Newsflash: Most Facebook users not using their apps. Actual usage relatively poor... thousands, not millions.
Most actual Facebook users knew the deal, but today, Facebook released "activity" numbers for its apps and the results aren't pretty.
Instead of lots of applications showing millions of "users", only one single application has over a million daily users, and that's Top Friends. Most of the applications had around 10% of their userbase that actually interacts with the application in any given day. Knowing that most Facebook users average logging into their Facebook accounts everyday, this isn't really that much usage.
For example, the ultraviral "Zombies" app only has about 3% of its installed base using it on any given day, making its actual usage numbers around 90,000 people, not 3 million.
On the other hand, the "Are you interested?" application has about the same number of active users, but this represents a full third of their userbase!
This is a great way to show statistics on usage and also puts this Facebook phenomenon in a little bit of perspective. Nice move!
Now, all these developers can get to work creating apps that more than 10% of the people that have them want to use in any given day.
ClownCo now called Hulu
From Hulu.com...
"The first bit of news we'd like to share is that we have a name: Hulu.
Why Hulu? Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we're building. Our hope is that Hulu will embody our (admittedly ambitious) never-ending mission, which is to help you find and enjoy the world's premier content when, where and how you want it."
The name is inherently fun--and fun is the spirit of the service we're trying to build... good old clean corporate-pay-a-naming-consult-$100k-to-come-up-with-a-name-the-MySpace-kids-with-their-Chemical-Romance-and-their -bling-will-like kinda fun.
Personally, I liked ClownCo.
links for 2007-08-28
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I would rather be a wildlife expert. I would rather be a public relations professional.Huh?
Meet Alex Lines, my co-founder & CTO at Path 101
Looking for a partner is different than looking for just a developer, and it's a difference that was particularly important to me. To build Path 101, I could have just scraped some angel money together, done some consulting, and pulled a spec out of my own personal echo chamber and put something out there. But, that wouldn't have been as good as something that was vetted by someone who had a stake in the outcome--whose interest and ownership in the project inspired a true sounding board, real feedback, and new ideas.
But where to find someone in this market? On one hand, it felt like everyone who had the technical capability to be out there building something was doing just that--and working on really interesting things. On the other hand, this new wave of innovation had been going on long enough that there were probably a few early projects that were impressive but just didn't seem to make it to the next level. I figured there had to be a few talented folks who may be ready for their second Web 2.0 tour of duty.
When I was at Union Square Ventures, we looked at ATTAP, the builders of Riffs, PersonalDNA and Life I/O. I used to joke and call it the "techie commune". It was a bunch of really impressive, cutting edge tech folks working on some very ambitious personal information management and recommendation products--all located in half of WebCal founder Bruce Spector's apartment. The first time I met Alex Lines, he was a lead developer there and he showed us how he had hacked together a mobile geolocation system based on cellphone tower data. It enabled a cellphone to know where it was in the city long before phones had GPS built into them. He had hacked an exposed mobile API and did some tower wardriving throughout the city.
ATTAP alumni was one of the first groups I went looking for to find potential partners. Even though the company might not have reached the success they were looking for, I was always impressed by the people they had and their ability to flat out build really elegant stuff.
I met him again earlier this summer at a nextNY event--after he had left ATTAP and I was anticipating leaving Oddcast. I didn't know I would be working on Path 101, so our ships passed a second time in the night. But, after scoping out some team pages, asking around, and cross referencing a nextNY softball RSVP by "a. lines", I zeroed on on Alex, who, as it turned out, had already read the original Path 101 post on my blog with some interest.
So we met up and realized that we saw eye to eye on the project from the start. What was important to me was that we had the same approach to partnership--mutual respect for experience and each other's opinions, open communication, and a goal-oriented approach. This was not a guy I was going to get bogged down in personal issues with, nor someone who thought he knew everything or thought I did either. I also liked his approach to technology--focusing on functionality and relevance to the user--above loyalty to "web 2.0 trends". Alex met with a former colleague of mine and the feedback really summed it up nicely:
"...he is a technologist, and not predisposed to any programming language or framework. Find the best technology to solve the problem. Big plus. "
His technical capabilities extend to perl, ruby, php, c, c++, sql, korn, bourne, javascript, html, Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux, OpenBSD, Mac OS X, and, as we learned last Friday, softball bats.
He's also a bit of a Renaissance Man. At Vanderbilt, he was a Physics and English double major.
Plus, he's also a Brooklynite (Park Slope), so how could I go wrong?
I'm excited to be working with Alex and we're currently busy laying out our vision of Path 101, meeting with potential angels, and other stakeholders like career offices and professional societies.
We're also looking for a great front-end designer/developer to join our team, so if you know anyone, please do send them our way. This train is leaving the station!
Angels or VCs? Or both?
