too many people bury themselves in their own work, and then when it comes down to needing a supportive community to grow their service, they find a lot of tumbleweed blowing through their social graph. Don't expect to disappear on your friends and fellow entrepreneurs for months on and and then expect the cavalry to arrive when you need a Digg.
Secondly, pulling your head out of the sand once in a while can inspire you. I make it a point to spend time with entrepreneurs who work in other verticals, because you never know when an idea that works somewhere else can be reapplied in a novel way. I don't spend all of my time in the job space because it contains a lot of the kind of stagnant thinking I want to disrupt with Path 101. Some of my best ideas have come from startups and just other professionals in completely different industries.
A lot of people cling to startups who seem to be on the rise, but fail to be there for others when things aren't going so well. Helping someone who is down and out in a difficult time is not only severely needed, because the ups and downs of the startup world can be difficult, but can also put you in the right place at the right time when companies start scuttling themselves. You might be able to take over a cheap lease, hire your superstar coding buddy who tried to go out on his own but it didn't work, or grab an unwanted server (or two).
Community participation is also important. By sharing your successes and failures with others, not only can that raise your own profile, but contributing to a strong local tech community can have longer term benefits. Maybe it will be easier to hire your next developer down the line because more people will know what you're up to, or the community will just attract more people. I never thought of any of this stuff when I started nextNY, but I can clearly see a positive ROI to my participation. If it wasn't for nextNY, I never would have found my partner Alex, because I caught up with him at a couple of community events right after he left his last job.
I don't know if this makes me sound insincere or not--I'm just trying to point out to those who wouldn't normally take their eyes off their own work that there can be a positive ROI to being a bit selfless. Not everyone is naturally this way, and so sometimes people need to see incentives, which, to me, is fine as long as the help is authentic.
June 30, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Free Business Plan: Coffee Shop WiFi Social Network
In your local coffee shop, there are probably tons of interesting people around you--all using the free (or not so free) wifi.
Some of those people may be consultants for hire. Other people might be doing really cool startups. The guy next to you may be your best friend's new roommate. The girl across from you might be your soul mate.
How would you know?
How about an opt-in social network that you login to when you get sent to those Terms of Service pages for logging in to the free wifi. You could agree to show your profile--which could be a new profile or maybe just an aggregation of your Facebook, LinkedIn, etc profiles anytime you login to that wifi node.
Personally, I'd love to know who's around me when I'm sitting down at a coffee show and I'd be more than happy to display what I'm up to as well. Plus, I like the idea of making the coffee shop experience offline a lot more social, because you could start a conversation with someone in person based on mutual interests.
The data about where I tend to login to free wifi could also be used in a MyBlogLog kind of way... where if I login three times, I automatically get added to that shop's community. At that point, it would benefit the shop to provide free wifi and encourage participation on the network, because seeing where interesting people or your friends go to hangout would encourage you to show up as well.
Of course, this means you have to have feet on the ground to get into the firmware/software setup of all these routers in all these random coffee shops. There's no easy way to get viral adoption here. It's curious to me why Starbucks never setup the "Your Starbucks" social network, because people have such strong affinities to the one that they go to and often see the same people all the time.
June 29, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
I know what Plinky is going to be: Awesome. That's all I can say.
Alex and I had the pleasure of chatting with Jason Shellen a couple of months ago on the phone--Smart guy and pretty funny, too. He slipped us some info on what Plinky was about and I think it's very cool. I can't wait to see it.
Interesting that Polaris funded the seed round.
With a guy like Jason, there's little risk of execution or that the technology won't work. Plus, getting adoption is part of an iterative process--the crowd rarely loves you on your first pass--so why not fund this early? If you like the entrepreneur and their vision, I don't think a couple of months of traction with bootstrapped or angel resources really proves much of anything.
Good luck Jason! Send an alpha invite our way!
June 23, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Pay to Listen: Is the Sermo model the answer for monetizing communities like Twitter, Get Satisfaction, and Tumblr?
For those of you that don't know, Sermo is a social network for doctors to share information, insights, and advice with each other. You would think, given such a high quality demographic profile, that driving advertising revenue would be like shooting fish in a barrel. What pharmaceutical company wouldn't want to get their ads in front of doctors talking to each other about medicine?
Of course, what doctor really wants to join a social network full of pharmaceutical ads--not to mention how likely are they to click a banner ad about drugs? (Although they might be able to sell a list of the doctors with the highest clickthroughs to patients, so I know who NOT to go to in an emergency.)
Unfortunately, given current ad formats, monetization through advertising directly flies in the face of the quality of interaction in the community. It degrades the user experience, creating a problem for startups.
