links for 2007-08-01
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The Voki widget is the most robust flash application to date on Facebook.
Voki Launches Facebook App
One of my last tasks at Oddcast was to get a Facebook application out. Using our partner APIs, which allow us to add Voki to nearly any environment, we were able to build the app pretty quickly after I specced it out. You can create a Voki and send it to individual friends, broadcast it in your newsfeed or paste it to your profile.
So, given all the noise about how crowded Facebook is getting, if you want to make sure your friends really get the message, try using your own voice and a speaking character that looks like you, or a fish, or a robot, or whatever... Get the Voki Facebook app!
mmmm... Dogfood: Telling people about my idea
As a general rule, I never signed an NDA while I was at USV.
I was also recently talking to a startup about potential employment who wanted me to sign one, too. I balked.
I've been banging the transparency drum for quite a while--the idea that you should tell as many people as possible about what you're up to and not worry about keeping your idea a secret. The basis of that is as follows:
- Chances are that if your idea is a good one, in a big enough space, someone's already had it, so you won't really be tipping anyone off.
- It doesn't take long to build anything, so even if you kept it secret, at most you're going to have a three or four month headstart, which is pretty meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
- The idea isn't nearly as valuable as the execution. You could say you're going to build a LolCat maker, but if you can only use one kind of cat, its not going to get any traction whatsoever. The devil is in the details.
- Speaking of the details, you're likely to get them wrong the first time anyway...or learn more as you go along, so your first idea is never really a good one.
But the question is, will I eat my own dogfood? I had a conversation about this with an entrepreneur a little while ago and we both agreed that when its your own startup idea--the one you're really passionate about--there's a slight bit of hesitation. I certainly understand the fear... that you tell someone you're working on something and the one competitor that could ever possibly do what you're doing turns around and releases your idea and puts all of its weight behind it--all before you could even hire your first developer.
But that's paranoia. Reality tells us that startups, for the most part, move faster and can focus better on particular problems. That's why big companies buy startups--they know they can't really build things internally and get it right, let alone on time and under budget.
On top of that, by not being public about what you're up to, you lose the opportunity for feedback and collaboration. Perhaps someone out there has already tried what you are thinking of and has some tips. Or, they bring with them a completely complimentary skills set and could be a potential partner. You never know until you start talking it up.
Plus, I'm convinced that, to be successful, you really need to immerse yourself in the community you're trying to serve. If you want to do a healthcare services startup, you need to be in the healthcare community talking with doctors, patients, etc. Tell then what your ideas are. Get feedback. Get new ideas. Entrepreneurs who work in well protected bubbles (echo chambers) do not succeed... do not generate momentum... their ideas die on the vine.
Still, its scary just putting it out there.
With all that being said, I'm going to start a conversation here--a conversation about an area that I'm exploring. Yes, to do a startup. Its funny because I always said I'd never do one. I also used to say I'd never work at a VC, too, and also had no interest in working for a portfolio company. Thankfully, I've also said many times that I also have no interest in being really rich, too, so I should be set there.
So what is it? What's the space? Partners? Funding? Etc. Patience, grasshopper. There's a lot to do and a lot to talk about and there will be no shortage of coverage on this blog.
Adults riding tricycles:Facebook Backruptcy
Jason's exhausted by Facebook. OM calls it Facebook Fatigue.
Do you know how many friend requests I have waiting for me? None.
Why? Because I don't ask people to connect to me who aren't my friend and don't link to my Facebook in my feed everyday.
I mean, what's the point of being friends with all of my blog readers of Facebook? Do I want to see the latest photos uploaded by the 2000 people who read my blog? Um, sorry, not really.
When Fred says "[Jason is] drawing attention to the problems with Facebook", he's really not seeing how the average person on Facebook, which is still a college student or recent grad, is using it. I picked out the first five actual college students that I'm friends with and counted up their apps. They average less than 3 a person. Fred's got about a dozen or so, as do I, but I'd never think I was the average user. A lot of these TechMeme All-Stars are extrapolating their own experience... all six weeks of it, and making judgments on the whole platform. Man, if I was a college kid interested in getting hired by a VC firm, I'd start a blog all about how college kids actually use Facebook. I'd be doing polls of my friends, video interviews, etc. I think it would be an eyeopener for all of us, frankly.
Hearing Jason complain about all his requests is like when your older cousin comes and plays with all your stuff, breaks it, then hands it back to you and says, "This doesn't work... its busted."
You know who really knows something about Facebook? danah... because she actually spends much of her time talking to the kids who are on it. There's no substitute for getting out there and talking to young people, whether its in a classroom or in focus groups or whatever. My time spent in the classroom last semester was incredibly valuable for me to talk to students about how they actually use the internet. At least Fred has a few kids of his own he can talk to and stay grounded in.