I'm pretty sure I'm not allowed to fundraise according to the SEC, so let's just play hypotheticals for the moment... wink wink, nudge nudge.
IF I was a startup looking to raise seed money for development of a project, ooh.... something similar to Path 101 (I think I've settled on having a space there), and raising somewhere between 250-450k, what should the makeup of that round look like?
On one side, not many VCs would even do such a round pre-product, but a few of the would. There are
some smaller, perhaps more specialized funds that do this sort of thing. Either way, these are people that are primarily in the business of investing in startups. To me, the benefit is that they have experience, connections, and they (ideally) have a sense of professionalism around the way they conduct their business. (i.e. They're not going to show up at your door one night demanding their money back.)
The one thing I don't necessarily believe is that it makes them any more likely to invest in an A round. Sure, they've gotten a chance to get to know you, but if a VC is interested, they don't need to put in 200K to do that. They can take you out to a few lunches and hang around the rim enough to see what you're up to. Plus, if you don't wind up coming out with a compelling product, they're free to just walk away from the deal anyway. At least with angels, there isn't an expectation that they're going to participate significantly in an A round, so you won't have egg on your face if it doesn't happen.
As for angels, you're likely to need them at this point, so I think the question becomes more of a question of composition. Friends? Family? Big names? Angel groups? A mix? How many?
If you can, I think its advisable to avoid friends and family, unless you have friends and family in the business that you're going into, whether its tech or something else. You'll need their moral and emotional support and you should let them know that's what's important. You don't want money, or lack of it when the company blows up, getting in the way there. Plus, unsophisticated investors, even if it's your mom, are probably going to be a little bit of a pain in the butt. (Although, Jeff Bezos' parents turned out to be good angels...)
I think a mix should probably be in order.... the professional investors that you know best, and also a few "reach" candidates. If you could get anyone on board--captains of industry, celebrities, etc--who would it be? For me, I think anyone on the founding teams of Monster, Careerbuilder, or Hotjobs would be perfect. Published authors of books like "What Color is Your Parachute?" would be ideal, too.
But I'd like to hear from entrepreneurs. What's been your angel experience? Surprises? Who's been a much better addition than you expected? Who's been a disappointment? VCs in angel/seed rounds?
nextNY Softball today - All geeks with gloves welcome
We might not score 30 runs, but at least we'll get in a few pitching position players.
Come on up to Central Park's Hecksher Field #2, right by Columbus Circle at 6:15 today (Friday, August 24th). We'll try and get the first pitch off at 6:30, but if we have some 1.0 guys, they might need a little more time to stretch. :)
Feel free to pull friends and folks from your companies... we have extra spots.
Never cooked with the toaster oven before...
...just warmed stuff up.
Just threw some pork chops with salt, pepper, oregano and olive oil in. I cut the fat off, but left it to drip on top. Looks like its working so far.
New Commenting System
No more captchas... wooo.
Disqus is a perfect example of an opportunity to do exploit something small to a bigger player, like commenting, do it cross-platform, and create a lot more value to users than any one platform could do on their own.
Now if there was some way to combine it with MyBlogLog, that would be something... a suite of social tools around surfing and commenting with a single identify and tracking of participation. A geek can dream...
Thanks Daniel and Jason!
Leave the panini, take the meeting...
Yesterday, my brain ceased to function for about 3 minutes. It was scary stuff.
I was supposed to meet with a VC about Path101 (or is it Path 101? Space or no space?) and they e-mailed me saying their flight was two hours late. So, I figured that was the end of the meeting and replied that we could talk on the phone in the next few days. I was at the Web 2.0 Meetup at Slate and I was starving. So, I ordered myself a chicken panini with gouda.
Fifteen minutes later, the VC calls while in a cab coming over from a meeting in Jersey City and asks if I'm available to meet for dinner. He had dinner scheduled originally with someone else, but he was going to bail on it to meet with me.
Here's where the 3 minutes begins.
I told him that I had ordered a little while ago and suggested maybe we could meet up after our respective dinners.
When I got back to my conversion with Kristian, he said to me, "So a VC that you really want to work with offers to cancel his dinner to meet with you, and you pass because of a nine dollar panini?"
"Oh... wait... . jeez... That was really stupid wasn't it?"
"Yeah."
"Dammit... I gotta go call him back... what was I thinking?"
I'll tell you what I was thinking... I didn't want to waste food. Years of my mom scooping extra servings on my plate so that she didn't have to throw anything out just hardwired themselves into my brain, cementing a pattern that would be highly sub-optimal in this situation.
So I paid and bailed on the panini... told the waitress to enjoy it... and left for dinner after calling him back to let him know I was totally free to meet up if it was still on the table. Thank God it was.
"Yeah... I could have had a $500 million exit... if it wasn't for that $9 ($12 with tax and tip) panini."