Instead, Sermo is making the user experience a priority, ridding their site of ads, and instead, allowing financial investors, government agencies, and yes, the pharma companies, an opportunity to observe the interactions and pull useful insights out of the community. Instead of taking their customers out of their natural environment to do surveys and research, they're making the whole community into a huge research panel.
The value to the institutions that live and die with drug approvals, potential recalls, new patent uses, etc. is unquestionable. In fact, Sermo should become profitable this year, after securing almost $40 million in investment.
Does it really take that much money to build a social network? No, but these types of information creating communities are requiring a second phase of build--tools to secure and to harvest the data, as well as a more robust infrastructure to scale the community and insure it's continued growth.
This is an interesting potential path for communities like Twitter, Get Satisfaction, and Tumblr. On their face, it might not be obvious to folks how they'll ever drive revenue, especially since these aren't necessarily places people want to be sold to.
The information coming out of Twitter is a gold mine--whether it's about brands, stocks, events, music, etc. I'm a bit surprised that Twitter hasn't done more along the lines of search and trend tracking, but I suppose their amazing growth has given them more immediate fish to fry. Anyone who's ever tracked a consumer brand on Twitter knows that a marketer or brand manager would pay through the nose for this kind of insight into customers in the wild.
Get Satisfaction--the community powered customer feedback portal--is creating a place where people can tap into their userbase and understand issues, problems, opportunities, etc. Since the Kryptonite lock incident, companies have realized that social media engagement isn't a choice--it's a business necessity, and yet great tools for engagement and participation haven't really been built until GetSatisfaction.
I love the fact that customers can create pages for the companies they love or hate even before the company joins the network. Not surprisingly, many companies will be the last ones to the party, but what this model also does is to give the company a great pipeline for who to sell to next.
Tumblr may wind up with a similar model, especially if it continues to be a place where cool people share cool things on the web. I don't know of they can continue to maintain this atmosphere and scale at the same time, but if they can, there's surely a lot of interesting trend data that can bubble up from Tumblr.
In a lot of ways, this model is just like the way Google monetized search. You built a place where people could get something done or solve a problem for free--try not to interrupt their experience, and then try to harvest the data their participation created.
There are, of course, several challenges with this model. First is that the visionary community person who created the community may not be the same person tasked with building the application that packages the data and the participation tools for the entity that ultimately pays for the service. Of course, it's integral for the visionary community folks to be a part of this process to protect the interests of the consumers, but ultimately, you need an industry person to really understand and service the needs of the pharma companies, Comcast, or the brand marketer, whoever it may be.
Second, investors may have to make a kind of leap of faith about the value of the data and the ability for the team to build a product that gleans valuable insights from it. Whereas now they don't have to make much of a leap of faith as to whether or not there's user value in these free applications, the chasm has shifted to betting on whether or not the business information seekers will buy in.
June 22, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Call for Topics for Startup Workshop at Web 2.0 Expo in NYC
Albert Wenger and I will be moderating a three hour startup workshop at NYC Web 2.0 Expo in September. There is a lot we could talk about from getting started to hiring to fundraising. But rather than just pick the topics ourselves based on what we think might be interesting, we figured we should find out ahead of time what folks really want to hear about. So please use the comments to suggest questions, topics and even guest speakers (three hours is a long time and we will vary the format including break out sessions).
June 17, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
5 things you need to do to turn a napkin into a company
Growing a startup isn't easy, but at least once you're up and running, you're more likely to get outside feedback and suggestions. When all you have is an idea, it's often hard to figure out where to begin. Here are five things I tell napkin stage entrepreneurs all the time:
1) Have great relationships with the people who know you already. If the people who have either worked for you or that you've worked for won't vouch for you, who will? Investors, employees, and partners are all going to look for this. So, before you spend the next 6 months trying to pound the pavement trying to drum up new relationships, how about spending half that time with the successful people who know you already?
2) Join the conversations already going on in your space--read blogs, start a blog, join groups, listservs, attend meetups. There are a bunch of reasons for this. First off, unless you're actively engaging with thoughtful people in your industry on a daily basis, it's going to be extremely difficult to be as current as possible on the trends that affect your idea. Plus, engagement in conversation, both online and offline, will attract likeminded thinkers, which you're going to need when you get your idea off the ground.
3) Use every single even mildly related service you possibly can--and not just once. You need to have a really thorough knowledge of what else is out there--not to defend your idea and explain why it's different, but to learn from (copy, improve upon) the best ideas the market already has, and understand what isn't working about the ones that fail. I can't tell you how many times I mention a related company to a startup and they've never even heard of it. I shouldn't know more about the startups and existing services in your space than you do.
4) Identify the 30 most knowledgeable people in your space--analysts, investors, executives, even competitors--and try to meet with them about your idea. Look, all you have is an idea. Chances are, all of these people have thought about or heard of your idea before, and they have existing day jobs, so they're not likely to just jump in and steal what you're doing. When anyone can copy your idea in a matter of weeks, it's a matter of execution anyway--and that requires all the best thinking you can muster. Plus, chances are that some of these people will put you in touch with people who could help build your idea, through collaboration, investment, or even literally code it up.