Twitter Funded: Don't be a Hater
I'm so excited that Twitter and USV are now FOLLOWing each other.
But I do hear a few murmers here and there that go something like, "I don't get it... what's the business model?"
A lot of people criticize Web 2.0 apps because they don't have an apparent business model up front. What people aren't seeing, however, is that value creation is a business model at such an early stage.
When semiconductor startups get funded, it takes quite a lot of money to design and build a chip, and revenues are often nowhere to be found for the first year or two of the company's life. No one complains about the business model, however, because its simple:
"We're building these little things and people will by them. See...we drew a hockey stick. We have a business model."
But having a business model in Excel has never stopped a hardware company from going under. Why? One of the main reasons is technology risk. Its entirely possible that while you're building your hardware, some genius at MIT will invent a chip standard that the whole industry adopts while you're still touring fabrication plants in China. Plus, you may not be able to build exactly what you want to build because, as Wile E. Coyote will tell you, sometimes it doesn't exactly work the way you want it to. For example, there was a company around a few years ago called AirFiber. AirFiber was supposed to solve the last mile problem by shooting teh interwebs around with frickin' laser beams through the air. The technology completely worked in the lab and you could get the internet from building to building without digging up the ground. The business model? Sell these laser routers to telecom companies. Simple, right?
Not so much. Turns out that the beam wasn't wide enough and when the telecoms tested the stuff out in the field, they kept getting blips... birds would fly through the beam. Telecoms balked before they could update the technology. Business model: Fekked.
The point I'm making is that today's web service startups have very different characteristics. There's little to no technology risk...because you can build just about anything. Ever hear someone say, "We were going to have a wiki in it, but we just couldn't get the thing working." Therefore, people assume that you should automatically fast forward the development of the business to the point where you should pretty much start generating revenues as soon as you build it. That's a little bit unfair, because these things are different animals. Its not entirely clear exactly how some of these things will get monetized and sometimes it takes creating value first to see it.
Take Google and Skype. Google created lots of value for its users by building a great search engine. Only then did someone realize you had a great inventory of expressed demand that you could advertise against. So, instead of technology risk, investors took the business/execution risk that the smart folks they surrounded the company with would figure out the business side.
In the same way, Skype, as a P2P app could never have charged for its services until it got to a critical mass of distribution. Just because you built it and it works doesn't mean the product is done.
So, we can all guess what Twitter's business model is going to be, but you know what, we'll probably be wrong. It doesn't matter because the metrics that count, like active user growth and engagement are all pointing in the write direction. This is a company creating value for its users, and doing it with more and more users everyday. It will find a business model and at first, value creation for users is, in fact, a business model. Its the very reason why Web 2.0 startups fail--they just don't build anything particularly compelling for users.
Others say that you had a similar problem with Web 1.0... poor business models... it was just about the eyeballs. This is a misconception. There wasn't any more crap in Web 1.0 than Web 2.0 or frankly at any time in the history of innovation. The issue was a capital issue. Venture got way overfunded, grew too fast on the cost side, went public too fast and blew up when valuations disappeared under the scrutiny of the public markets. Its not like these things didn't have potential. Webvan may have gone under, but Fresh Direct makes a really nice little business here in NYC and they didn't raise nearly the kind of cash that Webvan did. eToys may have gone under, but you can probably buy all that stuff on Amazon now.
Business model or no business model, it really comes down to careful, rational, smart execution, and realistic funding. I have no doubt that some West Coast firm probably wanted to put $10 million into Twitter and then probably would have followed up with another $15 million a year from now and that's the kind of thing that ruins businesses.
Trip Recap... Santa Barbara and the End
Anytime I hear "Santa Barbara", it makes me think of The Graduate, when Ben is searching for Elaine at her college and he shows up at her fionce's frat house and asks about the location for the wedding.
"Where's the makeout king getting married?"
"Santa Barbara!"
That's where we headed for our final stop for a few days... to Mere's parents house. The drive down along the coast was really beautiful and we couldn't get over how blue the water was.
It was a long drive, though... like a really slow rollercoaster... up and down and around... Don't plan on averaging any more than about 35 or 40 down the coast when all is said and done. Plus, you'll want to stop at every scenic overlook, too... and you probably should!
We finally made it to her parents house on Sunday afternoon, just in time for dinner. Her dad is really amazing with their outside grill, but even more amazing as project manager for the construction of their house. He planned and built their house from an empty patch of land at the top of the hill, and while they're still doing little things like putting in doors and furnishing, its really amazing.
If I had this pool, I'd be in it everyday... drifting.. here in the pool... Ben Braddock style.
Maybe one day we can get Mere's dad to do a video tour Bob Vila style, because knowing her dad, there's a story behind those lights, the fences, the arch, and every stone... the attention to detail was really impressive.