Looking for a CTO/VP of Engineering for Path101
When I was eight, we got a computer. An IBM PS/2 with an 8086 processor and a 20MB hard drive. That was 1987—twenty years ago. My only experience with coding, however, was the C-logo class I took in school that year. Man, could I make that turtle rock and roll… I was the C-logo master. But, I never followed up on it at home, because our home computer wasn’t for hacking. It was for my dad’s business. Quite a few times, I got lectured for not reading the MS-DOS manual first before just playing around on it. That was pretty much the end of my coding career, which means that, today, now that I want to build Path101, I need someone’s help.
I can always go outsourced--to some team of Uzbekistanians (Uzbeks?), but I want to do more than just get something up. I want to be able to break out of the echo chamber and work with a true partner—not someone who may be gone from this project in three months. There’s no substitute for a real live human in the same room as you who has his or her own dry erase marker at the whiteboard. Even virtual teams will tell you that the most productive sessions are the ones they have in person.
So, in the spirit of uber anti-stealth, I’ll put my conceptual thinking for the build and the structure, as well as what I’m looking for in a partner relationship, in the hopes that there’s someone out there who not only sees the value, but has the same philsophy on how to create this.
First of all, whoever takes this project on has to be a data jockey. The real value of a Web 2.0 app is the leverage it can get out of its data—the data it pulls in, the data it pushes out and the mashup of data in the middle. Every piece of data that comes in or out of this thing needs to get used 8 different ways if we’re really going to knock socks off.
Example: Imagine a student is using a resume building tool. You shouldn’t have to create a resume for paper and a resume for LinkedIn and a resume for Facebook. Using standards like hResume, they should be able to use the resume wizard once, then populate a LinkedIn profile with the same structured information that we popped out a fancy PDF version to send out by e-mail. But let’s go a step further... Let’s say that a student participated in a special summer program related to their major at a local college—a two week immersion course on financial modeling, for example. The enter it in the resume wizard. However, our structure means that we know the dates, we know the location, and we can ask what this thing was—a course? A scholarship program? An internship? We should allow the student to be able to publish that information to other students with similar interests. That’s how I found out about the mentoring program at my local financial professional society. Someone a year ahead of me went through it the previous summer and suggested I participate. The information about that course was on her resume, but for it to get into my head, she had to bump into me randomly in the cafeteria—a lucky break for me. Efficient use of data structures and matching would have put that program and the 8 other summer programs just like it in front of me when I was thinking about my summer.
You might ask why would students allow that to happen? Aren’t they competing with me for the same jobs? Not if they’re a year ahead of me in a different recruiting class. Plus, perhaps they understand (or we can teach them) the value that sharing a summer program with me this year means that I might send a job opportunity their way at my company next year.
Just as an aside, one thing that also seperates Path101 as a business from what’s out there is our philosophy of giving as much value back to the students as possible. Think about that aggregated dataset—all those college resumes with all those positions. Monster has them. They know where almost every college student interned last summer. That’s about as close to the total universe of available opportunities as you can get, but do they expose it to students? No. They show those resumes to recruiters who pay for the access to the students and they show you the jobs that people pay to list, leaving the larger universe of opportunities to rot. That’s their business. All those random little companies that you’ve never heard of that provided some really interesting internship opportunities—ones that never get posted at $250 a pop because the company can’t afford it—are being wasted by Monster and not shown to students in order to protect their own bottom line. Millions of students worked their butt off to research and network their way to internships they couldn’t find on Monster, especially in the non-business areas. Monster sits on that useful data, leaving next year’s students on their own to recreate that whole research process all over again. No wonder it’s so hard to find a great internship. That’s not the way Path101 is going to create value for students.
In addition to trying to get the maximum value creating leverage for every piece of data, whoever works on this build needs to believe in portabilty of the application. Its not just about Facebook either, which obviously a student needs to be able to access all of our services on. One day, before they buy us, Monster may want our whole application to appear on the Monster site, or the NYTimes, or the PR Society of America. Schools may want this to appear on their sites and we can’t afford extensive enterprise integrations with every school. Integration needs to be a matter of skinning, cutting and pasting iFrames and code, and incredibly robust APIs—caveman style easy…but I’ve been beating that horse to a pulp lately.