5) Be a leader of startups in your space. All startups need some basic help with the nuts and bolts of running a business. Gathering a critical mass of other startups doing similar things allows you all to learn from each other and focus on the parts of your business that creates value, not stumble on the basics. Also, putting together events for new companies in your space can attract potential clients, who may want to checkout a bunch of startups all at once. A good example of a group of new startups in a single industry coming together to help each other and learn is the new Fashion 2.0 Meetup group here in NYC. They're sure to attract more industry speakers, investors, etc. as a group than any one of them would have been able to individually. Competition? Sure, some of them may be competitive with each other, but better to know and have a dialogue with the enemy than not.
June 16, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Donna Bogatin, what's your glitch? Startup Hater's personal vendetta against Fred Wilson is bewildering
Oh... I mean... Chatter.
In my old apartment, I had a huge desk up against a wall that, I admit, I never really moved. When I finally went back there to sweep, I found some fuzz and bones that, at one time, was a mouse who chewed right into an extension cord and zapped himself. Had I never swept up back there, I never would have noticed him.
In the same way, I'd never notice Donna Bogatin's blog, "Startup Chatter" either, except that she constantly links to TechMeme stories, making her one really angry pilot fish who never generates her own insights. That's the only way I know that she's still blogging, and still, for some bizzare reason, hating on Fred Wilson and every Union Square Ventures portfolio company.
Her latest target is Daniel Ha and Disqus, which just launched at the end of last October. She rips on both the company and Fred, who backed it, because of a "spoon-fed puff piece" that appeared about the company on Louis Gray's blog. She attacks Fred for being "consistently, disingenuously mum regarding
meaningful insights about achieving what really matters to the
investors in all of his portfolio companies: A BIG PROFIT ON THEIR
INVESTMENTS".
This is what bothers me. The Brooklyn boy in me gets pretty pissed of when she calls Fred Wilson "disingenuous." Fred's been a mentor, friend, teacher, and supportive angel investor, and it just irks me to see her talk trash about a really great guy--and a great investor. After taking her to lunch a while back to try to open up a dialogue, and then promptly getting ripped on again the next day, Fred doesn't bother with her, but I can't let this go.
Why?
Because Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures (along with David Hornick's VentureBlog) opened up the world of venture capital investing to entrepreneurs in a way that no one had ever done before--not with PR speak, but with an honest and sincere day to day account of the behind the scenes thinking that goes into running a venture fund. Plus, he's consistantly one of the most insightful bloggers out there and, unlike Donna, full of original and useful ideas.
Donna's big gripe about Union Square Ventures is that she thinks they're not focused enough on building real companies with real revenues. Has she even looked at their portfolio? Of the 19 investments that they've made, at least 6 of them (FeedBurner, Etsy, Indeed, Oddcast, Tacoda, and Instant Information) were generating multiple millions of dollars in annual revenues. Of the other 13, del.icio.us was sold 9 months after USV invested, which was the choice of the founder and majority owner, but could have been built up into a people powered search engine (which, last I checked, is a real revenue model), 4 are recent investments, and the rest are in various stages of building up scale--a necessary requirement for significant revenue generation for some of the plans of these companies. (Google had to get to signficant scale before they had enough search traffic to monetize against.)
And the silliest thing about her comments is how she speaks on behalf of the USV investors about what really matters to them. Nearly all of the USV investors reupped in the firm's next fund. With exits in Tacoda, Feedburner, del.icio.us, and nearly guaranteed (b/c of significant revenue traction) big exits in Indeed and Etsy, not to mention the potential of their other portfolio companise, USV's doing just fine in terms of creating revenue generating businesses and ones with successful exits.
So, basically, she has no idea what she's talking about.
Actually, that's not the silliest thing about her comments. The silliest thing about her comments is that she's now trying to make a business helping NYC startups as an advisor. How wise do you think it is for someone advising startups and offering to make introductions to VCs here in NYC to constantly rip on the #1 VC firm in the city? If that's the kind of advising she gives herself, I'd hate to hear what she has to tell startup companies.
That's part of the reason why I feel the need to respond to her comments as well. Ever since I started nextNY, I feel very protective of the NYC startup community and I've been really wary of self-proclaimed experts looking to profit off of newbie startups--especially when you can get these services for free.
If you're a NYC startup and you want feedback on your pitch, biz plan... anything... You can join the nextNY list and just ask for a small group of folks to meet up with you about it. What you'll get is an experienced group of current entrepreneurs, investors, developers, etc. who are part of the over 1700 folks involved in nextNY. They'll be happy to sit around a table with you and give you excellent feedback on your idea--better feedback than I'm sure you'll get from the crazy cat lady of the NYC tech blogging community.