Mere at home... finally!
Getting to stay in one place for a few days, as the driver, was a welcome rest. Her parents were gracious hosts and joined us for a Dodgers - Phillies game, too.
In the end, the EuroPod (Subaru Tribeca), made it 5594.3 miles, and did 20.9 MPG over that span. The... ah-hem... two speeding tickets have been paid for (my mom, who is now reading this blog, and, to her credit, sent me a Plugoo message the other day... didn't know about the second one...) and will not show up on my insurance b/c such is the out of state policy for the New York Department of Motor Vehicles. It was a little short on pickup, but then again, I'm used to driving a car with 300HP. It was a very comfortable drive, though, and picking up a portable XM radio was a clutch decision.
Oh, and for those of you that took bets in the pool... there were no arguments. None. 5594.3 smooth miles.
So thanks to everyone who housed us, fed us, met up with us for lunch, brunch, etc... We had an absolute blast and will be sure to visit you all soon again... and fly there... and stay longer.
Wrapping up the trip recap... San Fran Siblings
Only a couple more stops to go to wrap up my recap.
After Petaluma, we stayed in San Francisco to meet up with Mere's siblings, and hangout with Toby and Brooke, too.
@ptrain's siblings.
I can't speak for Mere, but they're my fave couple that we hangout with... Love the matching shirts!
I can haz nap now?
View from Amy's apt.
Foggy!
Driving the Europod down Lombard St.
Did I ever tell you about my special talent? I took this picture. In fact, many of the pictures I have where its just me and another person up close, I took. I have a knack for flipping the camera around and holding out my arm in a way that makes it look like someone else took it. In fact, my aim may be better when I'm not actually looking.
Helio releases Exchange sync... Now my milkshake is better than yours
So I didn't actually get it going yet, because I'm probably moving to a new mailbox, but Helio just launched its Microsoft Exchange support... and they pushed the little sucker right to my phone without telling me. I had to find out from another blogger. Apparently, tech is ahead of PR.
Assuming this works, even if its just a timed sync, its awesome.
Now if only that Exchange server could be Gmail/Gcal, I could die.
Don't go without healthcare, because...
... don't let coverage lapse because the companies use that as an excuse to jack up the already insane rates.
And health status has nothing to do with it, you WILL get hit with a softball ricocheting off a mustang while you're kayaking, approximately three days after you let coverage lapse. All while a cat sits at Chelsea Piers saying "I HAS YOUR INSURANCE SIRTIFICAT RITE HERE".
--Hilarious e-mail from Ed Costello
IFlop?
Link: IPhone Use Disappoints; Apple Slides - New York Times.
Apple’s shares slumped 6 percent on Tuesday after AT&T said the early surge of iPhone buyers starting service on its network was smaller than some analysts had anticipated.
(Nelson Muntz: ha-ha!)
Registered users? Here's the stat I want to see... Growth of Engagement
I was talking to a VC about a company with a million plus users and I realized how many web applications I've signed up for and never went back to, or only used once and never went back to again. I'm a registered user on those sites, but so what?
What's really important to driving value is that someone uses your service more today than they did yesterday, and startups need to make sure their data capture is robust enough to be able to slice and dice this.
The services that have created the most value for me are ones that I use more now than the first day I started with them: Typepad, Flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter, LinkedIn, Last.fm, Facebook, Highrise. Sometimes, my usage of them grows because others join or I see what others are doing with it, like Twitter. Other times, the product is flexible enough that I can find new uses for it and grow into it, like del.icio.us and tagging things for: myself as a memory tool. All of these applications are ones that I started out with slowly but I use them more and more everyday.
If I was a VC, I'd want to know account level data. Andrew is looking into time spent on the site for the USV portfolio, and of course that's good if it grows, but I'm not sure how comparable that is across different types of sites. Plus, sometimes I'll leave a site open all day and never do anything with it because I forget about it. For me, logins is a good proxy, but not perfect either.
Run the numbers... How many of your users logged in more in the 2nd week of usage than they did in the first? Week 3? Month 3?
Registered users is an absolutely meaningless statistic. A million registered users and $5.35 will get you a Jamba Juice in NYC.
Subway Thumbing
The girl that sits across from me is knitting a scarf in a bag...it is full of color...bright, vibrant color which she is not. She is drab. Gray bag. Brown boots. A jacket of indeterminately gray-blue-green color that one might paint a Chrysler. Her knees are bruised...probably from tearing out a carpet in her no bedroom walkup. She makes things there...fixes things. Has a toolbox and a good pair of scissors, not some plastic crap you buy in the Duane Reade back to school aisle. She just got up and off, but she'll probably buy a Diet Coke from the bodega on her corner in Downtown Brooklyn, because even though its after midnight, she'll probably spend a few more hours on that scarf tonight.