Also of major importance to me, and maybe this is most important, is the platform this is being build on. No, its not Java or LAMP or Ruby on Rails—it’s TRUST and RESPECT. I need to be able to trust and respect the insights of someone who has built a scalable application before and that person needs to trust me that I’ve actually been in the classroom with college students, mentored them, and talked to them about their career aspirations. But it goes deeper than that, right? It goes far beyond the 1’s and the 0’s. I had a VC ask me what I would do if Facebook offered me $10 million for this site in a year once its up in 25 schools and growing. As a co-founder, perhaps that nets me $2-3 million after tax—not too shabby for a year’s work. You know what, though? That doesn’t really change my life much. Plus, I honestly don’t consider myself a serial entrepreneur. This is my idea. Will I have another one? Maybe. Maybe not, and if I don’t, $2 million basically gets me a nice apartment in the city. I’m not really about to trade in my big idea for a nicer apartment—that’s not enough for me. What I really want to do is to be able to tour the country talking to college students because I’m the guy who started the service they use day in and day out to pursue their passions. I want to hear about the paths they uncovered and the people they met. I want to get a letter from some successful entrepreneur ten years from now who tells me that they didn’t even know what entrepreneurship was until they logged on to Path101 and started exploring. That’s what value is to me. If I was just in this for as quick money, I would have spent the first two years of my career burning myself out as an investment banker.
So, in a since, what I’m building… well… This is going to be BIG. At least I want it to be anyway…and perhaps one day we’ll capture the even larger opportunity of career changers, moms returning to work, people laid off at 50… even goals that aren’t necessarily about career stuff.
Whoever joins will be a signficant equity partner, be able to get his hands dirty in the build and also manage a tech team. I’ll be honest—there’s been some strong angel/VC interest in this (over and above folks you might guess on your own) and so it seems likely the team will be able to be focused and fulltime for six to nine months.
So that’s me and that’s a little bit about what Path101 is looking for. Maybe you’re sitting in a big media company twiddling your thumbs itching to get back in the startup game. Maybe you just had a successful exit or a big blowup and you’re looking for the next thing. Maybe you’re at an early Web 2.0 startup and the writing’s on the wall that it isn’t going to wind up inside Google anytime soon. Let’s talk.
We are talking about Bay Ridge, right Jason?
Jason Calcanis "grew up in the famously gritty Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, where violence was as ubiquitous as graffiti", according to Fast Company.
Bay Ridge?
This Bay Ridge?
So, um... I guess if the violence is as ubiquitous as the graffiti, then there's... um.... no violence.
We do have tornadoes, though.
Subway Thumbing
The guy who just walked into the car has personal space issues...as in...he's in mine. Push off a little, buddy. Plenty of room in this car. Ah, nice. Today's the first day of normal express trains in Brooklyn. If Chris Angel, Mindfreak, was Mexican, he'd be the guy behind me. N train arriving. Time to switch. I'm not really into sitting on the train in. I'll be sitting all day. I don't need to be sedentary for another 45 minutes. We havent left the station yet. The train is silent. No a/c, no motor noises. No announcements. Just the deep voice of the conductor, not over the PA system, but outside the doors on the platform talking to a customor. Its the last two weeks in August and the trains are showing it. Pretty empty. I could still sit if I wanted to. I need to break today up into bite sized chunks, so I can be really efficient. I have a Facebook app to finish the spec for (consulting project) and I need to finish up the syllabus for my class, which starts two weeks from Thursday actually. I need to move to another car...or I'll be soaked by the time I get to work. Perhaps that's why this car is so empty. I wonder if it is every car. Yup. Every car. Dammit. What are Windorphins? I guess this is effective advertising, because now I'm curious and I want to go to their site. Ok, I felt a little bead of sweat roll down my back. Its hot in here. Its official. There's now a guy lying down asleep on the floor of the car at the end. I dont think he was there when I walked in. No one around him seems the least bit troubled by it. Some guy went over to him and nudged him. He's awake. This little girl sitting by me has an old school baby doll with a plastic head. Someone has played tic tac toe on the baby's head in blue ball point pen, several times. Man its hot in here. When I commutted to high school, you could open up window vents on the B trains. This baby has a thumb sucking feature and eyes that roll back. The kid has just discovered a hole in the back of the baby's pink onesie, which she conveys to her mom in spanish. Ah...there is a window vent. I didnt notice that before. I just went over to open it. Funny enough, it requires two people to open it because of where the latches are. This guy next to it was all to happy to oblidge, as if he'd been scoping aid for the last few minutes himself. Finally,the car just got noticeably cooler. Did I do that with the window? If we elected a mayor of this car, I'm sure I'd win. Me and my Passenger of Action campaign would handily defeat the dude who kicked the sleeper.
Asking for my e-mail address so I can use the Going.com Facebook app? No no no no no!! (pounds pillow)
Are you serious?
Yes, I'm beating this point to death, I know.
THE WHOLE POINT OF GETTING THE APP ON FACEBOOK IS SO I DON'T NEED OR WANT TO HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH GOING.COM!!!
If you can't figure out how to get me to use your service without having my e-mail address... or at least convincing me that giving you my data is useful by providing value first, don't expect to see me using your Facebook service anytime soon. Uninstalled. (Do not want!!)