I can't wait until she rips on Path 101--that will surely generate tons of unintentional humor.
June 16, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Just added a Twitter counter to my blog? Are you following me?
Right now, I have 2653 RSS subscribers and 890 Twitter followers.
Assuming not every one of my Twitter followers follow my blog via RSS, I'm going to say that puts Twitter penetration in my blog audience at about 25%.
If you're not on it, check it out, particularly if you just don't get it.
What's the point of it? It's a short form conversation that's going on between blog posts. Think if it this way: It's the "hallway track" at a conference--when the best conversations are the ones had spontaneously over on the side, away from the main exhibit room.
So before you think about whether you want to publish when you brush your teeth to the world, think about it from the listening perspective. You spend the time to read my blog, where the posts are often entirely too long--why not find out about what I'm thinking and who I'm talking to when I'm not blogging?
It's time to listen in on the hallway track. I'm here on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ceonyc
June 14, 2008 in It's My Life, Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Risk and the Raise
Back in October, Alex and I were two guys and a Powerpoint.
We raised $350k partially based on that Powerpoint, but *I think* it was more based on the strength of our relationships and the fact that we were working in a big, lucrative space begging for disruption. The investment was meant to recruit additional developers, carry us to a product, and give us some running room after to iterate.
We're on the verge of accomplishing the first half of that goal. We hired two great developers and we're literally a couple of days from rolling out some of our product in an early Alpha version. (No, no, it's not a "launch". It will probably suck and break on day one, but you've got to start somewhere, right?)
Some entrepreneur friends were surprised and maybe even thought it was unfair that we were able to raise before having at least a demo or something up. Certainly this is the kind of thing that VCs look for, but angels can be a different story.
Thinking about risk and value creation in relation to fundraising is interesting to me, because its on the forefront of my mind right now. Since we're about to roll some product out, we have a very clear idea of what the product will look like and where it's going. Of course, it needs to iterate based on user response/uptake, but that goes without saying. What's very clear to me, though, is that the iteration and eventual inflection point for the service really depends on additional resources--a kick-ass user experience person and an operational/biz dev person. These would clearly be our first hires after any kind of a financing, because the product not only depends on seamlessly integrating several complimentary career applications, but also on syndicating our services out to other communities and groups.
So the big question is, why wait? (Especially if we've identified prospects for these roles, which we have.)
Right now, there's two scenarios:
1) Launch, iterate with existing team, catch lots of falling knives and try and power our way forward to some arbitrary milestone that brings the term sheets pouring in, not that we or the VC's are even 100% sure what that is. Then, spend time trying to fill out team.
2) Try and raise a couple million sooner rather than later, since we can very definitely say "This is the product and the near future of the product you are investing in." We make our hires and hit the ground running, and make a much bigger impact in shorter order.
Option #1 plus a nice hockey stick might bring a higher valuation... but is that really what we should be optimizing for? Outside of raising ridiculous amounts of money at ridiculous valuations, have you ever heard an entrepreneur attribute their ultimate success to a million or so here and there on interim valuations? On the VC side, have you ever heard a VC say, "The success of our fund has really depended on waiting another month or so to see more traction on deals and teams we liked"?
The worst thing that could happen is that we come out, inspire potential partners and employees, and we're unable to take advantage of them because we don't have the resources. Raising money takes time, focus... Raising at the moment your product gets really good and people finally get it is probably the worst thing you can do, because then you won't have your ducks in a row for when opportunities knock. The trick is finding support from folks who see where you are going with something and believe that you have the passion and ability to get it there, even before its a sure thing.
June 11, 2008 in Path 101, Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Eric Friedman joins USV
Fred's post on the USV blog...
And Eric's response on his own blog...
June 10, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Sound and fury folks... signifying, well, you know...
I talked to quite a few folks about the events of Internet Week and a couple of people brought up the fact that they really weren’t sure who they should be out there meeting.
I’m not particularly plotting about how I network. I just try to meet cool, interesting folks and get to know them well. If I have one good thought provoking conversation with someone passionate about what they do at an event, I consider the whole thing a success.
But if you’re focused on “who to know”, then I think it’s easy to mistake buzz for influence or knowledge. I think too many up and coming people in the tech scene worry about the “in” crowd or folks that appear on the outside to generate a lot of buzz in the community. Focusing on them, however, is an easy way to take your eye off the ball and not focus on the things you need to do for your career or your business that make a real impact.
Influence is not measured by blog links or twitter replies, but on size of deals done, decision making, P&L responsibilities.
For example, when you go to a tech event, who are you more focused on? The doe-eyed videoblogging distraction or the product manager who runs a successful web service for a major media company. One of them can share some widsom about how their latest user experience redux boosted conversion and traffic. The other one… well.. not so much.
TechCrunch is the ultimate example of this. The LA Times called Mike Arrington a “Kingmaker” and certainly everyone treats him like he is—but can anyone actually point to a single instance where a TechCrunch mention was singlehandedly responsible for anyone getting funded or getting a business deal? I’m talking about a situation where, if TechCrunch had not annointed a company as worthwhile, the company couldn’t have gotten it on your own. Who has he made King?
I don’t think any VC or angel worth their salt really cares about what Mike’s opinion about a company is—they do their own work and have too much at stake to blindly outsource judgement. Good writeup, bad writeup, no writeup… I think companies are realizing that it still takes a great product and a lot of footwork to acheive success—not just one make or break article. Much of that is because, for most companies, the TechCrunch audience isn’t even really the target crowd the company should be going after. If you’re building a B2B service, you’d rather get writen up in an industry mag. Location based marijuana ratings system? A High Times mention will go a lot further than a TC review.
The most knowledgeable and influential people that are relevent to your company are often under the radar. There are tons of really helpful angel investors out there that never blog, never show up at Meetups, Tweetups, MashMeshing, or what have you. They need to be sought after. Ambitious startups need to turn over every rock. They need to go to the successful people in their space and ask them who’s been the most helpful, whose opinion they respect. Find out who’s in a VC firm’s friend of the family network—who are the individuals invested in VC firms. Too many people rely on blog traffic and Twitter buzz to figure out who to contact versus their actual potential clients.
If you’re a publisher tool and the only thing you have in your biz dev queue is a big tech blog, then you need to get out there and perch yourself at CondeNast, Martha Stewart, Meredith Corp., Scripps, etc. People from these places should be your on your board—to help you understand the landscape and to get you in front of potential clients, and you’re not going to find them at gatherings of the young digital “elite”—nor can most of the people considered the “elite” make any intros to these folks. Contrary to popular belief, the Director of Business Development for the company you think should by you isn’t trolling the blogs for deals—they’re taking inbound phonecalls and setting up real life meetings with companies more aggressive and ambitious than you.
So before you worry about whether you’re in with the right talking head, take a step back and reexamine who you really need to be out there talking to. Chances are, it’s not the same people everyone else thinks they need to be talking to.
June 9, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Write code. Change Washington. A developer job opportunity with the Obama campaign
Now that we know who the Democratic nominee will be, it's time to go to work...
Obama for America is looking for exceptionally talented web developers who want to play a key role in a historic political campaign and help elect Barack Obama as the next President of the United States. (Interested in a security expert position?)
This six-month opportunity will allow you to:
- Create software tools which will enable an unprecedented nationwide voter contact and mobilization effort
- Help build and run the largest online, grassroots fundraising operation in the history of American politics
- Introduce cutting-edge social networking and online organizing to the democratic process by empowering everyday people to participate on My.BarackObama
You must have:
- At least 5 years of professional web development experience
- A deep understanding of LAMP development processes and best practices
- Experience building complex applications using PHP and MySQL
- Advanced or expert CSS, Javascript, and AJAX skills
- An abiding desire to put your technical wizardry to work for democracy and for our country
Special consideration given to candidates who have:
- Experience scaling large LAMP applications
- Posses deep knowledge of MySQL performance and query optimization
- Strong practical knowledge of web application security
- Created highly usable user interface/experience for complex web applications
- Worked in a fast‐paced web development environment and have proven their ability to write outstanding code under tight deadlines
Successful candidates will join the development team in Boston, MA. Candidates should be willing to commit to work through the election in November. This is a salaried position. Housing assistance may be available for those not located in the Boston area.
June 4, 2008 in Politics, Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Facebook doing a great job making it hard to meet complete strangers off the internet
When I was a sophomore in college, poking (not literally) around AOL, chatting until the wee hours of the morning was a pasttime. In 1998, you could logon to the AOL software and search member profiles for "Fordham" or "Brooklyn" to find people (girls) to IM with live. New people on tap--it's a concept that has largely disappeared from the typical social web experience today. Now and then, I get a random Skyper from Italy, but young US users don't really use Skype for IM. Now it's about your friends (and maybe people who read your blog.)
In fact, one noticable change about Facebook in the last few months is the disappearance of "Network" pages. These were pages meant to aggregate all the activity of users in a particular network, be it geographic, corporate or a school. For the most part, they focused
on people you didn't know--random wall posts from strangers, events that were public but not really meant for you, and browsing of people in your city or school but outside your friend group.
This was counter to the experience Facebook clearly wanted you to have--one about your friends and the information they wanted to share with you. So, despite the fact that the site "opened up" to high schools, then to the general public, the experience actually got less open as these network pages disappeared. Even mass friending is generated by your email account, guaranteeing that you're unlikely to get a friend request from someone you don't know, unless you're Scoble or Calacanis.
What this means is that the social signal to noise is still pretty high. If you think about all the content you see on Facebook, the vast majority of it is content directly tied to people you know. That's why the events platform is so successful. Finding relevent events on the web has been a challenge for quite a while, and now, having that filter of being shown events that my friends are going to is as good a recommender as any. I find more new events though Facebook than I ever did using any other tool. Evite has much of this same data, but they really blew it by not showing me things my friends are going to.
Applications have gotten less and less spammy, too, and will be even less disruptive after the next UI iteration.
When you keep your connections to your actual friend group, the pictures, events, notes and updates are all highly likely to be relevent to you. That's why its so hard to unseat Facebook at moment. Not only are all my friends there, but they're presented to me without much disruption.
Not only that, but that's also why mainstream users don't care about data lock-in. If all my friends are in one place, than what do I care if I can't move them? I don't want to. Imagine if Facebook was a bar and all your friends were there at a party. You wouldn't say, "Hey, all my friends are here... How do we get them out?"
That is, unless it felt crowded, which Facebook's reliance on activity vs. presence ensures it won't. At any given time, most of your friends, just aren't doing anything, which is fine.
The interesting thing to me, though, is where all the strangers went and whether anyone mainstream really cares. There are video services like PalTalk that are based around random chat rooms, or servicesthat can introduce you to people along specific shared interest lines like last.fm, Flickr, MyBlogLog, but is seems clear that the web has gone the way of Meetup Scott's favorite shirt: "Fuck you, I don't need more friends."
Was it always the case that we preferred our own friends to new folks, and we just didn't have the critical mass of friends online before? Now, it's odd if someone my age or younger isn't on Facebook.
Fred wrote the other day that he think the web is going the way of everyone publishing to the world. I think he's almost right. He should have written "everyone publishing to whoever they want, which includes everyone, if they choose." I'm not sure whether that means people will choose everyone or not.
It's possible we'll wind up in two camps. There are tons of people who go out of their way to make Facebook profiles, MySpace photos, etc. private, and ohers who live out loud. The social implications of the divide are interesting, although I don't necessarily agree with Tom that its a class thing. There are just as many show-off inner city teens on MySpace as their are rich guys who want to publish their health records.
You might say those teens don't know any better, but I think we may get to a world where we just throw up our hands and say, "What was the fuss about anyway? So now you know. Big deal."
June 3, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
David Karp sums it up perfectly: Techcrunch is "the dev community’s douche magnet."
You know, there comes a point where we have to stop calling David a "wunderkind" and just refer to him as a really smart, thoughful guy who knows what the eff he's talking about. I think I'll just shorten that to calling him "David Karp." Does Anyone Still Read TechCrunch? | David's Log
"After giving some thought to the future of TechCrunch, I think it might be a necessary evil. It’s managed to capture a huge amount of the negative voices in the development community. Unless they’re leaking info, their stories have no real impact on anyone’s business. And so far as I can tell, the development community, at least the brilliant folks I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with, pay no attention to TC (especially on the East Coast). Meanwhile, anytime I catch their awful writing, or feel suicidal and start reading TC comments, I’ll have to remind myself that if these poisonous people weren’t holed up at TechCrunch, I might actually have to interact with them :[ So I think I’m grateful Arrington has charged himself with being the dev community’s douche magnet."
June 2, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Oh, I thought this was supposed to be real tech journalism... Silly me.
So Haterington is basically admitting that he wants to single out the Twitter team to rile them up. What is that supposed to accomplish... besides increased traffic to TechCrunch?
from Hey Twitter I Have A Few Questions Too
"Twitter continues to be annoyingly and constructively responsive to criticism. They respond to this post here, saying “We’re working on a better architecture.” Kind of takes the air out of the balloon when you can’t get them riled up."
I think it's pretty interesting to compare Kara Swisher's focus on the ongoing coverage of Yahoo!, Microsoft and Facebook--companies where billions of dollars are at stake, the future of search and the ad market, and the whole tech landscape, with Mike's continuing shoulder chip and insistance on picking on one small startup company (and a guy who doesn't even work there anymore) whose extreme popularity is causing them to face some tough technical challenges.
The unfortunate thing is that it's causing a non-story to bubble up to the top of TechMeme. I wish we could bury stories there, because a petty Haterington vendetta is not news as far as I'm concerned.
June 1, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Cities based on ideas are made of straw... and why Paul Graham is wrong about New York City
Paul Graham recently wrote a piece about cities. He puts forth Cambridge as a city of ideas, New York as a city that is all about money (where people doing startups are second class citizens) and the Valley as a place for startups.
I’m not about to start comparing the Valley to New York City. That’s just silly, because the Valley has a multi-generational head start on creating tech startup companies. However, given that, it does make me wonder why Cambridge and the Boston Area is so far behind the Valley, because Route 128 has been a tech center since the late 1950’s. I mean, “Harvard and MIT are practically adjacent by West Coast standards, and they're surrounded by about 20 other colleges and universities,” as Paul puts it. Perhaps he should be explaining why his City of Ideas gets less than a third of the venture capital investment that the Valley does.
I think the fact that Cambridge is a city of ideas is exactly why you could say it’s questionable how great a place it is to do a startup. In an environment dominated by academia—where you lack time pressure, a sense of immediacy—you’ve probably got just as much of a chance of creating an interesting intellectual exercise in burning cash as you do building anything that resembles a real company. I mean, have you ever tried collaborating with an academic institution if you’re a business? Your startup would run out of cash before they figured out the right academic chair to lead the effort and which pool of research money to allocate for you. It’s no accident that startups need to be spun out of these institutions to be successful. Plus, seen any hugely successful companies come out of university incubators lately? (And no, Zuckerberg’s dorm room does not qualify as an incubator.)
Also, think about it another way. What are the last 10 or 20 really novel "ideas" in the startup world? Things that required a leap of thought... We can debate it and certainly I'm up for creating a list, but when I think of good ideas, I think of del.icio.us, Skype, Wikipedia, Twitter, Bug Labs, Slingbox, Google (b/c of the biz model)... Hardly seems like Cambridge has a lock on the idea generation market in the startup world.
Ideas today are a commodity. Anyone can have an idea, so being the Capital of Ideas is pretty much equivelent to building your city of out of straw. If I were a co-founder of 3PigsTech.com, I’d think about building somewhere whose choice of building material was more formidable.
Which brings me back to New York City. By saying that “New York tells you, above all: you should make more money,” Paul Graham is basically admitting that he’s never been north of Central Park, on the Lower East Side, or out into the Boroughs. I grew up as a finance major in NYC and I made the same mistake that Paul makes. It wasn’t until I finished school and got about three years into my career that I soon realized that there was a lot more going on in NYC than just Wall Street.
When I think of ideas, I think of creativity, not just scholarly research and publication in academic journals. An idea has no value unless it’s either a) new or b) executed. If execution is a business phenomenon, I can’t imagine a better place to execute than NYC (or the Valley, if you’re a tech startup), but in terms of new ideas being generated from creative people, I wouldn’t exactly hold the ivory towers of Ivy League schools up against the creative culture of NYC. New York City is a mecca for design, fashion, dance, art, film, theater, international relations—it’s not difficult to imagine that this stew of creativity rubs off on other industries.
Hedge funds, for example, are a great example of creativity leaking into another industry. The most forward thinking, creative investors break out of old institutions to play markets in out of the box ways at hedge funds.
We even solve creative engineering problems here. Peter Semmehack from Bug Labs, an open source hardware company pushing the limits of creativity in the consumer electronics space, has always said that he has found the best and most creative engineering talent here in NYC. Need to explore a completely unfamiliar environment millions of miles away? That was the challenge for the Mars Rover, and it’s no accident that much of it was built here, by HoneyBee Robotics.
Paul also makes the point that someone creating a startup in NYC would feel like a second class citizen. I have to be honest—I’ve felt that way several times, but mostly from people outside NYC. Within the city, I’ve actually felt really supported. Most of my 21 angel investors are not only in NYC, but they’re either NYC natives or have lived most of their lives here. Among my large diverse group of friends (I grew up here, went to school here, never lived anywhere else, and know tons of people doing very different professions), I’ve received fantastic support. No one ever asks me why I don’t just go into investment banking or trading.
In fact, most of my friends aren’t even in finance at all. Some of my closest friends are a magazine publisher, a lawyer, and a producer for televised mixed martial arts. I play on a softball team with two PR folks, a clinical psychologist, a chocolate retailer, two IT guys, another lawyer, a teacher, a media buyer, and oh yeah, one guy in finance. Most of the volunteers at the kayaking program I participate in don’t even have regular 9–5 jobs. The other day, I was out on the dock with a guy that resells guitars and plays in a band, a former non-profit exec, a public health researcher, and another IT guy. And these people don’t all live in big luxury apartment buildings in midtown. They live with roommates in Astoria, in studios on the Lower East Side… just scraping by but still loving every minute of it. And we haven’t even mentioned all the actors and actresses. Surely they’re not in it for the money, right?
So, the idea that NYC is just all about the money is just ridiculous…. just as ridiculous as this:
“One sign of a city's potential as a technology center is the number of restaurants that still require jackets for men. According to Zagat's there are none in San Francisco, LA, Boston, or Seattle, 4 in DC, 6 in Chicago, 8 in London, 13 in New York, and 20 in Paris.”
How about we make the list “number of restaurants that don’t require jackets for men”? I have a feeling NYC would lead that list, seeing as the total number of restaurants in NYC minus 13 is probably more than SF and Boston combined. Is this really how Paul thinks his YCombinator startups should make decisions on where to build their business? By restaurants with jacket requirements?
But rather than argue about whose city is better, which is similar to the arugument about what language to code in, go with what you know. Generalizations will get you nowhere. It would have made no sense for me to build Path 101 anywhere else but NYC, because my network is here. I found a great technical co-founder, two amazing developers whose experience could not be any more well-suited to their tasks, and a slew of supportive angels. That doesn’t mean all this stuff comes in a box if you move your startup here, but if you can say the same thing about your neck of the woods, be it Louisville, Miami, the Valley or Cambridge, stay put, keep your head down, and build like the dickens. Your city is what you make of it and how you build your network, not what the pundits tell you it is.
May 28, 2008 in nextNY, Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Who's the Dick on my blog?
Lawsuits: Sxip mauling investors in Vancouver's Silicon Forest
Sxip Identity, a Vancouver-based startup that's built a tool for porting your Web identity across sites, may have hustled investors out of $370,000 by misrepresenting acquisition efforts by tech titans Google and Yahoo. Founder, CEO and president Dick Hardt (no joke) now says the company is insolvent, and has no plans to honor the convertible bridge notes which were to revert to cash or equity upon sale or additional investment in the company. Where did the money go?At an identity conference a few years ago, Sxip handed out advertising fliers with the slogan, "Who's the Dick on my blog?"Well, Sxip Identity apparently owes Sxip Networks, also founded by Hardt, $4.7 million — and owes Hardt $275,000. The angel investors have filed suit, alleging that Hardt never disclosed the existence of the other company, and that the arrangement puts Hardt in a position to recoup money from the company before other investors do.
Well, I guess now we know.
May 22, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Top 10 Reasons to Date an Entrepreneur
1) Our hours are really flexible. We can meet up anytime between 11PM and 8AM. Sleep can always be rescheduled.
2) We will never come home and complain about our boss.
3) We'll pay for all our dates the old fashioned way. (Old fashioned=Circa 1999...with worthless stock options)
4) You can tell all your friends that you're dating a CEO who runs their own company. You can leave out the fact that the CEO is also the secretary, the janitor, middle management, and a web design intern.
5) Some of us have millions of dollars in the bank. Of course, it belongs to our investors, but still...it's in the bank.
6) You get to be a beta tester of the next Google or Facebook.
7) We're good at teamwork. We have to be...not all of us can code.
8) We're not afraid of commitment. In fact, let's move in together... you know, economies of scale and all.
9) Your place is closer to my office and has more bandwidth. Do you mind if I just leave this server here? Really? Is it loud? I never really noticed.
10) Your parents will just love us... They're accredited investors, right?
Bonus: Passion: We haz it.
May 19, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
Tiered Twitter
Dan Farber suggests that Twitter should just charge a subscription fee as a business model.
"Much of what gets sent via Twitter is a form of self-advertising. If you like Twitter so much, how about paying $5 a month for the privilege."
I think Dan's got it partially right. Clearly there are people who use Twitter as self advertising. The presidential campaigns, Gary Vee, Jason Calacanis... with thousands of followers, many of whom are also influentials themselves with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of blog and social network eyeballs as a group, are clearly getting a lot more tangible value out of Twitter than someone who uses it to share with 6 friends. I think it's important to have both sets of users.
The casual users with small networks of friends potentially contribute much more to Twitter, in aggregate, then they get back--so charging them the same fee that Jason Calacanis has to be doesn't make a lot of sense, and would put up an artificially high barrier to growth. These users contribute a lot of good data--zietgiest data, brand information, or simply good local content that others might be able to leverage off of to create value themselves. They're not pitching a candidate, product or book, so why charge them?
I think there should be tiered pricing. What do you think Gary Vee would pay for Twitter if, like Dan suggests, it came with some SLA's and rebates for outages...or rather, what is Twitter worth to Gary? Given his recent book sales, I'd say that he wouldn't blink at $50/month--or at least he shouldn't. Neither should Jason, or Obama, CNN, or Zappos. If you have 5000 followers, that's about a $10/CPM to your message across. Given the number of Tweets to phones, the engagement level of the users, I'd say that's pretty cheap, actually. Then we could scale it all the way down to like 300 followers or something at a few bucks a month.
May 18, 2008 in Venture Capital & Technology | Remember this post with del.icio.us| E-mail this post to a friend
How soon should you make yourself irrelevant?
One piece of advice that sticks with me is to try and hire so that you make yourself irrelevant--the goal being to build a well oiled machine that run